Antigoddess (12 page)

“Maybe you should sit down.”

Cassandra looked at Andie and Henry. Who was he talking to? They were all standing: Henry by the sink, and Cassandra across from Aidan. Andie lingered near the refrigerator like she was trying to decide whether she should offer them something to drink.

“Cassandra. Maybe you should sit.”

“Don’t worry about me.” She felt fine. The vision of the jungle had shattered and been shaken off. Aidan looked like hell. Like he might be sick, and it scared her. She wished she knew what he was going to say; she tried to will the knowledge into the dark space in her mind. But it never worked like that. It never worked the way she wanted it to.

“I don’t know how to tell you this.” He looked at them from under his brows. Gold hair obscured his eyes almost completely. “It’s going to sound crazy.”

Cassandra nodded. What right did she have to not believe? Whatever he said, she would take it. She would take him at his word, like he’d always taken her. Blood pounded in her ears alongside the ticking of the wall clock. Her eyes strained in the shoddy light cast from the fixture above the sink, the only one they’d turned on when they got to the house.

“I never wanted to tell you,” he said, and stopped. “That’s not true. I always wanted to tell you. I just never wanted to have to.” He looked at her. “I’m not who— I’m not what you think I am.”

Not what?

“The girl. You said she didn’t seem human. And she isn’t. And neither am I, exactly.”

Three seconds ticked off the clock before Andie and Henry started to laugh.

“God, you really scared us,” said Andie. The laughter stopped slowly, awkwardly, when neither Cassandra nor Aidan joined them.

“You’re serious. Cassandra, he can’t be serious.”

Except he was. She’d never seen him look the way he did now, so somber and scared, and—

And regretful.

He took a deep breath and pushed away from the chair.

“I didn’t expect you to believe it at first. I figured on having to prove it.” He looked at Cassandra’s hands like he wanted to touch them, but he didn’t. “Follow me.”

He led them to the second level and up to the sparsely furnished loft space where Andie and Cassandra used to have slumber parties, hanging out on beanbag chairs, reading magazines and eating popcorn.

“What’re we doing up here?” Andie asked. Aidan didn’t answer. He walked to the window. It overlooked the walkway of paving stones and the small front yard. It took him a moment to get it open; the locks were sticky, and when he jiggled them the glass rattled in protest. Winter air rushed into the loft as he pushed the pane wide. It bit at their necks and made them blink against the cold.

Away we go, into the dark.

He didn’t look back before he stepped into the window and dove out headfirst.

“Aidan!”

Andie screamed and Henry did too; they almost knocked Cassandra over rushing to look down, expecting to see their friend’s head burst like a pumpkin on the walkway. The front door opened and closed. Footsteps came up the stairs, and there he was, unhurt.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

*   *   *

He was a god, he said, and always had been. Or at least, that was what they used to be called. What they were now, he didn’t know. It seemed like the wrong word when he was so limited, so much less than he’d been before. But there were still things he could do, the extent of which he wasn’t quite sure. It had been too long since he’d pushed himself, or since he’d been pushed. He’d lived as Aidan for a long time. He was Aidan. But he used to be called Apollo.

Apollo. God of the sun, and of prophecy.

Cassandra lifted her eyes.

“And the girl? Your twin?” Andie asked. They were downstairs again, sitting at the kitchen table. Talking about it like it was normal. Andie and Henry looked like they expected to wake up at any minute.

“Artemis. Goddess of the moon and of the hunt.” Aidan squeezed Cassandra’s hand, folded in his. She hadn’t run or slapped him. She hadn’t even shouted. But her fingers were as cold as a corpse.

The way he talks, when he says those words. His voice isn’t even his voice.

“What was happening to her?” Cassandra asked.

“She’s dying,” he replied. “She’ll run until she can’t run anymore, or until whatever you heard behind her catches up.” He ran his hand across his face, over his eyes. “You said she’s almost laughing. Did she seem insane? Crazy?”

“I don’t know.”

But you hope so. You hope she’s so mad that she won’t understand it when the teeth tear into her skin. That she won’t feel it.

She wanted to reach out, hold him closer. It was strange to hurt so much for someone she wasn’t even sure she knew.

“I haven’t seen her in eight hundred years. My sister. She went deeper and deeper into the wild. Away from men and machines. And I never followed. She belonged there, I thought. Where no one could touch her.”

“I don’t understand.” Cassandra’s hand in his felt like stone. “What’s happening to her?”

“She’s dying. I think they’re all dying. In different ways.”

“I thought gods didn’t die,” Henry muttered. “That they were … immortal.”

“We are. I don’t know what’s happening to them. Something’s changing.”

“What about you? Is that what I saw? Those feathers?”

Aidan squeezed her hand. “No. I’m all right. I think those feathers belong to another sister.”

Another sister.

“Do we need to find her? Artemis?” Cassandra swallowed. The name felt clumsy coming out of her mouth. “Can we help her?”

“No.” Aidan shook his head. “No. If we go, they’ll find you. I think they’re looking for you already. And I don’t think she can be saved.”

“What do you mean, they’ll find her?” Andie asked. “Who’s looking?”

“I don’t know. Others who are dying. I think that’s what the dreams mean, and the visions. I think it means they’re coming for you.”

“Why?” Cassandra asked. But she knew. It was something about the visions, and the way she knew things. It was changing, and they could feel it, like a beacon. They’d use her however they could. They’d squeeze the contents of her head out into a glass.

“What are we going to do?” Henry asked. He hung back in the shadows, his broad shoulders slumped, arms crossed. The question sat awkwardly on him. Cassandra was surprised he hadn’t left. Henry was always so logical.

“Your hands are cold,” said Aidan, and Cassandra felt them start to warm, heat radiating from him into her fingers. It was sweet comfort. And it was an invasion.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“We’re going to do nothing,” said Aidan. “We’re going to hide, for as long as we can.”

*   *   *

“You’ve put too much phenolphthalein in it.”

“Huh?” asked Andie. Sam nudged her out of the way to examine the titration vials. Pink liquid danced inside the delicate clear tube. Dark pink liquid. He pushed his stocking cap farther back on his head like he could get a better view.

“You put in
way
too much,” said Sam.

Andie and Cassandra looked at each other vacantly. Poor Sam. Andie wasn’t much use as a lab partner on a good day. On a distracted day, she was a walking booby trap. Cassandra’s partner was luckier: Jeff Larson, a brainy kid who preferred she not do anything anyway. The pink in their liquid was barely visible, just a scant tint, like the rose coating on a pair of sunglasses Cassandra had owned as a child.

They were doing acid-base titration, ten lab teams of students neutralizing the pH of an unknown acid while Miss Mackay looked on, walking behind the stations in her rather unnecessary white lab coat. Cassandra sighed. She and Andie weren’t partners so much as assistants. They handed things to Sam and Jeff when asked, but mostly stayed out of the way. Cassandra kept her eyes on her station, trying to avoid eye contact with Andie. Whenever their eyes met it was there on the tips of their tongues; they had to clench their teeth to keep from screaming it. Aidan was a god.

The words were underneath everything else as Cassandra walked through the day, a day that felt stiflingly normal. At Andie’s locker that morning, her team had gathered around to talk about the game and Cassandra’s head had almost exploded. And when Casey seethed about Misty and Matt, Andie’s eyes bulged dangerously from their sockets.

Talking about anything else felt ridiculous, like talking about what to have for lunch back and forth across a black hole.

“Can you get me the handout?” Jeff asked.

“Sure.” Cassandra reached for it and her arm almost knocked the flask of base off the table. He looked at her irritably.

Aidan watched from across the room, standing with his own lab partner. He smiled. They’d seen him go headfirst out a window. She’d felt the inhuman heat of his hands and wondered why she’d never noticed it before. But she still loved him. He was still Aidan.

(Aidan but not Aidan.)

And he hadn’t changed.

“He’s still our friend,” Andie had said to her and Henry when Aidan left them alone. “We can’t treat him any different just because of his past. Right? If we say anything, he’d probably get locked up in a government lab or something.”

“He’s a god,” Henry said. “They’d never be able to hold him.” And then he’d shaken his head like he couldn’t believe the words out of his own mouth.

Cassandra wasn’t sure. He didn’t seem like much of a god. Who knew what he was or wasn’t capable of? She looked away, back at the glass tube, the liquid inside still slightly pink. The past was the past. But it stretched out so far, farther than even her imagination could go. How could she catch up? It seemed impossible that she could matter to a being like that. Her whole life would pass and to him it’d be no longer than a moment. Aidan would remain, and eventually their time together would diminish to a dot.

“Maybe we should give up.” Sam leaned against the table staring at their titration, which seemed an even darker pink than before. He raised his hand, the white flag for Miss Mackay. Beside Cassandra, Jeff kept working, adjusting drips and reading and rereading the handout. The flask of base on the table rattled with his efforts.

“Easy, Jeff. You’re going to lose something.” Cassandra reached out to steady it. Then she felt the vibration through her feet. She glanced at Andie, who had finally gotten into a real argument with Sam over how the mistakes had been made and whose fault it was. Neither of them noticed the shaking.

But there was shaking. Reverberating through the entire room. The glass of the titration stations blurred at the edges. Metal desk legs clanged against the linoleum floor; the back row of desks started to slide. Somewhere, a piece of wood split with a loud crack.

Around her, clear glass tubes bounced, and several Erlenmeyer flasks hit the floor and shattered. But everyone kept working. Even Jeff beside her, though she had no idea how he was able to.

“Stay still.”

“Cassandra?” Aidan asked. She heard him from across the room. The floor shifted violently and her legs buckled. She had to grab on to the table to keep from falling. Jagged cracks raced through the linoleum and up the walls, splitting it like an earthquake, and Aidan walked across the room. Dust from the ceiling fell into his hair. An intense heat grew somewhere below them, and the floor rippled like water.

Get out. We’ve got to get out.

The light fixture fell from the ceiling and sliced into Miss Mackay’s head, right through her pixie cut and into her brain, cleaving her skull open. Cassandra’s stomach lurched. Miss Mackay walked calmly toward Andie and Sam, talking while reddish fluid ran down her cheek and dripped from her chin onto her white lab coat.

Aidan grasped her shoulders. “What’s happening?”

Pressure. It built below them, sucking the air out of the room, and it built in her brain until she thought she might scream. Then it exploded, hurling her backward, boiling her insides. Only the strength in Aidan’s arms kept her on her feet, but she pulled him down, crouching against shattering and flying glass. Women screamed. They were screaming, and then they
weren’t screaming,
which was worse. In the aftermath she smelled dust. It filled her lungs and choked her. She couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in her ears.

Miss Mackay knelt by her side and Aidan said something; they each took an arm and dragged her to the eye-flushing station. She found herself bent over into two soft jets of water. The cool of it brought her back, out of the dust and broken things. Away from the blood.

“Hold your eyes open as much as you can,” Miss Mackay said. “How much got into them? Cassandra?”

“None,” she said shakily. “I mean, I’m okay. I thought it got into my eye, but it didn’t. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Miss Mackay sighed. “Okay. You scared me. We haven’t lost an eye in here in years.” She clapped Aidan on the back. “I’m kidding. Just to be safe though, keep your eyes in the water for a little longer. And rinse all over your face.” She stayed until Cassandra did it, then ordered the class back to work. Cassandra wondered if she’d ever be able to look at her again without seeing her head split open.

“Hey,” said Aidan, his hand on her lower back. “What just happened? What did you see?”

She took a deep breath and looked up helplessly.

“A building just blew up somewhere.”

8

THE ISLAND OF CIRCE, REDUX

“Ay caramba.”

The scene in the room hadn’t paused when the door opened. It was a jumble of caressing, and giggling, and soft sighs. The scent of amber incense wafted up, cloying and strong.

“Shut up, Hermes.” At the sound of Athena’s voice, Odysseus’ eyes fluttered open; his brow creased as he tried to focus.

This is just like it was before.

The scene from thousands of years ago and the room she looked into now. Odysseus had been marooned on Circe’s island after the Trojan War. His men had been transformed into pigs and beasts, and he’d been taken as Circe’s plaything. He’d lingered there for a year in Circe’s bed, while Athena labored to send him home.