by Nicole Thorn
Kezia snuggled deeper into the pillows, so I knew she wouldn’t wake up for another hour or so. I already felt wide awake, so I slipped out of bed. Immediately, Kezia wiggled over to the warm spot that I had left behind. She wrapped herself up in the blankets, making herself into a little demigod cocoon.
A smile pushed up the corners of my mouth. She looked so comfortable there, and I didn’t want to disturb her. I pulled on a pair of pants and went to shower.
She said a month. She had been wanting to sleep with me for a month and hadn’t been able to say it. I didn’t know what to think of that, other than to feel glad she had waited. If she couldn’t have told me earlier, then I had to conclude she hadn’t been ready. We had been together for six months, but it didn’t feel like that long. More like a couple of weeks had passed.
That thought led to others, ones that I tried to push off. Like how, it felt like weeks to me, but would it feel like that for Kezia? She would always, more or less, look like she did now. In a couple of decades, would it have felt like weeks to her as well? What about three centuries, when she’d had other people in her life, in her bed? What would it have felt like then?
Shaking those thoughts off, I left the bathroom. Everyone in the house had an agreement. We wouldn’t think about that, because it would be too hard. The only ones who managed to ignore the looming mortality were Jasmine and Verin. Jasmine, because she just didn’t dwell on things that she couldn’t fix. I thought Verin could deal with it, because some part of him believed that he would fix it.
I stepped out of the bathroom barely after six. Everyone else would be asleep for hours yet, so I went downstairs to my studio. My thoughts had started to spin out of control, and I needed to calm them down. The best way to do that would be to make some kind of clay sculpture. Maybe I could get something for Kezia done. She would love anything that I did for her, but I always liked to put extra effort into those things.
I sat down and started working on something. Kezia’s sculptures sat on the other side of the table. She constantly thought they looked terrible, but I thought they looked fine. She had taken to doing plants, which amused me. She had a rose set up, all ready to paint. It had a thin stem, with little thorns sticking out of the side and all. I thought it looked fine, but she insisted it could use some more work.
A duck, I thought. Kezia would get a duck, because I knew that she would love it. After probably an hour of working, without any music playing, I heard the garage door open. I turned around to see Zander standing there. He took one look at me, and frowned, heavily.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
Zander came into the garage and looked around. “Not really,” he said. “Is Kizzy all right?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “Sleeping.”
He nodded, still looking around the garage.
I sighed. “You know?”
Zander cleared his throat and looked anywhere but at me. “It’s kind of hard for me not to know. I can sense everyone in the house. Most of the time it’s background noise, but sometimes it’s a little, uh, louder.”
“I see,” I said, going back to working with the clay in front of me. I didn’t offer him anything else, hoping the demigod would leave. Zander and I didn’t have much of a relationship. We’d be brothers-in-law one day, but we didn’t know when that would happen. Until then, Zander and I maintained this awkward interaction. Not quite friends, but still family.
When he didn’t walk away, I put my things down, and turned to face him. “You and I both know that I’m not good at this confrontation stuff,” I said, quietly. “If you have something you’d like to say to me, I suggest you just say it.”
Zander rubbed the back of his neck, and he said, “I’m happy that Kizzy has you, but I kind of want to threaten you, if you ever hurt her.”
“We’ve already done this,” I said.
“True,” Zander said. “At least, you’ve done it.”
When he and Jasmine started dating, I did threaten him. Zander had always been protective, but sometimes he went too far. I’d found Jasmine having a massive breakdown because of him before, and I’d listened to her ranting about how he wouldn’t calm the hell down when she needed him to. He had caused some issues in our house, because he wouldn’t let Jasmine be.
“And I stick by that,” I said.
“And I stick by my own threat,” Zander said.
“You know that if either girl finds out about this, they’ll want to kill us,” I said.
Zander snorted and nodded. “Yeah, I know. Kizzy would probably wrap me up in some vines and try to suffocate me. Might actually be worth it, just to watch Jasmine hitting you with various household items. But she’d get angry with me too, for threatening you.”
“Then it’d probably be best if you don’t hurt her,” I said.
Zander turned to stare at me with narrowed blue eyes. He crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “Why do you think I would do something to hurt Jasmine? It’s far more likely that you would do something that hurt Kizzy, don’t you think?”
“You’ve already done something that’ll hurt Jasmine. She just doesn’t know it yet,” I said.
The demigod stopped moving, and I watched his eyes shut down. His face became stony. For someone so good with emotions, he certainly didn’t know how to hide his own. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “I’ve never done anything to hurt Jasmine, and I never will.”
“Kezia told me,” I said.
His teeth ground together. “Told you what?”
I looked around the garage, and said, “Let’s go for a walk. That way, no one can hear us.” I got off the stool and left the garage. If Zander didn’t follow me, then I had no way of forcing him. Nor would I try. It took all my thin willpower to even say the words. They had been building up in my head and throat for weeks, until I could barely think of anything else when Zander and I were in a room alone. Not that that happened often. The two of us didn’t know what to do with each other. Too different, I supposed.
But, he followed me out of the garage, and I went down the street, to Verin’s house. I didn’t walk inside the house but broke into the backyard. It had gotten wild, since Verin started living with us. The grass and weeds spread across the ground, and it looked like some people had started throwing things in the yard. I had little doubt that the other demigod maintained the inside of the house, but he couldn’t have cared less about the outside.
“All right,” Zander said, crossing his arms over his chest. “What are you talking about?”
“My father,” I said.
Zander tightened his grip on his arms. His teeth ground together, and he looked around the yard. He didn’t say anything, or lie, which I thought was smart of him.
I nodded. “Yeah, Kezia figured it out. She knows you too well, and though we don’t know Verin well, we still managed to put everything together.”
Zander paced away from me, and I looked up at the lightening sky. Rain dripped from the roof, onto my forehead as I watched. “Okay, so you know,” he said, stopping.
“Took you that long to decide you didn’t want to lie to me?” I asked. “Kind of pointless to do so when you know that lying will only get you deeper into this hole.”
“You don’t seem that upset,” Zander said.
“I don’t know how I feel,” I told him.
He shook his head. “No, you can’t pull that shit with me. I can feel what everyone else does, remember? I know what you felt when you found out that asshole died. You had a moment of grief, profound grief, and then relief. You felt relieved when he died, and that’s something you can’t hide from me.”
“I wasn’t trying to,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I know what to feel about my father being murdered. That doesn’t mean I know what to feel about you being the reason for it, or having Verin be the one to do it. If you wanted him dead so badly, then why didn’t you kill him yourself?”
“I told Jasmine that I wouldn’t,” he said. “It wou
ld hurt her so much if I killed that man.”
“You think this won’t hurt her?” I asked. I finally sat down on the porch. It had been such a long year, I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. So, I sat down. Zander sat down next to me, and I felt the tension throughout his body.
“I know it will,” Zander said. “I just . . . I hate that man so fucking much. Even now that he’s dead, even now that there’s nothing for me to hate, I want him to suffer. I want to know that Hades is punishing him personally, because I hate him.” The words came in a low growl that vibrated the very air.
“Maybe it’s stupid of me, but I don’t get why,” I said.
“How can you not, after everything that man did to you and your sisters?”
“We didn’t know anything else,” I said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have nothing else?”
“Yes,” he said. “I grew up with just Kizzy, no one else to come save me if something went wrong.”
“No,” I said. “You guys had group homes, and foster homes, and each other. You had people that you could go to, if you wanted. You had people that might’ve noticed if something had gone wrong in your life. When things happened with Kezia . . . ” Now I couldn’t keep the growl out of my voice. I bit out the next words, “No one noticed, because she didn’t want them to notice. She made herself believe that she had somehow earned her treatment, that she deserved all the things that happened. Me and my sisters . . . we didn’t have to trick ourselves.”
“You didn’t deserve it.”
“No,” I agreed. “But that never occurred to us.”
Zander went quiet.
“We had this father, this horrible man for a father. He liked to manipulate, and condescend, and torment us for seemingly no reason. He liked to be a bastard, and make us feel bad about ourselves, because then we needed him.”
“He tortured you all,” Zander said.
“We didn’t see it like that. We loved him, because he had been our father. He had been our father that locked us in the house and told us that we couldn’t do anything. Our father who would humiliate us whenever we did something wrong, and who would tell us that we owed him for raising us. He would tell us that our mother didn’t love us, but he did. He stuck around because he did, and we owed him for that. And we didn’t have anyone else, so we loved him. Jasmine loved him until the end, because she didn’t have another father.”
“I know that,” Zander said.
“And when she finds out that you manipulated Verin into killing him,” I continued, “things will blow up. They will get ugly, she will scream, she will cry, and she might leave you.”
“But you aren’t mad with me?” Zander said.
I didn’t know if that actually mattered to him, but I answered anyway. “Not really, no. Maybe I’m a terrible person, too, I don’t know. It’s hard to be mad when I have so many bad things in my head because of that man. I haven’t liked him in a long time, but I still loved him. But you were right. When I found out he died, I felt a moment of relief.”
Zander rubbed his hand through his hair. “Gods, everything is so screwed up. I don’t know what’s worse. That you’re a little relieved that that man is dead, that Jasmine is grieving him, or that Juniper doesn’t care.”
“Juniper needs to not care,” I said. “In her head, she weighed our father against Verin, and Verin came out more important. When she gets attached to people, she can’t let them go. They belong in her life, just like how some things belong in a certain spot in the kitchen. How the car keys belong by the door, and shoes belong in our rooms. She’s getting better, and that actually scares me.”
“Why?” Zander asked.
“Because I worry what’ll happen when she can’t hide anymore,” I told him. “When she can’t hide from the things that Verin did, or the things that you have done. I worry that she won’t be able to handle it anymore.”
Zander’s jaw worked, and he bounced his knee. “Everything will be fine,” he said, stubbornly.
“You’re taking notes from Verin now?”
He snorted. “Maybe. Everything will be fine, though, because we haven’t suffered this much, only for things to get worse. I refuse to believe that things can keep getting worse, every time I turn around.”
I laughed and looked up at the sky. “I hope they didn’t take that as a challenge.”
“Screw them,” Zander countered, shooting to his feet. He paced around, his jaw working. “Screw all of them, because they don’t care about us. Why should I give a damn about the gods when they won’t help me figure out what’s wrong with Jasmine? They don’t give a shit. They never have.”
“Probably not,” I agreed. “But that doesn’t mean you should test them, either.”
“Why not?” Zander asked. “It’s not like they’ve got anything else to throw at me. The two people I love the most have already suffered, and I’ve taken care of the people that made them feel that way.”
I raised an eyebrow but took a second before responding. “The gods aren’t the ones that locked Jasmine in a dog kennel when we were younger, and they aren’t the ones that raped Kezia.”
He flinched at the words, but I didn’t take them back. “They could have stopped it,” he growled.
“Yes, they could have,” I agreed. “And you can be angry with them forever, but that won’t change what happened. You could be furious with them for all the things they didn’t stop, while they sat up there, screwing and eating and drinking, and you’ll never not be angry.”
“I will be angry,” Zander said. “They don’t get off the hook for something like this.”
“They’ve lived thousands of years,” I said. “They will live on for thousands of years. They went from being these deities that everyone worshipped, to stories in textbooks. One day, people might worship them again. They might look at the Greek pantheon, and ask for forgiveness for all the things we humans have done. And in all this time, the one thing that will never change the gods is your anger.”
Zander paced away from me again, his hands buried in his hair. “That doesn’t mean I have to forgive them for everything they’ve done.”
“No,” I said. “But they will keep coming by. I’ve met more gods in the last six months than I have in the rest of my life. They will keep showing up, because apparently, nothing is going to calm down any time soon. Are you really going to stay furious with them every time they show up, basically offering yourself up for punishment? Not everyone will be as lenient with you as your mother, or Demeter.”
Zander stared at me, and I knew that his next words would aim to hurt. I had learned to recognize that look in his eyes. That deep blue, dangerous glint. I had seen it when he attacked my sister, and I had seen it when he threw words at his mother.
“I’m not going to roll over, and let things happen to me and those I love. I’m not you.”
The words struck me like blows, but I took them. People had said worse to me in my life, and he hadn’t lied. I never fought my father. The most I would do to protect my sisters was take their place. I’d sleep in the dog kennel every night, if that meant they got the warm bed. But I never struck my father, and I never talked back to him.
Zander’s face changed the second the words left his mouth. He stepped back and shook his head. “Jasper, I . . . Fuck.” He turned around and punched a tree hard enough that I heard something crack. It split his knuckles wide open, but they healed almost before the blood even flowed.
I rose to my feet and stuffed my hands into my pocket. “Stay angry,” I said. “That’s up to you. But things are going to unravel, and I know you can feel that. Everyone in the house knows what happened to my father. Everyone but Jasmine, and the second she finds out, your anger won’t do anything.”
“She doesn’t have to find out,” Zander said, sounding defeated.
“She will,” I told him. “It’s just a matter of time.” I left the backyard and walked to the house. Zander caught up with me only a few feet down
the sidewalk. We didn’t talk, but I knew that he walked with me to make sure I didn’t die. If Erebus decided he wanted to attack instead of talk, then we’d both be goners,
We got back to the house, and I found Kezia up. She had come downstairs wearing jeans, and one of my old shirts. I didn’t think she wore the shirt to hide herself, but because she liked it. Her cheeks heated the second she saw me, and Zander made his escape. He’d probably talk to her later, about what happened.
“Hey,” she said, ducking her head.
I wrapped my arms around her. “Good morning,” I said, leaning down to kiss her forehead.
Kezia tilted her head up, so that my mouth landed on hers instead. I felt her warm lips, and the way they curved up in a smile. When I pulled back, her eyes danced. “What were you and Zander doing?” she asked.
I took Kezia’s hand and brought her to the garage. When the door closed, I told her what Zander and I had talked about. I didn’t bother leaving anything out, because I wouldn’t lie to Kezia. About anything.
Her eyes widened. “He said that to you?”
“It’s not that big a deal,” I told her.
“The hell it isn’t,” Kezia said, getting up. I wrapped an arm around her stomach, and she stopped moving. If she wanted to, it would’ve taken nothing to break out of my hold. Instead, she let me pull her back against my body. I pushed her pink hair over her shoulder and laid my mouth against her neck.
She melted immediately, and then squirmed when my fingers bit into her hips. “Don’t get into a fight because of me,” I said.
Kezia crossed her arms over her chest and looked sideways at me. “But I wanna.”
A smile curved my mouth, and I pressed my lips to her cheek. “Please?”
She sighed. “All right, I won’t pick a fight, but I am going to talk to him about this. And if he doesn’t have a good explanation, then I can’t control what happens. Okay?”