We Will Bleed

by Nicole Thorn

  Eros stepped up in a saunter, holding a hand out. “How about you head back? I have it all taken care of from here.”

  The woman snorted. “They said they wanted something quiet and calm. You are the opposite of that. Isn’t your wife wondering where you are?”

  “Probably, but she’ll understand. Go away.”

  “You go away.”

  We listened to them going back and forth for a while, and I wished we had gone down to the courthouse. That would have been legal and probably a lot quicker than this. It also would have avoided a god fight in my backyard. I had never seen two go at it, but I feared for the house. Surely, they would fix what they broke.

  “Fine!” Eros yelled. “You can marry them, but I get the next couple.”

  “We’ll see,” Hera said with a big smirk. “Let me just make a few slight adjustments.”

  With a snap of her fingers, we all wore different clothes. The girls had on green dresses that stopped at their knees, and all three boys got thrown into tuxes. My clothes changed too, and I had on a white dress I had never seen before. It had no sleeves, and the bottom had delicate lace as the pattern. It went a little longer than the girls’, and I seemed to have been missing shoes. Hera curled my hair, letting it fall around me.

  She handed me a bouquet of wildflowers, and gave Zander two ring boxes. “I thought you would prefer American traditions for the wedding.”

  I smiled. “Thank you.”

  The woman cleared her throat, and began with her speech, as if she had married a million other couples. I suppose she could have, and I wouldn’t have ever known.

  Zander handed me and Jasper our rings, and I looked down at the silver band that would be his. It had careful vines etched into it, matching the smaller one that Jasper had for me.

  “Jasper,” Hera said. “You can say your vows first.”

  He cleared his throat and smiled at me. “I guess I should have prepared something that would sound more elegant than this, but I didn’t. Kezia, I love you, and I really don’t know what I would be if I didn’t have you in my life. Everything would be quiet and dim, and I don’t want that anymore. I want you, and all the things that we can make together.”

  I held my hand out, and he slipped a ring onto my finger. Then it was my turn.

  “Jasper,” I said, still smiling. “Thank you for helping me want more than . . . what I had been willing to live with. It wasn’t much of a life, and I’m glad you helped me see that. I get to keep you forever, and it hasn’t really sunk in yet. I promise that no matter what comes, I’ll be at your side. I love you more than anything.”

  I put his ring on him, and Hera spoke. “With the power vested in me by me and the universe, I am happy to declare you officially married. Jasper, you can kiss your bride.”

  I still didn’t believe it, but I trusted that time would come. As our family screamed in the background, Jasper leaned down to press his lips against mine. I smiled, holding him there to me.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Eros said. “But I want cake.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:

  I Can’t Say That I’m Surprised

  Jasper

  EVERYONE CLEARED OUT of the house for the night, allowing Kezia and I the illusion of a honeymoon. We broke the bed. Well, she broke the bed. I hadn’t minded it, until I had to get up in the morning, and found splinters on the floor. Then I remembered what happened the night before and stopped caring that my bed had been ruined.

  The two of us at in a bathtub together, Kezia in my lap. She leaned against me and poked my chin. “I think we should get the master suite now, because we’re married. Or we can move into a house with three master suites. That’d be nice.”

  I laughed, shaking my head. “Juniper would never go for that. We gave her the master bedroom in this house, because we thought that would be better than letting her share a bathroom with Jasmine. You can’t even begin to imagine the screaming that would go on. I’ve seen some fights . . . ”

  Kezia patted my chest, after turning around so that she could straddle me. I didn’t complain, shockingly enough. “I believe you. I’ll make it my personal mission to never have another fight like that again. Which means we should probably move to another house, right?”

  I could just picture Juniper trying to adjust to another house, and not being able to do it. She had been getting better lately, aside from the one slip she had when we had to pick new seers. Better didn’t mean fixed, sadly, and I feared Juniper would never be fixed. We all loved her, but I wished that things didn’t hurt Juniper as much as they did. “I don’t think that’ll work out, either.”

  Kezia sighed and rested her chin on my shoulder. “You’re probably right. But a girl can dream. We can’t stay in this house forever, though. The humans will eventually realize that none of us age, and that might create some tension.” She turned back around and settled into my lap again.

  “We’ll deal with that problem when it arises,” I said, wrapping my arms around Kezia. I marveled that we could even do this. I’d been in the room when she took a bath before, but actually getting in the tub with her was a new thing. Kezia’s foster mother had often attacked her in the bathroom, so she didn’t feel comfortable with other people in the room with her while she bathed.

  My sisters and I weren’t the only ones making progress. The first time Kezia invited me into the tub with her, I had been surprised. Now, I just enjoyed feeling my naked wife against me. She had dragged my arms around her and huddled up against my chest. “We have to get out of the tub eventually,” Kezia said. “They’re going to be back before noon, ya know.”

  I did know. My sisters had warned me several times, but I ignored them. I figured that if I had to listen to them go on and on about their sex lives, they could live with watching Kezia and I leave the bathroom together. She stretched, and I tightened my arms around her.

  “We should go have the rest of the cake,” Kezia said. “Before Jasmine and Zander take it.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed, and let Kezia get out of the tub first. The two of us got dressed, and then headed downstairs, where all our wedding food awaited us. We reheated everything, set it out on the table, and started eating it. We got maybe a quarter of the way through the meal before the rest of our family showed up. Just like expected, they immediately went for the food.

  “So, how’s married life treating you?” Jasmine asked, smiling grandly.

  “It’s been fifteen hours,” I said.

  “So?” Jasmine asked. “It should be different, right? It should feel different. Like this wonderful, massive thing has happened, and now you’re even more solid than before. You should think about yesterday as one of the happiest days of your life.”

  Kezia and I looked at each other. “It was,” I said.

  “Definitely,” Kezia agreed.

  Jasmine pouted at us. “You two are no fun.” She flung herself into Zander’s lap and put her arms around his neck. “Our wedding will be massive, romantic, and it’ll make everything else afterward feel different and wonderful, right?” She gave him big eyes, filled with love.

  “Of course,” Zander said. “We’ll do it the right way.”

  I felt like Kezia and I had done it the right way. She didn’t love me any less today than she had the day before, and I felt the same about her. This thing that tied us together, it hadn’t changed anything. I married Kezia because I wanted to call her my wife. Not because I wanted our lives to change. As far as I was concerned, everything could stay the same.

  Kezia squeezed my hand, and whispered, “We’ll have to hide in the corner while they’re having their wedding. I don’t see a way around it.”

  I smiled. “Nor do I, but we’ll eat all the good food first.”

  “Yes!” Kezia said, laughing. She kissed my cheek, and then offered me the last bite of steak. I took it, because I knew that she would care more that I had eaten than she did herself. I was a literal god now, so I couldn’t die from star
vation. That didn’t mean I couldn’t hurt myself. It would just be harder.

  Juniper went around the kitchen, cleaning everything. Verin followed behind her, playing with her hair, helping her, and making comments. My sister seemed equally annoyed and pleased with his antics. She kept laughing, and batting his hand away, at any rate. Eventually, she hung off Verin, and said, “Fine. I’ll stop cleaning, but you have to entertain me.”

  “I’d do that, if you told me where you put my drumsticks.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Juniper said, smiling up at her boyfriend.

  “Why do you look pensive?” Kezia asked me, touching my cheek.

  “Everything feels okay right now, so I’m waiting for something to happen,” I said. “That’s usually how it goes. We have a nice day, and then someone comes in, and ruins it for us.”

  Kezia frowned, looking around the kitchen as well. “Normally, I’d say that you’re being paranoid, but the last time we had a nice day like this, you ended up hanging from the ceiling in your studio.”

  A studio that she still hadn’t stepped foot in. We would work on that eventually, when we had less things to worry about.

  “But what are the chances that something would happen now?” Jasmine asked.

  “Very high,” Erebus said from behind us. We all jumped, because he came out of nowhere. Literally. He stepped from the shadows as if he had walked down the hallway. The man looked neat, in a suit with a white shirt and white accents. He offered a smile, and I noticed that he didn’t have anything sweet to snack on. That set all my alarms off, and I watched him approaching us.

  Erebus came to the table, sat down, and laced his hands together on top of the table. He looked around at each of us, and said, “Congratulations are in order, I suppose, but let me first say that I’m offended you didn’t invite me. I wouldn’t have dragged anyone else along, if that’s what you were worried about.”

  “We didn’t invite anyone,” I said.

  “I suppose that’s true. Wonderfully rude of you, by the way. I appreciate that kind of callous disregard for others.”

  Kezia’s eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t their wedding, so no one else gets to be offended that they didn’t get invited. I don’t care what you think about that, either.”

  Erebus grinned, and leaned forward. “That’s why I like you so much, you know. You’ve yelled at gods and walked away without flinching. You’ve defied the odds, and made your mortals, immortals. All of you were raised outside of this world, so you can’t even begin to imagine how many people are willing to bow down to what the gods want, without trying to fight or argue.”

  “I’d believe it,” Jasmine muttered.

  “Me too,” Juniper agreed.

  Erebus smiled. “And you haven’t done it. It gives me a lot of hope,” Erebus said. “For chaos to come, that is.”

  “I’m so happy that we could have given you something to look forward to,” Kezia grumbled, looking irritated. Erebus didn’t seem to mind, which didn’t surprise me. He enjoyed that kind of fighting.

  “I’m happy too, though the gods won’t always be so lenient as they have been with you. They need your seers, and they need you. That’s the only reason that you haven’t been punished for talking about them the way you have been. Soon, though, they won’t be able to handle it anymore. They’ll start to chafe at the things that people say, and they’ll want to get their revenge. You all know what happens when gods want their revenge.”

  We did. We’d done our research on the gods, and the stories told about them. Death would’ve been a mercy, but the gods liked to watch people suffer more than anything. They wanted remorse more than revenge, I thought. Remorse that someone could ever think themselves better than a god.

  The fact that Erebus sat in our kitchen telling us all this worried me.

  “Thank you, by the way,” I said. “For bringing me back.”

  Erebus smiled. “The one who sent me . . . he’s not happy that the gods created you, but he’ll always be there to fix their mistakes. For my own entertainment, I hope that doesn’t involve killing you three.”

  “You can’t kill us,” Jasmine said.

  That seemed to amuse Erebus a great deal, since he started laughing. “Don’t think that, not even for a second,” he said, through the laughter.

  Zander pulled Jasmine against his chest, holding her tightly. Verin shifted around, so that he could stand next to Juniper as well. Tension started to beat through the room, like it had its own heart, or something.

  “Nymphs, giants, demigods, gods, they can all be killed. They can all fall to us, because we are stronger than all of you. We’re also uninterested in you, for the most part.”

  Primordial beings, he meant. Erebus, darkness, sat at our table. He could be anywhere darkness existed, and he could do anything with that darkness that he wanted. I didn’t fully understand the scope of his power, but I knew that it went beyond what anything I’d met could do.

  And this primordial being had taken an interest in my family, for whatever reason. There had to be other demigods that created as much chaos as Kezia, Zander, and Verin did. We couldn’t be the only fascinating things that happened by him.

  Juniper cleared her throat, and leaned in. “I’m sorry, but what are you doing here?”

  “Talking,” Erebus said.

  “Bloody hell,” Verin muttered. “Other than stopping by for a nice chat, what are you doing here?”

  Erebus smiled, looking up at Verin. “Isn’t a nice chat enough?”

  “Not usually,” I said. “Usually, when some creature stops by, they want something.”

  “That’s the gods’ influence. They are so bored with everything around them, they don’t understand what they’ve done. They’ve spent so much time, up on that mountain of theirs, that they’ve forgotten how to entertain themselves without hurting someone else. Do you know the extent of what they’ve done in the last hundred years or so?”

  “What?” Jasmine asked, leaning forward.

  Erebus thought for a second. “It’s more than just the last hundred years, really. The gods ruled all, at one point. People called them by different names, but they represented the same things. Then, one day, someone conceived a different kind of god. A singular person, who took the form of a man, and ruled all. People started to believe in him, because his followers turned into these violent, driven races, willing to do whatever it took to convince people that their God was the only god.

  “And when that happened, all those idiots on the mountain were offended, of all things. They watched these people ravaging the land, and they could have put a stop to it. They could have come down for their thrones and slammed everyone into the ground. They could have made themselves known, and shouted that they are the true gods, and that the false god did not exist. That’s not what they did.

  “They gave up their lands. They decided that if the humans wanted to believe in the air, rather than beings that could actually give them something, then the humans could do that. They disappeared, taking their vast store of gifts with them. They stopped listening to the humans that still prayed to them. They stopped paying attention to those that they could help or hurt. They allowed their statues to crumble, their tombs to grow dusty and unused. Even now, they ignore those that still pray, those few that still believe in them.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” I asked.

  Erebus smiled. “There is a point to it, I promise.”

  “Then get to it,” Zander grumbled.

  “The gods lost what little touch they had with their humans. They started to see those humans as toys to play with when they got bored. Oh, they always saw them as inferior, and didn’t particularly care when they died, but never like this. Never as cruel as they’ve been lately, or as lacking as they’ve been. They stopped caring about their demigod children, the creatures that ran around the earth, they stopped trying to be what they are. Gods.

  “Some of them have started trying to
connect again, in their own way. They’ve removed punishments from people that have been suffering for hundreds, if not thousands of years.”

  Like Arachne. The gods had turned her back into a human, and the second they did that, Arachne turned on them. She had someone tamper with our visions, tried to kill the Oracle, tried to kill my sister, she started her own training camp. When Athena found out, she turned Arachne back into a spider, and we hadn’t seen her since.

  “They’ve decided to force order back into this world, but they’re still trying to punish the humans for believing in a false god. They’re working behind the scenes, and by doing so, they are hurting even more people. And so many are tired of it.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “The gods are trying to control that which they’ve left alone for centuries. Their children are tired of being ignored, and then bullied. So many creatures are tired of the gods playing with their lives just to prove a point. Even some of the minor gods are sick of bowing to people who clearly don’t care about their well-being.”

  Kezia looked at me, and her eyes filled with worry. “Does this have anything to do with those training camps that we’ve found in the woods?” she asked. “Or why the gods won’t tell us anything important?”

  Erebus leaned back in his chair, a self-satisfied look on his face. “My family and I, we’re mostly keeping out of this conflict. Almost all my children have decided they want no part in this, and my father decided the same thing. It’s just me, and two of my daughters that aren’t sure if we want to take sides. I love the chaos that it’s creating, and the world has been going on like this for too long. We could use an uproar. The humans could use the shock, to keep them from thinking they are the top of the food chain. Lately, it seems like they’re all getting too uppity for their own good.”

  “What sides are you talking about?” Zander asked.

  Erebus continued talking, as if we hadn’t said anything. “I just haven’t quite decided what side would be better. If we could get the Olympians to forgive the humans, that might be better. At the same time, it would be such fun to usurp them, and put new gods in their place, don’t you think?”