What happened to me?
I breathe in clouds and exhale ice. If this is heaven, then it’s not very exciting. Who ever thought the afterlife would be like playing in a giant white parachute, without the playing or the parachute? There’s nothing here. My mom should be here with me if I’m dead.
The flat white divides itself neatly in two. White and black. Like Zeus and Hades. The darkness rises, covering up the white until there’s only a thin line left, and then...
Nothing.
And then...
Hands.
On my face.
Big, strong hands.
From far away, there’s a rhythmic beep, as if someone on another continent has forgotten to replace the batteries in a smoke alarm. Smoke alarms are important because that way, you know if there’s been an explosion. An explosion—yes. I remember orange flames and a ragged hole in the ceiling.
I remember stars.
“—with me,” he says. Those are the words I was tracing on his lips before I came here, to this nowhere place. Please stay with me. “Brigit.”
That voice. A golden voice. I can feel it behind my eyelids the way a person feels the sun even as they sleep.
“Wake up.”
I’m not asleep.
But.
I’m not awake until I open my eyes. It takes another eternity to figure out how to move my lids, which are weighted down by some outside force.
The voice insists. “Wake up, Brigit. Come back.” It’s fervent, like a prayer, half-commanding and half-beseeching. It makes me wish I was the churchgoing type just so I could hear someone pray to God like this. Unfortunately I’m not the churchgoing type. Unfortunately I’m a total sinner. A whore, if you will. Yes—that’s what I was doing. I was working. I was working—
I open my eyes and look into the face of God.
Not God—just a god, and he is so beautiful it makes the machine off in the distance beep faster. What little I can see of the room is white like my dreams, white like the world I was just in, and Zeus is a stretch of living color. Black slacks and a white shirt and golden eyes that shock me back to life. Giddiness races up my veins and pours into my brain, stirring up all the memories there. Waiting in the dark of the alleyway. Seeing him for the first time. The way he circled me, stalked around me, looked. Much like he is now, eyes hard on mine. “If you’re going to look any longer, you could at least pay me for my time,” I rasp.
He makes a noise that I would mistake for a sob if I thought he could cry and tips his head to mine.
I thought I was alive before, when I opened my eyes, but when his lips meet mine—that’s when I live. The rich, clear taste of him. It’s a hot, searching battle. I found you. I was right here, waiting for you. My heart breaks, comes back together, and he shoulders himself closer. Yes. Get closer. Never leave me again.
A door opens and the air in the room shifts to admit a lady in a white coat, dark hair and dark eyes and a quirk to her lips. She holds a clipboard with a thick stack of papers. “I expressly told you not to wake her up.”
Zeus draws my bottom lip between his teeth and bites, one last gift before he pulls away and stabs a finger in her direction. ”I expressly told you not to fuck around with me.”
“You were a danger to yourself and others,” she says calmly, coming around the side of the bed and squinting at the machines. “How are you feeling, Brigit?”
“Fine, I think.” More than fine, really, as long as he’s touching me. A distant nervousness tolls in the back of my mind. “What happened?”
“You sustained some injuries in an incident at Olympus,” says the doctor, eyes settling on me. “How much do you remember?”
A mirror on the top of my head. Zeus, looking at me, horror in his eyes and a smile on his face. “Not much.”
“Not your arrival at the hospital, then?”
Zeus glares at her. “The point, Carina?”
“That’s Dr. Jain to you.” She adjusts something on one of the machines. “We’re finishing the last drip now.”
“And then what?” He smiles now, and a shiver rocks my shoulders. This is the only man in the world whose smile is more dangerous than his frown. “Unless you’re planning to drug us both and do away with the bodies.”
Dr. Jain—she sounds familiar, somehow—puts a hand to her chest. “I took an oath, Zeus.”
“And you took my money,” he reminds her. “I’d stay within the terms of our agreement.”
I get the sense they’ve been bickering for quite some time, but I’m missing a piece of the puzzle—bickering about what? “I was well within the terms,” she shoots back.
“It was against my express wishes, Dr. Jain, and you—”
“And you signed a form.” She’s come prepared with the form and whips it off the clipboard, dangling it in front of Zeus’s face. “In the space reserved for an emergency contact, you wrote, and I quote, Call my brother Hades and tell him I’d rather die.”
He gazes toward the ceiling, long-suffering and gorgeous. “A blanket statement for—”
“For the eventuality when you came in here on the verge of an overdose, covered in blood, and scared six people out of the waiting room?” My face gets hot thinking about it. “People don’t rush the emergency operating room, Zeus. It’s not done.”
He slides a hand down and takes mine, squeezing it lightly, almost as if he’s afraid he might hurt me. “I own this building,” he says. “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.”
“Yes, well.” Dr. Jain lets out a long sigh. “Someone had to stand up to you.”
“Where’s the form I sign if I don’t want you to ambush me with my bastard brother?”
“Let me reiterate that you were about to interrupt a surgical environment, and you signed a document that specifically requested his presence.”
Zeus’s eyes narrow. “It was a joke, Jain. I would never invite him anywhere unironically.”
“Fine.” She tosses a blank page in his direction. “Sign whatever you want. But it’s not the painkillers or either of your brothers we need to talk about.”
Zeus’s face darkens. “What, then?”
Dr. Jain leans against a countertop and rubs at her forehead. “I ran the tests you wanted.”
He straightens up. “What did you find?”
“Both of you had relatively high concentrations of a substance we can’t identify. Someone in your house—”
“Not possible.” He moves again, putting his body between me and her. His doctor.
“Someone who might have had access to the food?” She shrugs. “I can’t guarantee it’s Demeter. Have you located her?”
Zeus turns back toward me and blinks. I’m still here. “No. I have no plans to find her.”
“Someone has to find her,” the doctor insists.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” It’s a bizarre question to ask, but her voice is so familiar that I can’t let it go.
Her dark eyes meet mine. “The two of us haven’t technically met.”
Zeus pushes a hand through his hair. “Brigit, meet Carina Jain. Jain, obviously this is Brigit, but conscious.”