Designed by Death

by Melody Rose

  “Mom?” I prompted.

  “Yes, Cheyenne?” She blinked down at me. “What is it?”

  “The box?” I held out a hand and gestured to the white cardboard. “Why don’t we sit down and open it?”

  “I don’t--” Mom began, but then I stopped her by reaching out and putting my arm through hers.

  “I’m not giving you a choice,” I said with force, though it was coated in a kind tone.

  Together, we walked towards our lumpy and faded couch, where we sat down next to each other. Khryseos and Argyreos pranced over and hauled their large bodies up on either side of us. There wasn’t really enough room for the Doberman pair, but they made their own spots, seeming to shrink before our very eyes so that they would inhabit the same space as us. The dogs book-ended my mom and me, a comforting presence as we prepared for one of the most nerve-wracking moments of our lives.

  We had ordered the test weeks ago. It had been Mom’s idea originally. She was adopted and had never met her birth parents. She wasn’t even sure if they were still alive. However, with the advances in genetic technology, where you can literally order a “do-it-yourself” kit and then send it in for analysis, we didn’t really have an excuse. Especially not when we needed to know where she came from so we could find out why she could predict the future.

  At the beginning of the summer, I bucked up the courage and told my mom everything I learned this past year about my powers and, consequently, hers. Upon finishing, she burst into panicked laughter.

  “That’s… that’s not possible,” she choked out through chuckles.

  “That’s not what Eros said,” I rebutted with a shrug.

  “They’re just songs, Cheyenne,” Mom countered with a scoff. “I make them up on the spot. It’s not some life-altering prophecy thing.”

  “I’m telling you, Mom,” I persisted, “you predicted the whole thing.”

  I proceeded to relay the entire semester to her while picking out the clues she mentioned in her song. She collapsed on the couch, sucking into it like a missing sock or a lost quarter. Her face transformed into something like astonishment mixed with utter horror.

  “I don’t even know what to tell you, Cheyenne,” Mom said when she finally managed to string a sentence together. “You know I’m adopted. I never met my birth parents. I don’t know if they had this… what did you call it?”

  “The Sight,” I filled in.

  “The Sight,” Mom repeated, as though it were a naughty word, all whispers and low tones. “I couldn’t tell you anything. I’m sorry.”

  That was how we ended up here, twelve weeks later, with the results of my mom’s genetic kit to tell her her family’s origin. It took some convincing, but I saw no reason why we shouldn’t use modern technology to help us out. Considering that Mom had no interest in finding her birth parents, and I didn’t want to violate that wish, this seemed like the next best thing.

  We sat on the couch, side by side, and stared at the box. Mom’s gray eyes focused so intently on the piece of mail, as though she were willing it to open of its own accord.

  “You know the Sight only lets you predict the future, not move things with your mind, right?” I whispered as I leaned over and gave her an encouraging nudge.

  “I’m still not convinced that your god was right,” Mom said as she shook her head slowly. “It’s just so impossible.”

  I groaned and slapped my thighs. “First off, he’s not my god, and second, you lived with a daughter that couldn’t get burned, and you think it’s impossible that you might be able to predict the future?”

  “Your father had those fantastical abilities, not me.” She waved me off with a flick of her wrist, as though that made my logic inconsequential. “It makes sense that you would inherit some from him but me? I’m just ordinary. I’m nobody.”

  “No, that was Odysseus,” I joked. But from the blank expression on my mom’s face, I could tell that she didn’t get the reference.

  “That was how he tricked the cyclops,” I explained. “When they were trapped in the cave. He said his name was ‘Nobody’ so that when the cyclops asked who blinded him, he said ‘Nobody!’ It was a trick.”

  “Honey, I love you with all of my heart, but I swear when you speak in Greek myths, I have no idea what you’re saying,” Mom said with a mix of honesty and sincerity.

  I decided to change tactics. I took her hands in mine and forced her to look at me. Khryseos laid his head on her knee reassuringly.

  “You’re my mom, that’s not nobody,” I said with a small smile. “Look, whatever this test says, that you’re descended from Salem’s witches or just a normal couple from New Jersey, you’re still special to me. With or without the Sight.”

  Mom’s eyes welled with tears, but she blinked furiously to keep them from falling down her face.

  “Cheyenne,” she said, her voice coming out as a croak. “I don’t know if I can look. I don’t even know what this is going to tell us.”

  “Everything or nothing,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t know Mom, but I just need some sort of answers. Don’t you want answers?”

  “I’ve never cared about my past,” she said as she shook her head. “I’m too much of a free spirit. I went wherever the wind took me. I thought if I looked back, I was wasting time. Plus it hurt too much when I thought about losing my parents and your father. It was better to focus on my time with you.”

  She reached up and put a hand on my cheek. I turned so I could kiss her palm. While the gesture was sweet, I wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily.

  “Do you want me to open it?” I offered, although I really thought it was her journey to take, her discovery to make and not mine.

  “That didn’t fool you at all, did it?” she asked with a chuckle.

  “Not in the slightest,” I replied with a smirk. “Because I really want you to open it, but if you don’t, I will.”

  “No, no, no, I’ll do it,” Mom said as she pulled away. She reached out and slapped the box on her lap. “It’s like a band-aid, right?”

  Before I knew what was happening, Mom took out her keys and sliced through the tape on three sides. The box flipped open and revealed an assortment of confetti paper strands, colored blue and white. I leaned over, trying to get a better look, but she twisted the box so that the back flap blocked my view.

  “Oh, come on!” I complained lightly. “One minute you’re telling me you can’t do this and the next you’re hogging the box. What does it say?”

  Mom paused, and then, with a dramatic flourish, she pulled out a mini Greek flag. “Guess I’m Greek?”

  “Wait, really?” I balked. “Weren’t your adoptive parents Greek?”

  “Yes,” Mom confirmed, continuing to rifle through the box. “Hence the ‘Paulos’ last name. But where is the…? Oh, here it is.”

  Mom revealed the piece of paper that read off more specifics from her genetics test. She held it close to her nose, trying to read the small font. I kept trying to convince her to get some of those cheap reader glasses, but she refused to succumb to any admittance of aging whatsoever. So I waited patiently as her older eyes interpreted the words. She mumbled some of them aloud until she came to a particularly stunning part and then stopped talking altogether.

  “We received your test… you're 72% Greek… blah blah blah, ah, here, specifically from the region of…”

  I waited, but she seemed caught in her own words. They were trapped in her throat. I did what I could to dislodge them.

  “What? What region?” I asked eagerly.

  “I don’t…”

  “You don’t know how to pronounce it?” I guessed. I threw out my hand, empty palm up. “Let me read it. I can--”

  “I know how to pronounce it,” she replied as indignant as ever. “I just… It’s got to be a coincidence, right?”

  “Not if you don’t tell me what it is!” I said, not bothering to hide my impatience any longer. “What region is your family from?”

/>   “Delphi,” Mom said as though she were pronouncing a death sentence.

  My mouth opened up and stayed there. At first, I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly. But there was no mistaking what she had said. They traced my mom’s DNA all the way back to Delphi in Greece.

  In disbelief, I yanked the paper out of Mom’s hand, and she let me. My eyes scanned over the words until I could confirm her declaration. I looked up and met her eyes, my bright blue ones boring into her terrified gray ones.

  “Delphi,” I repeated, the word coming out as a whisper. “As in, the Oracle of Delphi. The one blessed by Apollo and one of the most famous congregations of Seers in all of history.” I clicked my tongue and then held out the piece of paper to Mom, although she didn’t take it. “Yeah, that’s no coincidence.”

  Mom released a heavy sigh and set the white box on the coffee table, pushing it all the way to the very edge as if to put it as far as possible away from her. When she didn’t take the paper I offered, I threw it back on the box. It fluttered off to the side and landed face down on the coffee table. Argyreos hopped off the cushion beside me and stuck his neck out in order to sniff the box.

  “What else was in the box?” I wondered.

  The Doberman answered the question for me when he proceeded to pull out a thick amygdalota cookie and swallowed it whole.

  “Argyreos!” I scolded as I stood up and pulled his collar back from the table. Mom promptly followed my lead and scooped up the box. Khryseos trotted alongside her, jealous of his brother for getting a sweet when he didn’t get one. But Mom didn’t relent, thank goodness. She set them down on our small two-person dining room table. Then she gripped the top of one of the chairs, her shoulders hunching over it, making her look much older than she really was.

  I was too busy scolding Argyreos to notice right away. But it was my dog that alerted me to my mom’s despair. He whined and jerked his nose in her direction until I looked up and spotted her. After giving Argyreos a sharp point of my finger, I approached my mom and rubbed my hand on her back in circles.

  “It could be a coincidence,” I offered, though my voice gave away my lack of confidence in my own words.

  She released a heavy sigh. “We both know it’s not.”

  “It’s probably not, but if you want it to be, we can keep pretending that it is,” I said gently. “I just needed to know. For my own abilities and heritage, to see if it was real.”

  “I think there’s a 72% chance that it is,” Mom said with a half-smirk that didn’t reach all the way to her eyes.

  “If I had known this would trouble you so much, I wouldn’t have asked you to do it.” A pang of guilt punched me in the gut as I looked into my mom’s sunken eyes.

  “No, honey, this is good,” she said as she reached out and tapped my cheek with her hand. She left it there for a moment, and I leaned into her touch. “The truth is always the best option, even if it hurts or is hard.”

  “I don’t ever want to hurt you, Mom,” I said, my voice softer than I intended it to be.

  “Oh, baby, I know,” Mom said. She pulled me into a hug and kissed the top of my head. Being shorter than her, the action made me feel like a young child all over again, wrapped up in my mom’s arms for comfort and security. I felt the chuckle against her chest as she said, “I just really didn’t want your god to be right.”

  “Again, not my god,” I said, pulling away so I could look her in the eye and really get the point across this time.

  “You said that you became friends when you built his bow and arrow,” Mom reminded me.

  “But then I insulted him and evened the playing field again,” I added with a wince as I thought back to the moment when I nearly got smote for insulting the god of lust at the peak of my frustration last year.

  “Well, that would also be your father’s hot-headedness in you,” Mom said as she tapped my nose affectionately. “I hope you don’t get that way with Ansel.”

  I knew she was changing the subject for her sake, and as much as I wanted to change it back, she knew my weakness when it came to talking about my boyfriend.

  My heart lifted at the thought of seeing him soon. He was supposed to pick me up to go back to school in a little less than a week. I didn’t want to tell my mom how excited I was to get back to the Academy, but I wanted to see my friends and get back to the smithy. Slowly but surely, the Academy was becoming a second home for me. When I wasn’t there, a part of me was missing. But I couldn’t say anything to Mom because I didn’t want to sadden her.

  “He’s the one that explodes, remember?” I joked. “Not me.”

  Ansel had control over his father’s sun fire, whereas I could control Prometheus's Eternal Flame. They were two different elements, each unruly in their own way. The Eternal Flame seemed to have a mind of its own, whereas the sun fire harnessed the literal power of the sun, and sometimes it was a lot for Ansel to handle. Because of my heat resistant abilities, I was one of the few people who could get close enough to calm him down before he went supernova.

  Mom rolled her eyes at my joke. “Very funny, Shy.”

  “I thought it was clever,” I said with a cheeky grin.

  “Just don’t be like Icarus, okay?” Mom said with a warning tone that threw me off.

  “Wait,” I paused. “What do you mean by that?”

  Before Mom could respond, there was a knock at the door.

  We looked at each other curiously, a clear sign that neither one of us was expecting someone. Since Khryseos and Argyreos didn’t explode into a series of annoying barks, that meant that it had to be someone we knew. But then, who would be paying an unexpected visit without calling first?

  Mom broke the ice and stepped forward to unlock and open the door. As if by magic, Ansel stood on the other side. He wore his black military uniform with his official orange Fotia sash draped across his broad chest, proudly. The fabric pulled at his well-toned muscles as he stood up straight and official. He had gotten a haircut earlier in the summer, and while I wasn’t a fan of the shorter golden hair, I did like that I could see his chiseled cheekbones, sharp chin, and vibrant green eyes easier.

  My face broke out into a smile the moment I saw him and expected his reaction to match my own. When he only offered me a small half-smile, I instantly knew something was wrong.

  “Well, speak of the devil,” my mom said, her voice suddenly cheery. “Were your ears ringing because we were just talking about you.”

  “Mom,” I groaned, annoyed by her lack of tact as she didn’t notice that something was clearly bothering my boyfriend.

  “What?” she shot back at me. “It’s true.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked as I widened my stance and crossed my arms, as though preparing myself for an attack.

  “Cheyenne,” Mom scolded. “That’s not any way you--”

  “It’s okay, Ms. Paulos,” Ansel interrupted her as he took a step into the apartment. “Unfortunately, I haven’t come with good news.”

  All the air left the room. I didn’t like his tone, his expression, or his stance. It was his soldier demeanor, which he hadn’t shown to me often since we started dating. Something had to be seriously wrong for him to be acting this way around me in my own home.

  As if they knew what was coming, Khryseos and Argyreos lined up on either side of me, guarding me against the oncoming news.

  “What is it?” I asked, steeling myself as well as I could. “Just go on and tell me.” Like a band-aid, I thought, thinking of my mom’s own anticipation just moments before.

  “You might want to sit down,” Ansel offered, gesturing to the couch with a stiff arm.

  “Just tell me,” I told him, my voice hard and unrelenting.

  Ansel took in a big breath, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob with discomfort. My anxiety only grew with every breath that passed between us, the seconds of silence dragging into a full minute before my boyfriend spoke the news that would forever change the rest of my life.

 
“It’s Ruby. She’s dead.”

  3

  Raindrops fell off the edges of my umbrella in a rhythmic pattern. I never got along with water. Wet and cold were pretty much the antithesis of my entire being. So, of course, on one of the worst days of my life, it just had to rain.

  Despite the constant thrumming, I could still see the coffin through the curtain of water. It was a long, dark wooden thing with silver handles. It sat atop the cot that would lower it down into the six-foot deep pit where my mentor’s body would rest forever.

  I knew that there was a cemetery on campus for fallen students and teachers of the Academy. I just never thought I would have a reason to visit it. Now I was at the center of the ceremony, being her main pupil. Ruby’s brother, Jarred, stood beside me, stoic and still as a statue.

  In the corner of my eye, I could see Ansel under his umbrella. He kept trying to catch my eye and reassure me that everything would be okay. But I didn’t want his comfort just then. I wanted to watch every moment of this funeral because I needed to convince myself that it was real.

  None of it seemed that way. Not from the moment I fell onto the kitchen floor in a fitful rage when Ansel told me the news. Not as I went to the Academy to start my third year and headed straight to the forge, expecting to see the endearing grimace of my mentor, Ruby. But she, of course, was not there. She was in that coffin, leaving the school and me forever.

  Ruby was a daughter of Poseidon, but instead of inheriting an obvious power from her father, like something to do with water, she gained a natural connection to horses. As horses were a symbol of Poseidon, they gravitated towards Ruby. She was their caretaker, alongside Mac the farmer, and the on-campus ferrier. Because of her work with the steel of horseshoes, she was the resident blacksmith on campus and taught the weapon making classes.

  However, when I met Ruby two years ago, I learned that she had Parkinson’s disease and struggled to complete the projects the Academy asked of her. Together, we struck up a bargain, and I worked on the projects while she instructed me. She had become an integral part of my experience at the Academy, one of the main reasons I looked forward to coming back every year.