“I can’t teleport between realms.”
“So make an entrance.”
Make an entrance? I sucked in a breath. The only people who could make entrances between realms were realm rulers. But…she wasn’t much older than I was. How—
A deep rumbling filled the air. The water went choppy and the rock I hid behind vibrated so much I worried it was about to break into a million pieces. I grabbed hold of the rock as the water sloshed around me. When the rumbling stopped, the girl was gone.
AS SOON AS I PORTED home, I shifted back to fins, settled onto my clamshell bed, and pulled up the search engine on my phone.
“Does that hurt?” Rhode asked as she swam into my cave. Soothing blue light danced across the pale limestone floor.
“No.” Luckily the girl’s name was weird enough to stick out online. “She’s really seventeen.” There were too many pictures of her spanning too many years for the way she looked to be a glamour. Vain gods reliving the glory days was one thing. The awkward stage before that, not so much.
“Who?” Rhode asked, swimming above me so she could see.
“Persephone.” I moved my phone to the left so Rhode could see the picture around my head.
Rhode clicked in approval. “Pretty. What was she in?”
“N-nothing.” As I scanned over a news article about her an icy feeling settled in my stomach. “She’s a realm-heir, like me.”
“Which realm?”
“Living.” I shifted, trying to get comfortable on the soft-bottomed plants that filled the shell. “This rock star guy traveled to the Underworld to save his dead wife or something and met up with her there.”
Rhode tilted her head in confusion, the motion tilting her body just enough to brush against mine. She jerked back and swam up a foot, releasing a stream of bubbles as she rose. “She’s a psychopomp?”
I nodded, still reading. “Orpheus told everyone about her when he got back to the living realm and he’s just famous enough for people to listen.”
“So she has worshipers?” Rhode’s voice was tinged with worry.
I shook my head. There were people who believed in us, but not many. “Mostly everyone seems to think he got into some heavy drugs and hallucinated the whole thing.” I set the phone down on a rock and exchanged a look with Rhode. “But it still counts.”
Gossip, speculation, it all counts as worship, which explained why this girl was so screwed up. Child gods can’t handle worship. She’d need someone to channel that power away. Since she was older than me, she was probably fine to handle the initial gossip, but then things got worse. Some tabloid reporter had seen her with Orpheus and snapped a picture right before his wife miraculously woke up from her coma. It hadn’t taken long to put a name to her face. Now people knew her name, her face, where she lived, everything.
“Is she going to be okay?” The worry in Rhode’s voice reflected my own, and for one gut churning moment, I allowed my thoughts to shift in a direction I never let myself think about.
When I gave her sentience, how much of her personality was hers and how much of it was mine? I pushed away the thought. Rhode was my friend, not some weird reflection of me. “She’s in trouble, Rhode, but I can help her.”
“How can I help?”
“See this?” I held up my shell, wondering why I was even explaining this to Rhode since she wouldn’t remember. “Dad uses it to store powers I’m not old enough to handle. Demeter must not know about how to do this, but if I show her...”
Rhode followed my train of thought. “She’ll be able to do it for Persephone.”
“Exactly.”
“But you can’t leave this realm without your Dad.”
I grinned. “Leave that to me.”
OVER THE NEXT few days, I sent guppies to keep an eye on my dad. But until one of them saw him teleport away, the only thing I could do was wait.
“Does that hurt?” Rhode asked as I stepped into the storage crate.
“No.” I snapped, too sick with worry to bother with manners. She wouldn’t remember if I was rude anyway.
“Oh. Good. Triton...” Rhode hovered in the doorway for a few minutes, watching as I stacked boxes. “As fascinating as this... collection you’ve got going is, people are starting to talk.”
“You’ve told me.” I was trying to make a level surface to display my collection of random human stuff, but it was hard since the whole container was tilted. Still, it was a pretty decent distraction.
“I have?” She hesitated, looking confused. Well, as confused as a dolphin possibly could, which was looked more like delighted despite mild puzzlement. “Why do you collect all this stuff?”
“I like it.” I fingered a dark Metallica t-shirt I’d found in one of the boxes. What would it be like to not hit reset every time I wanted to talk to a friend? The only other person in the entire realm I could really talk to was my dad. And he was always busy.
Persephone would remember me.
“Yeah, kind of figured that,” Rhode snarked. “But why? I mean, you’re royalty. You literally have the best of the best of everything you can get down here. What’s so fascinating about their trash?”
Grunting, I lifted another box wondering if it was even worth explaining again. “It’s not trash. It means something.” I held up the duck, mind flashing with images from all the shows and commercials I’d seen of loving parents bathing cute little children with a bop of soap on their nose. Maybe this particular duck had never been used in one of those weird, human moments complete with sappy music playing in the background, but it was the closest I was ever going to get.
A yellow and blue guppy swam to the entrance of the storage container and flapped in an awkward circle, the extent of its instruction-following abilities.
Dad had left the realm! “Gotta go.” I scrambled out of the crate, legs merging back into a tail.
“Go where?” asked Rhode, bumping against me at exactly the wrong time. She let out a surprised squeal when we popped up at the outcropping of rock, now significantly smaller thanks to the tide, I’d hidden behind when I first saw the girl.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” I put a hand on her slippery head to calm her down.
Rhode thrashed around in the water, eyes wild. She wasn’t cussing me out, which meant I’d let speech slip somewhere in the transition. Maybe that was for the best considering what I was about to do.
Before I showed Demeter my shell, I needed to find the girl to make sure she was okay. Because if I left the realm, I was in big trouble. So if someone else had managed to help her or if she didn’t need help anymore for some other reason, I’d rather find out now.
Wind whipped against me carrying the sting of salt water as I made my way toward the sand bar. My legs divided in two so I could walk when the water got too shallow to swim. Only a tiny strip of the sand remained above sea level. Hopefully it would be enough.
Holding my breath, I ran my thumb along the sharp edge of my shell. My flesh split and a tiny drop of blood welled up along the cut.
“Persephone,” I whispered, letting the blood drip toward the sand. Three drops fell from my finger then whipped by me in the breeze so fast I couldn’t tell where they landed. Why was wind such a big thing up here?
I crouched low to the sand, ready to try again when I heard a soft voice behind me.
“You called?”
I spun around so fast, I almost fell face first into the sand. There she stood, all but glittering in the sunlight as her blonde hair fanned around her, gently swaying in the breeze. Brilliant green eyes stared at me in speculation under heavy lashes.
“You’re okay!” I ran up to her and just in time realized giving her a hug was probably a bit too familiar considering we’d never actually met. The whole speech I’d prepared on the off chance she showed up fle
w out of my head leaving me stuttering in disjointed fragments. “I—I saw you the other day, and I thought—I mean, you looked—I wanted to help you. To make sure you’re okay.”
“Who are you?” She tilted her head studying me with a calculating look in her eye. For one moment, I wondered if I’d been wrong about her being close to my age. That gleam in her eye made her seem older, wiser, and powerful enough to set my hair on end. But then her lips melted into a warm smile and the moment of doubt passed.
Cautious clicks came from the waves and I remembered Rhode. I held a hand out behind me so she’d know I heard her.
“T—Triton.”
“Now there’s a name I’ve never heard before.” A slow smile played on her lips. “You must be new.”
I nodded, too tongue tied to say much else.
“Are you Poseidon’s son? You look just like him.”
People kept saying that, but I thought maybe they were wrong. Maybe I looked more like my mom than my dad. That would explain why he couldn’t look at me, anyway.
“Am I right?” She arched an eyebrow at me.
I hesitated. Dad didn’t want my existence publicized just yet. Child gods don’t do so well under the pressures of worship. But…this was another god, so surely the same rules didn’t apply. “Yeah.”
“Do you—” she broke off, clearing her throat and glancing down at the sand. When she looked up at me again, worry flickered in her eyes chased by fear. “Do you really want to help me?” Her voice broke on the word help.
“Yeah,” I breathed, unable to articulate much else.
“Why? I mean, you don’t even know me.”
A million lines from a million shows sprang to my mind, but I pushed them aside, determined the next words would be mine.
“We’re the same.” I didn’t just mean that we were both gods. That day that she’d screamed at my dad from this beach, I’d heard the rage in her voice, yeah, but there was something else. She was alone. Just like me. Somehow despite belonging to an epic family of gods, we were both alone and angry and scared of what we could do. Of who we could become. “We should stick together.”
A smile broke across her face and she held out her hand. “Will you come with me?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Yes.” But I wouldn’t get very far if my dad thought I’d left the realm. “Just one second.” I knelt down and touched the tip of my conch shell to the water, eyes closed so I could concentrate.
I felt, rather than saw, trace bits of power pouring out of the shell and into the sea foam. One tiny push from me was all it took to send the foam in a thousand directions. If Dad tried to find me before I was ready to come back, he’d have a heck of a time trying to trace me through powers.
“I like the way you think,” Persephone gushed.
“Aw, that was nothin’. Wait till you see what else I can do.” I grinned and grabbed her hand, ignoring the warning call of the dolphin as the two of us disappeared.
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Book 2 of The Daughters of Zeus
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Acknowledgments
Thanks again to my wonderful writer’s group and my fantastic editor, Deb! I couldn’t have done it without you. As always, a big thanks to my family for their unending support, especially Tyler for sitting through hours of editing audiobooks. No one wants to hear their sister talk that long.
About the Author
Kaitlin Bevis spent her childhood curled up with a book and a pen. If the ending didn’t agree with her, she rewrote it. Because she’s always wanted to be a writer, she spent high school and college learning everything she could to achieve that goal. After graduating college with a BFA and Master’s in English, Kaitlin went on to write The Daughters of Zeus series. www.kaitlinbevis.com
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