We Will Bleed

by Nicole Thorn

  I took a deep breath, letting his words sink in. Maybe it was crazy to jump to the worst right off the bat. I’d wait until I heard what my mother had to say, and then I would panic. Maybe she knew exactly what was wrong, and it would be a simple fix. After all, we’d not had anything strange happen lately. Why should I have assumed?

  “We’ll have to make out a bunch later,” I said. “To make me feel better. Just a warning.”

  Jasper smiled. “I can live with that.”

  “Good. Because I mean . . . like a lot of kisses. Tons.”

  He pulled me to him and pressed his lips to my hair for a few seconds. The apples were ready, and I didn’t want to waste more time than I needed to. Mom would get down here and set everything straight. Then she would probably tell me we’d been silly to worry in the first place. She and Aphrodite might have even been able to fix the problem. Jasmine could have had a cold for all I knew. That might have been it.

  Jasper helped me carry the apples, and Zander had gotten the bucket by the time we got into the kitchen. Jasmine started helping him with his cookies, and I had Jasper for the pie. Verin sat at the table with Juniper, after having made her some tea. He promised that the kitchen would stay clean.

  It felt like it took forever for everything to finish baking, and I kept getting antsier. Like time was running out, even though I had no hourglass going. About another hour, and this would probably be over. Then I’d cuddle with Jasper.

  “Backyard,” Juniper ordered when Zander grabbed the matches. “No fires are allowed in my house.”

  “It’s magic fire,” Zander sighed. “It won’t burn your things.”

  “Out. Side,” she said again.

  The six of us moved, and Jasmine hurried over to go say hi to Nemo. It would have been mean to go out there and not greet him. If I hadn’t been so twitchy, I would have brought him a cookie or something. He settled for a throat rub from his mommy, while I called for mine.

  Zander dropped his chocolate chip cookies into the bucket, and I unceremoniously let a scoop of pie fall in. It made a sad splattering sound and didn’t look very good at the bottom of the metal bucket.

  I struck a match, and tossed it in as well, speaking with Zander as we summoned gods to earth. The food lit up in a green and pink flame that I knew all too well. It burned until there wasn’t anything left in the bucket, and the scent of chocolate and fruit surrounded us.

  It took a couple minutes, but our mothers walked out from the inside of the house, each holding their bribes. They had plates of pie, with a couple cookies on the side.

  I noticed my own mother first, because she looked different to me. We’d entered spring, so her eyes changed colors. They had shifted to a vibrant green, representing the changing world. Persephone got to be up top for a while, and that always put her in a good mood. Though I wondered if having to be away from my sister, made her a little less happy. She didn’t love me as much as she loved my sister, but I didn’t hold that against her. Persephone had been in her life for so long.

  “Hello, darlings,” Aphrodite said. “Verin, so glad you’re settling in well. I knew you would.”

  The man lifted an eyebrow at the goddess. “Did you now?”

  “Very much so. Don’t doubt me. It’s rude.”

  Zander rubbed the back of his neck, shuffling on his feet. “Okay, while it’s great seeing the two of you, we need to talk about something. Do you know why we called you here?”

  Mom finished her side hug with me, and she shook her head. “No, is something wrong? You all look fine.”

  Jasmine crossed her arms, speaking with only a fraction of the nervousness she used to. When you went up against as much as we all did, getting worried about talking to gods kind of went away. Jasmine had met many gods by now anyway.

  “We’re not that fine,” Jasmine said. “We tried talking to Callie, the Oracle, and she didn’t have any answers for us. We were hoping you did.”

  “About?” Mom said.

  “Me. My visions are blocked or something. I can’t see anything, but Juniper and Jasper still can. Do you know what might keep me from being able to see the future?”

  It felt like lightning moving through my body when I saw the look on Mom’s face. I got uncomfortable and clutched at Jasper like my life depended on it. I didn’t like seeing my mom looking worried about something. Goddesses shouldn’t worry about anything.

  “Well?” Zander said. “What could do that to her visions?”

  “Several things,” Aphrodite answered, oddly quiet. “It happened before. It could be that again.”

  “Could be,” Zander responded. “What else could it be? Can a lot of people come along and block visions like that? Because I feel like you guys making the seers so vulnerable to that kind of thing wouldn’t be smart. So not smart that I don’t know if you would let a lot exist. There must not be too many reasons, so could you go ahead and tell us what would make a seer stop seeing the future?”

  The women stayed silent, and I really, really didn’t like that. Since when did they have nothing to say? I guess that wasn’t too new to me, since they weren’t supposed to help us. The other gods would have gotten snippy if they took it upon themselves to meddle when there had been an agreement not to. Sure, they could ask us for any number of favors, but when the tables turned, we had been hung out to dry. How was that fair?

  “Zander,” his mother said. “We’re not supposed to get in the middle of things down here. It can only make things worse. Can you trust me on that?”

  “Not right now. Not when my girlfriend might be in danger. Don’t pretend like you guys didn’t set this up. I know you better than that, Mom. You found us people, and you pulled the strings until we did as you wanted.”

  Her voice got harsher than it normally did when it came to her son. “Don’t speak to me in that tone!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m your mother.”

  “Because you’re my mother, or because you’re a god, so fucking far above us?”

  Jasmine squeezed Zander’s arm, pulling him to her. “Hey, let’s stay calm. Okay?”

  “Not okay.”

  Aphrodite handed Mom her plate and stepped closer to her son. She grabbed his face, aiming it at her. “Respect me because I’m your mother.”

  “Prove it and help us.” He pulled his face away. “You have all the power in the world, and you don’t use it to help us. You run around making us fall in love, and then you leave us alone to hope that we don’t lose our people. What the hell is that?”

  I agreed. “We’ve helped you. We’ve put our lives in danger to do things that shouldn’t have been left up to us. But we did it. The least you could do is tell us what’s going on with Jasmine. It’s not a lot to ask.”

  My mother touched my hair, and I wanted to flinch away from it. I could be touched by the people I trusted, but I didn’t trust her right then. Not when I felt like she had all the answers and chose not to give them.

  “This is so much bigger than you,” she said to me. “You don’t see the whole picture. We don’t keep things from you to be mean, or to frustrate you. We do it because there are rules in place. If we break those rules, then the whole world could fall apart. Where does it end? We help you with this because we think it’s worthy, then someone else decides to do the same for their child? What if what they think is right goes farther? What if that mistake hurts how the world works? It is not our place to step over the line.”

  Zander nodded, rubbing his jaw. “Then it’s also not your place to call yourselves our mothers.”

  “Zander,” his mom sighed.

  “No. Don’t do this. Don’t pretend like you’re doing this for any reason other than to cover your ass. You think Kizzy and I are dumb? You think we believe we’re on the top of your priority list? We’re aware that you’ve had more children than we could ever count, and there’s nothing special about us. You only come when we call you. You have no respect for how it makes us feel. You let m
y sister get tortured, and you didn’t do a thing. And now, you’re going to abandon us again.”

  Jasmine put her hand on his chest, drawing his attention. “Don’t get upset. We’ll figure this out with or without them.”

  Mom dropped the plates into the bucket, and they shattered on impact. She paid them no mind as she said, “You don’t have to believe us when we tell you this. It’s the truth either way. We love you and wish we could help you with every scrape and battle you face. But we can’t.”

  My arms crossed, and I almost couldn’t look at her. “No. You mean you won’t. It doesn’t surprise me anymore, but I wish you would admit that you do it to protect yourself. It has nothing to do with us.”

  The woman put her hand on my shoulder. “I want you safe and happy. Sometimes not knowing is better. You don’t have to hurt as long.”

  I swallowed hard and realized that Verin hadn’t said a word. I looked at him, and he had his eyes hard on the ground. He said he didn’t buy any of this, but I wondered now. He’d been screwed over by the gods as much as we had.

  Finally, Zander said, “You don’t get to decide how someone hurts. They do or they don’t, and it isn’t your place to change anything. If you won’t help us, then you might as well leave.”

  Aphrodite agreed. “Yes, we should go. You kids can think what you want, and we’ll let you cool off. Zander, you need to get control of that temper of yours. You’ll only get in trouble.”

  “Fine,” Zander said. “Then I get in trouble.”

  I watched him stewing, probably wanting to break something in half. He didn’t take frustration well, and the boy got really aggressive. In a bad way, actually. A hostile Zander wasn’t a safe one, though he wouldn’t have hurt any of us. It only meant he would want to go storm a castle, attacking what he found there. It wouldn’t have even mattered if he found the right enemy, as long as he thought it would help.

  “Goodbye,” my mother told me. “I wish you all the most luck you could ever have. And know that I do love you, and you’ll be fine. You’re so strong.”

  I didn’t feel strong, especially not then. Not when ruin could be around the corner, and I didn’t know how to stop it. My family hung in the balance, and even my mom wouldn’t help. What did she know that she couldn’t tell us?

  The goddesses left, and Zander looked ready to kill. Jasmine put her arms around his middle, her chin resting on his chest as she stared up.

  “I love you,” she said.

  It must have done what it was meant to, because he softened ever so slightly. His shoulders started to relax, and Zander put his arms around Jasmine’s body. “I love you too.”

  “We’ll find out why I can’t see,” she promised. “Then you can kill whatever is doing it, and then we’ll be great. We can go up to our room and I’ll be naked for a whole day.”

  Jasper frowned, and I patted his shoulder.

  Zander nodded at his girlfriend. “Fine then, if you think we’re fine, maybe we’re fine. I’m still pissed off.”

  “I can tell. Do you need naked time now?”

  “I’m . . . locking you in your room,” Jasper said.

  Jasmine laughed. “Works for me!”

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  I Would Rather Deal with Gorgons

  Jasper

  WE ALL ENDED up in the living room, sitting on the various pieces of furniture, and staring at nothing. I held Kezia’s hand, because the talk with her mother had not gone as well as we hoped. I hadn’t really believed it would go well, to be honest, but I still didn’t like the look on my girlfriend’s face. Her eyes seemed sad.

  She still looked better than Zander. His mood seemed to be shifting like crazy. He went from furious to worried to sad on a cycle. I could read the emotions on his face and based on how he gripped my sister. Jasmine took it in stride for once in her life. Normally, she would’ve been all over him, making sure he knew to chill out. The sadness probably had something to do with that. Jasmine couldn’t handle sad.

  “All right, so what’s our next step,” Juniper said, sitting up, and staring at all of us. “There has to be a next step, right?”

  We all looked at each other, saying nothing.

  “I don’t know where to go from here,” Jasmine said. “I mean, if Callie couldn’t help us, and the gods won’t, who else do we have to ask?”

  “Medusa might know something,” Juniper offered. “But I don’t particularly want to talk to that crazy gorgon again. And quite frankly, I’m not entirely sure she’s any better than the gods.”

  Verin sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. He looked around the living room, and said, “But there is some solution. We just don’t know it yet. Who else is in Seattle that could help us?”

  “A lot of things,” Kezia mumbled.

  “Sorry, what was that Aunt Kizzy?”

  Kezia narrowed her eyes at Verin, but answered without telling him, again, to stop calling her that. I had already hit the demigod once and gotten away with it. I didn’t think I’d get a second punch in there, but I’d try if Kezia asked me. In all honesty, I had only done it the first time because Juniper asked me, and he hadn’t been expecting it.

  “There are a lot of nonhuman, nonanimal creatures around Seattle,” Kezia said. “I mean, it always felt weird that Zander and I ended up here at the same times the seers had. There are only three seers on the entire planet, and we happened to be in the same city as them? But Aphrodite had something to do with that. She wanted us in the same city, because she was matchmaking.”

  Kezia glanced at me and smiled. She ducked behind her hair, and I took her hand. Jasmine and Zander had their own little moment, while Juniper rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, we get it. She did a wonderful job.”

  “It worked for you too, Juni. Don’t forget that,” Jasmine said.

  Juniper narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms. Verin slung his arm around her shoulder, jostling the girl a little. “Don’t worry. I would have found you eventually, luv.”

  Juniper huffed, shrugging his shoulder off. “Anyway. Aside from us seers being here, and three demigods—”

  “Four, actually,” Kezia said. “Callie said that boy she had been making out with was a demigod.”

  “That’s true,” Jasmine agreed.

  “Yeah,” Zander said, rubbing his jaw. “I hope he’s not using her, because I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with some kid . . . ”

  “He’s probably only a year younger than you,” I said.

  “Shut up,” Zander responded, dismissively.

  I smirked, but then frowned. “However, yes, that means four demigods that we know of. That’s if there aren’t any more of those camps out in the woods. Plus, there is Callie. Medusa.”

  “Other gorgons too,” Jasmine chimed in. “The chimeras that we had to kill, and then Arachne.” She wrinkled her nose. “Spiders . . . Gods, I’m still having nightmares about all those spiders.”

  Zander rubbed her shoulder. “It’s okay, I won’t let them bite you.”

  “So. Many. Spiders . . . ” Jasmine said, closing her eyes.

  “And Argus came here as well,” Juniper said, quietly. She glanced sideways at Verin, whose expression went tense. Verin and his mother had moved here, thanks to some manipulating from Aphrodite. Why she wanted so badly to get us involved with demigods, I didn’t know, but she had seemed determined to set us all up. Only, when Verin arrived, things started going wrong. Someone had kidnapped Cerberus and stole the golden fleece. Argus, a giant with a thousand eyes, had been behind the entire thing. To either throw us off the trail, or just to hurt us, he had killed Verin’s mother.

  Things had gone downhill from there, since Verin then went and murdered a bunch of innocent people at one of those camps we had been talking about. I didn’t know what to think of that, because Verin seemed mostly fine now. I knew that he had to have been hiding his thoughts from us, but he could fake it really well.

  Juniper didn’t seem bothered by anything he did, which worried
me the most. I worried that she could so blindly follow him, and stay with him, no matter the damage he caused. My sisters and I . . . we all had issues. It could be decades from now, and we’d still be finding these time bombs inside us. They just waited for the right combination of events to go off and wreck us.

  “This isn’t the first time we’ve wondered, why Seattle,” Kezia said, sitting forward. “It seems like such a random place. The gods won’t talk, and I don’t think we’ll be able to uncover that particular secret anytime soon.”

  Verin sighed. “Right,” he said, staring at nothing.

  “They don’t want us to know,” Juniper said. “It’s just like the gods to be that inconsiderate. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Zander grumbled. “I understand that my mother is selfish, and don’t need anyone else to explain it to me.”

  Jasmine covered her face. “My boyfriend is going to be turned into some kind of flower. I just know it. I’ll have to go into the woods and lay by him when I get lonely. Then people will think I’m this strange, stupid girl, who talks to the woodland life. They’ll want to have me arrested, all because you can’t keep your mouth shut.”

  “They won’t turn me into a flower,” Zander said.

  Verin raised an eyebrow. “Were you raised with the same stories that I was?”

  The two of them started talking back and forth, and I stopped paying attention to them. I looked at Kezia, and the worry that wrinkled her brow. She shifted around in her seat, and I took her hand before she could get too uncomfortable. Her delicate fingers gripped mine, but not too tightly.

  If she wanted, she could have broken every bone in my body, and left me a bleeding mess on the floor. It wouldn’t have taken too much time or effort, either.

  “Are we really just stuck then?” Jasmine asked, breaking into the conversation. She looked around, and worried the corner of her lip. “Like, I wouldn’t normally complain about not seeing a bunch of people dying, or being hurt, or all the thousands of things that I can get visions of, but this is different. The last time that my visions went weird like this, I could’ve died.”