“You look flushed,” the nurse commented when she walked in seconds later. “Are you feeling okay?”
I searched frantically for a reason that would explain away my elevated heart rate and the shortness of breath she was bound to notice when she took my vitals. “I have nightmares, sometimes,” I blurted.
The nurse gave me a sympathetic smile as she adjusted the blood pressure cuff. “After what you went through, I don’t doubt it.”
Chapter X
Medea
HE KNOWS. I GLANCED over my shoulder as if writing the words would summon Jason. But he was out late again, and I doubted I’d see him before morning. I lay sprawled out on the bed, my feet kicking in the air, the pen a mottled plastic mess from chewing on it.
Jason’s not just acting like he knows; he’s acting like he knows something I don’t. He keeps making these weird comments about what I’m eating and how things fit and how emotional I’m apparently being. Except I’m not. I know my body, really well. There’s some soreness, some fatigue, a bit of nausea. But the mental stuff, my appetite, the way my clothes fit, none of that has changed yet. Healing is kind of my thing. If something throws my body out of balance, it self-corrects.
I frowned, tapping my pen to the page and thinking that over, comparing it to all the research I’d done on pregnancy in the last two weeks. Insta-healing should really mess with my ability to carry to full term. Shouldn’t my immune system just be like, “Nope, foreign body, destroy?” And if it does have some way of magically going “Okay, this is supposed to be here,” shouldn’t all the self-correcting stuff seriously mess with development?
At least I’m not going to do the whole sci-fi super-quick pregnancy thing. Everything checks out measurement-wise for five weeks with multiples, which means my super organ regeneration stuff isn’t speeding up the process. But all those crazy hormones that should be affecting me but aren’t kind of need to be there, right?
Does he think about this, any of this, before he opens his mouth to hint or cajole or even worse, lay out a guilt trip? Did he consider that we have no idea what a pregnancy would do to my body? Like, he’s making this huge assumption that if the demigod lines keep progressing, one day a god will be born. But he has no consideration for the fact that we’re a cross of two entirely different species.
I paused, rubbing at the back of my neck as I studied the pattern of thread in my blanket. Their bodies work differently than ours. The gods get weaker every generation. And they burn if their bodies get hit with too much power before maturity. They literally unravel. Demigods are born with their powers and we’re getting stronger with every generation. So what if there’s a tipping point? What happens if my children are too powerful for me to carry? Zeus wouldn’t have cared about that possibility, but it should matter to Jason.
But he can be pretty damn Machiavellian sometimes. He didn’t even hesitate before shooting my mom. Gods, I’ll never forget waking up after she died. He made the doctor flush the pain medication, disconnect all the IVs, and monitor me until I was conscious. Then he charmed the doctor into jumping out the window.
I swallowed hard, transported back to the memory. Coming to was weird. I felt groggy and disoriented, and I remember being confused about the extra people in the room. And then I saw my mom. Jason had covered her up with a sheet, but I still knew.
I cried. Even after everything she’d done. Crying isn’t new to me, but the way the sobs tore at me, the way they hurt? It was a horrible feeling that I never want to experience again, much less be responsible for someone else experiencing.
Jason sent Tantalus and Narcissus away. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were rounding up every single employee in the hospital and charming them into destroying any evidence that I’d ever existed. And then he stayed with me while I cried. He let me cry. Not once did he tell me to shut up, or stop overreacting. There was no trying to pretend like nothing was wrong or making me feel stupid or emotional or anything else. The man just sat beside me, offered me his shoulder, and wrapped an arm around me until I finished.
No one had ever done that for me before. Not that I could remember. It was the most I’d connected with another human being for over a decade. I fell in love with him right then. Amazing how powerful something as simple as touch and sympathy can be.
I cried until I was exhausted. And then, only when he was sure my tears were spent, he told me how much trouble we were in.
Turns out my mom had an army.
A door closing down the hall caught my attention. I closed my journal, and slipped it onto the nightstand, a smile breaking out across my face. “Hi, hon!” I called.
Jason opened the door to the bedroom, his face morphing into an expression of surprise when he saw me. “You didn’t have to wait up. You need to stay well rested.”
What did that mean? Maybe that we could be under attack any second and you need to be rested enough to teleport everyone off the island on demand, the logical side of my brain countered my paranoia. Maybe. “I was working on something. Everything okay out there?”
Jason nodded as he used one foot to push the shoe off the other, leaning against the wooden doorframe for balance. Once he got his shoes off, he flipped on the ceiling fan. “Just testing out the shield with Glauce.”
“How’s that going?” I moved to my feet and stretched. Sitting on the bed cross-legged, hunched over my journal, was not doing my back any favors. But I’d gotten tired of lying hunched over my journal and writing. Maybe I’d get one of those adjustable bed desk things next time we placed an order. Ordering an actual desk was out of the question, size-wise.
Jason’s eyes flickered over me. “Uh, good. She can’t expand it any further without sacrificing the integrity of the shield, but it’s solid. Nothing is coming through it, and she’s getting better at keeping the shield steady in the back of her mind.” He waved vaguely to the back of his head. “If she can just leave it up while she goes about her day, we won’t have to rotate the other demigods in as much.”
That was a relief. We only had ten other demigods who could generate a shield, and it took every one of them to match the shield Glauce generated on her own. According to Jason, gods could cast a shield and leave it up without thinking about it. They didn’t have to constantly visualize or monitor it, so long as it wasn’t under active attack. Jason was pretty sure demigods could do the same thing with enough practice. He’d been working with Glauce to try to figure out how.
“But enough about that,” Jason said, a smile playing on his face as he crossed the room to me. “Is this the one I picked out?” He tugged on the strap of my nightgown.
The back of my legs bumped against the bed. “Yeah.”
“Wow.” He slid the strap down my arm and then changed gears, sliding along the slick fabric at my side. “You really fill that out.”
I swallowed hard, thinking of the secret I was keeping from him.
His hand went still on my side, the heat of his skin contrasting with the chill from the ceiling fan. “Everything okay?”
“Perfect,” I lied, twining my arms around his neck and drawing him into a kiss.
Chapter XI
Aphrodite
“UNO,” I DECLARED, triumphantly.
Hephaestus dropped his cards onto the handcrafted metal table. “Thank the gods. Can we play something intended for the ten and up crowd now?”
“I’m working my way up.” I walked over to his game closet and pulled it open. “If you hate Uno so much, how come you’re dreaming about it?”
“I wasn’t. You must have seen it somewhere and it worked its way in.”
“Nope. I never saw it before tonight.” I dug through the dim cabinets in search of something else. “Any suggestions?” Our options were kind of limited. There were only two of us, and neither of us could read in a dreamscape. Even Uno had been a bit tri
cky. I tossed a fabric banana filled with tile letters aside and grabbed a box with a tiny man wielding an ax. A quick scan of that showed way too much reading.
“Get Quirkle,” he suggested. “It’s color-and shape-based.”
“Ooh.” The rules of the game clicked into place in my mind, along with a dozen other useless facts about it I’d never need to know. My hand closed on the box and I turned back to Hephaestus. The intricate iron scrollwork adorning the door shuddered as it clicked into the frame behind me.
Gods who were created like me knew almost everything. There were limits of course: mind reading, telling the future, and anything intentionally held back by older generations of gods were off-limits. But at least I’d always know how human creations worked, even their board games.
But having all that knowledge swimming through my brain at all times would be overwhelming. So, until I consciously thought about it, the knowledge stayed buried. I returned to the table and picked out six tiles before passing the bag to Hephaestus. “Thanks for babysitting, by the way.”
Hephaestus grinned and I did my best to ignore the way his distorted face twisted the smile into something grotesque. His face was half-perfect. The other half twisted and caved in on itself, leaving a soft, mushy-looking spot where his eye had once been and the kind of whorls and ridges I’d only ever seen in fun-house mirrors and distorted pictures. As if that wasn’t enough, electricity seemed to ripple across his features. The dead flesh twitched and moved. “Eh, I’ve got nothing better to do.” He studied me for a long moment. “Why haven’t you dropped your glamour?”
I glanced down at my hands, all but shining gold despite the dim light. “I can’t seem to shake it. I guess because Persephone’s the one keeping it up?” In a dreamstate, I should have been able to appear any way I wanted. “Or maybe because I don’t have the power to change anything in a dreamstate right now.”
“Maybe. It’s weird, seeing you like this.” Hephaestus said, drawing out his six tiles.
“I hate it.” I glanced at my tiles. “I can match four.”
He motioned for me to go. “I never wear glamours either.”
I laid out a row of purple tiles. “I didn’t know you could.” With the way his face rippled and twitched, I’d always figured any glamours he wore would get distorted beyond recognition.
“No, I can. I just choose not to.” He built a row onto my purple star, adjusting the size of the round table to accommodate the game.
“Why?” Forgetting my turn, I glanced up at him.
“Destroying the Steele was the hardest decision I’ve ever made.” Hephaestus had been the one to create Olympian Steele, infusing the metal with his power. The fact that it could kill gods with a scratch had been a surprise to him. Once he realized how dangerous his weapons really were, he took the power back into himself and destroyed every single piece of Steele, disfiguring himself in the process. “I could have just kept it a secret, a way to protect myself. An ace up my sleeve. But . . . if it ever fell into the wrong hands . . .”
We’d all be in danger, like we were now. I nodded to show I understood as I added to his row of squares.
“The decisions I’ve made haven’t always been right or good.” He laid down a tile with a click. “I’ve done horrible things through the ages. But that day, I made a good choice. This”—he motioned to his face—“reminds me that I have it in me to do the right thing. I’ve earned these scars. Hiding them would mean hiding who I am. What I’ve done.”
“I know exactly what you mean.” Shivering despite the stuffiness of the room, I stared at the game, considering my next move.
Zeus had handcrafted me for his own personal enjoyment. Every bit of the way I looked was designed to appeal to him. Sometimes the weight of that knowledge, that nothing about myself was ever intended to truly be mine but his, was overwhelming. But if I changed, I’d be giving him power he shouldn’t have over me anymore. Zeus was dead, and I’d lived on. Every day that I embraced my reflection as my own made it that much more real. Except my reflection wasn’t my own anymore. I stared at my golden hand, outstretched to place a tile.
“I knew you would.” Hephaestus said quietly. He laid down a purple piece. “Quirkle!”
Swearing, I redoubled my efforts, studying every tile on the gleaming metal table before executing my next turn. “Got any plans today?”
“None as big as yours. Are they really letting you out?”
“Assuming nothing else goes wrong.” I drew in a deep breath. Air in dreamscapes almost always tasted a bit odd. Maybe it was the lack of scent or movement? Poseidon was the only one who ever thought to factor those sensations in.
“Are you still going to need us for dream walking after you get out?” Hephaestus laid down another tile.
I nodded. “Ares says the cabins are pretty close together and sound carries, so it’d probably be for the best. And that’s a good thing. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.” Actually talking. Not just sitting awkwardly near him while silence filled the room. “Why didn’t you talk this much during the road trip?” I asked, referring to the celebratory road trip Ares, Hephaestus, Adonis, and I went on after Zeus’s defeat.
The table blinked in and out. “I think you’re waking up.”
“See you soon.”
I opened my eyes to a smiling nurse pulling a cart into the room.
“Sorry if I woke you,” she said brightly, grabbing a blood-pressure cuff from the white, wire cart. “I’m going to get your discharge paperwork started as soon as I get your vitals. Why don’t you go ahead and get ready to go?”
I should have felt relieved. The last three weeks should have bored me out of my mind. I should have been itching to leave this room behind. But I wasn’t.
There’d been something nice about playing my part from the safety of a hospital bed. Though Ares spent most of his time gathering information, he visited as much as he could, pulling me into dreamscapes each night to tell me what he’d found before leaving me to the others. But he still hadn’t located Hades or a weapons cache or our location. I’d kind of hoped he’d find everything he needed without me ever having to leave this room.
It wasn’t as if I was useless here. My being sick and wounded gave Ares’s cover credibility. And Medea dropped by almost every day, so I’d gotten some great information from the chatty demigoddess. But the second I left, the real work would begin. Every word I said, every move I made, would have the potential to destroy us both.
When the nurse left, I took a shower in the tiny bathroom adjacent to my hospital room. After I shut the water off, I eyed myself in the fogged-up mirror, my heart sinking in my chest. Gold eyes stared back at me with a look of dismay. Damp hair, the color of liquid gold, curled around a strange face. Even my skin wasn’t my own. There’s nothing left of me.
I’d avoided looking at myself in the mirror as much as I possibly could. Wearing Elise’s body felt wrong on more levels than I could count, and every time I saw a flash of gold hair out of the corner of my eye instead of red, my stomach twisted in knots. But this morning, there was no avoiding it.
When I walked out of this hospital, I’d be stuck on an island full of demigods who thought I was someone else. If I screwed up, Ares and I could both die for it. I couldn’t lie, I couldn’t drop this glamour by myself, and I couldn’t teleport to escape. I was stuck here, powerless, and I couldn’t—I didn’t—
Stop. Breathe, I reminded myself, trying to take steadying breaths as I sank to the floor of the tiny bathroom, clutching my towel and tucking my knees to my chest.
“Knock, knock,” Medea called from the room. “Elise?”
Oh gods. I tried to pull myself together but the added pressure only spun me further into the panic attack. When she knocked on the bathroom door, it inched open.
“I’m sorry!” Medea’s fingers wrapped around the ed
ge of the door to close it, but then she stilled, probably catching a glimpse of my leg on the floor. “Elise? Are you okay?”
The lie caught in my throat and she pushed the door open the rest of the way. Her eyes widened when she took me in, curled up against the shower stall and gasping for air. “I’ll get a nurse.”
“N-no!” I managed to say. “I’ll be—I just need—it’s just—I can’t do this,” I said with sudden realization.
She was nice, and I was lying to her, I was pretending, and she couldn’t—she didn’t even see me. Not the real me. She’d hate me. Even I hated me. Walking around in someone else’s skin to gain trust? That was at least ten levels of wrong. “I need to leave. I just—”
“Okay.” Her voice turned soothing and she knelt beside me. “You’re getting out of here today, yeah? I’ll help you pack.”
“Not here.” My hand swept back, tangling in the damp shower curtain. “Here!” I waved my arms as though I could encompass the entire island, my hand thumping against the wall with the wild motion. “I want to go home.”
The sentiment startled me, because I didn’t really have one. Oh, sure, I’d charmed my way into a small condo in Pebble Beach, but I’d never considered it home. Never thought I’d miss it if I went away for a while. But now, the thought of that open place full of windows and lights, where I didn’t have to wear a glamour, and gods ’porting in and out, seemed overwhelmingly far away.
Understanding dawned on Medea’s face as she sat across from me, the back of her head brushing against the ceramic sink. “I’m far from home myself. Choosing to go with Jason and leave everything I knew was terrifying, even though I wasn’t in the best situation.” She swallowed hard. “It gets better. You make friends, and sometimes, they can be even closer than families. Just give us a chance.”
Love & War Page 9