Broken God

by Andrews,Nazarea

  This is all of my power, ripped violently free, flaring white hot through me and the girl in my arms, through new Olympus. I feel the weak shields of my family, thrown up hastily as my power, the blinding light of the sun, rips through the mansion.

  I hear a howling, rising and falling like an ancient drumbeat. A girl screaming my name. My uncle’s silent rage. And then it all fades. All of it is gone, washed away, and clean, and gone.

  There is only Del in my arms and the sting of betrayal.

  Chapter 23.

  “She’s wrong.”

  “If she were wrong, he would be here.”

  “She’s wrong!”

  A soft sign. “Niece, I want her to be wrong as much as you.”

  “She isn’t wrong.” I say, my voice rusty.

  Fuck. It feels like I swallowed a handful of glass and gargled it for a few hours.

  I pat at the bed and my heart skips, terror ripping through me. “Where is Del?”

  “Not Del,” Iris grumbles, and I feel her shift closer, sitting on the bed and curling into my side. I can’t see anything yet. Sun spots dance in my vision, annoyingly.

  “Artemis,” I whisper and she shifts closer. Takes my hand. “Where is he?”

  Silence, and then. “He left Olympus.”

  For a long moment, I don’t say anything and then, “You know this is him. He killed three of our cousins, sister.”

  “It’s Hermes,” She almost pleads.

  Hermes. The trickster, the thief, the apprentice to Hades, the cousin who took one look at two confused children in Olympus and befriended them, and never, never looked back.

  “You will pick her. Her word. Over Hermes?”

  I stare at her, and tug Del—Iris—closer.

  “She’s mine, sister.”

  Artemis snarls and I shift. Sit up.

  “There’s something you don’t know,” I say. “About Del’s prophecy.”

  Artie goes still and I force a smile.

  “She said it would hurt. That the only one capable of hurting me would be the one to kill us.”

  She’s pale, and I feel Del—Iris—squirming at my side. She shifts away until I let her go.

  “I always thought she meant you. You’re the only one I cared about enough to think could hurt me. But you aren’t capable of that. You couldn’t hurt me anymore than I could hurt you. But Hermes. Hermes could hurt both of us.”

  “No,” she whispers.

  “Sister. It’s prophecy. Cold and unfeeling and unavoidable.”

  “Why?” she whimpers, and I pull her into me, rocking her as she breaks.

  My strong sister, falling apart in my arms, great shaking sobs that rip my breath away. “Why would he do this?”

  I have an idea. A very good idea. But. Until we speak to him, we. We won’t know.

  “Bring him home, Artemis. Bring him home and we’ll find out why.”

  Her head comes up. Curious and almost hungry. “You want me to hunt him.”

  I shrug. Nod.

  And she smiles.

  The first time Artemis hunts, we’re five. She had before. Lost things and toys. Our mother when Leto wandered away and left us in the care of a nursemaid.

  But the first time she hunted, purely to hunt, we were five. She overheard the groundskeeper speaking to Leto about a wildcat that was picking off our sheep, and this light came to her eyes.

  Don’t.

  She looked at me, and her gaze, even then, was cold. Disdainful.

  Sister, it’s dangerous.

  She didn’t answer me.

  She only smiled.

  It took her two weeks. Two weeks of slipping out at night, and following the moon. Of tracking and trapping and coaxing the hounds to follow her.

  It should have left her exhausted, but every night, she crept back into our room as the moon began to fall, and she fell into bed next to me, her tiny body smelling of the wind and the grass, wild and free and savage, and she slept like the dead as I rose with the sun, chased it through the endless warrens and alleys of our home. She woke and ate and sat dreamy at my side.

  I have never seen my sister as happy as she was on that first hunt, when she was chasing merely because it was intriguing and she couldn’t not. When she came home high on the hunt and covered in grass seeds and burrs.

  The day she came home covered in blood, I knew she had found what she would be. She was addicted to that. The scent of blood, the taste of prey, the puzzle of the chase. Artemis teased me for chasing the sun.

  I smiled, and nodded, and never said a word as she slipped from our bedroom to chase the moon and her prey.

  My sister is a hunter, the best the world has ever seen, and I have never known her to fail in finding her prey.

  It takes three weeks.

  Three weeks, and I am trapped in new Olympus the entire time.

  Here is what I know: my family is petty and malicious and spending extended amounts of time with them makes me vaguely violent.

  The worst part is that my sister is not here, and my cousin is why we’re all on edge. I’ve been stripped of my buffers, the ones who stand between me and the rest of the crazy, and it makes me tense. Nervous.

  Angry, if I’m honest.

  I send Iris away, have her brother come for her. I don’t want her near my family, not when they are on edge and dangerous.

  Dion is almost sedate, in those long weeks. He spends them in his room, and then he crawls into mine, and I’m startled to realize he is painfully sober.

  He’s the one who asks.

  “When she said we would die. What did she mean? We’re gods, brother. How do we die?”

  I have a theory about that.

  But I just shrug.

  “I don’t know, Dion. I think, though, it’s like everything else that’s happened to us.”

  He looks at me, eyebrows raised, whiskey- golden eyes peering at me, intent. I summon a smile and pour him a cup of wine. “It’s a choice. And a slow slide.”

  Chapter 24.

  Iris comes first.

  She comes with a rush of fury and babble of visions, trailed by her twin.

  “Mortals aren’t welcome here,” Athena snaps, coming to a standstill in the hall as Iris and Heath enter the room. I slide a glance at her, but Iris answers before I can.

  “Yeah, see, I don’t care,” she says carelessly. “I’m the Oracle of Delphi and he is my guard. We’re permitted in Olympus, if my god is here.” She points at me. “And oh look. There he is.”

  I swallow my laugh at Athena’s infuriated growl, and when she swings her furious gaze toward me I shrug. “She’s not wrong.”

  “Then seclude her,” Athena snarls. “I don’t want a fucking mortal in my home.”

  She’s stalking away before I can respond, and I catch Iris’s arm. “You should have told me you were coming.” I scold, gently.

  She bats her eyes at me, all fake innocence. “You want me to leave?”

  I snort and drag her down the hall, toward my room, and Heath trails us. “Why are you here?” I ask, when we’re tucked into my room.

  “Artemis will be back tonight. I thought you might want some support.”

  I shiver at the quiet complacency in her tone.

  The sure knowledge.

  Then she turns to me, and her brother is forgotten as she steps into my space, and kisses me, deep and hungry. Until the room spins and I don’t care about little things like my cousin’s betrayal.

  Until Heath huffs and says, “Okay, cut it out. We have shit to talk about.”

  I blink at him, and feel the real desire to snap his neck. Iris pulls back regretfully and nods. “He’s right. We need to talk.”

  How will we die?

  It took me three years to realize that Del told me how we would fall. But she never told me how we would die.

  Epilogue.

  In the end. It is easy. It is painfully easy.

  It is as easy as breathing. I've had two thousand years of experience, and none,
and it still feels easy. The hardest part is telling Artemis, and even that is easier than I expect. She knows, I think, when she first enters the new Olympus, clad in blood- stained silver. She looks at me and Heath, just behind Iris.

  Then she nods, once, as if resolving something in her mind.

  It was easy, after that.

  Tie up some lose ends. And slip away.

  A slow slide into the darkness, and a shedding of the life I didn't want.

  The world is much larger than it was, when I left Olympus, so long ago. It was harder then. And I still managed it.

  This? This is painfully easy.

  Sometimes, when I'm sitting outside, on the rocking swing that Heath put up when Iris kept sitting on the wooden porch, sometimes I miss it. Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision.

  Then her words echo through me and Iris snuggles into my side, and I relax. Let go of the fear chasing around in my chest, the wonder if I am still me without--

  "You are everything," she whispers, in our bed at night.

  "You are not only your power," Del whispered, a hundred thousand times, throughout history.

  I wonder if the others will learn that.

  Hermes looked like hell.

  Worse than.

  There had been some concern that Artemis would be gentle. She loved our cousin. I don't think this would change her opinion of him. But when he was dragged into Olympus.

  I realized how wrong we had all been. My sister is outraged, and she took all of that fury out on our cousin. His leg is broken, and he limps in on it, none of his speed or grace in evidence. His face had been beaten so badly he is almost unrecognizable. There's a shamed air about him, and he avoids looking at us as Artemis prods him in the back, nudging him up the hall of the gods.

  A hound snarls and paces alongside, snapping at Hermes whenever he slows.

  He doesn't slow often.

  The family is quiet, the kind of preternatural silence that we never have. The gods are always plotting, aligning themselves with and against the others, plotting who will be stabbed in the back next.

  But now, we are quiet. Now we watch as one of our own parades in front of us, broken and on his knees.

  And there is no pity.

  "Why?"

  The question comes from Hades, and it snaps Hermes's gaze up.

  "Because we're dying, Uncle. Even you. Persephone has been dying for centuries, and you've done nothing. We are not all gods of the underworld. And for those of us who aren't, we are dying. Can you comprehend that?"

  "What does killing your cousins do but kill the pantheon faster."

  Hermes's gaze goes disdainful. "Do you really believe that is all it was? Killing my cousins? I don't give a fuck about them. Think about what I am, uncle."

  There is a breath of silence and then, "A thief. You are a thief. You're stealing their power," I murmur.

  Hermes turns a wide smile on me. "You always were the one who made the logic leaps none of the rest of us could. Do you have any idea how much Thea hates you for that?"

  My half-sister makes a startled noise, but I ignore it. And his claim. "You can't divide us, cousin. Even if Athena does hate me, she didn't kill. We have always loved almost as fiercely as we've hated, and none of us have ever killed. Until you."

  "Do you want me to apologize, Apollo? For taking what I need to survive? Do you truly expect that of me?"

  "No," I say, simply.

  Because why would he. Gods don't apologize. We don't fade, and we don't die, and we don't apologize. Except.

  We are all doing that. We are all dying.

  "How will you punish him?" Heph asks, his voice a low rumble through the room, and Hermes's head bows.

  They stripped his power.

  And Iris watches me while it's done, something knowing in her gaze.

  You have to choose, Apollo.

  How do gods die, Iris?

  A sad smile. They break their power.

  In the end, that's what they did. The stripped Hermes of his power. Stripped him of the very thing that made him who he was. Hades would have taken him to the Underworld then and there, but the triplets refused to allow it.

  It was fitting, what they did. Stealing his power and his memories, and reducing him to the quiet mortality that he hated so much.

  We left within the month.

  I saw Hades, before we did. The family stayed in new Olympus. I think all of them felt their mortality in ways none of us had, before Hermes began stealing power.

  And now, we knew. How the pantheon would fall.

  We would cannibalize each other. Stealing power from each other until there was nothing left and we were all dead.

  I left.

  Before the others could turn on me.

  I took Iris and Del, took Heath and broke my own power.

  Hades knew. He stood by my side, and I shattered it, shattered my tie to the sun and song, to healing and prophecy, even to Artemis.

  That was hard. Harder than I anticipated.

  Maybe because I didn’t. I never planned for Artie to be part of what I gave up.

  Mortal life was…different.

  Heath found a deserted cabin in the mountains of West Virginia, and we moved there. Iris never addressed staying with me. She merely packed up my apartment, kissed me when I protested, and moved us halfway across the country.

  There were weeks, that first few months, when I couldn’t breathe. When I was desperate for my sister, for my power. When I would spend days in the big empty bed, and shake. I could hear them, whispering about me.

  Once, when Iris was busy outside, I roused myself to ask Heath why.

  Why were they here.

  She won’t leave you. I won’t leave her.

  It was that simple and that complex and it sent me back to my bed for a week, as the fresh reminder of my missing sister spiraled through me.

  Learning to live again was a slow thing.

  There were days when I reached for my power and felt a sudden stabbing reminder that it was gone.

  Days when I’d laugh and turn to find Artie, and remember that she was gone.

  But slowly. Slowly.

  It changed. I reached for help instead of power, and Heath was there, with a quick smile.

  I reached for Iris, instead of Artemis, and she was always at my side.

  Why?

  I never asked, but she told me. It was after midnight, as the year ended and another began.

  I’m yours, Apollo. She whispered it into my skin as she moved over me, pressed into me.

  Even if you aren’t a god. You’re mine. And I’m yours.

  She rode me slowly and kissed me with such care that I barely felt the slow climb of arousal, barely felt the hot pulse of it in my gut until I was gasping and coming, inside her.

  Later, as she slept across my chest and I stare into the moon through the small window of our room, I wondered if this is what I had always been.

  I was Del’s and Del was mine.

  I didn’t need to be a god, for that to be true.

  Artemis came, six months later. Her power broken, her hair long and wild, her eyes haunted.

  I hugged her, my very mortal sister. And the world that had felt so strange felt a little bit right.

  I chase the sun. Still.

  Artie says it’s my nature, laughs and leans into Heath when I blink at them, wide- eyed and blind from sunspots.

  Iris agrees, and kisses me soft, until my arms slip around her waist and I am home.

  I ran from this, for so long. Fought it and feared it. Drove myself mad, trying to outpace my own destiny.

  This was always where I was meant to be, though. But now I’m human, and I have my twin and my Del. There is very little more that I could ask for.

  I chase the sun, and when I do, I feel very close to her. To all of the girls who came before, that I loved, that taught me who I was as a god, and how to be a man.

  I leave their ghosts, and the sun, behind, and step int
o our shadowy cabin, and into the embrace of my family.

  Godhood a thing broken and forgotten behind me.

  About the Author:

  Nazarea Andrews (N to almost everyone) is an avid reader and tends to write the stories she wants to read. Which means she writes everything from zombies and dystopia to contemporary love stories.

  When not writing, she can most often be found driving her kids to practice and burning dinner while she reads, or binge watching TV shows on Netflix. N loves chocolate, wine, and coffee almost as much as she loves books, but not quite as much as she loves her kids.

  N is a self-professed geek and enjoys spending her spare time lost in her favorite fandoms and can often be found babbling about them on social media.

  She lives in south Georgia with her husband, daughters, spoiled cat and overgrown dog. She is the author of World Without End series, Neverland Found, Edge of the Falls, and The University of Branton Series. Stop by her twitter (@NazareaAndrews) and tell her what fantastic book she should read next.

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