by Diana Tyler
Before Damian could say another word, Katsaros’s suspenders snapped off his waistband and fell to the sand, and his button-up shirt split open, revealing chestnut clumps of chest hair. Damian heard a loud ripping sound and watched in bewilderment as a horse’s sorrel hindquarters appeared on Katsaros’s back end. A rust-colored hoof kicked the corduroy pants into the lake.
“What the…” Damian backed up to the edge of the water, half tempted to turn and sprint back up the hill.
A guttural neighing noise vibrated in Katsaros’s throat as he tossed his head, his copper hair shedding to the ground until he was completely bald, save for a black curved line bisecting his scalp. Damian realized it was a snake tattoo, its forked tongue trailing down the length of his nose. It looked just like the golden pin his father had worn on the lapel of his uniform; the Fantásmata insignia.
“Wait…” A shiver shot up Damian’s back. “You work for the Fantásmata? And…” He shook his head as Katsaros’s bare arms doubled in size, peaked biceps and rounded deltoids bulging where blubber had been. “You’re half horse?”
“I am a centaur.” Katsaros ran a hand along his smooth head, then dragged it back until it covered the spade-shaped serpent’s head on his brow. “And I once worked for the primitive form of the Fantásmata. The Pythonians.” He drew a breath and followed a white-tailed eagle with his eyes as it soared overhead. “A very long time ago.”
“How long?” Damian reached for his hoodie and pulled it on. Though it was barely the month of Pyanepsion, the bite of winter hung in the air.
“Two thousand years.”
Two days ago, Damian would have laughed at something so ludicrous. But how could he argue with his own two eyes? He’d had more than enough strange sightings to last a lifetime; more than enough blots on his record to get him exiled or executed—probably both. That someone could time travel and shape shift wasn’t so farfetched anymore.
“How is that possible?” he said. “How are you still alive?”
Katsaros stepped closer. “I told you that heaven existed.”
He smiled up at the pink parade of clouds passing over. Then a shadow eclipsed the sun, erasing his smile. Throwing back his shoulders, Katsaros scanned the still water, his head moving from side to side, up and down, as if following another bird. But the air was empty. He whinnied quietly and extended his arms to either side, tucking his chin under as he drew a deep breath through his nostrils.
“Deimos! Phobos!” he bellowed. “I command you in the name of Phos, son of the All-Powerful, be gone from here!”
A howl ripped through a sudden gust of freezing wind, leaving a cold coat of moisture on Damian’s skin. “What was that?” He wiped away the wetness with his sleeve.
“Dark spirits…always spying.” Katsaros surveyed the area, his black tail swatting the air. “Be grateful you can only feel their presence. They’re uglier and stink more terribly than I ever did.” He chuckled. “And I assure you, I was a foul sight before I met Iris.”
“Iris my ancestor?”
Katsaros nodded.
“She’s in heaven now?”
Another nod.
“And I take it that’s where you’re from.”
“I’m no longer mortal. When I died, my spirit was escorted to paradise by one of Carya’s kind.”
“But in the myths, the centaurs were lower than dirt.” Damian dropped his head and lifted his palms to Katsaros as compunction knotted in his stomach. “No offense.”
“That brings us back to victory, doesn’t it?” Katsaros smiled. “I’m living proof that faith can save the soul of any wretch, even a murdering, thieving, lying, cheating, centaur such as I was.”
Damian lifted his shoulders in a heavy sigh. “I want to talk, I really do, but even you said time was short.”
“Time is irrelevant when you don’t have a plan.”
Katsaros turned and walked to the white shirt lying crumpled on the sand. He squatted onto his haunches and pulled something from the front pocket and brought it to Damian. “You’ve seen that there’s much more to your existence than meets the eye.” He held his fist closed and took Damian’s hand, then released the jasper stone into it. “Now you must learn to walk by faith, and not by what you can see.”
Damian unfastened the chain and clasped it around his neck. He held the rock between his fingers. “Did my father believe all this? Did he see what I’ve seen?”
“Your father received his doma at eighteen, following the pattern set by the very first Asher in ages past.” Katsaros frowned and scratched his ear as a heron warbled in the distance. “He suppressed his power, as was your family’s custom for hundreds of years. Their fear closed the door to Duna.”
Damian’s heart sank as a thousand questions shot off like fireworks inside his brain. What had their powers been? What might have happened if they had rallied together, or if just one of them had been brave enough to see what their doma could do? Had anyone ever even tried? Is that why his father had died?
“But in the end,” Katsaros continued, “his heart softened. He prayed.”
“To Duna. The god that the goddess person at my house talked about.” Damian said it flatly, as though it all made perfect sense. In reality, it was like a million jigsaw puzzle pieces had been scattered in front of him.
Katsaros knitted his brow. “Her name is Carya. She’s his messenger.” He closed his eyes, and in a few seconds he was transformed back into the avuncular man Damian knew him as, replete with a new wrinkled shirt and pair of plain suspenders.
“There is just one god, Damian,” Katsaros said. “He’s the one who created all things, even those things which have forsaken him.”
Damian felt his chest rise and fall against the cool red stone as he breathed. He’d never been fearful. Only on those occasions when he could sense his sister’s distress was he ever the least bit afraid. Not even the prospect of venturing into hell daunted him. But suddenly, his fight-or-flight response was reversing; willing him to flee rather than confront whatever unknowns loomed before him.
“You feel frightened,” Katsaros whispered.
Damian looked closely at Katsaros. He could detect the faint form of the snake tracing the ridge of the man’s nose like two parallel scars. He hesitated. He didn’t want to admit that he wanted to hide like his family had always done.
“It’s all right to admit you have fear, Damian. It’s an attack on your psyche, direct from Duna’s enemies. They sense boldness like blood in the water and will devour it if you let them. I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to succumb. You don’t.”
“How? And how could we ever stand a chance against the Fantásmata?”
Katsaros shook his head, then looked toward the sky as if invoking its sympathy. “I feel as though I’m conversing with my former headstrong self. Your ears are just as deaf as mine were.”
“Using my head and being headstrong are two different things, Katsaros, or whatever your name really is. My family had every reason to keep their domas under the radar. What possible difference can I or my sister make?”
Damian’s throat tightened as tears threatened to spill over his eyelids, guilt and remorse stilling his mind, ridding it of every thought but Chloe. He’d kept her at a distance for so many years because she embarrassed him, because she was different, because they had nothing in common—or so he’d thought. Now everything had changed; they shared more than DNA. They were Ashers. And she’d had the courage, or perhaps the idiocy, to explore what that meant, while he, the athlete who knew no fear, wanted nothing more than to retreat and forget the day he’d watched her walk into that mist.
“I’m sorry, Chloe,” Damian whispered. He could feel his boldness shriveling inside him like a flower parched by the sun, and he was helpless to revive it. “I can’t do this.”
Hot energy buzzed through his body as bones, sinews, muscles, and skin materialized in rapid flashes over his hands. His hoodie appeared on his arms, followed by his jeans and shoes.
Katsaros’s face hung long with sorrow as Damian removed the necklace and cupped it in his hand. “This should have been for Chloe, like Ethan said.” Then he gave it to Katsaros and tramped back up the hill.
“And what of your sister?” Katsaros shouted after him. “You’re choosing to leave her? I came here to open the portal…for you.”
Damian stared ahead, the evening breeze soughing through the brambles. He made a quarter turn and forced the words off his tongue: “If Duna is so powerful, he doesn’t need me to help her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
LETHE
Chloe’s eyes flew open as she felt cold hands seize her ankles and drag her down the bed. She clawed the sheets as she looked down at Deimos’s hooves; a rope hung from one of his talons.
“What are you doing?” she yelled, kicking uselessly as Phobos squeezed his thumb into a pressure point near her shoulder blade. She screamed in pain and let him pull her onto the floor.
Gazing around the room, she saw no shaft of light, nor did she feel that peaceful presence that had relieved her earlier. The gold cup she’d drunk from was in pieces near the wall, and the sense of calm she’d felt was just as shattered. Had her prayers not been heard at all? Had the brilliance that had filled the room, and the water that had quenched her thirst, been just another stunt of magic?
“Bind her hands,” ordered Deimos as he tossed Phobos the rope. “It’s your lucky day,” he said to Chloe, his many voices creating a bone-splitting sound that whooshed around the room in a flurry of haunting echoes.
“Don’t tease the poor waif.” Phobos wrenched Chloe’s wrists as he joined them behind her back. “Her brother has just abandoned her. She’s neither loved nor lucky.”
Chloe opened her mouth, but then restrained herself from taking the bait. She lifted her chin and stood perfectly still.
“Oh, you must want to know the reason why.” Phobos stepped in front of her, his coarse mane abrading the side of her cheek.
“Do what you came here to do,” Chloe said, her heart already frozen inside her chest.
She wished that she found what Phobos had said hard to believe, but she didn’t. She had never been more than a nuisance to Damian, a thorn he’d had to tolerate for their parents’ sake. He probably thought that she deserved this, and maybe she did. Her disillusionment, paired with her intractable curiosity, had led her too far afield from Petrodian mores. And now she was paying for it.
Phobos inched closer, sniffing her with his large, brown-speckled snout. “You can try to act brave all you want, but I smell your fear. My name isn’t Phobos for nothing.” He hissed as he sucked in a humid stream of air through his fangs. As he turned away, his ear twitched, and he gave an arch grin, twirling a whisker around his sooty finger. “And that…” He sniffed again. “It’s your sadness, so strong, stronger than anything else.”
Chloe pushed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and closed her eyes.
The first thing she saw was her treehouse, the getaway her father had built for her when she was four years old after Damian had made her cry—over what, she couldn’t remember. “Every little girl needs a hideout,” her father had said. Then he went to work and completed it over a weekend. It was as if he knew she’d need it, as if he knew it would be the only place in which she would find solitude and escape into her imagination after he was gone.
What she wouldn’t give right now to sit in the tire swing and have him push her in it one more time, or to go down the slide into her mother’s arms, then host a tea party inside for them both.
Where were her parents now? The thought of them wandering through the Fields with Anastasia and Calix, mindlessly picking flowers without knowing one another’s names, pierced her heart like a knife.
“She is perhaps the saddest girl I’ve ever seen,” said Deimos. He crossed the room and picked up the pieces of the golden cup. “Her parents are killed, her brother betrays her, the All-Powerful gives her only water to sweeten her hours in hell…” He clucked his tongue and shook his head in mock pity. “And worse yet, you cannot be killed.”
“Not entirely,” Phobos said. He motioned toward the golden fragments in Deimos’s hands, and the pieces hovered into his own. “Fortune has not turned her back on the girl completely.”
Chloe felt like she was floating somewhere high above the room, looking down on her body, witnessing her own death from afar. Though her heart still beat, she was just a shell, a corpse cursed to be left unburied. “Let me drink from the Lethe,” she heard the corpse say.
“I knew she would volunteer.” Phobos’s green eyes flashed.
The fragments levitated in the air between them, then in a yellow blur, the cup put itself back together.
Phobos spun Chloe around and loosed the rope from her wrists. “I told you the rope was needless, Deimos. Even if she has a doma, she’s too pathetic to use it now.”
“This is on your head if anything happens,” Deimos blustered. “Those were our orders.”
Phobos waved him off and pushed the cup to Chloe’s chest. “Come, let us watch the Lethe wash away your sadness.”
Throngs of sackcloth-covered souls lined the banks of the gully, and Chloe noticed that there wasn’t one child among them. The youngest girl and boy she saw couldn’t have been younger than twelve. All of them, huddled together like hapless sheep, gripped their baskets tightly, just as Calix had when Chloe found him by the dead olive tree.
“Why do they love those flowers so much?” Chloe couldn’t help but ask.
A few strides in front of her, Deimos leaned over and dragged a talon along a long line of flowers, slicing off their glowing, star-shaped heads. “The judges of Tartarus found the task a fitting pursuit. These spirits did nothing exceptional or egregious in life, and so in death they do the same.”
Chloe jumped as Phobos, nearly clipping her heels with his untrimmed toenails, erupted with a heart-stopping roar. He came alongside her, pointing and snickering at the screaming swarms of people who didn’t even know what a lion was.
“The weak and cowardly come to Asphodel,” he whispered, disdain dripping off his tongue. “They never stood for anything, always strove to blend in. Cowards, the lot of them.” He spat on the ground. “Sniveling little worms. That’s all your world is full of now.”
Chloe’s vision blurred. Blue waves rippled at both tear ducts, then flowed onto the corneas, filling her eyes with the sight of an ocean she knew wasn’t there. The image was fuzzy, as if she were looking at it through fogged glass, but there was no doubt it was the Great Sea; water that blue didn’t exist anywhere else.
“Settle down!” Deimos shouted toward the souls. “Pick up your cursed flowers before they get swept into the current.”
Chloe squeezed her eyes shut until every speck of blue had disappeared.
“Your salvation approaches, Asher,” Phobos whispered to her, then he pounced on all fours and took off into the gully.
Chloe held her breath as Phobos stood and stretched out his arms, then swiftly dropped them, all ten fingers flexed toward the dry riverbed. She watched as the ground beneath him started shaking, and all the waiting souls shouted with hoarse voices and clapped their hands against the wicker baskets.
“Lethe, flow!” Phobos commanded.
In moments the water had risen to Phobos’s shins. He turned and slogged his way back to the bank and joined Deimos. The pair watched the throng stampede into the river like a pack of rabid dogs.
Deimos reached back and pinched Chloe’s arm. “What are you waiting for? No one is coming to save you, Asher. You’re alone down here, and the only person who knows where you are has already moved on with his rotten life.”
Chloe skimmed the sea of faces, searching for her parents. She knew they were out there. If she just searched hard enough, she could find them, and know them, even if they couldn’t know her. She couldn’t let herself give up. Not yet.
Lowering her head, she stepped forward toward the river.
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“Good girl,” Deimos cooed. “Empty your mind, and be free at last.”
Head down and strides long, Chloe made a beeline for the river, surreptitiously scouting for an empty area where a careless splash of water couldn’t make its way down her throat. She waded in, her body going rigid as the cold waves nipped at her hot-blooded legs and hips. Her toes plunged into the gritty sand and pushed across the pebbles.
She had never before stood in a body of water that wasn’t a pool, as there was a law against “trespassing” into the myriad tributaries and rivers that snaked through Petros and the Great Sea into which they flowed. The only sea that men could touch was the Sea of Enochos, where the Justice Council erected floating pyres and burned alive the worst criminals, but even these never touched the sea; by the time they hit the water, they were already dead, reduced to ash and bone.
“It’s the sweetest drink you’ve ever tasted,” shouted Phobos. “The nectar of the gods.”
Chloe dipped in her fingers and dragged them across the crystal water, struggling to control the adrenaline pumping through her veins. Her heart thumped quick and loud in her ears, like the frenetic drumbeat of the Lycaea festival. She felt as though the water was penetrating her pores, stinging as it mingled with her undead blood. Her vision tunneled and blurred at the edges once again, this time zooming in on her hands as she cupped them together in the water and lifted them to her lips. She would have to make this convincing…
Splash!
The hair on Chloe’s neck bristled. She turned to see Deimos charging through the river, ripping through the water with his talons, his fangs slick with saliva as he shouted at her.
“The river won’t be here all day, Asher. Drink from it or I’ll drown you.”