by Molly Ringle
In a puff of wind, Hekate reappeared out of nowhere next to him, her arms sheltering Galateia. Startled, Akis almost fell over. Then he murmured a wordless sound of gratitude, and Galateia leaped from Hekate’s arms to his. He held her, both of them shaking. He touched the bruises on her face. Tears stung his eyes, and he spat curses against her parents, then held her tight again.
Hekate’s arms slid around them both. They glimmered into the spirit realm. “All right, children,” Hekate said. “How is that fake death looking now?”
***
That night, at the shore, the two lovers climbed into a rowboat and launched off to sea. A pair of reliably planted witnesses saw them go, and took note of the red paint on the boat’s sides, and the single round lantern they took aboard. So the next morning, when the overturned red boat washed back up on shore, along with a drenched round lantern, Akis’ cloak, and one of Galateia’s sandals, the whole community bemoaned the tragic drowning of the two lovers.
Hekate, of course, had transferred them into a larger ship bound for Greece, manned by expert sailors, before capsizing the red boat. Then she returned alone to Sicily to help weave a temporary peace.
The prince held stern councils in the village, with the temple and Thanatos representatives in attendance. With both sides aggrieved at the loss of young life, everyone had become more subdued. Hekate’s mood-altering spells did have something to do with that. They all agreed to keep their disputes free of violence, and to consult the prince or other lawmen over any conflict rather than taking matters into their own hands.
The truce wouldn’t last, she suspected, but it was better than some towns ever achieved. And the important task had been accomplished: Akis and Galateia were together and safe. They were also, she confirmed when she later went to see them, married.
***
Wow, were we ever star-crossed. Galateia and Akis, Sophie texted Adrian that night, as she got ready for bed.
Weren’t we just, he responded. Maybe it isn’t the best thing to be remembering right now. Kind of violent…Thanatos and stuff…sorry…
No, it helps. It honestly does. B/c it turned out ok. Great even. :)
Good then. Whatever helps. I’m glad.
Sitting on the Airstream’s bed, she smiled, gazing at the messages. It’s late here, I should go to sleep, she thumbed in. But stay safe for me, ok? Knowing you’re out there also helps.
His answer flickered in a minute later. Knowing you’re out there has kept me going so many times. Not just this life. Sweet dreams.
She bit her lip to catch the flattered grin that wanted to spread there. Sweet dreams, she typed back. Wherever they take you. ;)
Sentiment in text message didn’t translate into a full relationship recovery, and didn’t mean she’d be able to snog him without anxiety. But hey. Baby steps.
Before going to bed, she opened her shiny new notebook computer and called up the files Zoe had finally sent her: Adrian’s random writings from his teen years. Sophie read them for at least an hour, lulled by their ordinariness and charm, drawn into the mundane details of yet another life.
Chapter Forty-Two
Akis’ mother knew the truth, and planned to journey over the sea to visit them someday soon. Galateia’s parents—well, maybe they could be told she was alive in some future year. But Hekate planned to keep their location a secret even then.
She established the couple at the temple nearest the Underworld, a seaside village that considered the local deep cave a sacred site. Hermes came to meet them as well. Akis remembered him from a couple of visits to Sicily in earlier years. Together Hermes and Hekate brought Akis and Galateia to the Underworld for a tour.
There Hekate told them who they had been: the king and queen of this magical realm, the first living people to discover its secrets. Their eyes grew round, and both youths looked around at the cave with new scrutiny.
Hekate offered them the pomegranate while Hermes stood quietly at her side. Her heart raced.
But the lovers looked at each other, then at her, and Akis shook his head. “I think not yet. We’ve…been through enough lately.”
“We just want to get settled first,” Galateia added. “As normal people. We want a calm life.”
Hekate stared, astounded. Never had she expected them to turn it down. They were Hades and Persephone! “But then surely, when you’re older—and the immortality fruit—you must join us. I’m sure the others will vote you in at once.”
“Of course we would,” Hermes assured.
“Goodness, no.” Akis laughed, sounding shocked.
Galateia did too. “That would require even more thought. I can’t say I’m ready for that.”
“Well—I’ll ask again when you’re older.” Hekate tried to recover her smile. “You can be sure I will.”
“To think, you were our daughter.” Akis studied her in amazement.
“No wonder you’ve been so good to us,” Galateia said. “I feel honored just to have this knowledge. Just to be brought here.”
They had a new home to get back to, furnishings to acquire, neighbors to meet. A life on the Earth’s surface to live. Hekate returned them to it. She assured them she’d see them often, and fetch them down here anytime they liked.
“But what if they actually do decline?” she fretted to Hermes that night, lying on her front on the hearth rug in the Underworld’s sitting room.
“We can’t force them.” The firelight bathed his figure as he relaxed beside her. “They’re adults. In charge of their own lives.”
“Adults.” She snorted.
“Fourteen does begin looking dreadfully young after a point, to some of us.” He grinned at her. “How old are you now, darling? Forty?”
“How skilled you are at counting.”
He crawled over, rolled her onto her back, and straddled her. “I’m bedding such an old woman. My my.”
“Ha. How old was Aphrodite by the time you found her? Eighty?”
He laughed. “Probably not quite, but she won’t say exactly.”
“Neither will you.” Since their skin was already touching in a few places, she surrendered to impulse and sent a shot of truth-telling through him. “How old are you, really?”
But he sensed the magic, or guessed what she was doing, and leaped off her. He pressed his mouth shut just long enough for the spell to wear off, then gave her a dirty look. “Play fair, love.”
Ashamed, she sat up and wrapped her skirts over her knees. “I’m sorry. I’ve never done that to you before, I promise.”
He leaned back on his hands and stretched out his legs toward Kerberos, who snoozed in front of the hearth. “Yes, I would know if you had. But it’s nice that the magic’s rebounding on you and making you say so.”
It wasn’t done rebounding. She kept talking, against her better judgment. “I love you, but I feel like you don’t tell me enough. Like this relationship, if that’s what it is, doesn’t really count to you. Sometimes I think of it like a marriage, but now that I’ve seen my parents’ souls together again, in a true marriage, I see how ours isn’t one. And I sometimes want what they have. With you.”
The words were out. A sort of horror washed over Hekate in their wake.
Hermes drew up his knees too, and gazed at the fire. The flames crackled. Kerberos sighed in his sleep. “What a dangerous force, that spell of yours,” Hermes finally said.
The rebound wore off at last, having done its damage. She stared at the fire as well. “Forget I said anything. It doesn’t matter.”
“A marriage with me? No one would want that.”
“I only said I sometimes want it.”
“And I don’t tell you everything because you wouldn’t like to hear it. As I’m sure you already suspect.”
She closed her eyes a moment, and opened them again. “Yes.”
“But…” His voice altered from defensiveness to what sounded like sincerity. “You still know me better than anyone else does, despite not having every li
ttle fact at your disposal. If you do want one relevant fact…” He held out his arm toward her, without looking at her. “Go ahead, give me the truth spell. Then ask this one question. Ask me who I love most in the entire world.”
Her hurt melted into tenderness. Tears rose in her eyes, making the flames glimmer. “Yourself?” she teased.
“Go on.”
She set her fingers gingerly on his arm. “Who?” she whispered, and sent the shimmer of magic into him.
“You,” he said.
She let her fingers drop, weak with relief.
He set his hand on her knee. “To have you love me still, after all these years…it’s more than I deserve. It’s made me happy.” He smiled at her in his usual mischievous fashion. “Like I’ve stolen something no one else was able to steal.”
“Well, that’s a feeling you’re familiar with.”
“One I like very much.” He jumped onto her, flipped her skirts up, and wriggled his shoulders and head between her legs. While she laughed in surprise, he began kissing the dark curls there. “When Apollo shot that arrow through me,” he said, “I was one year older than Galateia and Akis are now. There. Let’s see how skilled you are at counting while I’m doing this.”
***
There wasn’t much to say about the sad life of Krokos in long-ago Crete. Well, you could say a lot about it, Landon supposed. You could write a whole novel about any life if you went into enough details. But he’d been over the whole of Krokos’ lifespan now, and could have summed it up in a minute. In fact, it was best done that way. The long version was too depressing.
Krokos was gay, which was tolerated in Knossos and vicinity as a leisure activity, but not regarded as a marital option. In his teens, he met the sexiest man he’d ever seen, a guy with green eyes, an unbelievable body, and, it turned out, a false name and a habit of lying. After a few amorous visits to Krokos, the guy left the island and didn’t return.
Krokos, heartsick, eventually bowed to familial pressure and married a girl. He hated being married, and she hated him before long. She bore him one kid, then the rest of the kids had to be some other guy’s, because Krokos sure wasn’t sleeping with her anymore. Not his thing, sex with women.
He went on farming and being miserable until the wondrous happened: the gorgeous man returned. He didn’t look a day older, though it’d been fifteen years since Krokos had seen him. No wonder; turned out he was an immortal, the famous Hermes. This time he was a tad more honest with Krokos. And somehow Krokos felt better about the lies from before. After all, being lied to by the divine trickster was far better than being lied to by some ordinary jerk. It was practically an honor.
He got the impression Hermes pitied him rather than loved him, and that pity was probably the reason he was being more honest now. But the trickster paid him frequent visits for another month, and caressed and cajoled Krokos into a happier frame of mind.
Maybe the affair would have gone on even longer if Krokos hadn’t been killed.
Thanatos, original edition, had been spreading like a weed in Crete. People recognized Hermes as one of the hated unnaturals. Soon they also figured out who his local lover was. One day at dusk, while Krokos walked back to his house from the fields—bam. Blow to the head from an unseen assailant. Here lies Krokos, sad mortal lover of a Greek god.
For Landon, there were several upsetting take-aways from that lifetime. For one thing, he had loved an immortal and Thanatos had killed him for it. And yes, it was confirmed Thanatos was responsible. In the Underworld afterward, a downcast Hermes showed up and told Krokos’ soul that Thanatos was claiming credit for it in their latest hate speeches in Knossos. He’d tried to find out the exact culprit who wielded the stone so he could drag them to local justices, but had no luck identifying them so far. Besides, Thanatos too often was the local justices in Knossos lately.
For another thing, this wasn’t the only life where Landon was gay and closeted and miserable. In fact, it was a constant in pretty much every life he’d recalled so far. That was beyond sad; it was outrageous and pathetic. No wonder Niko and probably lots of other people had seen right through his denial, because shit, gayness was apparently a fundamental aspect of his soul.
As for the third-most disturbing thing, it was more a strong suspicion or gut instinct, and was also actually more strangely comforting than disturbing.
He waited until Niko reappeared as his guard, then Landon walked up to the bars, as close as he could get, and looked straight into those green eyes.
“Yes, that’s you, isn’t it,” Landon said in the ancient language Krokos had spoken on Crete. “Hermes.”
“Poor Krokos,” Niko answered in the same language. “You didn’t deserve that fate.”
Landon’s heart, so long shielded by a wall of fear, broke open then—at the eyes, the voice, the reconnection of souls, some mix of tragedy and hope. A miserable laugh tumbled from his lips. He leaned his forehead on the bars, still gazing at Niko. “Why did you give me that pomegranate? I didn’t need to know what a loser I was in every single goddamn life. I want to drink from the spring of forgetfulness instead.”
“So far we haven’t found such a thing.” Niko drew close to the bars too, and took hold of one. “Maybe Sophie knows of a plant that does that. Some days, or at least some hours, I’d eat it too.”
Landon wrapped his hand around Niko’s. Niko stayed still and allowed it. “Krokos and Hermes,” Landon said. “Is that why you kept tracking me down?”
“It’s how I kept tracking you down. Convenient that way.”
“Great. Another million things I don’t understand.”
“Such is life, Petal.”
Krokos was the name of a flower, the crocus. Thus the nickname Petal?
Their hands still touched. Niko’s hands, these hands here, had killed Betty Quentin, because she was the head of Thanatos. But in another life Thanatos had killed Landon, because he had loved an immortal. Who to trust anymore? Who to care about?
“One thing’s for sure,” Landon said, staring at their overlapping fingers. “If I ever get out of here, I’m coming out. I’m gay, I always was, everyone can tell, I might as well own it.”
“Finally, a decision of yours I can applaud.” Niko caressed Landon’s fingers with a stroke of his knuckles, and pulled his hand away.
Chapter Forty-Three
At the Blue Caves on the island of Zakynthos, Erick Tracy drew out the ancient gold leaf from his pocket, along with his latest batch of strawberry tree leaves. It was sunset, and the other tourists had left. Now only he and Tenebra stood on the narrow rock ledge, sea caves arching over their heads, blue water slapping the rocks at their feet.
Since joining their team, Tenebra had been bewitching the gold artifact to conceal it from everyone except herself and Tracy, and even then, Tracy never let it out of his possession. She’d also frequently been throwing glamours onto the members of the central team when they went out—Yuliya and Krystal as well as Tenebra and Tracy—so they’d go mostly unnoticed if anyone was looking for them. The way it worked, Tenebra said, was that it caused a sort of reflection: instead of seeing you, the rest of the world saw someone or something they believed belonged there, and which therefore escaped their notice. He and his teammates couldn’t see the glamour on themselves, but could see it on each other. It turned his companions into blandly uninteresting folk whom his eyes wanted to drift away from. And he had oddly blank interactions with cashiers and taxi drivers and such when he wore the spell. They treated him like he was someone boring they saw every day, unworthy of paying much attention to. A bit off-putting, actually.
But Tracy had no doubt they were indeed being followed. A couple of times, both in Bulgaria and Greece, he suspected he glimpsed Adrian Watts, though if it was Adrian, he was in some sort of disguise himself. These glimpses were always in public, where Tracy couldn’t very well attack him, and in any case he didn’t have the heavy weaponry on him that an attack on an immortal would require. But so
far the immortals hadn’t molested them, nor sent the authorities after them, nor even left any new ominous lipstick messages. Most importantly, they hadn’t got hold of the gold leaf, which surely they would have stolen if they could. So Tenebra’s magic was working.
Tracy thus remained content to continue amassing his small army and preparing to take over the Underworld. That powerful kingdom might be right here on the other side of the wall between realms, within these shadowy blue caves echoing with surf.
“Ready?” Tracy asked Tenebra.
She nodded. She looked more attractive lately—a gleam to her eyes, her generous breasts and hips bulging under her long black dress. All part of a glamour to charm him? He didn’t mind if so. He’d help her feel young again if that’s what she wanted, and he did like the idea of what that magic might be able to do to him in bed.
But for now, he had to focus on breaching the other realm with her.
He slipped his arm around her waist, and gave her a smile when she arched an eyebrow at him. “This is how it works,” he told her. “You know that. Now, let’s see…”
He had switched realms a few more times alone, at other sacred sites, but this was the first attempt at one of the Greek seaside caves, and also the first time transporting another person with him. But the switching got easier each time, and now it only took a few seconds before the world did its jiggle and he swooped into the spirit realm, pulling Tenebra along.
Out in the stretch of sea visible beneath the cave arch, all the boats vanished. The cries of strange creatures filled the air, and several red-winged birds, startled by Tracy and Tenebra’s sudden appearance, burst into flight from their cave roost and flew out over the water.
“Ha,” he said in triumph.
“Ahhh,” she exhaled—her creaky-door sound of satisfied wonder. She touched the rock walls, and knelt to squint at the water, where fish of all sizes darted and rippled. “So much power here. Different and untapped. Marvelous.”