by S W Clarke
“Isa,” Hercules said, one massive hand rising to pat my arm. For all Justin’s warmth, the demigod’s hand practically scalded me through my coat. “Surely you’re acquainted with such reactions. By now I consider them not at all, because what is the physical form except passing, transient? It’s what’s in here.” He tapped his finger to the side of his beautiful brown curls—by which I understood he meant his mind.
But all I could manage was to wonder how his hair gleamed so well under the store lights.
“What do you think of this?” Cupid had drifted over to a rack and raised a smart wool jacket to his chest, the hanger still inserted. “I just adore it.”
“Perfect.” I couldn’t help a soft smile; he was growing on me. “Cupid, will you help Hercules find some clothes? I need to step into the bathroom.”
Cupid stared Hercules up and down. “We’ll see. Might need a tailor just to make this guy a shirt that’ll fit.”
I set a hand on his small shoulder. “Anything’s better than a lion skin.” I turned, hesitated and turned back. My eyes flitted over Cupid’s loincloth. “You wouldn’t happen to have a phone I could borrow, would you?”
I shielded my eyes as he reached inside the little scrap of cloth. He poked me, floating up to my height. “I’ve got limited minutes. Don’t abuse them.”
I offered a grave nod as I accepted the phone. “Absolutely not.”
↔
I found the bathroom in the back of the store. I had to squeeze in, and the light flickered with precarious uncertainty before it stayed on, but I had privacy. Sheer, absolute privacy.
I set my backpack on the sink and pulled my phone out, staring at it. What if the World Army was tapping my calls, too? Surely they had that power. After all, they’d put an illegal tracer in Justin’s car. He was a fugitive to the Canadian police, but what about here in the United States? Had they coordinated with the local police to create that minor blockade at the entrance to the city?
Perhaps. It was, after all, the World Army, an arm of the World Government. They fought for humanity, regardless of nationality. And their power transcended national borders.
I looked up Egya’s number on my phone, wrote it down in a notebook I pulled out of my backpack. I tugged a bobby pin from my hair and maneuvered the SIM card out of my phone, pocketed it and dropped the phone itself in the trash.
I called Egya on Cupid’s phone. I desperately needed to talk to him.
Except he didn’t pick up. I stared at myself in the mirror as the phone rang, pulling off my coat and rolling up the sleeve of my sweater once more. I cringed as the puncture came exposed—the rash had turned redder, and it was painful to the touch.
The phone kept ringing. Egya didn’t even have a voicemail option, so it eventually just went silent. I tried again, the phone set between my ear and shoulder as I pulled out the first-aid kit from my backpack and swabbed a little disinfectant over the spot and set a piece of gauze there.
After three unsuccessful calls, I yanked the phone from my ear and started texting. I need to talk to you, I wrote. It’s urgent. I set the phone in my backpack and placed my hands overtop it. I sighed and spent a second contemplating who I wanted to look like this time.
I was getting sick of changing my face. For once in my long life, I just wanted to have a single appearance, one whose dimensions and angles Justin could grow used to. Could grow comfortable with, perhaps describe with perfect acuity even when he was old and his vision grew poor.
I stared at my dark hair and heart-shaped face in the mirror. It had been decades since I’d seen her, the woman I once considered a human sister, if an encantado could have such a thing. Hinata, a half-Japanese, half-British transplant from Japan to Brazil. She’d saved me from another woman’s brutal scorn, and I loved her in the way you love your chosen family: completely, without conditions.
She hadn’t lived a long life, so her face had never aged past twenty-one. This was how I remembered her—how she looked the last day I ever saw her face: still careful of the world and optimistic all at once.
This was how I would commemorate her. Once all this was over, I would shift back to this beautiful face and remain with it until the end of my mortal life.
Right now, I just needed to change long enough to escape an army.
Except when I tried to shift into a new appearance, nothing happened. I closed my eyes and I felt nothing—no breeze around me, no percolation inside me. I opened my eyes, and I saw Hinata’s terrified face gazing back.
Whatever was in the dart meant that I could not change. I could not use my magic. But that wasn’t possible. Was it? Even though I was clothed, I felt naked without my magic. Panic started to raise in my throat and I clutched the sink, breathing fast and hard.
My last anxiety attack had occurred four years ago, when the gods left. But it came on in just the same way as they always had: with an impending sense of doom. The walls of the bathroom seemed to grow tighter, the light above me turned harsh, and it was all I could do to ride the waves of my heaving chest through the terror circulating inside my head.
The thing about panic attacks is that they feel like eternity, like forever. But when they pass and you look at a clock, an impossibly short time has passed. Meanwhile, a thousand dark thoughts have sieved through your mind.
At the end, I stared at myself, still in the same illusion I had taken on when Justin and I had arrived at the motel. “This is your face,” I said. “This is your face right now.”
Fifteen minutes later, I came out of the bathroom and found Cupid floating outside one of the tiny dressing stalls, dressed in the dapper wool coat, a sweater vest, and a pair of jeans he’d cuffed at the ankles. On his feet were a pair of baby-sized brogued leather boots.
Meanwhile, Hercules’s massive frame barely fit inside the stall, and he banged the door as he tried to change. “It’s not going to fit,” he reported over the door.
Cupid groaned. “Hold on—I’ll go find the extra-extra-extra-large stuff.” When he turned and saw me, he froze. “Isabella? What’s wrong?”
Hercules’s face appeared over the dressing room door. “Lady, you look like you’re about to faint.”
“Just find the clothes,” I whispered. “Then we need to leave.”
Cupid flew off to the extra-extra-extra-large section, and Hercules stepped out of the dressing room still in his lion skin. He came up to me, set the back of one palm against my forehead, and looked down at me with complete concern. “You’re warm.”
I would have chuckled if I wasn’t so terrified. Who would have thought Hercules, the demigod of Greek lore, was a caretaker? But then, so much of the nuance of personality and personhood was lost to history. Only the stories, embellished and polished by the people who lived to tell them, remained.
Looking up at Hercules, my stomach shifted as it had in the car. “I’m OK.”
“You are absolutely not,” he said. “You’re very easy for me to read.”
“How is that? You’ve only just met me.”
“As I mentioned, your eyes flick back and forth before you speak. The longer they do, the greater the weight on your mind. And when it’s bad, you develop two lines between your eyebrows.” He removed his hand from my forehead, drew his finger downward between my brows.
I tried not to shudder with the sensation. If I was easy for him to read, then he would definitely be able to tell how I reacted to his touch.
His finger fell away, and that expression of concern remained on his face. He waited in silence.
I drew in a long breath. “I told you I’m an encantado.”
“Yes.”
“And we have the ability to take on different appearances.”
He nodded.
I pointed to my shoulder. “When we escaped the tunnel, the World Army shot me with something.”
His eyes drifted to my shoulder. “I saw.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you say an
ything?”
“Because I saw you remove it, too. I knew you would tell me if I needed to be told.”
He’d only just met me, and Hercules completely trusted my judgment. Right now, I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done that.
Hercules and I stared at one another until our silence was broken by Cupid flitting over. “Get a load of these!” he crooned, dragging along a pair of extra-extra-extra-large mustard corduroys.
Chapter 10
When I spotted Justin outside the barbershop, he’d changed out his sweater for a long-sleeved shirt with the cityscape monogrammed on the front. He was rubbing his hand over the orb of his newly shaved head and staring at the sidewalk. His other hand folded and unfolded at his side.
So here was my boyfriend in relief, unaware of being observed. He looked like a man carrying a planet on his shoulders.
I came up behind him, slipped my arms around his waist. “Hey.” Whatever had passed between me and Hercules in the Gap, my guilt came out in the kiss I planted on his cheek. “You look like a proper tourist now.”
Justin flinched before he relaxed to my touch, his elbow rising backward toward my chin, and for a second, I thought he might get me right in the jaw. He’s trained as a soldier, I thought in that moment. You don’t walk up and grab a soldier like that.
But he stopped himself just in time. When he turned toward me, a forced smile tugged at his mouth, disappeared as quickly. “I’m broken,” he murmured.
“What?”
“I’ve been useless to you. Sick, passed out. It wasn’t me who saved us back at the tunnel. It was supposed to be me.”
“Useless?” The thought made me scoff, and yet … a part of me resisted acknowledging that, in some ways, Justin’s choice to let Serena Russo mess with his genes had caused all this. The illness, the lapses into unconsciousness. All of it.
He saw my thoughts behind my eyes. “You know it’s true. The whole reason I joined the cadets back in Montreal, trained with the World Army, was to be useful. Kat ...”
When he trailed off, I waited. But nothing else came.
“Kat?” I said.
He shook his head, avoiding my eyes. “I was useless to her, too.”
I hesitated, but I couldn’t help myself. “Do you miss her?”
We encantado know men. We know their tics, their gestures, what they mean when they say no, and what they mean when they say yes. And right now, Justin was giving me every indication that the answer wasn’t no.
“No,” he said, finally meeting eyes, “I don’t miss Kat.”
He missed her. Of course he missed her. They had only just broken up before we had to leave Montreal. It made sense, after all—feelings didn’t just transfer from one face to another. Not if they were real.
And his had been real. I had to admire that.
The part of me that adored him surged to the surface. “If you hadn’t been with me all this time, I wouldn’t have made it this far. I promise you that.”
“You’re sweet, Isa.” He leaned forward, planted such a tender kiss on my cheek that it felt more meaningful than some kisses I’d had on the lips. “When the time comes,” he said, “I won’t fail you.”
Before I could respond, his gaze shifted behind me, and he barked a laugh.
When I turned, the two demigods stood outside the Gap, looking right out of different decades. Hercules’s mustard corduroys fit his width, but not his height; they ended at his ankles. He’d paired them with a black, v-neck sweater and still—still!—managed to look like a babe.
Meanwhile, Cupid had stuck with his wool coat, his sweater vest, his jeans, and his brogued boots. He couldn’t fly in that getup, so he just looked like the most stylish child of New York’s elite.
“Oh no, Isa,” was all Justin had to say about the two of them. But I saw the way his eyes lingered on Hercules’s biceps in that shirt. Evidently I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t help but admire his physique.
“Call me Hinata,” I said. “For now.”
Justin touched my long hair, my lips. “You haven’t changed.”
“About that …” I leaned close to whisper in his ear. “I can’t shift.”
“What?” His hands went to my shoulders. I winced when he touched my right side, and his fingers fell away. Before I could protest, he urged aside the collar of my loose-necked sweater to see. Concern clouded his features. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Hercules stepped forward. “The fiends shot her with a dart of black magic that limits her powers. But she is strong. She will overcome the venom coursing through her veins.”
“I was shot with a dart filled with something that stops me from shifting. Not black magic.” I shot Hercules a glance. “Science.”
“Black science,” Hercules added.
“Sure,” I said. “Black science.”
Cupid snickered. “I forgot what a hoot this guy is.”
Justin raised an eyebrow. “Hercules already knew about this?”
Shame rose in me, and then the defensiveness that sometimes follows shame. “He was carrying me. Come on”—I pulled my collar back up—“we don’t have time for this. Not here. Not now.”
Justin’s expression morphed from hurt to expressionless, an effect of his training: instantaneous compartmentalization. I had seen him do it once or twice before, and each time it was discomforting, mostly because it had all happened so quickly. It felt like one day he’d been Justin, and the next—after some Clockwork Orange-style conditioning, VR sessions, and time spent under Sergeant Johson’s tutelage—he’d been a soldier.
Justin retrieved a pocket knife from his waistband, but he left it folded. “We need to go inside the barbershop.”
I stared at it, then at him. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You may be a capable scientist, but I know the World Army’s tactics.” He pointed at my shoulder. “They put a tracer in your arm. We need to cut it out.”
I reached up, felt under my sweater. At first I could barely touch the spot for how tender it had become, but I persisted until there, beneath the skin, I discovered a tiny nub I’d never felt before. It lay right where I’d pulled the dart out.
“Shit,” I said. The street around us lay empty, not a pedestrian in sight, and yet I knew the army would be here. They would be here just as they had come for us in the tunnel. Just as they had found us every time since we’d left Montreal because of the tracer we’d never noticed inside Justin’s car. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”
This modern world with its trackers, WIFI and satellites … It was all so confusing. I was out of my element. Now put me up against a gaggle of witches and I’d know exactly what to do.
Still I should have known better after I’d found the tiny disc on the floor of his Mustang.
Justin threw his arm around me, started us toward the barbershop. “We’ll fix this. Come on.” Hercules and Cupid followed after, but Justin held up a hand. “Not you two. Cupid, did you see that McDs two blocks back?”
Cupid nodded.
“We’ll meet you there.”
“I can help,” Hercules said. “In antiquity, I performed a surgery to remove gout from the big toe of Achill—“
“No,” Justin said. “This isn’t antiquity—it’s modernity. It’s the World Army. I know how to handle it. And as much as you’d like to think otherwise, she is my girlfriend. The love of my life. Not yours.”
Justin squared off against Hercules and I thought: He’s back.
“We’ll meet you, OK?” I said back to them. I pulled Justin away before the clash of the … ahh, yummy titans could really get interesting. We left the other two on the sidewalk and went inside the barbershop, where Justin’s black hair was being swept up.
“Bathroom?” Justin said to the barber.
The barber took one look at me and pointed to the back. “No needles.”
“It’s not like that,” I said with an embarrassed laugh as Justin urged me toward the ba
ck of the shop.
We went inside the bathroom, and Justin pointed at the toilet. “Sit.”
I did as he said, pushing the cover down and sitting on it, germs be damned. I felt completely out of my depth, ashamed that I had missed something so obvious to anyone with military training. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I said as he flicked the knife open, ran it under hot water in the faucet. “How bad will it be?”
“They’re coming, Isa. We need to get this done fast.” By which I could tell he meant: it would hurt a fair bit. He gestured for me to remove my sweater, which I did. I grabbed my first-aid kit from my backpack and got an alcohol swab out, rubbed it over the spot where the dart had gotten me.
Justin knelt beside me, and we met eyes.
“Do what you need to do,” I said. “I trust you.”
What passed between us in that moment was more than just an incision in the bathroom. More intimate than any love making. More precious than any secrets shared.
It was validation. I saw it in his eyes, the light that appeared inside them. I trusted him, and that fact meant the world to him.
So I set a hand to his cheek. “I trust you, Justin.”
And because we had no more time, he set both hands to my arm and proceeded to cut the tiny capsule out.
Except it wasn’t a tiny hurt. It was horrendous. The knife cut in, and I felt it all. I pressed my eyes shut, gripped his thigh with my hand. I tried not to scream, but in the end, I had to muffle my mouth with my hand.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as he dug for the tracer. I might have heard his voice break on the words, but it was hard to tell with the overwhelming pain. I only knew that my eyes opened, blurry with tears, and I saw his own eyes glossy under the light. This act pained him, too, even as he forced himself to do it. Even as he swiped the tears away to keep his focus.
Finally, when I was about to scream that I couldn’t take it anymore, he stopped with an exhale. “There.”
But all I could see was blood on his palms. “You got it?” I said.