by Helen Scott
“Would you like to hear about Isa?” he asked after a while. His voice was soft, as though he didn’t want to intrude on her thoughts.
“If you want to tell me?” She knew that Isa was his soulmate and that he’d locked her up because of the gods tormenting her, but other than that, it was all a blank slate. Aster didn’t feel threatened by the other woman. What she and Dem had was new and strange, and there was no way in hell it wasn’t going to be impacted by his past, so hearing about it could only help, right?
“She was beautiful. The first time I saw her, my heart stopped.” He paused and Aster waited, frozen, unsure what to do in this situation. When he asked, “Are you sure you want to hear this given what we just did? And that we’re still naked together?”
Angling her head to look up at him, she said, “Isa is part of you, and I want to get to know you, so that means I want to get to know about her too.”
He nodded. “I was out chasing down one of Dionysus’ cats, a panther, if I remember correctly, but it was hard. The thing had been moving about so fast that it had sapped my energy. I couldn’t teleport anymore, so I took a train to the furthest destination I could think of in the direction the cat could be heading, hoping to beat it there by some miracle. Isabeau was on the train. She got on a few stops after I did and sat down a few rows in front of me. I didn’t notice her at first, not until the ticket master came by, and then once I had seen her, I couldn’t see anything else.
“Brown ringlets surrounded her face. According to her, it was not a very popular style at the time, but she couldn’t get her hair to do anything else. Her eyes were a clear blue, and they always seemed to see through my bullshit. We started talking, and that was that. We never lost touch, spent all the time we could together. She was fascinating; her opinions were so different from those I had encountered in women before, very modern for the time. Isa probably would have loved what society has become over the last century. She loved reading, couldn’t get enough of Romeo and Juliet. We would go and see it performed whenever we could.
“At some point, Zeus noticed that I was spending time with her, and it all went downhill from there. He started speaking to her, whispering crazy thoughts in a way that only she could hear them. Most of the time, he wasn’t visible to her, but when he was, he’d take my form. Zeus twisted and bent her mind in so many directions that she couldn’t bring herself to believe anything . . .”
Aster could still hear Dem talking, but couldn’t make out the words as the world spun around them. She tried to get his attention, tried to move, to speak, but nothing worked. By the time everything stopped moving, she was nauseous again.
She was in a hospital, an old one. The white-tiled room she stood in held rows of bathtubs, most containing a woman who was submerged up to her neck and covered with a sheet. Along the far wall were a series of boxes, two of which contained women in a similar situation. The boxes closed around their bodies up to their necks. It looked like a horror movie flashback where they showed the building as it was before the murder spree or ghost or whatnot took up residence. A chill that had nothing to do with the sweltering temperature of the room ran over her skin, and she broke out in goosebumps.
“Come on, Isabeau, time’s up. I need you ta be a good girl for me now. No more tantrums.” The nurse had a slight accent that Aster couldn’t place. She sounded like she should be in an old-timey film, with the slight warble in her voice.
Turning, she found the woman who had been speaking. A white apron covered her black floor-length dress, and a white cap was pinned to her hair. The heat and humidity in the room from all those baths must have been overwhelming in an outfit like that. Tucking some hair that had come loose behind her ear, the nurse pulled the blanket off the bath, releasing a cloud of steam.
As she walked forward, Aster could see that Isabeau was restrained within the water; leather cuffs around her wrists and ankles prevented her from moving. Quickly, the nurse unlocked them and had Isa stand, before clothing her in a dress of some kind. Isabeau was being led from the room, and Aster was being dragged along with her, the memory not letting her go.
“There you are, princess, back in your tower.” The woman didn’t say anything offensive, and yet, the way she said princess seemed belittling and almost spiteful.
The room was small, barely containing the metal-framed bed. When Isa sat on it and began softly singing to herself while playing with her hair, Aster knew instinctively that this was how she spent most of her time.
“Isa.” Dem’s voice came from beside her.
Turning to look, Aster saw him standing there, but something was off.
“Were you a good girl for the nurses? Did you have a good bath?”
She nodded and backed up into a corner, pulling the white shift gown down over her knees.
“Do you want to play?”
She violently shook her head, banging it on the bedframe more than once.
“What the hell?” Dem’s voice came from the other side of her now, and she was confused. “Zeus?”
As soon as the name was out of his mouth, the other man disappeared.
“Isabeau, are you well?” Dem asked, kneeling in front of the bed.
“Demetrius?” The brunette’s wild eyes found his.
“I’m here.” His voice was knotted with emotion.
Her hand reached up and clutched at some of her hair. “There were two of you, but you vanished, but you’re here. Two of you. Two of you.” She repeated the phrase over and over again, each time a little quieter, before she pulled on the handful of hair.
The clump that came out made Aster wince in pain.
“Isa love, have I been here frequently of late?”
“You know where you’ve been. Bad man. Bad, bad man.”
“I will protect you. I promise.” Dem was clearly in pain seeing her like this, but there was an undercurrent of anger in his voice as well.
“Protect me from yourself? He wants to protect me, but he hurts me. How could he protect me?”
“It doesn’t matter how, just know that I will.” He reached out to touch her knee, distress etched in every crease on his face, but she flinched away, shrieking her head off as though he’d poured boiling water over her skin. She pulled on more hair. This clump came away easily, as though she’d pulled it out multiple times.
“No touching, I get it. I’m sorry, love.”
The door opened, and a nurse came in, seemingly oblivious to Dem’s presence. Aster guessed by the way that he was moving that he was physically there, but invisible somehow.
“What are we screaming about now, princess?”
“Touchy, touchy. No touchy.”
The nurse gathered up the clumps of hair from the bed and walked out, returning no more than a minute later with a straight jacket, or at least the ancestor of the straight jackets that were used in her time. Wrapping Isa up was like trying to dress a baby, but eventually the nurse won through patience and skill versus wild flailing.
“There you are, princess. Be a good girl now.” Satisfied that Isa was secure, the nurse left her alone again, with the exception of Dem, who apparently made himself visible to her once more.
“I love you, Isa. I always will.”
“I love you, Dem.” She paused after she spoke, as though assessing the words for their accuracy, before adding, “I hate you, Dem.”
His body visibly reacted, hunching in on itself as though he’d been punched.
“You won’t see me again, my love. If you do, scream that beautiful little head of yours off. I hope somehow you will be able to forgive me for everything.”
Aster’s heart clenched. The woman in front of her was so different from the woman Dem had described. She’d never thought the mind could so fully protect itself, but it was obvious that Isa’s mind was trying to do exactly that. There were questions that couldn’t be answered logically, actions that had been taken, decisions made, and at some point, her brain had decided enough was enough.
Aster slowly felt herself waking up from the memory as though it was a dream. She wished it was. When she opened her eyes, she found Dem propped up beside her in bed as he read. She wanted to crawl into his lap and heal this wound that had festered on his soul for all those years. He had to let her, though, which she wasn’t sure he would do yet.
“Welcome back.”
“Thanks.”
“Do I want to know where you were?”
“Probably not, but I should tell you, anyway.” She sighed, knowing that keeping this a secret would doom their fragile bond from the start. “I was in one of your memories. You found Zeus tormenting Isa in what I think was a mental hospital, although to be honest, it looked more like a series of different torture devices.”
“I see.” He was frowning at his book as though he was trying to burn its pages with his eyes. “So, now you know a fraction of what Isa went through just because she chose to be with me. Do you understand why I tried to avoid this?”
“I understood before I saw that. I just don’t agree with your choices. Would she really have wanted you to shut yourself away from the world? To never love again?” Aster ducked her head, trying to make eye contact with him, but he stubbornly looked at his book. The questions she’d posed to him had to be ones he’d thought of before. “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded, eyes guarded as he looked at her.
“Why did the nurse call her princess all the time? Was she royalty?”
He snorted. “About as far from royalty as she could get. The nurses didn’t like that Isa got special attention just because I paid them an exorbitant amount of money for her to have a private room and avoid most of their so-called treatments.”
She thought for a moment about what it must have been like for both Dem and Isa to go through that.
“You know I didn’t choose to see that memory, right?”
He nodded, but she didn’t feel like he truly accepted that she had no control over what she saw. Then again, maybe she was just projecting her own fears onto him. Either way, it didn’t matter. Once she talked to Phobetor, she would be able to figure all of it out. At least, that was what she was hoping would happen.
Chapter 14
Aster watched Cin sitting at the countertop reading something on her phone for a moment, before she cleared her throat. She had a lot to apologize for, but they were sisters. Maybe not by blood, but that didn’t matter, so they would work through it.
“Hey, S—” Cin caught herself just before using Aster’s nickname.
“Hey.” She shoved her hands into her pockets and then yanked one out to shove a lock of hair behind her ear. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on with me and my visions, hell, with me in general, but I wanted to apologize for how I treated you. I know we’ve spoken since then and moved on, but I just . . . I wanted to make it clear that I regret what I said. You are my family, always will be.”
“I forgave you as soon as you said it. Don’t worry about it,” Cin said, standing and wrapping her arms around Aster.
“Thanks. I know I was a bitch, and you don’t deserve to be treated like that. We’ve both been through hell the last couple months. I wish things could have been different, but then you wouldn’t have found Thad, and I would never take that away from you.”
“Sweetie, really, it’s okay.”
Aster nodded. “The thing is, I need a favor, and you’re the only person I know who can help me.”
“Okay . . .”
Taking a deep breath, she took the plunge. “I need to go to the Underworld.” Before Cin could protest, Aster told her all about Chloe, Lycus, and Phobetor. “I know it’s crazy, but he’s the one who is causing this, and I just want it to stop.”
Cin let out a slow whistle. “Man, when you ask for a favor, you really go for it, don’t you?”
“I wish I could ask for a different favor, believe me. It’s not like I want to go to the Underworld.” Realizing she might had just insulted her sister, again, she hastily added, “I mean, I’m sure it’s a nice place. I’d just never had it on my bucket list, you know?”
“Oh, I know.”
“So you’ll take me?”
“I really wish you would ask for a different favor, but I will take you. Fair warning, you may have to meet Hades, though. He’s pretty chill, but can be a bit persnickety about who comes and goes from his kingdom.”
“Oh, uh, sure.” The idea of meeting one of the most revered and feared gods in history made her shiver. She hoped that it didn’t come to that, but at the same time, she was sure she’d find it fascinating.
Cin stood, patting her pockets until she found her cell phone. “I’ll need to ask for directions so we don’t get lost. And, most importantly, do not let go of my hand for any reason whatsoever. If you do, the Underworld will literally drain the life right out of you. Clear?”
“Clear.”
She was texting back and forth with someone about directions. For all she knew, it could have been Cin’s birth mother. They had met and spent some time together, but Aster got the sense that they didn’t really get along.
“So your mom and dad never got back together?” Cin asked as she tucked the phone away into a pocket again.
Aster shook her head. “Phobetor wouldn’t allow it. Chloe can’t even bring herself to contact Lycus. It’s so heartbreaking. She’s still marked and has nightmares. Poor woman only sleeps a few hours a night. It just doesn’t seem right, you know?”
“I wouldn’t be able to live like that, that’s for sure. Now, hand, please, and remember what I said.” Cin stuck her hand out and waited until Aster took it.
Her sister’s vice-like grip ensured that even if she relaxed her hand, they wouldn’t lose their connection. She wasn’t about to let go. She’d survived the Order of Talos, and she and Dem had just reconnected. Letting the Underworld suck the life out of her was not on her agenda.
The room shifted, and just like jumping with one of the siren brothers, everything went black for a moment before seeming to come into focus once more, only this time they were somewhere dark and chilly.
Looking around briefly before Cin started tugging on her hand, Aster saw rock everywhere, like they were in a cave, or a tunnel judging by the way Cin was moving. After walking for a while, they ended up in a fancy room.
There was a bar on one side and couches and a TV on the other. Lanterns and lamps lit the space, giving it a warm glow. The big couch in the middle was a deep scarlet color, which brought out the red in the arched brick ceiling. Everything was elegant, functional, and welcoming. If she didn’t have to be connected to Cin the whole time, it would be a nice place to hang out. That wasn’t about to happen, though.
A woman appeared from around the corner. Aster tried to see her, but her sister blocked her view.
“Aunt Megaera, thank you so much for helping!” Cin gave the other woman an awkward one-armed hug.
Megaera had dark hair and perfect skin, the kind Aster only ever saw in commercials for skin care products. She looked like a marble statue that had come to life. The deep-red satin dress she wore highlighted her naturally red lips and gave her a refined air. Aster was willing to bet that she had picked the color of the couch. The woman seemed to have an affinity for red.
“And you must be Aster. I’m Megaera. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I feel like I know you already.” She smiled, and it was infectious.
“Nice to meet you too. Are you here to give us directions?”
“I’m going to lead you to the gates. You’ll have to find your way from there, as I would not be welcome. It shouldn’t be difficult, though. Come.” Megaera swirled away, her dress fanning out behind her as she led them out of the cozy area, pausing briefly to pick something up at the opening.
They went back through the tunnel, splitting off and taking a turn Aster didn’t think they’d taken before. After a few minutes of walking, she could see why Megaera had chosen to lead them instead of just giving directions. The
tunnels were like rivers coming off an ocean. Each one twisted and turned in ways that were unexpected and had other tributary-like tunnels coming off them. By the time they turned, she knew there was no way she’d be able to get them back to where they had come from.
She could hear noises in the distance, screams and moans, but most of all, she could hear running water. Soon, the tunnel ended and they were in a large open area. The running water she’d been able to hear was a river. It was a massive thing, cutting through their path with a strong current. The bridge they took to cross it made Aster uneasy. It was just wood, and old wood at that. She could hear it creaking under their weight. Once they were on the other side, she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“I didn’t expect to see rivers here.”
“The river Styx is a pretty well-known thing. I’m sure you’ve heard of it before.” Cin chuckled.
“That’s Styx?”
“Actually, no. That was Kokytos, the river of tears,” Megaera responded from in front of them.
“Oh, good, nice and happy, then.”
The light in the open area was dimmer than it had been in the tunnel, which Aster thought was odd, but it seemed to be getting darker as they progressed. Passing by a tree wasn’t something she had expected, either, but apparently the Underworld was full of surprises. It wasn’t just one tree, though. It turned out to be a whole wooded area. She’d never heard of the Underworld having a forest, but that wasn’t all that surprising since the only people who generally went to the Underworld were either dead or magical beings.
Megaera stopped a few moments later in front of a doorway. She’d called it a gate before, but Aster didn’t really see anything that looked like a gate in the opening.
“Here is where I leave you. Try to stay on the path. It will lead you back to the Halls of Night, where you will find the Oneiroi.” She started to turn away, but seemed to remember the item in her hand. “This is for you, Aster. Don’t take it off while you are in the Land of Dreams. It is obvious that you don’t belong here, but this will help to disguise that.”