by Camilla Monk
Not that I even understood it in the first place; I didn’t have that kind of love in me. Mine was a tiny rotten fruit my parents had spit out long ago. It was full of jealousy and disappointment, of spite and heartache. As a result, the longest I’d ever stayed with a guy was a couple of months back in high school—serious relationship and all—and my definition of romance was to flirt with a lone customer at closing time, follow him home and nail him savagely on his couch before grabbing the last beer in his fridge and going home to sleep in my own bed.
And it was just fine like that. It was . . .
I jolted when Faust’s fingers reached to thread in a strand of my hair. He thumbed it with a sense of wonder on his features. “What is she thinking about, this fearsome blue-haired princess I can’t still?”
This, right here, was the kind of trouble I needed to stay clear from. The rational part of me recognized his silky murmur and cheesy lines for what they were: a not-so-elaborate tactic to bang me, but, if I was being honest with myself, I liked the way his voice caressed my skin. I liked that he was always so calm, that he could peel my layers off so easily and soothe me in the same breath, without even trying.
“Nothing . . .” I mumbled.
He smiled, as if he didn’t really know to ask because he could read my thoughts like Palombara. I chewed the inside of my lip. Maybe I was overthinking this; Faust didn’t exactly have Prince Charming written all over him, and he wasn’t trying to sell me forever after. He just wanted a little bit of now. I risked a hand to his cheek, grazing his beard. It was rough in places but overall softer than I expected, and so many shades of golden, sandy here, a few near-silvery hairs there. He purred and turned to mouth my fingertips, sending a warm shiver sizzling all the way to my toes.
Normally, this was the part where I rolled atop him and took things in hand—all of them. But I wanted to stay like this a little longer, sitting on a big bed somewhere inside a snow globe as his face inched closer, and pretend it was romantic. Faust cupped my face, his fingertips tracing my jaw, the bridge of my nose. My lips. I let him. My eyes half-closed in a daze. I basked in the unexpected tenderness of the moment, listened to the rhythm of our quiet breathing.
It’s complicated, but basically, we didn’t make it to first base because of a badly taxidermized fox.
The fox was in Ryuuko’s hand when the bedroom door slammed open. Faust and I jerked apart awkwardly. She saw us. Froze. It was beyond awkward, fricking embarrassing really, and I felt even shittier because I knew it must have hurt her, walking onto us . . . well, technically we hadn’t kissed.
She took a sharp breath and marched to the bed. My cheeks were blazing while Faust scratched his hair in mild confusion. She tossed the fox onto the bedspread, her brown gaze burning with repressed rage. “I made as a gift.”
Wow. What a coincidence, since she’d served us fox for dinner. Of course, Ryuuko was an adult—possibly an immortal one, at that—surely, she wouldn’t taxidermize dinner’s fox to gift it to me and make things even weirder between us. I squirmed away from the mangled mess of orange fur covering stiff limbs that stuck out at odd angles. Faust grappled for it and ran his fingers over the fox’s grimacing maw, tracing bulging glass eyes and the long pink tongue dangling from its wide-open mouth. “It’s a masterpiece. Another raccoon?”
Ryuuko’s bob rippled like black silk as she shook her head. “Fox.”
His fingers skittered down the creature’s back to meet a fluffy tail. “Obviously. My bad.”
She took the fox from his hands abruptly and shoved it in mine. “For you. Now we’re friends.”
Yeah, right . . . My gaze traveled between her and the monstrosity sitting on my lap. “Thanks, I guess. It’ll look great,” In the garbage. “atop my fridge.”
She gave a sharp nod. “You do that. You put it on your fridge.”
“Ryuuko has a passion for taxidermy,” Faust thought it useful to explain. “And the skill to go with it.”
Another brutal nod. “I like research.”
The stiff smile I’d been trying to keep on my lips unhooked with a sinister creaking sound only I could hear. Research. The kind of research she’d been planning to do with Faust’s body. I peeked down at the fox’s canted snarl, a sinking feeling in my stomach. I wasn’t staying alone in a room with her. Ever.
She narrowed her eyes at me—gauging what I’d look like once taxidermized?—and said, “Now she wants to see you. You leave your gift here.”
No need to ask twice. I dropped Ryuuko’s masterpiece on the bed, and Faust and I got up to follow her. She pivoted on her heels without another look, leading us down the hallway where birds still shivered and flew from one branch to another. I hadn’t dared last night, but this time I ventured trembling fingers toward the living painting.
Ryuuko’s voice cracked like a whip. “You don’t touch.”
She glared at me over her shoulder. I pursed my lips and mumbled, “Sorry.”
We went down a flight of stairs, crossed the salon, and a deserted two-level library, crammed with ancient books all the way to the ceiling. Ryuuko eventually stopped in front of a set of massive, red-lacquer doors. She pressed her palm to a golden disc-shaped lock with one of those complicated Asian symmetrical patterns. The lock gave a faint click, and she pushed the doors open, revealing a laboratory from another time.
My gaze was immediately drawn upward, to the vast canopy dome looming over our heads, some twenty feet high. A coat of snow had gathered all around it like a milky crown, but in its center was a splash of pearly sky. Once I’d managed to tear my eyes away from the sight, I took in the hundreds of shelves and drawers lining the walls all around me from floor to ceiling: more boxes, jars, books, and . . . more taxidermized shit than I had ever seen in my entire life.
Standing in the middle of this madness was Lady Palombara, her hands demurely folded over a salmon silk dress and the long white apron covering it. I couldn’t help it, the moment our eyes met, everything Faust had said came back to me. Was she thinking about her husband right now? How did it feel for her to help us face Perses and Montecito? Was it a form of revenge, or maybe after so long, the pain had turned into something else, the lingering ache of dull grief? The corner of her mouth twitched, and I remembered too late that it was a bad idea to think around her.
“I would do it all over again,” she said, answering the question simmering at the back of my mind, “and if it had been possible, I would have turned my Ichor into blood for him, not the other way around.”
“Ichor?” I asked.
“It is the name we give to our essence. Long ago, humans pictured Ichor flowing in the veins of titans, instead of all too mortal blood.” She smiled. “Poetic, but quite incorrect: we would need veins for that to be possible.”
My eyes fell to her pale hands and widened a fraction. Smooth, save for the delicate outline of her knuckles. Like Montecito’s, Palombara’s body was an envelope, nothing more. I looked down at the back of Faust’s hands in contrast, and the lines snaking under his skin, chaotic paths that reassured me there was still a part of humanity in him—as he’d claimed earlier.
“Faust’s nature is different than mine,” Palombara confirmed softly.
Whereas she merely possessed a human appearance, Faust remained flesh and blood. Did that mean he could . . .
“No,” Palombara answered before the question could truly take shape in my mind. “Chronos spared him the torment of having to bury his children.”
I registered the shadow passing in Faust’s gaze when she said that, thought of his unknown child killed so long ago, and it was all it took for anger to flare in my veins. “Like he spared him the torment of seeing again?”
“Emma,” he sighed. “There’s no point . . .”
“No point in ever asking why?” I replied, fighting the frustration mounting inside me, that made my head feel too hot and my skin too tight.
He gave a nod.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “It�
�s not fair! It’s worse than just living your life thinking your luck is shit. It’s someone . . . something out there, who decided for you that you’d be bumping into furniture for the next two-thousand years, and you’re not allowed to question that, only bear with it?”
“Fate works like that.” His voice sounded weary, defeated, but then his smile returned, chasing the clouds in his eyes. He winked. “Not all of it is bad.”
I wanted to stay pissed, but I feared his brand of lazy optimism was getting to me; I could see he had a point. No matter how rough, our roads were peppered with tiny blessings: great weed, cheap beer . . . new friends. “If you say so,” I muttered.
Palombara’s hands clapping put an end to our debate. She tucked a pearly gray curl behind her ear. “As humans like to say, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Let’s get to work.”
I took another look around at the bizarre junk and thousands of jars crammed on the shelves. “This is your magic lab?”
“We do research,” Ryuuko corrected, her back to a lone table where stood an unfinished . . . okay, I had no idea what that was. A platypus maybe? With teeth?
“But that’s not why I brought you here,” Lady Palombara chided her. She glided to Faust, her face glowing with a sort of motherly love that made me uncomfortable because I didn’t fully understand it. He had killed her husband when she didn’t have the strength to, and somehow, it only deepened their bond instead of shattering it. She told him, “I wanted to give you something I thought you might need soon enough.”
He cocked a curious eyebrow as she went to open a long drawer labeled with Greek signs and retrieved a shiny golden crochet vest. “We wouldn’t want you to catch a cold.” She placed the garment in his hands. “Put it on; I’m sure it’ll fit you like a glove.”
Faust couldn’t see how tacky his new vest was, but he seemed troubled nonetheless as his fingers felt for the soft material. “May I ask where the wool came from?” he asked, buttoning the front over the ruffles of his shirt. Man, he looked like a lighthouse.
“With this, he doesn’t make a hole in your chest again,” Ryuuko stated icily.
He—as in Perses? I stiffened, my gaze fleeting between the two women. Lady Palombara gave a soft chuckle. “He’s decided to become a hero; let him fight his war wearing the golden fleece.”
My jaw fell all the way down to my chest. She’d given him . . . a divine Kevlar.
Faust patted the vest with hesitant hands. “Theia, it’s very precious. Are you sure?”
She feigned a pout. “Don’t you like it? I found the pattern on the Internet.”
Since his mouth appeared unable to form words at the moment, I stepped in to express the proper level of shock. “Hang on; rewind. What do you mean Faust decided to become a hero?”
“He disagreed with me at first, but he’s been thinking about it since last night.” She grazed his forearm tenderly. “You don’t guard the table; you guard Chronos’s power. Wherever it lives.”
His left hand rose to thumb the tattoo circling his right one, almost like an unconscious gesture. “I hope you’re right.”
She reached to tap said tattoo with her forefinger. “Your eterathis would stop you if it wasn’t the right thing to do,” she countered.
So, it was physical. That tattoo could control him if he strayed from his contract . . . I looked back and forth between them. “What do you want him to do? Is it about your kamikaze plan, like you said last night?”
Palombara laid kind eyes on me. “Yes. If neither hiding nor leaving the table at Lady Montecito and Perses’s mercy is an option, then perhaps the time has come to unseal it once and for all.”
My brow shot up to meet my hairline. “Isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to avoid?”
“We unseal the table and put all the power in the testicle. We give Faust a new baetylus. A better one,” Ryuuko explained.
My arms dangling at my sides, I could almost hear the cogs whirring in my brain in a desperate bid to process both halves of her sentence. “Should I ask what’s a baetylus first, or are we going to unpack that testicle comment?”
“Both excellent questions,” Palombara agreed. “But first, Ryuuko dear, bring us the cane.”
I swear I caught a disdainful sneer on Ryuuko’s lips, but it happened so fast, and a millisecond after she had already reverted to her default deadpan self. She went to fetch a wooden cane I hadn’t noticed lying behind her mangled platypus. She took Faust’s right hand gently and placed the cane in it. “To replace.” The corners of her lips lifted a fraction. “Now you have a vine staff again, centurion.”
I wasn’t sure why a centurion would specifically need a vine staff, but . . . Ryuuko could smile, which was the biggest news here. I pursed my lips tightly, so they wouldn’t part in amazement.
“Thank you, Ryuuko,” Faust said. He seemed just as troubled by this new gift. His fingers trailed up and down the tormented curves of the long cane.
“It looks exactly the same,” I noted.
Faust shook his head. “Not quite.”
He turned the staff in his hands, revealing a rough purple gem encased in the hilt, buried in a wood knot as if the vine had grown around it. Judging by the shape, the whole thing must be the size of an egg. Despite its grainy surface, it caught the light in places, casting odd lavender flares on his hand.
I nearly raised a hand to touch it, but I remembered what had happened to Faust’s previous cane and shoved guilty fingers back in my hoodie pocket. “What kind of stone is it?” I asked, studying the careful movement of Faust’s thumb as it brushed the gem over and over.
“It’s for our plan,” Ryuuko informed me.
Lady Palombara rested her pale fingers over Faust’s rugged and tanned ones. “I have no idea what became of its twin, but I managed to hold on to this one for all those years. Perhaps my greatest treasure, and yet I never imagined it would be of any use. But now I see there will never be a better purpose for it.”
I eyed the purple gem doubtfully. “It’s not really a testicle, right?”
Lady Palombara’s mouth pursed to stifle a guilty chortle. “Oh, it is. It was once one of our father Ouranos’s . . . attributes. But it’s long been petrified,” she quickly added, as if that made it okay.
I shot her a look of silent outrage. She had given him her dad’s ball. Like, literally.
Faust winced. “It’s somewhat metaphorical, Emma. Ouranos was an entity so vast and so complex you can’t really describe him in human terms. What you see is a fragment of a primordial deity, a stone imbued with an infinitesimal fraction of its power—in short, a baetylus.”
Exactly like the table, I realized—except this one appeared to be portable.
In Lady Palombara’s eyes, the galaxies darkened, swirling menacingly. “Chronos cut them off; it’s a fitting fate that his power should be sealed in them.” When she noticed the consternation on my face, she plastered her sweet mask back on and waved my unspoken concern off. “We titans were a rowdy bunch in our youth.”
Faust cleared his throat. “Chronos overthrew his father, and well . . . he wanted to make a clear point.”
“That he’d nut whoever tried to resist him?”
He grimaced. “Sort of, but in truth, there wasn’t much left of Ouranos when Chronos took his remains apart. It was more a symbol, to take away that which made him his father in the first place.”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t understand any of this. What’s the plan?”
“Oh, you two are going to surrender to Lady Montecito,” Palombara replied, like an afterthought. “And once you have and she takes you to the table, Faust will unseal it.”
I eyed the purple nut. “And you think that thing could suck in the table’s power before Montecito or Perses does?” Her lips stirred—as good as a yes. I went on, “But what happens once it’s done? Can Faust kill Perses with his new cane?”
“Of course not.” She plunged her gaze into mine but didn’t bother completing her expla
nation.
“So, I need to cover for the two of us,” I ventured. “If he tries to get Faust, I step in, and I buy us time to escape.”
“You’re stupid.” Ryuuko’s voice knifed me.
“Hey, I thought we were over that shit—”
Faust thankfully spoke before I could yell, ‘You wanna go at me?’ and subsequently bludgeon her with her half-assed platypus. “Emma doesn’t need to come. If I manage to channel the table’s power into the baetylus, I may not be able to kill Perses, but . . .” His eyes narrowed in a determined glare, but his throat worked in vain. God, I wished I could have ripped that fucking contract off his wrist. “I can do this,” he said at last. “No one wins against time.”
I studied him, intrigued by the implications. What were the table’s true powers, once unleashed? Could he control time entirely? Kick Perses’s ass all the way back to Jurassic Park or that kind of thing?
“Are you sure you can beat him?” I darted a guilty glance at Palombara, before adding, “You were able to stop Massimiliano because he never managed to summon the Spear; he tried, but you got him before it appeared completely. It’s different for Montecito; obviously, she went all the way, and back at the station, you couldn’t freeze her or Perses’s shadows,” I recounted, trying—and likely failing—to filter the worry out of my voice.
Ryuuko’s lips quivered with barely repressed anger, but she didn’t speak to me. She turned to Lady Palombara instead. “She doesn’t see; she’s too stupid.”
Okay, the truce was over for good. She could shove her fox up her ass. “Hey,” I snarled. “How about we sort this shit out with a good old arm wrestling match?”
She balled her small fists. Lady Palombara took a step aside to shield her. “Emma, dear, language.” Her posture relaxed, her hands folding back over her apron. “And to answer your question: no, Faust can’t hope to succeed alone. He’ll need you.”
Our quiet exchange in front of the Porta Alchemica came back to me. The only reason the black hole is in me is because it needs to be here, right now. A shudder cascaded from the top of my scalp to the small of my back. Far as I knew, the Omega would only suck in power upon direct contact: Faust could still heal or stop time as long as he didn’t touch me or I didn’t touch the table—So, if Palombara was so sure Faust would need me, it meant she believed I would have to . . . to—