Love & War

by Kaitlin Bevis

  Does Dr. Jones remember me from before I was rescued? I didn’t see her as often as the others. Just once a year for that checkup. Jason charmed all of Mom’s staff into forgetting everything they knew about me, but charm wears off. So it was too risky to just let them leave. We had to bring them here, where we can constantly wipe their memories and renew their willingness to comply.

  I know I should feel bad about that. He basically brainwashed them. Whatever lives they’d had before, friends, families, it’s all gone. But they weren’t charmed when they worked for Mom. That’s not one of her powers. All she’d had to bait them was money. They cut into me over and over again for money. They kept me drugged and powerless for money. And they took away my chance to have friends and family and a life outside of those four walls for years for money. Turnabout’s fair play.

  Twins. I dropped the pen, staring at the word until it swam on the page. The wind tore the paper from my hand, flipping it to the other side. Startled out of my reverie, I slapped it back down.

  My “options” are a joke. Let’s say I do decide to share my body for another nine months, get over the constant feeling that it’s all happening again, that I’m being used for parts by some parasite. Let’s pretend that the knowledge stops making me want to throw myself off a cliff, and I just persevere. What happens then? If I’m what comes next, what are they? They can’t leave the protection of this island. And they certainly can’t be raised by normal parents. Adoption is not one of my options. Jason would never allow it, and this isn’t some myth. I can’t just sneak them away to be raised by whatever poor mortal family I choose to inflict them on.

  I shook my head, well aware I was dancing around the issue. Laughter from a group of demigods playing volleyball up the beach drifted toward me and even though I wasn’t a fan of the game, I suddenly wanted to play. To think about something else.

  He wants kids. But I just got a life. I missed school and friends and play dates and prom and graduation, and dating and driving and homework. Mom robbed me of my past, so I don’t want to lose my future. Right now, I deserve a chance to live life for my own benefit. Maybe one day, I’ll be ready for this. But I kind of doubt it.

  Could I ever raise kids without being jealous of what I didn’t have? And if I could, if parenting is as transformative as the Internet says, if looking at them makes me want to give them everything and put them before myself and all that sappy stuff, that’s even worse. I don’t want yet another reason to wonder how my mother could do that to me.

  I chewed on the pen, forgetting it had obtained a light coating of sand. “Bleck!” Spitting and scrubbing at my tongue helped a bit, but I knew I’d be gritting granules between my teeth for hours.

  What can I do? Move out? Leave them with him and just call it a day? I don’t want to lose him, but even if lighting myself on fire didn’t sound more appealing than leaving him, I have nothing. On paper, I died ten years ago. I’m not like the others. I can’t just charm people into giving me essentials. And I didn’t go to school. I have no training, and my social skills are questionable. I need this island where my powers are a kind of currency and my status, marriage, and lineage give me a place in this society.

  I can’t just move into a different cabin but stay on the island. No one would get it. They’d all hate me. And if I have kids, I’m trapped.

  So, that leaves option three.

  I refuse to go under the knife again, even if it’s not a knife. But I can take abortion pills. The problem with that is everything the pharmacy had on hand from before we moved in expired and got tossed out and we haven’t put in an order for anything we didn’t think we’d need. Why would we? There are three, I scratched out the word, four girls on the island. Carrying the birth control that we use consistently is one thing, but the odds of any of us needing abortion pills are pretty slim.

  The pharmacy is putting in an order for more supplies, but the ideal window to take those pills is before I hit seven weeks pregnant. According to my own research, it can work through week fifteen, but Dr. Jones said she refuses to administer it after nine weeks. Still, it’s not like she can say no to me.

  I caught my breath and stared down at the page. Gods, I should really feel more conflicted about this, shouldn’t I?

  I scrubbed at my eyes. My face felt raw from the constant barrage of the salt-tinged wind and my own tears threatening to brim over.

  It was bound to happen. Maybe not this soon, but Jason wants kids and he knows I don’t for the obvious reasons. We were going to have this disagreement somewhere down the line.

  Why does he want kids? What twenty-two-year-old guy actually wants kids? I don’t have a wide range of experience, mind you, but the Internet says most guys don’t even think about kids until they reach a certain age. We’re prepping for war, for Chaos’s sake.

  Jason wasn’t talking about one day either. He was talking now. All those jabs about how much trouble it is to order birth control, all that grumbling about wearing condoms, the constant “wouldn’t it be nice if” scenarios. It never ends.

  I flinched when I read over that paragraph and straightened my back. This was why I’d chosen to write in a journal rather than vent to Glauce or Otrera. Any time I complained about Jason, he came out sounding like some sort of demanding, manipulative monster. And he wasn’t. Troubled, I stared out at the choppy waves.

  Jason’s great, he’s sweet, he’s caring, he’s everything I ever read about. I love him. But . . . he’s so insistent.

  It just makes me wonder—I scratched out the line, my pen moving furiously to turn my suspicion into a solid block of black.

  “They wanted to call it hope.” I set down the pen, drew in a long breath, and dug my fingers into the sand beyond my beach towel. I forced myself to think back. Back to when things were actually bad, because I couldn’t afford to lose perspective now.

  My pen returned to the page. Mom actually sounded offended at the ridiculous name. She just sat there at my bedside, chatting like everything was normal while I fought back tears and wondered when the next time I woke up would be.

  “Hope is a thing you wish for,” she’d complained. “Something that might work. This is a sure thing.”

  I’ll never forget that self-satisfied grin on her face when she told me they were going to call it the golden cure or the golden. . . . I don’t remember, something equally ridiculous. I remember wondering if she’d put more thought into naming this than me.

  “We’re gonna be so rich, kiddo.” She grabbed my shoulder and gave it an excited squeeze.

  And gods help me, I leaned into her touch. A nurse came in then. The redhead. They had names, but I refused to learn them. I hated this nurse the most because she was so damn peppy, but right then, I couldn’t be angry because I was too scared. The cluster surgeries were horrible. There aren’t words to describe the way I felt when I woke up.

  I started crying and begging and pleading and grabbing for anyone who got close to me, sure if I just squeezed their hand hard enough, they’d take pity on me and stop. Of course, I knew better. But these moments always had a way of making me revert back to that six-year-old who was scared to go under. Mom gave me a warning look and the nurse clucked in disapproval before saying something meaningless about how I’d sleep through the whole thing. She actually used the phrase minimum discomfort.

  Minimum discomfort? When I next woke, I’d be missing parts. Oh sure, it was all internal stuff you could supposedly live without thanks to dialysis, but I was sick to death of surgeries. All I wanted was to go home. I begged them to stop, knowing that weeks, maybe even months of monitoring loomed before me while the world outside just kept on spinning. It wasn’t fair.

  “Count down from ten,” the nurse instructed. Gods, I remember the exact cadence of her voice. I can hear it. This memory is so sharp, so clear, that it’s almost like a movie playing out in my head. B
ut I don’t want to write this like a story. I’m trying to capture how I felt. What I thought. Only what happened next didn’t feel real. Maybe it was the medication, I don’t know. The whole thing felt like it happened on a screen somewhere across the room. In that moment, I was there, but I also wasn’t.

  Salt stung my cheeks as I began the countdown. “Ten.”

  The door burst open.

  “Nine.” The word was out of my mouth before I could process what I was seeing—three strange men with a gun to my doctor’s head.

  The one in the middle, Jason of course, not that I knew that at the time, was handsome. It was weird of me to notice that given the circumstances, but I blamed the drugs. They all looked a lot like my parents. Their hair, eyes, skin, everything about them practically glittered gold. I didn’t know what that meant then. But I remember glancing at my IV, wondering if maybe the nurse had mixed up my pain medication. I could feel them kicking in, but waking illusions were new, even for me.

  “Eight,” I whispered, my mind hell-bent on following instructions, no matter how illogical.

  Jason pushed the doctor forward. “Go on, get the rest of it.”

  “What’s the meaning of this?” my mother demanded, moving protectively in front of the bed.

  I’d love to think she was protecting me, but I knew all she cared about was her product.

  “We’re here for the cure.” Jason thrust a white cooler with a red insignia on it toward the nurse. When his eyes landed on me, he hesitated.

  I stopped counting, sensing my chance. “Cure.” The word fell clumsily from my lips. “Me.”

  My mother shushed me, but Jason’s eyes softened in sympathy. “How much does she need?”

  The doctor exchanged a wide-eyed look with my mother.

  “It’s—” I tried again, my fingers biting into the fabric of my blanket. “. . . me. The cure is me.”

  He furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s delirious,” my mother protested. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” She kept babbling, gesturing at the IV drip and demanding the doctor back her up, but Jason’s eyes never left mine.

  I focused intently on forming the right words with my mouth. “Don’t . . . let them . . . cut me open again.”

  His eyes widened, then darted to my mother who immediately objected, using her politician voice.

  I fought to stay conscious through the screams and gunshots, but the medication was too good at its job. My eyelids flagged. Mom’s body hit the floor with a loud thud, but I couldn’t drag myself out of my stupor long enough to process what that meant before consciousness completely slipped away.

  I’m better off, I’m better off, I’m better off. If I wrote it enough times, maybe it would feel real. I’m better off. I’m better off, I’m better off, I’m better off. I’m better off.

  ***

  “There you are!” Otrera exclaimed, crashing down beside me in a spray of sand.

  I jerked back, startled, shutting the journal before she could catch a glimpse of the crazed scrawl. “How was your run?”

  “Great.” Otrera said, breathing hard. The athletic demigoddess had a tall, wiry build, skin of the darkest gold, and a perpetual ponytail full of box braids. “Except I misjudged the distance. Got all excited thinking I was done and—” She drew in another breath. “Ugh.” She dropped backward, her hand hitting the beach towel with a thump. “I’m gonna need a minute.”

  I reached into my bag and grabbed Otrera’s metal water bottle. “Here.”

  “Lifesaver,” she gasped and took a huge gulp. “Whatcha working on?”

  “Just journaling.” I tucked the book into my beach bag. “Jason said a blog was too high risk, no matter how private I set it, so I’m going old school.”

  Otrera nodded and took another sip of water. “Cool. Is Glauce meeting us tonight, or—”

  I shook my head, and made a futile attempt to brush the sand off the blanket. “Jason’s testing every inch of the shield. Again.”

  “Poor thing.” Otrera clucked, her eyes sliding to the demigods playing volleyball down the beach as a particularly large burst of laughter reached our blanket. “He’s working you two to death.”

  I shrugged. “He’s starting to ease off now that we’ve got the evacuation drill down to a science. He’s talking about taking a few days then starting random drills.”

  “You can’t keep doing that, Medea. We don’t know enough about how this stuff works.”

  “I’m fine.” A strand of dark hair worked free from my ponytail, and whipped around in the wind. Irritated, I tucked it behind my ear.

  “I’ve seen you afterward. You’re not fine.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Otrera was in her mid-twenties, making her one of the oldest people on the island. And that meant something to her. She flip-flopped between mothering Glauce and me, and just hanging out like a regular person.

  The first time she saw Jason kiss me, she’d grabbed my arm so tight I was sure her fingers left bruises. She’d made some excuse to Jason, then marched me off in the opposite direction and told me in no uncertain terms I didn’t have to do anything with him that I wasn’t comfortable with. The age difference between us made her squeamish. But now that Jason and I were older news, she seemed to be coming to terms with it.

  “Well if she’s not meeting us, I guess there’s no reason to wait,” Otrera decided, climbing to her feet and further upsetting the blanket. “I need a shower.” She shoved my shoulder when I nodded. “Want to hang out at my place until the dining hall opens or were you sticking around here?”

  “I’ve got plans with Jason before dinner, but I can walk with you.”

  She climbed to her feet, brushing off sand and we both set off in the direction of the cabins. “How’s the new girl?”

  “Still pretty out of it. But I think she’s going to be okay.”

  “Saw her other half today,” Otrera whistled. “I can kind of see why the goddess was into him.”

  “I didn’t think he was your type.”

  Otrera laughed. “Not at all. Doesn’t mean I’m blind. He’s gorgeous.”

  Demigods do not all look alike. I mean, most of them have golden features, but there’s a lot of shades of gold once the mortal side of genetics gets mixed in and no shortage of variation in build and bone structure. Even beaten-up Adonis was hotter than any demigod I’d seen around here. Hell, he rivaled some of the gods I’d seen in photographs.

  “Wonder how she reacted when she figured out he was taken.” Ugh, why was the entire way home uphill?

  Otrera laughed. “From what I’ve heard, not at all. There’s a reason Elise ran to Tantalus when she got scared, not Adonis. Everyone’s pretty sure Adonis and the goddess were hooking up.”

  I had a hard time believing that. Sure, he spoke about the goddess with reverence, but there was no denying the look on his face when he looked at Elise. “Everyone who?” I asked as we ambled past the dining hall.

  “Everyone we had on the ship,” Otrera said. “They all mentioned how cozy Adonis and Aphrodite were getting in the reports. Jane said they made out during one of the photo shoots.”

  Jane was one of the few demigoddesses who could hold a glamour, and she wasn’t prone to exaggeration. “Really? Does Elise know?”

  “She was there. Jane said she went right back to the ship and wouldn’t say a word to anyone the rest of the night. Well, until . . .”

  Until Tantalus beat the daylights out of her. I went still in the middle of the dirt road, feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach. Poor Elise. She hadn’t seemed mad at Adonis when we last spoke, so maybe she’d forgiven him. Or maybe he was just the only familiar person in her life right now and she couldn’t afford to lose him, no matter how alone he made her feel. I’d been there.r />
  “What a scumbag,” I said with feeling, determined to visit her as often as possible.

  Chapter IX

  Aphrodite

  “WHAT DO YOU mean, she’s what comes next?” Ares demanded that night in his dreamscape.

  I’d been in and out of consciousness the entire time I’d been on the island and hadn’t slipped into strong enough nightmares to wake up screaming, so the precaution of pulling me into a dreamscape was likely unnecessary while I was still on pain meds. But better safe than sorry.

  “Medea’s parents are both demigods.” I tried to keep myself from glancing around. Looking too closely at another god’s dreamscape was beyond rude, but I couldn’t help myself. This was literally an inside glimpse into Ares’s thoughts. And there was no one I wanted to know better.

  Ares still couldn’t put a lot of power behind his dreamscapes, so the room blurred into warm colors: reds, yellows, and oranges. I felt like I was in the heart of a flame. The fact that he could generate even this much of a dreamscape comforted me beyond measure. After all, he’d been poisoned, too. Tantalus had locked Ares, Artemis, Adonis, and me in a cell after he’d dosed us all with the compound. We’d escaped, but not until he’d done major damage. Ares hadn’t been poisoned as much as I had, and not for half as long, but I had a tendency to latch onto whatever hope I could and ignore the information that didn’t fit my desired outcome.

  “Like Adonis, and Elise, and the others.” Ares raked golden hair out of his face, stuck in his glamour, even now. But at least the dreamscape didn’t reflect the myriad of bruises decorating his face in the waking world. Spikes of red light flickered throughout the dreamscape. “I don’t have amnesia, Aphrodite. I know all about Zeus’s science experiment.”

  Traditionally, demigods had powers passed on by their parents, but no way to control them. Weaker demigods lived out their lives with little more stir than gifted humans. Stronger demigods caused epic levels of chaos until some god took pity on them and sent them on a quest that would make full use of their powers before killing them in a blaze of glory. Because demigods took power to create, we hadn’t seen more than the “slightly above gifted human” variety until we met Adonis.