by Gabby Fawkes
Peering at them, I realized she was right. There was an orange one that had to be a carrot sausage, a green one that was some kind of leafy thing. There was even one that looked suspiciously like a pizza sausage, based on its consistency.
“Jeez, Axel.” She swivelled to level him an accusing glare. “What did you say to her? Tal looks like a ghost.”
“I just slept bad,” I said, which was only half lie.
“We talked about shifting,” Axel said, making for the door. “How Tala’s going to try it when we get back to Olympus.”
And with that, he left. Kian said something else approving, but I hardly heard. Not with the way excited butterflies had invaded my head. Screw shifting and screw even these weirdo yummy-looking sausages.
Axel and I had kissed! He’d looked at me like… like he’d wanted to do that from the first second he’d laid eyes on me. Like it killed him not to. And the way, as our lips had pressed, his hands had grasped mine tight…
“You really not gonna eat these?” Kian said, popping one in her mouth.
I took the pizza-looking one, and took a bite. Yup, it sure was pizza.
“It’s good,” I said.
“Yeah, but are you?”
I sighed. Was this the question of the day or something?
“I’m fine,” I lied, taking another sausage for good show.
I’d tell Kian and Demi what had happened later, maybe. Once we were in our timples back at Olympus. No way did I want them teasing me about Axel while we were all cooped up in a tiny room together.
As for the fact that what I’d both been wanting and fearing would happen with Axel had actually happened… well, I’d deal with that later too.
25
We ended up going back to Olympus later that same day. In the wig sack, Dion’s maenads had also managed to sneak a note that Hera was MIA (in Milan?), which meant we were in the clear to return.
Not that it was in any way a happy or relaxing one. After our intense encounter, Axel was more determined for me to practice shifting than ever. Luckily, the ball was in only a few days, so avoiding him and his dogged demands wasn’t hard. He even went so far as to threaten me with not being able to come along to the ball, though Apollo put that one down quickly.
“If we go – we all go. Anyway, if things go to plan, we can just waltz out of there like regular DSA snobs with sticks up our asses.”
“If things go to plan.” Axel snorted.
But he didn’t dare argue with Apollo. Apollo had barely agreed to us crashing the DSA fundraiser at all. His one requirement had been that Dion wear the shaggy beard he’d tried foisting on him.
“But you’re more of a beard person,” Dion protested as we got dressed, preparing to leave.
“Neither one of us are beard people,” Apollo said firmly. “But if one of us is going to have to wear that hideous thing, it’s going to be you. Besides, it’s a better disguise.”
Dion couldn’t argue with that. It contained a beard so bushy it gave rise to the question of whether whoever wore it actually had lips.
“Remind me why this is in style for mortals?” he asked us miserably, eyeing his reflection like he wished it would disappear.
“Don’t ask us,” Demi said, trying to stop from smiling.
“Besides,” Kian said, “You look… uh… rather…”
At this, she dissolved into laughter with the rest of us.
Dion slumped onto the ground, ripping off the beard and tossing it aside. “Yeah, very funny. Hilarrrrious.”
Artemis tossed it back to him. “If we get caught, we can at least make excuses. You get caught – it’s game over.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dion said. Although he didn’t fling the hairy beard away again.
Artemis made her hand a shield against the sun as she peered out of the room we were in, into the distance. “Is Aphie even coming?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Axel said curtly.
Dion smirked.
Like clockwork, seconds later came the sound of heels clacking on stone. There was Aphrodite– in a red bodycon dress that showed off all her perfect hourglass form.
My jaw dropped. That was Axel’s ex?
“Thought you’d dress down?” Artemis said, raising a brow.
Aphie gave her dark brown butt-length wig a tug, then settled her hands on her ample hips. “Something like that, yeah.”
Great, just… glorious. How had I not noticed that she had a voice as sultry as Marilyn Monroe too?
Beside me, Demi was griping, having trouble fitting her long hair under her wig.
“We could always cut it,” Apollo said, passing by.
“No,” Demi said firmly and, with a final wrenching shove, got the wig over the rest.
Aphie crossed her lithe arms across her ample chest. “So. We have a plan?”
“No,” Artemis said. “Which you would’ve known if you’d bothered to show up.”
Aphie didn’t give her a passing glance. “I had business to attend to.”
For some reason, that prompted Axel to go over and stand by me.
“Listen,” he told me and my friends. “I meant what I said. The DSA are smart, suspicious and more than capable. If anything starts going wrong, you get the hell out of there. If you get caught, there’ll be no helping your friend. Besides, there’ll be other chances.”
“Yeah.” Dion bobbed his head, his fake beard swishing so tragically we giggled. “Like….”
A dismal silence.
“Never mind,” Apollo said. “Point is, we go in, we go out. We talk to who we can. Split up.”
“So they’ll think the weirdos aren’t all friends,” Aphie said with a pointed look at us.
“Did Jenna somehow escape school and inhabit the body of a goddess?” Kian whispered to me.
I smirked unhappily. “Just our luck.”
“One question,” Demi said. “Are we going to have to go through the fountain again?”
“No, no,” Apollo said. “That was for an emergency. Since we have time, we’ll go the good old-fashioned way.”
“Which is?” I said.
A whinny answered me.
“No way,” Kian said, her head flicking round, searching for the source of the noise.
“Yes way,” Dion said, his smile partially visible in the thatch of his ruddy beard. “Want me to show you them?”
“Um, yes!”
As we followed Kian to the white winged horses, Artemis filled us in some more about the fundraiser. “Some big players to watch out for are: Lucinda Wottle, Stewie Millvale, Gordon, and Willow and Arbor Bartrynl. We can point them out, although they’re pretty easy to spot, usually the center of attention. Lucinda has crayon red hair and enough makeup to sculpt a face. Stewie has these big blue eyes that look like they could beam out of his head at any minute. Gordon is big, hairy and has personalized Rolls Royces on both wrists. Willow and Arbor look like distant members of the Addams family.”
“Not that you should even attempt approaching them if you don’t have your story down,” Axel said. “Or interrupting them, for that matter.”
He didn’t say anything about burning them, PV chimed in brightly.
-I was wondering when you’d make an appearance.
Miss me?
-Do you want the true answer or the answer you’ll like?
Never mind. You can’t ignore me forever.
-Yeah, we’ll see.
My PV’s words churned in my gut. What if today, something went wrong, and…
No. I wouldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t.
“This mission keeps looking more and more promising,” Kian said sarcastically, her smile growing real as she patted a horse’s muzzle.
Although the horses’ clear favorites were Artemis and Demi, who they nickered to and nuzzled against with their long soft heads.
“At least there’ll be panem et circenses,” Demi said gaily.
“Food and entertainment, all anyone needs to be ha
ppy,” Artemis said, brows raised. “You know Latin?”
“Yeah, we learned it at school.”
“Where you also had, if I remember… sparring and some propaganda class?”
“History,” I said. “But yeah, basically.” Artemis’ dark eyes were distant, narrowed. “Why?”
She gave her head a wave, sending her caramel wig shifting. “Just… it’s odd. Other than up here in Olympus, only the btsan follow Latin orders. And then your friend, apparently being turned into a mutant bear…”
“So we’re already ten minutes late,” Aphie said in an attitude-laced voice.
“You can go on ahead yourself, if you’d like,” Axel said.
Aphie’s face showed hurt, then she clambered onto the nearest winged horse. “Fine. Don’t blame me when you get there too late to be let in.”
And then she was gone. The tension in Axel’s shoulders relaxed. Yeah, they’d definitely had a thing before. But was there anything left now?
“As much as I hate to say it, Aphie did have a point,” Apollo said. “We better get going.”
“Dibs on Lips,” Dion said, sidling up to Kian.
“If you call me that again, I will push you off the horse as soon as we’re airborne,” she said sweetly.
“Is that a yes?” he said, grinning.
I could feel Axel beside me. Demi and Artemis had already paired up, while Apollo was going solo.
Axel’s hand on my lower back was gentle. “Want to go together?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, pretending that my heart wasn’t going Oh my god!! Yes!!
You should’ve closed the door last time you kissed, PV crooned. Let your bodies take you where they would…
-And I should’ve kept taking the crazy pills so I wouldn’t have to listen to your pervy homicidal babble, but we all make mistakes.
That shut PV up at least. Which was good, since my own mind was doing an internal freak out happy dance as Axel helped me up onto the horse.
As soon as I was seated steadily, the horse reared.
Axel gave it a commanding pat on the rump as he got on himself. “None of that now.”
His breath tickled my jaw as he said, “They aren’t used to shifters.”
Great, even the freaking horse could tell I was bad news.
But right now, my mind was pretty fixated on Axel and my closeness. As in, my butt pressed to his groin, his chest on my back kind of closeness.
“Why aren’t you in front?” I asked as Axel’s rump slap got our horse (Snowy, I figured was a nice, even if unimaginative name) running.
“This is a good chance for you to get some practice flying.”
My nerves went from oh-shit-Axel-is-pressed-up-against-me to oh-shit-I-have-to-fly-a-horse-that-hates-me.
“Hold up,” I said. “You mean I have to guide the horse?”
“Not much,” Axel said. “It’ll follow Dion’s lead, mostly. But you may have to guide it a little to keep it on track.”
“And I’ll do that by…”
“I’ll show you as it comes.”
I swallowed.
Okay, great, don’t mind me. I’ll just try to not concentrate on how I can feel the tautness of your body behind me.
As Snowy progressed higher, Axel wrapped his arms around me. Oh shit. Yep, I was finding it hard to breathe.
Though it wasn’t the fact of his strong arms around me causing it. It was the feel of him. How good it felt, like this. Me in his arms.
He let out a low groan.
“Axel?” I said.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “But are you sure that…”
“I said forget it,” he snapped.
“Gladly,” I said coolly.
I could’ve smacked him right now, only I didn’t dare turn. He was the one who’d groaned, and he was the one who’d asked to fly with me. Hell, he was the one who’d freaking kissed me. If he wanted to be an asshat still, then that was fine with me.
The rest of the trip went fairly speedily. At least, it seemed to. It was hard to see the progress we were making with the cover of cloud underfoot.
Still, there was something I didn’t get.
“Do airplanes not see you?” I asked.
“No,” Axel said. “Thanks to old magic and the sky being our domain, us Olympians – as well as Olympus – are invisible to reggies, unless we choose otherwise. Even if we literally banged into them, it would just register as turbulence.”
“Cool,” I said. “What about landing though?”
“We have a field to land in.”
That was a relief. I was getting a minor headache from the stress. Even though over the past hour or so, our talking had been confined to Axel giving me instructions on how to deal with guiding Snowy. Although she was skittish at first, I hadn’t done half bad. Axel and I were still on her back, at any rate.
Once we touched down in the field and dismounted, it was amusing to see how most of the others' wigs had shifted. Kian had clearly given up and stuffed hers down the front of her dress, while Dion’s beard was billowing behind him like a horrific mullet. Poor Demi looked dismayed as she tugged at hers.
“It’s no use,” she said, her curls streaming out of her green bob wig in all directions. “It’s not going to stay.” She scowled at Apollo. “And I’m not cutting my hair.”
“Calm your crazy,” Kian said, waving her hand. “There. Happy now?”
I gaped as Demi’s hair retreated under the wig. “You… can do that?”
Kian tilted her head to eye her creation. “Huh. Guess I can. Dion had been annoying me with shift spell practice enough, so I guess it paid off.”
“Clearly,” I said, trying to smile as I went ahead.
Demi could crack grow stuff, and Kian could do a whole bunch of spells and I could… maybe burn down an entire village and myself if I put my mind to it. Maybe I should’ve listened to Axel and practiced the whole shifting thing, or even just tried once. If he’d asked me that time we were in the Flying Narwhale room together, I would’ve actually done it.
But coming back and spending time with my friends, and having another murderous dream (burning down Flying Narwhale for the win), had changed my mind. Made me chicken out again. I wasn’t proud of it, but I intended to make up for it today. Screw the risks of talking to the DSA VIP. I was going to find them, and I was going to make them tell me everything they knew. Whatever it took.
26
Didn’t take long to make it to the gala hall. The forest the DSA had it built it in was right beside the field we’d landed in. As we walked the fairy-lit pathway there, a slight breeze brought pine to our noses and the sound of unseen owls and crickets to our ears.
“Do all creatures hate shifters?” I whisper-asked Artemis.
“No, just… dragon shifters.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “Though for good reason. While other shifter types – wolves for example – tend to respect nature, dragons will go burn down a whole forest if they get the fancy…” Seeing my expression, she trailed off with another apologetic smile. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said, although I felt even shittier, which I hadn’t thought possible. “So, all the reggie forest fires…”
“Are usually dragon caused, yeah,” she said. “Kinda ironic the whole massacre was...”
“We’re almost there,” Apollo said curtly. He gestured ahead, where, peering through the trees was a beacon of a building. A few more steps and we could make out its brightly-lit windows which gave us a glimpse of the interior, where elaborately-dressed guests cavorted on different levels.
“Time to split up,” Apollo said.
Kian opened her mouth, no doubt to unleash an angry retort, but Axel beat her to it. “Agreed. It’ll look suspicious if we all stick together.”
“Like it doesn’t already,” Aphie said with an eye roll. “With how everyone knows we took on that stupid bear.”
With an ‘ugh,’ she stalked past, tugging a miserable-loo
king Dion in her wake.
“But we’re in disguise…” he said weakly.
Axel shoved us out a blank slip of paper, then beckoned to Artemis. “Sister, you come with me and Apollo. People will expect us together if they do happen to recognize us.”
“Brothers,” Artemis said deadpan.
“More like grumpy brothers,” Kian muttered to me, taking the paper slip.
Already, the others had picked up their pace and reached the door, where several people awaited, indistinct in the evening gloom. Aphie and Dion had apparently gotten in without incident.
But, maybe because they were a slightly bigger group, the three Olympians were stopped. Nearing further, I got a good –if unsettling– look at who we’d have to contend with at the door.
The first woman – despite her silver talons of fingernails and the long thin wand tucked in the pocket of her eggplant-colored dress - didn’t look like she’d be a problem. No, what had me fiddling nervously with my wig were the two yetis of men on either side of her. Hairy and unfriendly-looking, they looked like they could break my friends’ and my arms with just a frown.
And it was almost our turn…
Kian gave my arm a sharp tug, waving the ticket in my face. “You see anything?”
It was blank.
“Maybe they can see something we can’t?” Demi suggested, peering closer at it.
“Better be,” Kian said, indicating the Olympians, who’d evidently made it through and were now disappearing into the entrance. “Otherwise we’re screwed.”
I swallowed, then squared my shoulders. Already, the guards had fixed their jeering stares on the next in line – us.
Here goes everything.
“Greetings,” the woman said in a reedy voice as we approached.
Her rude stare indicated that we looked just as bizarre as I feared. Damn it, Dion really couldn’t have picked anything more understated than brightly colored wigs for our disguises?
I didn’t want to know what they did to people caught trespassing. Or, worse yet, to runaway School for the Different kids.
“Tickets?” the woman said.
Kian extended our blank sheet of paper with a gulp. The woman’s rumpled brows raised and stayed raised as she eyed it.