We Will Bleed

by Nicole Thorn

  Zander tensed. Not enough for someone to notice if they didn’t pay attention, but enough for me to see it. His hand dropped onto her shoulder, and he squeezed it. “We’ll figure something else out,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Kezia offered with a sweet smile. “Like we just got through saying, there are a thousand different kinds of creatures in Seattle, we can probably find one willing to tell us what’s going on.”

  Jasmine sighed and put her chin in her hand. “I wish that I hadn’t given up beer.”

  Again, Zander tensed.

  She looked back at him, and said, “I’m not going to have any. I’m just lamenting the fact that I have nothing to calm me down now.”

  Shockingly, that didn’t comfort the demigod much. My sister had become an alcoholic before she even met Zander. She had finally stopped drinking, which meant that I no longer found her sitting on the porch, too drunk to figure out how to open the door and sobbing. Zander still had her keys, because she didn’t trust herself with the car yet. She claimed that it would come eventually, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.

  Juniper stood up, and said, “We aren’t doing anything by sitting around, moping. I’m going to clean the kitchen.”

  “It’s already clean,” Verin said.

  Juniper’s hands opened and closed, and she shuffled her feet. “Then I’ll clean it again.” She took off, moving as fast as she could. Verin got up to chase her. I stopped paying attention to that as Jasmine also got up. She rushed up the stairs, getting away from us. Zander followed, and that left Kezia and me sitting on the couch, quietly.

  She put her head on my shoulder. “I’m starting to get a headache. I’d like a few years where nothing goes wrong now.”

  “We both know that won’t happen,” I said. “Not as long as Argus is still out there, doing . . . whatever it is he’s doing.”

  She sighed again, heavier this time.

  I patted her knee. “I have to go grocery shopping. You want to head out with me, or do you want to stay here?”

  “Is it safe?” Kezia asked.

  “No idea, but probably no more dangerous than being in the house, either. All the bad guys know where we live.”

  Kezia frowned at me. “I was hoping you would lie to me.”

  “I’m not good at lying,” I said.

  She sighed. “Fine, very well. I can’t let you go to the grocery store on your own, though. That would be asking for trouble. Just let me grab my shoes.” She dashed up the stairs, and I watched her while she did. Well . . . I watched her legs. That counted, though. I grabbed my keys from the hook by the door.

  While my sisters and I had gotten much better, there were still some things that we had to do a certain way. Like grocery shopping. I did that, because Juniper couldn’t handle the cart or the people walking around, and she didn’t trust Jasmine to come home with the food we needed.

  In all fairness, when we had been nineteen, Jasmine did bring home a cartful of candy once. For no reason other than it had been on sale, and she had four shots of tequila. I didn’t think we needed a repeat of that.

  When Kezia came back downstairs, the two of us climbed into my car, and I pulled out of the driveway. The sound of rain hitting the roof acted as the only noise. We didn’t need to talk. Plus, I liked the sound of rain on cars. The pinging of it brought a weird sense of peace for me.

  We reached the grocery store and rushed inside. Kezia’s hair shined in places, from where the water had hit her. She shook her head out, spraying me with droplets, and making me smile. She blushed when she noticed what she did. “Oops,” she said. “Um, sorry.”

  “You’ve covered me in paint before,” I said. “This is nothing.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That was a paint war, and I had to win. If that meant wasting more paint that we should have, then so be it. And you can’t get upset with me for clearly being the better competitor.”

  “I’m not sure Zander would see it that way.”

  “Zander should learn to knock before he comes to talk to me. It’s not my fault when he sees things that he’d rather not see,” she said, grabbing a cart. She yanked the thing out of the row and started marching into the store. I laughed and jogged to catch up with her. Kezia wouldn’t let me take over pushing the cart, so we just started gathering the groceries. This process took less time, now that Juniper was willing to eat what she wanted, instead of starving herself. The same went for me.

  We went to the gardening section first, though. Kezia had to check out the pots. I didn’t think our room could hold anymore, but I hadn’t thought that with the last six pots she had brought home. “Are you sure you don’t mind more?” she asked.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Positive?”

  I turned Kezia around, so that she faced me. It had taken a lot of work to get to this point in our relationship, where I could touch her when she didn’t face me, and have her not freak out. When I had her pointed in my direction, I said, “Get as many pots as you want, grow anything you want in them. It’s fine. If nothing else, our room looks interesting now, and will look more interesting when you’re done with it.”

  Kezia smiled. “Okay.” She started to pick out pots. She chose four, in various sizes. Eventually, the room would be full, and we’d have to figure out what to do then. Until that moment came, however, she could do whatever she wanted. Kezia set the pots in the cart, and then frowned. “Those took up more space than I thought they would.”

  “You still need dirt, too.”

  “I do . . . ”

  “Why don’t I get another cart, and you can check out with this one. When you’re finished, you can come back and find me,” I suggested.

  “All right,” Kezia agreed. “But I swear to the gods, if you get yourself hurt while I’m doing this, I’m never going to let you live it down.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said.

  “I don’t trust you. The last time I left you alone, I came home to find you in the middle of fighting gorgons. What would I have done if you got yourself turned to stone? I don’t know how to fix that.”

  “Should I have just let them turn Jasmine to stone?” I asked.

  “You should have run,” Kezia said.

  “I would have, if they hadn’t been trying to kill my sister,” I argued. Everything we said had been discussed before, but Zander and Kezia still hadn’t forgiven us for that incident. It hadn’t been my fault that the gorgons attacked when the demigods had been out of the house.

  Kezia’s eyes stayed narrowed as I backed away from her. I felt those eyes still on me, all the way back to the cart section. I pulled one out, and then started the actual grocery shopping. I went through the cereal aisle first, and pulled out everyone’s favorite. We had six people in the house, and no one agreed on what kind of cereal we should’ve gotten. Verin insisted that everyone else had bad taste, and that the only cereal that mattered was Cocoa Puffs.

  “Excuse me, son,” someone said from behind me. I pulled my cart out of the way, to let an older lady pass. She thanked me and continued down the aisle. A man came in behind her but paused next to my cart. He had black hair, cropped so close to his scalp that it looked more like a shadow. His eyes also looked dark, but I couldn’t tell what color they were. They could’ve been green or brown or blue, for all I knew. He had warm brown skin and wore light clothing. A gray shirt and blue jeans.

  I looked away from him, grabbing the last box of cereal, and turning the cart around. As I moved it, I noticed shadows underneath the man. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except they seemed to stretch farther than they should have. I paused, glancing up.

  He hadn’t paid any closer attention to me then than he had before.

  The shadows underneath his feet stretched out, like little tendrils. They moved underneath the shelves, and then seemed to stretch for me.

  Well, crap.

  I pulled my phone out and stared pushing the cart. I had to get out of the aisle, because, as t
he demigods liked to remind us, I was nothing more than human. It’d take nothing to kill me. While walking, I texted Kezia. “Something in the cereal aisle. Don’t know what. Coming back to you.”

  My thumb hovered over the send button when the phone went dark. It didn’t shut off, but this strange, smoky darkness wafted up from the bottom of the screen and ate away at the light. I clicked the side button and heard the noise the screen made when it turned off.

  Of course.

  I tucked the phone into my pocket and glanced over my shoulder. The man still hadn’t faced me, but that didn’t fool me into thinking he didn’t notice my every move. The shadows under his feet continued to stretch out.

  I turned back to the cart and started to move forward.

  “Do you think you’ll get very far?” he asked.

  I stopped, gripping the handle of the cart. My mouth clamped shut, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. Words simply wouldn’t form, and I ground my teeth together. Kezia would be furious with me, but the man had already hinted that I wouldn’t get out of the aisle.

  I released the cart and turned around.

  The man had taken a box of Gushers from the shelf, and had it opened. The foil package crinkled when he pulled that out of the box as well.

  “Nothing to say?” he asked.

  I had plenty to say, but I didn’t know what. The urge to talk came over me, but I just stood there. I could think of a thousand other times that I had done that. I’d stood in front of my father while he said horrible things, took humiliating pictures of us, locked me in a dog kennel, and thousand other things. He had done a thousand things to me, and each one of them felt like being punched in the chest. Yet, while he did them, I hadn’t said anything. I never seemed to do anything, either.

  The man popped a brightly colored candy into his mouth and chewed on it. He looked up at the ceiling and made a slight gesture with his finger. The fluorescent light popped. Sparks and glass rained down on us, and more darkness covered the aisle. The man dropped his hand and glanced back at me.

  “I’m not going to do anything,” he said. “If that’s what’s keeping you from talking. I just wanted to introduce myself.”

  The other lights started to pop, one by one. The electric buzz began to die down, as those lights went out. I could hear people screaming throughout the aisles, in surprise and worry. I could only imagine Kezia, probably with a bag of fertilizer in her hands, sighing, and deciding she had to look for me.

  “Why are you doing that?” I managed to ask, but it felt like shoving words up my throat. It actually hurt. Like every muscle in my body had tensed, and I couldn’t get anything to come out easily.

  The man smiled as the last of the lights went out. “I like the way they scream,” he said. “The humans. They’ve learned to be scared of the dark, and right now, they have a thousand thoughts going through their heads. They’ll wonder if someone is about to come up from behind them with a knife. Or that something will come out of the darkness. It’s not as much fun as it used to be. They don’t believe in the monsters like they once did, and that means most humans have poor ideas of what’s going to come for them.”

  “Lucky them,” I said.

  “Why lucky?” the man asked. He finished off his package of candy and pulled another free of the box.

  “They don’t have to be as scared,” I said.

  The man thought about that for a second. “You’re right. They won’t be as scared, and that makes everything so much more boring. I wonder if there’s a way to fix that. Do you think I could get some kind of creature in here? It has to be something they wouldn’t know how to deal with. Probably not a chimera then, because they would think it an overgrown lion, at first. Until they saw the rest of it.”

  “If you’re just introducing yourself, then why would you need to bring a chimera into the store?” I asked, while thinking. Kezia could handle a chimera, as long as I distracted it long enough to bring the beast down. I could’ve done it, too, if I hadn’t left my cudgel at home.

  The gods had graced us all with weapons. Mine happened to be a cudgel that made Zander uncomfortable. He didn’t like it when Jasmine used her dagger, either.

  The man shrugged. “For fun,” he said. “Why else would someone introduce humans to a creature they believed didn’t exist? I’d have to kill them afterward, because Zeus would become annoying, but that wouldn’t be too difficult. I could choke them all in no time. Or, I could give them heart attacks. That sounds like fun. They always look so surprised when that happens.”

  My thoughts scattered, and I didn’t know what to say. I’d met many gods, and none of them had a cruel streak like that. Not even Athena, who had done some of the worst things that a person could. Mostly, they seemed apathetic.

  This man did not feel apathetic.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  The man dropped his box of candy and grabbed something else. I couldn’t see what in the dark, but I knew it had to be either another box of candy or pop tarts. Those were the only things on that shelf. When I heard the crinkled of tinfoil, I assumed pop tarts had been his selection.

  “Erebus,” the man said, throwing the empty packaging over his shoulder. As he said it, the entire store seemed to get darker. Outside, the sky darkened, taking away what little light we had left. The man disappeared into the shadows completely, but I didn’t believe it would stay that way.

  I dug around in my head, hoping to find something on the man. I vaguely recalled reading something about Erebus when I had been younger, but nothing relevant popped out at me.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  His voice floated out to me, from the same spot he had been standing before. “Just to meet you,” he said. “There’s been a lot of noise from around Seattle recently. You and your family seem to get involved in a lot of problems much bigger than yourself, and I want to see what happens.”

  “That’s it? You just want to watch?”

  He sounded amused when he started talking again. “Well . . . maybe more than that. I wouldn’t mind having a hand in some of this noise. Argus is furious with you lot, and I think that’ll be interesting.”

  My heart picked up its pace.

  “Argus?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “I found him in a cheap motel, furious. He had wounds on his eyes, and he kept screaming about this little girl who had done it. Kept calling her human. I became curious. Which of your sisters did that to him?”

  I didn’t say anything, worried for Juniper.

  Erebus, when he spoke again, sounded seconds from laughing. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m sure that I can find out on my own.” A pop burst through the air, making my ears sting. Outside, some light began to peek through, almost enough to brighten the store. I pulled my phone out, but it still wouldn’t work.

  Not that it mattered, because Kezia came around the corner a second later, panning her own light around. She shifted it from my face, to behind me. Her eyes had narrowed in suspicion, which made her look cuter than I’d ever say. “What’s going on?” she asked. “I know something happened.”

  I sighed.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  One Step Closer

  Kezia

  IF I COULD have groaned for an hour, I would have. Instead, I sat on the couch with my family, my eyes wide.

  “I think this is what fucked feels like,” I said.

  “No,” Zander replied. “Fucked feels good compared to this.”

  “Well . . . ” Jasmine started.

  Jasper’s eyes narrowed at her as he pointed. “No, you stop that. I will lock you in a closet, I swear.”

  Verin tapped on his knee, sighing. “We don’t know if it’s all that bad. The man could have killed everyone in that store, and he didn’t. He let Jasper go. He said he wants a little fun. Is that so bad?”

  I glared. “Is. That. So. Bad? Are you kidding? Do you know who Erebus is?”

  Jasmine cleared her throat, raising her hand like
she was in a class. “I mean . . . I totally know who he is. But, like, just in case . . . you should explain it. In detail.”

  Zander smiled at her. “Erebus is darkness. Like . . . actual darkness. Shadow. His father is Chaos, and his mother is Gaia. Earth.”

  Jasmine’s nose twitched. “Okay . . . Chaos is what the universe came from, right?”

  “Right. He started as this void, the only thing that existed. Everything else came from him. Erebus included.”

  My heart raced. “So the son of this thing, just introduced himself to my boyfriend.”

  “While eating Gushers,” Jasper added.

  I turned to look at him. “I don’t know what to do with that, and the only comfort I have is that you’re still alive. I don’t know if this guy is evil, or good, or neither. He wants to make a mess, so I’m leaning toward not so good.”

  Verin shrugged. “Maybe. He’s also old as time, so he could be bored. Bored isn’t evil.”

  “Threatening people is,” Juniper said. “And that all felt like a threat to me. What are we supposed to do? How do we find him?”

  “You think I know? Sorry, but I’ll need more time,” Verin said.

  I lifted an eyebrow at my cousin. “You’re not going to stumble upon this primordial being, Verin. Cockiness isn’t an actual superpower.”

  “Bet me.”

  Zander rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything to support me. Juniper would have to keep a tighter hold on Verin’s leash if she didn’t want him to get killed being stupid.

  “I have an idea,” Jasmine said, perking up. “Juniper, try and see what he’s doing right now. Or put your feelers out for something fishy.”

  Her sister sat up a little straighter, putting her hands on her lap. “It might be hard to spot Erebus, but I can try for something else.”

  She closed her eyes, focusing on triggering a vison. Verin sat up with her, unwilling to let his gaze leave her. This kind of thing wasn’t dangerous, so I didn’t feel tense with it. I’d seen a vison knock the seers on their asses, but this was a simple task.