Complete Nothing

For my true love, Matt Viola,

who has never stopped believing in me

I would never be able to do this job at all, let alone have so much fun doing it, without my incredible support team. Thank you so much to Sarah Burnes, Zareen Jaffery, Justin Chanda, Logan Garrison, Julia Maguire, Paul Crichton, Siena Koncsol, and Valerie Shea. Special thanks also go out to the amazing designers Chloë Foglia, Hilary Zarycky, and Bobby Haiqalsyah, for their incredible style and vision.

Humble thanks to all the fans, bloggers, librarians, and bookstore owners and employees who have been so supportive of my work.

Thank you to my ever-supportive friends (and family) Erin Scott, Wendy Stewart, Shira Citron, Kristy Gillio, Sharren Bates, Jessica Freundel, Meredith Rothouse, Courtney Elefante, Jen Calonita, Aimee Friedman, Katie Sise, Lanie Davis, Danielle Garretson, Rachel Hirsch, and Maura Deleo, for their unshakeable faith in me.

As always, thank you to my family, Matt, Brady, and Will, who make every day worth living.

After a time, I could feel nothing save the weight of his feet on my back, one heel pressing sharply between two lower ribs, and the other into the muscle of my shoulder. When he’d first told me to kneel before his throne and proceeded to thrust out his legs to use me as a footstool, I had thought it would be the humiliation that would kill me. But after half an hour, any pride had long since flown through the palace windows. Then it was only the cold, hard marble pressing into my palms and my bare kneecaps. The quivering of my muscles. The pain darting through my joints. I was forced to forget my pride as my brain focused merely on survival, on not collapsing, on refusing to beg for mercy.

It had been five hours, and my resolve was quickly crumbling.

“Orion!” the mighty King Zeus crowed, adjusting his feet, making sure to grind the hard soles of his sandals into my bones. “I know not how you do as a man, but you make for sturdy furniture.”

The guards and lower gods assembled laughed, and Zeus gulped his thirtieth goblet of wine. Another rivulet of sweat snaked its way across my forehead and down my nose until the drop slipped to the tip and clung there, trembling inches above
the pool of perspiration I’d been staring at these last few hours.

When it fell, so would I. There was no more surviving this.

And then, a commotion. Guards shouting. A woman’s voice. A slam, a screech, an explosion. The mighty Zeus rose to his feet, and I collapsed in a heap on my side. My arms and legs curled in on themselves, jerking and seizing of their own accord. Several vile guards laughed over my plight, but I didn’t care. I was free. For the moment, I was free.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Zeus demanded of his nearest protector.

Before the guard could answer, a voice rang out through the lofty chamber, echoing against its vaulted ceiling and surrounding us, as clear as day.

“If Orion is alive, I demand to see him! I demand an explanation!”

“Artemis,” I groaned. And in my weakened state I prayed that she would come save me. Even though she had once killed me. Even though she was the reason I’d spent the last two thousand years hanging among the stars, watching life on Earth go on as if I’d never existed. I prayed to her, the goddess protector of women, of all things. I begged.

“Artemis, please. Rescue me.”

Zeus glared down at my coiled form, alarmed. There was a cacophonous crash as Artemis attempted to break through the wall of armored sentries. Then Zeus flicked his wrist, and I experienced a sensation like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was as if a tremendous cricket bat had hit me square in the face, chest, and knees. I flew backward, through the open doorway at the back of the throne room and that of my cell. I slammed against the back wall of the tiny chamber I’d spent the last week or month or ten years
inside—I had no way of knowing—and hit the floor so hard I was sure no bone in my body had been left intact. I rolled onto my back and moaned.

“Eros,” I whispered, my voice a mere croak. “Where are you, my love? Where are you?”

I imagined her hovering above me, the sun in the sky casting a beatific halo around the long black mane of her hair as I lay back in the soft grass outside our humble cabin. The smile on her lips brought peace to my heart, and as she gently wiped my brow with her fingertips, the relief was total. If only she were here. If only we had never been found, if only we had devised a way to escape together so that she’d never had to make that hideous bargain with the king. If only, if only, if only . . .

Tears stung my eyes, and I bit down on my bottom lip. I hated the broken, shivering slab of flesh that I’d become, begging goddesses to help me, praying, sometimes, for death. I had thought that I was stronger than this. That I could survive anything. But Zeus was an expert in torture. He had seen, quite literally, everything, and he was very fond of reminding me of this fact. Every creative means of delivering pain and psychological damage that had ever been devised by god or Gorgon or human—he had witnessed everything—and for however long I’d been his prisoner, he’d been perfecting every last technique on me.

“Is it true? Does Orion live?”

I lifted my head. Artemis had somehow made it into the throne room. When I turned my head, I was able to see the smallest sliver of the bright-white chamber, past the golden bars of my cell, across the stone-walled room outside it, and through an open archway. I opened my mouth to scream her name.

Nothing came out. And suddenly I was choking. My throat
collapsed in on itself as if an invisible rope was being twisted tighter and tighter and tighter around my neck. Then, just as suddenly, the rope was released, and I was left sputtering and choking and gasping on the floor.

“If you are keeping him here, King, I demand to see him,” Artemis was saying when my coughing subsided and I was able to hear again.

“On what grounds do you make these demands of your king?” Zeus asked, amused.

“He belongs to me!” Artemis cried. “He was my love! I have spent these last two millennia attempting to return him to life, to return him to my side—”

“And you have failed,” Zeus pointed out. “So perhaps, my dear Artemis, he does not belong to you, in the end.”

“Where is he?” Artemis growled.

I saw a flash, and a mighty clatter rang through the palace. The guard at my door fell sideways across the threshold, his eyes rolling back in his head, and my heart began to pound in earnest. Artemis had felled Zeus’s guards. I was both terrified and infused with pure, hot hope. This offense would not sit lightly with Zeus, but it also meant I had a chance. I somehow pushed myself to my knees.

“Artemis!” I rasped, grasping for the golden bars of my cage. “Artemis! Here!”

Again my throat constricted, and I fell back against the rear wall. I sensed the air inside the palace go still. She had heard me. She would come.

But I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

“Orion!” Artemis cried.

My legs kicked out as I struggled in vain for air. I slammed my heels against the bars, rattling them as hard as I could, even as my vision prickled, even as my life began to drain from me.

“Orion? My love! Are you here?”

I heard her footsteps. Heard the cries of the remaining guards as they were flung aside, tossed through windows, slammed against the walls. My fingers clawed at the dirt floor in sheer desperation, trying to pull me closer to the bars, closer to my savior.

Zeus let out a mighty, furious roar. There was another explosion, so close this time the bars and walls shook, raining rocks and silt throughout my cell. She was dead. I was sure of it. And if she was, then so was I. My last hope. Gone. In an instant.

Until, like a vision, Artemis appeared in the doorway, as statuesque as ever in white robes, a gold-and-leather vest adorned with an intricate pattern of roses and stars, and a shimmering bronze crown. She was as beautiful as the day we’d fallen in love, her chestnut hair tumbling in ringlets around her perfect, sharp chin. Her skin was a creamy white, with the merest blush across her cheeks. Her emerald-green eyes widened at the sight of me, and suddenly I could breathe again.

I gasped in air—gasped in life—and reached for the goddess who would save me. I no longer loved her—hadn’t in centuries—but that could be explained later. After she got me out of here.

“Artemis,” I rasped.

“Orion,” she whimpered.

She extended her trembling hand and I felt, for the briefest second, the slip of her fingertips across mine.

And then everything went black.

“I’m . . . fine,” the love of my life mumbled, searching my face. “But who the hell are you?”

I gazed into his deep blue eyes and stopped breathing. I knew every green and brown fleck within them. I knew every dream and fear and hope they disguised. And yet they were a complete blank as they stared back at me. Slowly, achingly, a cold terror settled into my veins even as my lips tingled from our kiss. He wasn’t joking.

“Orion, do—do you truly not know me?” I stammered.

He chuckled in an embarrassed way and smoothed the back of his dark wavy hair as he looked around, waiting for the punch line. I took a startled step back, catching my shoe on the curb. Automatically, instinctively, Orion reached out and grabbed my arm to steady me. His touch stopped my heart, and I stared at his tanned fingers, then into his eyes.

It’s me, Orion. Please. Please, remember me. I’m the one who saved you. I brought you back to life after eons of hanging among the stars. I nursed you back to health and we fell in love. We spent hours, days, weeks together, telling our secrets, whispering our hopes, learning everything there is to know about each other. Please, you must remember me. Please, please, please.

He released me. “Sorry, no. How do you know my name?”

I felt Hephaestus’s presence at my side, the left wheel on his chair coming to a stop right next to my leg. I stared mutely down at him, my dark-skinned, dark-eyed, leather-and-metal-and-denim-sporting friend, wishing he could snap his fingers and wake me from this nightmare. Like me, Hephaestus was a former god, and as such, was almost mind-bendingly handsome with his square jaw, flawless complexion, and perfect muscle definition, but while he had been human for generations, I had only been in this mortal body for two weeks. I was still getting used to its quirks. Like the psychotic, panicked pounding of the pulse that I was currently experiencing. I had thought that I was familiar with every working of the human heart. As Eros, the Goddess of Love, it was supposed to be my specialty. But this was something new.

Hephaestus nudged my leg with the rubber coating on the wheel of his chair, but my brain couldn’t form words. My brain could form nothing other than a silent, anguished scream.

“Lucky guess?” Hephaestus offered.

Orion laughed again. “That’d be a first. Everyone’s always surprised when I introduce myself. I think my mom was high when she named me. She never heard of Michael or David or James?”

“You have a mom?” I blurted.

His handsome brow knit. “Doesn’t everyone?”

Hephaestus laughed loudly, forcibly. “Good one.” He looked at me with wide eyes, urging me to get it together. But at the moment I didn’t even know what “it” was, let alone how I could get it together. From the corner of my eye, I saw Darla Shayne and Veronica Vine in their matching outfits—Darla’s a blue minidress, Veronica’s a pink one in the same style—checking Orion out as they sauntered by on their way into school.

Back off,
I thought, angry adrenaline surging through me.
Back the eff off.

Darla turned to walk backward, slipping her sunglasses to the tip of her nose for a better look. Some skateboarder guy was performing tricks nearby, and without a thought I glared at his board, sending it flying out from under him and rolling into Darla’s path. She tripped and fell right on her ass on the sidewalk with a screech.

That was what you got for coveting a goddess’s man. But as I watched the boy retrieve his board and Veronica help Darla brush off her backside, I knew I was out of line. My power of telekinesis had only just returned to me, and I still had no idea why. The deal with Zeus was that I had to form three couples without my powers. To that end, he’d stripped me of every last one before depositing me here on Earth. So why had this one returned? What did it mean?