by D. S. Murphy
I was back in the meadow on the hilltop. The limbs of the tree swayed gently in the breeze. A falling leaf brushed against my arm. The deer was gone, but the goat was still munching away. I rubbed my hands over his back and felt the soft, curly white hair. I could smell lavender and oregano. It was so peaceful here. I felt like nothing could hurt me.
I waited for one of the women to come up like they had before, but no one came. After a few minutes I decided to look for them. I followed the path down the hill and came to the mouth of the cave. The entrance was dark, but I had an urge to enter anyway and see where it led. I walked down a set of staircases that had been carved directly into the rock, keeping one hand against the cool wall of the tunnel. At the bottom of the steep decline, the path opened into a large cavern. Light streamed down from holes in the rock far above; it shone like a spotlight on the almost domestic scene. Three women were doing chores. One pulled up water from an old well made of large stones. Another was digging white clay from the walls with a sharp spade, and the third was spinning wool into thread on an old-fashioned spinning wheel. None of them looked up when I entered. They kept working, their repetitive motions creating a soothing rhythm—a machine-like hum.
I approached the well in the center of the cavern. The surface was so smooth and clear I could see my reflection. Suddenly another face came into view—the same old woman that had seen me last time. I whirled around to face her.
“Cut the thread,” she said. “Save the tree.”
Then she shoved me. I went flailing backwards over the rim of the well and fell into darkness.
***
When I woke up again, it was dark and I was alone. I felt a little groggy, but most of the pain had subsided to a dull ache. I found my gloves on a table nearby and pulled them on, wincing as they disturbed the gauze on my finger. Then I walked past the fountain and found the stairs. I heard voices and followed them to the grand dining room where I’d had breakfast. Silver candlesticks illuminated the table, which was covered by a satin red cloth. They mirrored the glowing chandeliers above the table, under which most of the family had already gathered.
I looked first for Sitri but didn’t see him. Besides Heph, Mist, Dion, Stephanie, Alice and Able, there was another girl across from Mist, and a younger boy I didn’t recognize sitting next to Able. Stephanie was at the head of the table with her husband. I didn’t want to interrupt and was thinking of just going to bed without eating.
“Ah, there you are,” Able said, spotting me just as I was about to retreat to my room. “I see you’ve survived the afternoon. Take a seat and join us.” Alice gave me a warm smile.
The only empty chair was across the length of the table, at the other head. I didn’t make a move towards it. I noticed that they were all dressed up. Not in dresses and suits, exactly, but a certain elegant chic that they wore so casually it hadn’t registered at first. I looked down at my dirty, bloodstained and torn clothes.
“I’m not hungry,” I lied, eyeing the plates full of roast beef, chicken, vegetables, bread and potatoes. Silver dishes held gravy and butter. My stomach rumbled.
Able turned and said something to the boy next to him. He sprang up and grabbed a chair from against the wall nearby, and slid it into place next to him. Then he pulled it out for me and smiled. Cute kid.
I sat in the chair and thanked him. He nodded, his golden blond curls shining in the dim light. Alice gave me a little wave from across the table.
“Let’s see, who haven’t you met?” Able said.
“I introduced her to my fists not long ago,” Mist said, smirking. “It looks like she and them didn’t get along.”
Able frowned at her and tapped his fingers against the table. His rings sparkled in the candlelight. Mist flashed him a look and went silent.
“I’m Tori,” said the girl across from Mist, leaning around Dion and nodding at me with a small smile. She had darker skin than the others, and a sultry, bedroom voice. Indian I guessed. Her cleavage was practically spilling out of the pink sweat suit she was wearing. Her puffy round lips had a small gap between them that I wanted to put my finger in.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I tore my gaze away, my cheeks flaming. I’d never been into girls, but something about Tori had me captivated. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her smile and exchange looks with Dion. He leaned over and filled my wineglass from a green bottle.
The boy next to me was called Sam. He looked a few years younger than me—about the same age my brother would have been. Like everybody else at the table, Sam had perfectly symmetrical features, which made him look slightly inhuman. Like a porcelain cherub. The roughest looking at the table was Heph, with his scruffy goatee and long hair, but he wasn’t hard to look at. He had a low cut T-shirt that showed off a bit of his bronze chest, and some wooden beads around his neck. If he was trying to look unkempt, it wasn’t working. He just looked like a hot surfer.
Heph’s skin wasn’t as dark as Tori’s, but noticeable compared to Able, Stephanie and Mist, who were all—incredibly—paler than I was. I was pale like you could see through my skin. Fragile, translucent. Their skin was pale like marble statues, thick and smooth.
As I piled my plate up with food, I wondered how they were related, if at all. Had Able said Mist was his niece? If Stephanie was Able’s husband, could she be someone’s mother? Apart from Sam, she looked like the youngest one at the table.
“Why is she even here, anyway?” I heard Mist say in a whisper that carried. “I thought this was a family dinner. And what’s with the gloves?”
I looked at Able for help. Mist was being rude, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else. Instead they all looked at Able expectantly, like they’d been wondering the same thing.
“Kaidance might have the ability to see the future,” Able said. There was a moment of total silence as everyone else stopped eating.
“That’s a useful trick,” Dion said,
Mist crossed her arms and scowled at me.
“It isn’t common?” I asked.
“No,” Stephanie said. “The future has always been mysterious, even among immortals. When humans have the gift of sight, they’re often related to Prometheus or Apollo.”
“You know the story of Cassandra, don’t you?” Alice asked, just when I’d taken a big bite of food.
“Could tell the future, but nobody believed her. Right?” I mumbled.
“Do you know how it happened? Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy in order to seduce her, but she later refused him. So he cursed her, so she wouldn’t be believed.”
“That bitch deserved it,” Mist spat. “She had no right refusing him. She was one of his priestesses, working in a temple of Apollo. She was one of Apollo’s Sacred Virgins. When she signed up they told her she needed to keep herself pure for Apollo. Did she think he wasn’t actually going to come and claim what was his? If so, then she was never a true believer.”
“But she had kids,” Alice continued. “So her blood is fairly common. Different people see different glimpses of the future, in different ways. Not all of them useful.”
“And Prometheus?” I asked, taking a sip of wine.
“Prometheus means foresight,” Able said. “People used to consider him their savior. When the world was being made, the gods screwed up dividing rations, and humans were left with nothing. So Prometheus gave them a little bit of fire he stole from the forges of Olympus, and technology.”
“That’s never been proven,” Heph said, raising a finger with a crease in his brow.
“Could he really see the future?” I asked.
“I think it might be more appropriate,” Able said, “to say he was supremely well informed.”
“One time the king of Arcadia sacrificed a boy to Zeus,” Sam said, his eyes excited. “Zeus didn’t like it, so he unleashed a deluge, and the rivers ran in torrents and the sea flooded the coastal plain, engulfed the foothills with spray, and washed everything clean. But Prometheus told his son, D
eucalion, to build a great wooden chest and fill it with provisions. So humanity was saved.”
“Wait—isn’t that the story of Noah and the Ark?” I asked.
“Which story do you think came first?” Dion said, smirking.
“It’s exactly the kind of thing Zeus would do,” Able said, his features hardening. “He let people sacrifice children to him for thousands of years. Then one day he decided it was bad for his image, or cruel, or something. So he decided to just kill everybody and start over. If Prometheus hadn’t saved Deucalion, the humans would have been exterminated.”
“Deucalion founded the first cities and raised the first temples after the flood,” Alice said.
“Temples to Zeus,” Mist corrected. “Prometheus knew Zeus would just try to kill them again when he found out. So he told Deucalion to build a temple and thank Zeus for sparing them, which was total bullshit. But it worked. Zeus liked the look of that temple. He liked humans bowing down and groveling in front of him. So he helped them repopulate. He told them to throw stones over their shoulders and where they fell, they became men and women.”
Stones that became men and women? This was obviously ancient mythology. Why were we even talking about this stuff?
“So,” I said, polishing off my plate, “you think I’m related to Apollo or Prometheus?”
Mist snorted. “Not likely. She’s a total wimp. I mean, just look at what I did to her face. And she doesn’t seem that smart either.” I reached a hand up to my face. My eye was still swollen. I hadn’t checked myself in a mirror yet, and realized I probably had a black eye. I could withstand Mist’s bullying, but sitting with this group of people that looked like movie stars, when I looked like I’d been through hell, made me too self-conscious to deal. Besides, I’d already finished eating. I didn’t need to be here.
“Excuse me,” I said, pushing away from the table. I didn’t look back as I left the room, and nobody stopped me. Back in my room I checked out my face in the vanity mirror. My eye looked like a bruised plum. I touched it gingerly. I tugged off my gloves, then took off all the bandaids. Holy shit. My eyes widened. I had dark stitches all over. Two in my left ear, seven under my right arm and four on the inside of my index finger. I looked like Frankenstein. Those arrows had cut me deep. I also had a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my thigh. At least the bleeding had stopped.
I smelled rank, so I stripped off all my dirty clothes and wrapped a towel around me. When I went into the bathroom, I just about ran into Sitri. He was shaving, wearing low cut jeans and nothing else. I pulled the towel tighter against my body.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” he said, without looking at me. My eyes were drawn to his stomach muscles. They were so hard he looked like a plastic action figure. I wanted to throw off the white towel and tackle him with my mouth, but I couldn’t get a read on him—not that I had any experience with boys.
“Why weren’t you at dinner?” I asked.
“I stopped eating dinner at the house ages ago,” he said. “Got tired of all the reminiscing. Plus I’m not really family.”
“Are they all related to each other?” I asked.
“Pretty much. But it’s complicated.”
I nodded, watching the way his biceps rippled every time he raised the razor to his cheek.
“Ok, I’m done,” he said, wiping his face off with a towel.
“Sitri,” I said as he turned to go. I closed the gap between us, until I was looking up into his eyes.
“Thank you for saving me,” I said. It was a risk, being all up in his personal space, but I wanted to get a reaction from him. I wanted him to notice me.
He smelled like soap and aftershave. He reached down and tucked my hair behind my ear. I thought maybe he was going to kiss me. But instead, he just examined the stitches for a second. “Alice can take those out tomorrow,” he said. Then went back to his room and closed the door.
I couldn’t sleep that night. All I could think about was how Able must have made a mistake. Compared to the things I’d seen Able and Stephanie do, my powers didn’t seem like anything special. Mist certainly didn’t think I deserved to be here. And according to Alice, the angry bruises all over my body proved I didn’t have a lot of immortal blood in me. Able must have been disappointed to see me at dinner. I hadn’t wanted to come to Nevah at all, but now I was worried about being forced to leave.
What would happen if I wasn’t what they were looking for? Would they take me back to JDRI? Would I be locked up again? I remember Puriel’s determined expression as he chased us on his bike—if they made me go back, it wouldn’t take long for him to catch up to me. And I had no way of defending myself against him. Would Sitri and Able just abandon me now, once they figured out I didn’t have whatever it was they needed?
The sounds of people having sex broke through my cyclic pessimism. At first I thought it was Sitri, and my heart ached. Of course he would already have a girlfriend here. With girls like Tori and Mist around, I’m not surprised he didn’t even look at me. But when I snuck into the bathroom and put my ear against his door, it was quiet. The noise was coming from outside my main door.
Out in the hall it was louder. I recognized Tori’s voice. Her moans were so loud she was practically screaming. Did they seriously not care that everybody could hear them? I found the door the noise was coming from, and saw light coming out from under it. I was sweating now, from the fear of being discovered. I should go back to my room. Instead, hating myself for it, I bent down and looked through the old fashioned keyhole, which was just large enough to make out the scene inside the room. Tori on black satin sheets, being rammed by Dion—or at last I’m pretty sure it was Dion, he was wearing a mask that looked like it was laughing.
A floorboard creaked behind me, loud enough that Dion and Tori stopped and looked straight at the door. At me. My heart jumped through my chest, and I ran down the hall as quietly as I could.
I pushed forward, turning corners blindly until I was far away from the room, then sank down against the wall. Had someone seen me? The thought of someone watching me, while I was peeping through the keyhole like a psycho, made my cheeks burn with shame. When I finally caught my breath, I realized I was in a wing of the building I hadn’t been in before. A soft blue light was coming from under a door at the end of the hall.
I wasn’t sure it was safe to go back to my room yet, so I decided to check it out. I gasped when I opened the door. Inside was a room the size of a basketball court, filled with a full-sized replica of a Greek temple. Probably the Parthenon, from the pictures I’d seen of it. Massive statues of the gods of Olympus stood on alcoves that surrounded the room.
The floor was an enormous mosaic, and in the center of the room was a tree with golden leaves. I stepped forward and could see Greek characters carved into the tree branches and leaves. They glowed with blue light. Lines were cut into the floor filled with the same glowing substance. They flowed like little rivers from the statues towards the tree. In the quiet of the hall, I thought I could hear breathing. Paranoid, I checked over all the statues again, but they didn’t flinch.
I stepped to the side of the tree and saw the statue of Zeus, in the center against the far wall. I could tell it was him because he was holding a bolt of lightning. The lines from him to the tree were much bigger and brighter than the others, and I could see that he had fathered lines that went up and wrapped around the tree. The majority of the branches were tied to him in some way. This was a living family tree of some kind. But that wasn’t the thing that made my mouth drop open. It was the fact that Zeus’s statue was missing its head.
11
When I woke up the following morning it was almost 10am. Breakfast was over but a pot of coffee and some scones were waiting for me in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure what I should do with myself, so I wandered through the house a bit. I found a ballroom that looked like it hadn’t been used in ages, and then a library. I’d thought Able’s office was impressive, but it was nothing like this.
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Thousands of ancient leather books were stacked high and overflowing from shelves. Long oak tables divided the room, with antique green lamps evenly spaced between them. The ceiling was so high it looked like a cathedral, and it was painted with a fresco of the constellations that reminded me of the Sistine Chapel. Glass cases held antiques, and there were also a handful of large standing globes and statues. Like everything else in the house, it was luxurious, but somehow, all the books made me feel at home.
I wanted to just curl up on one of the leather couches and hide all day. I was dreading another sparring match. While my wounds seemed to be healing, they were still painful. But I wasn’t here to read. Able had brought me here for a reason, and I had six days left to find out what that reason was—and whether or not I deserved to be here.
The first person I found was Sam, sitting in a cushioned bench by a large window. He looked up from a journal he was holding and smiled.
“Writing a book?” I teased, sitting next to him.
“Would you believe I’ve written dozens already? But no, I’m actually writing a poem.”
“About what?”
“You,” he said with a sly grin. “Unfortunately I don’t know enough about you yet to finish it. But I will someday. Then I’ll write a song for you.”
“It’s a deal,” I said. A gust of wind sent a handful of orange and brown leaves sailing past the window.
“Do you know if I’m supposed to be anywhere? I mean, what do people normally do all day?”
“In the house? Whatever gives us pleasure. We all have our own interests. I’m sure you heard some of the excitement last night.”
Was he referring to Tori and Dion? Had he seen me? My cheeks were turning red. This conversation had taken an awkward turn.
“Isn’t pleasure kind of, I don’t know, frivolous?” I asked.
His eyes grew round and somber. “We don’t take pleasure for joy,” he said, “we do it to distract ourselves.”
“From what?” I asked.
“From the crippling emptiness of having our loved ones murdered; the perennial fear that we are prolonging the inevitable; the shame of knowing deep down, we don’t care enough to stop it.”