Marked by the Demigod

by Alessa Winters

  "He tried to rip out my heart," Iakov mumbles, and he just looks so exhausted. "I think...he thought if I didn't have that inside, I couldn't live. Even with you still alive."

  She pops her eyes open. "Wait, you don't have a heart right now?" And it's tragic, but it's also way way too funny under the haze of the drugs.

  He closes his eyes, but the corner of his lips twitch up. "We got it back."

  She smiles at him, and even the stretching of the skin on her face feels odd. "Don't do that again."

  "I like my inner organs where they belong, don't worry."

  "No, don't do that again. Don't hide me away." She stares at him, as if she is able to willpower him to agree to it from all the way on the tiny cot.

  As if summoned, he drags his chair over to the cot and grasps her hand. Then, after a moment, he buries his head in the blankets on her lap, hiding his face away from her, his breathing ragged.

  Though if they had tried to actually remove his heart, they probably fucked with his lungs to get to it.

  With great effort, she rests her hand in his hair, and he presses his head against her. "I was trying to protect you," he mumbles into the blankets, his voice muted and wet. "If they got to you, they'd kill you."

  She leans her head against the pillow, her eyes fluttering shut, but she forces them open again. "Still don't."

  He doesn't answer, but his shoulders shake, and in a split second of horror she realizes he's crying.

  "Aww Jeez," she manages out, feeling her eyes fill up in some weird feedback loop from being so close to him. "I'm okay, I'm okay." She pauses, "I think. I will be."

  He nods into the blankets, and he's getting blood everywhere. "I don't wan' you to die." He mumbles into the sheets, his shoulders still shaking.

  She pauses in the petting of his hair, feeling almost dizzy. "Of course you don't, then you'd be..." she trails off, her head pounding. "I dunno. Vulnerable?" He doesn't respond, so she resumes running her fingers in his hair. "That's the word, right?"

  He doesn't look up at her so much as roll his head over and peer at her. For a few seconds he just looks, as if weighing the words and finding them wanting.

  But instead of responding, he just lets his eyes drift shut again, the furrow between his brow, and within a few minutes, he's fast asleep.

  Or passed out from blood loss, Aimes can't tell the difference.

  After a few minutes, the door opens and Katya strides in, giving Iakov's bloody mess over her sheets only a spare glance. "He needs stitches, you're not wrong," she says, but it's in a kind enough whisper.

  Iakov doesn't stir.

  "Is it...more difficult than regular stitches?" She asks, her head feeling like it's drifting off as well. "Or just...regular human stitches? Can you stitch a god?"

  Katya smoothes the hair out of Aimes’s face, and it's so maternal she leans into it. "His mother was human, Aimes. His skin would work the same." She gives him another critical glance. "Are you actually asleep or just passed out?"

  He doesn't move.

  Katya sighs, then gestures at the door and the doctor walks in, looking all sorts of terrified. "Aimes, if he wakes up...be reassuring." Without waiting for a response, she grabs Iakov by the shoulder and limply pulls him back to sitting up in the chair.

  His head lolls to the side, and if it wasn't for the wet bubble of breathing, Aimes would swear he was dead, his skin paper white and his hair plastered to his forehead. Her throat closes up, difficult to swallow, and she reaches out, impulsively, but her arm is too heavy to reach.

  The splash of blood on her bed is viciously cold, sticky.

  Her face feels like it's stuffed full of cotton. "He doesn't want anyone to do that," she says, forcing the words through the lump in her throat.

  The doctor briefly glances at her, then slips on rubber gloves with a snap, and starts picking off the tattered fragments of his shirt. They stick to his skin, showing a gaping, ragged wound, like something you'd see out of a horror movie or bad special effects.

  The edges of his skin move, almost flutter, with each breath. Aimes gasps, bile climbing up her throat, choking her off, and Katya steps smoothly between them, blocking her view.

  "Hey," she says, in her professional calming voice, the one she brings out at the support meetings. "Hey, you're okay."

  Aimes can hear the sounds of bloody skin, and, somehow the sound of the stitching is much, much worse. "He doesn't --"

  Katya gets close, as if blocking more of the view will help. "We're not drugging him, just helping."

  She tries to crane her neck to see around Katya, but her head is too heavy, and Katya strokes the sweaty hair out of her face. She's in a little vortex of terror, in this too-stark little hospital room, with Iakov so close she can hear him but not see him, with him so obviously injured and --

  She must've made a strangled noise, for Katya pauses. "Hey," she says, her voice still too kind. "Nothing is happening. It's just stitches." Her blue screen of death eyes lock in hers, and they look surprisingly affected. "Do you promise not to panic if I tell you what happened?"

  Aimes struggles to swallow down the lump in her throat, the idea of actually finding out what’s going on bleeding off the edge of the fear. "You're going to...tell me?"

  Katya nods, pulling over another chair, revealing the doctor carefully, ever so carefully, putting a line of neat stitches across the scattered skin of Iakov's chest. "It's an interesting story," she starts, voice soothing.

  Aimes wishes she could see Iakov again, but the doctor is still there. "When will he wake up?" She calls around Katya.

  Instead of the doctor responding, Katya does. "In a few hours, he barely stayed conscious long enough to get you." She pauses, as if the thought just occurred to her. "Where...where did he put you?"

  "Some...some hole in the ground bunker." The anger is still there, looming in the background of her thoughts, as if waiting to lurch forward. "I couldn't reach anyone, there was no electricity but the fridge ran and the lights were on but they weren't plugged in and the beef jerky was in Russian."

  Katya's eyebrows flash up, but she continues stroking Aimes's hair, a soft moment. "We told your friends you were out on a convention and your coworkers you had a family emergency."

  That answers a question Aimes didn't know she had, the knot of suffocating pain sitting in her chest slowly working itself loose. "How long was I there?"

  "A little under two days."

  The doctor murmurs something, something so soft that Aimes can't quite hear, but Katya nods back. "She's almost done. Then we can leave you alone to sleep for a bit."

  Sleeping does sound good, but the corner of her brain that knows it would be dreadful sticks in her mind. "What happened?"

  Katya nods, her work face settling in. "He came back quickly, and..."

  And Aimes desperately clings to being awake, listening as best as she can, until Katya finishes and the doctor disinfects the new stitches and bandages him up in a clean white gauze, and they both finally leave.

  Aimes eyes Iakov, still asleep/passed out, but his face looks less grey and more like an actual person.

  Apparently, after leaving her in that hole, he came back and hatched a plan with Katya to separate the twins, and it sounds like a pretty fucking dangerous plan for Katya, but she had contacted one of the twins workers with some false information on Iakov. The plot gets confusing from there, but apparently Iakov tried to take on Vanya one-on-one with some sort of magic trap, and it sounds so much like a fairy tale or bad movie, the type that she'd turn off if she caught it on TV.

  And her brain hurts, hurts so bad that she just wants to sleep despite the vague buzzing in her veins and the throb in her chest, right where Iakov's stitches are. But he's still slumped in the rickety metal chair, his eyes still closed, his breathing quieter but still ragged, and she drifts off after staring at him for way too long.

  18

  She jerks awake.

  Well, she jerks awake because people are y
elling really fucking loudly around her and that fucking hurts cause her head feels like it's about to fucking explode.

  And someone's holding her hand so hard it feels like it's going to break.

  It takes a few seconds, but she pries her eyes open, only to see Iakov standing, gripping her hand, facing away and yelling. Katya's standing as well, close to the door, her face pale and drawn, and...

  And Trixie is in the middle of the room, her face as red as a beet, yelling right back.

  Aimes closes her eyes again, and they're still yelling. The words are so indistinct that they wash over her, spiking into her brain like something fierce.

  She twitches her hand in Iakov's in some attempt to signal him, and he abruptly cuts himself off mid word. For a blessed second the only sound is the scrape of a metal chair.

  "Aimes?" And it's Trixie's voice that speaks, close and soothing. "Aimes, you awake?"

  Now she has to respond, so she opens her eyes in slits again, and now it's Trixie looming over her, Iakov sitting in the chair, his hand still firmly in hers. The two of them are so mismatched, so from different parts of her world, that Aimes feels like her eyes are crossing.

  Trixie looks impeccable, in a flowing blouse and pressed slacks, like she came straight from work. Just her eyeliner is mussed, giving the only impression that she was screaming a few seconds before.

  Iakov's grip in her hand tightens ever so slightly, before consciously relaxing. "Didn't mean to wake you." He mumbles, his accent thick. He looks...better. Someone got him a new shirt, and his skin has some color back.

  The look Trixie gives him is pure venom, and Aimes really wishes she knew what the hell was going on before Trixie's face softens with worry. "Aimes, what happened?" She breathes. "You were out of town with no word, I couldn't text you, and Evan said you had a family emergency?" She throws a glare over her shoulder at Katya, who's still standing at the door.

  Aimes sits up, and is pleasantly surprised to find out that moving is way easier than it was ...before. Cause, of course, there's no telling how long she was out for, not without an obvious clock and an obvious window. But the pain in her chest is now a much duller ache, one closer to bad heartburn over, you know, actual stabbing.

  Trixie immediately helps her up, and the blood all over the sheets is gone, thank god. Cause Aimes can just imagine the screaming that would've happened with that.

  As if sensing her thoughts, Iakov gives her hand a gentle squeeze, and she locks eyes with him. He faux grimaces at her, conveying some sort of apology that he hasn't actually said. Aimes tries to be angry, but it's really good to see him without blood all over him.

  Trixie leans close, as if she wants to give a hug but doesn't know if it will hurt. "Aimes," she breathes, "Aimes, I was so worried I called your mom."

  A bubble of laughter hits her throat. "I'm sorry? This was..." she gestures at the small group, with Katya still frozen at the door, "this was out of my control."

  Trixie glances dubiously at Iakov. "I want to talk to her without you." She snaps out.

  Iakov's eyebrows flash up. "No." He drawls out, rubbing his thumb on Aimes's hand in such a clear moment of possession.

  As she sets her jaw, Trixie sits up straighter. "I will call in a lawyer on this," and her voice goes deadly quiet, and Aimes has known her long enough to know that this is a bad sign.

  She coughs, and they both look at her again. "Trixie, what have they explained?"

  The nostril flare happens again. "That he's some sort of Jesus figure and he married you then got cut open."

  Aimes blinks. "He's not Jesus."

  "No shit." Trixie snaps, then immediately softens. "Aimes, what the fuck?"

  She tries to sit up straighter, but her head swims. "You're probably dehydrated," Katya says from the door. "I'll go --" and quick as a flash, she's out of the room, and Aimes isn't sure she ever saw her run away from conflict so quickly.

  Iakov snorts, as if he thought the exact same thing. "I'm a Demigod, it's not fun."

  Trixie full on ignores him, and the put-out look in his face is so surreally funny that Aimes feels the bubble of laughter again. "I've been looking for you for three days." Trixie says, and her voice breaks, just a little. "I went to the police, they said they couldn't do anything."

  Aimes glances at the door Katya left from.

  "That'd be Miss Government," Iakov says, as if desperate to insert himself into the conversation. "She does that."

  Trixie still isn't acknowledging him. "Aimes, if you married him against your will, we can do something about that." Her voice is satisfyingly grave. "If he kidnapped you --"

  "I didn't," Iakov interjects.

  "If he kidnapped you, we can have him arrested, and you won't have to deal with..." she looks, significant, at Aimes’s hand, still held in Iakov's.

  And there's still no way Aimes can see getting out of this one without even more conflict. "Iakov, can you give us a moment?"

  He gives her the most unimpressed look. "No."

  She rolls her eyes at him. "I'm safe with her, just...go in the other room?"

  His eyes narrow, as if she doesn't quite understand what she's asking. "What, and get questioned by Katya's pet Succubi?"

  "Succubi?" Trixie blurts out, then, at their identical nonplussed looks, "oh my god you weren't kidding."

  Aimes gives his hand a quick squeeze, then withdraws her hand, despite the pang it gives her. His eyebrows draw up, and he gives her such a brief glimpse of distress that a lump forms in her throat. "A few minutes. Miri's harmless."

  "I'm not scared of her," he grumbles, but miracle on miracle he stands up, wincing. He gives her another long look, the sort of look that would be scandalous in any other situation, then steps out.

  The moment the door clicks closed, Trixie throws her arms around Aimes. "Oh my god," she whispers, voice thick. "Oh my god I'm so glad you're okay."

  Aimes awkwardly pats her on the back, noticing for the first time that the IV is out. "I'm okay, this...this isn't even the first time it's happened."

  Trixie pulls away, her eyebrows drawn, before her face clears. "That weird flu thing." She blurts out. "That weird flu thing at the grocery store."

  Aimes nods.

  "That long ago?" Trixie grips her arms, still clearly wanting to hug but actually wanting to see her face more. "That was like...8 months ago or something." A thread of hurt wounds its way through her voice. "Why didn't you say anything?"

  Aimes looks around the tiny little hospital room. "How would you explain this?"

  "Aimes, I saw the guy disappear and then reappear eight feet away. Have him do that, just, you know, not with you in a hospital bed this time?" Her fingers dig in on her arms, trembling a bit. "I thought you were dead. You looked dead."

  Aimes takes the moment to rub her arms like they used to do in college. "I'm okay," she pauses. "I'll be okay, it doesn't...it doesn't actually do any damage? Just hurts?"

  Trixie gives her the glare. "That doesn't help." Her voice cracks. "Jesus, why didn't you tell me?"

  Aimes doesn't have an answer for that, so she pulls her back into a hug. Trixie clings to her back.

  From the corner of the room, Katya politely coughs, startling them both. "She would be violating the law, that's why," she says, handing a cup of water to Aimes. "It's not as if she didn't want to."

  Aimes shoots her a grateful look, which she takes with a nod.

  Trixie squares off on Katya, squints, then scoffs. "You met her before you got punched, didn't you?" She asks, then shuts her eyes. "Oh my god, the guy punching, was that related?"

  Katya nods, and she has her professional composure back. "Aimes has faced some prejudice based on this." She even has her clinical tone out in force. "It has not been an easy transition, and she is very grateful to have you as a friend during it."

  "Don't talk like I'm not here," Aimes grouches, hauling herself up so she can swing her feet off the bed. "Can I go home?"

  Katya's eyebrows raise, but only for
a second. "Not yet, Iakov's calling in a professional warder."

  "He's not enough of one?" Aimes asks. If Iakov, scared, paranoid Iakov who didn't even want her to know who she was, was calling someone else, it must be bad.

  Though the bloody sheets and the rattling breath were enough proof of that. Her skin runs cold as she sips her water.

  "He wants better," Katya says, as if it’s the most blasé conversation ever. "This week....this week did not go well."

  And she was locked up for all of it.

  "How'd you even..." she gestures at the room, and the tiny little hospital hidden in the back of the government office in a strip mall. "Find me? I mean..."

  Trixie's eyes narrow and Katya groans. "I plugged your phone back in," Katya says, as close to grumbling as she gets. "I plugged your phone in and she showed up."

  Trixie doesn't even look at Katya. "Your phone finally showed up on the app," she says, airily. "I followed it."

  For a few brief seconds, Aimes tries to imagine how it must've been for Trixie, terrified, checking her phone every few minutes, then getting in her car and racing through traffic. "I'm sorry, it died and there wasn't any...actual electricity."

  Trixie sits half on the little cot with her, and it's as if they are in undergrad again and studying on their dorm beds. "You're not really in danger, right?"

  Aimes smiles, and even that feels fake. "They keep saying I am."

  Trixie raises her chin. "She can stay with me for the night."

  "That's not smart." Katya raises an eyebrow at her.

  "Is it night?" Aimes asks, and they both look at her, so she shrugs. "I don't know how long I was asleep. Or in that...place."

  Trixie bristles at the mention of it. "It's like...nine PM."

  "Great." And she suddenly, viciously, wants Iakov back in the room, if only for the cuddles, even if she very much doubts that she could fall asleep at that moment. But instead she pokes Trixie in the side. "Hey. Anything else I need to explain?"

  Her face creases, sudden. "If you were going to get married, you could've told me, I would've come to the ceremony," she says, quiet. "I wouldn't have judged."