Except.
I never let myself hear them before.
They’re different. The two of them are different than they were before.
Could I be different?
That’s beside the point.
The person who is not different is Demeter. What are we going to do about Cronos’s daughter?
His daughter.
Bile rises in my throat as old memories resurface, dredged up from thinking about all of them like this. My mind is defenseless, my body too tired to force them down. His daughter. His real daughter, not his foster daughter. She lived in that house with us, and with Eleanor, but she was not a foster child. It was obvious to anyone who looked at them. Cronos and Demeter had the same silver eyes. The same eyes Persephone has.
My hackles rise to think of her, but I gather myself enough to stop the reaction. Persephone looks like Demeter, and she is skilled with plants, and that’s where the similarities end. I know that’s where they end. I know it from the way Hades looks at her.
This isn’t about Persephone.
This is about Demeter. It’s convenient to think about Persephone because it’s so fucking painful to think about Demeter.
My exhaustion keeps the pain at bay while I pick over the past. Demeter always hated Hades, but they had some kind of deal, in the end. It had to do with his eyes, and his pain. Painkillers she made for him in exchange for something else. But he’s past that now. Zeus said something about it to me once. They hated each other, but tolerated each other as a means to an end.
It wasn’t like that with Zeus. He loved her, and she worshipped him. He fed her and dressed her and taught her to read. Zeus was the only one who could play—games like hide-and-seek and tag. He did that for Demeter. The three of us didn’t have those kinds of games. We went swimming, once I taught the two of them, or chased each other in the woods. But for Demeter, he would count to thirty. Count to a hundred.
And then she saw how Cronos favored Zeus. How Zeus was his chosen son. The one who would take the whorehouse and the business and step into his shoes one day. It broke something in her. She hated him for it. She hated me for picking fights with Cronos. We used to dig up antique glass bottles from the woods—the house was old, and people had buried them back there—and I would smash one and threaten him with it until he chased me out of the house. To the tree by the lake. I spent so many hours of my life choking on lake water with cuts from the whip on my back.
Demeter couldn’t see it for what it was. She couldn’t see that Zeus was trying to keep Cronos at the whorehouse, away from her and even away from Hades, whose brain was going to give out from the constant stress and torture. She couldn’t see how I was trying to do the same thing. Trying and failing.
All she wanted was Cronos’s attention. That’s what she saw. He paid attention to us, and not to her, and she would do anything to get it. She thought his attention equaled love.
It didn’t mean love. It meant fear and despair and a desperate need to escape.
I need this ship to be finished. It’s my way to escape, the same way it was when my father was still alive.
It’s a means of escape now. But it’s also a means to repent. Because proof of my mistakes is still back home.
Proof of that night is still living in a house with fields of flowers.
The night I never talk about. The night we only mention obliquely. The night I never want to think about again.
I can’t keep it away, and as the memory returns, I take a deep breath like I’m about to get hit with a thirty-foot wave.
There are two options with swells—swim hard, and try to keep yourself above the surface, or go under. Go through. Let it roll over you and pass by.
I let it come.
11
Poseidon
Eighteen years ago
The gravel driveway appears out of the trees before I’m ready for it, and everything in my soul screams at me not to go there. To go back to my ship at its dock in the city. Back to the sea. As far away as I can get.
I was about to do it. We were twenty minutes from pushing away when I got the phone call.
I have the damn thing pressed to my ear right now. It’s cheap plastic and does nothing but make calls in and out. I can hear the sea in the background of the call. “I don’t know,” I tell Caspian for the thousandth time tonight. “I don’t know a damn thing. Stay ready to sail.”
We’re running a job together on a borrowed ship, and he’s pissed I left him behind. Someone had to stay. It couldn’t be me. The sea didn’t want that. It became a riot of waves at the base of the ship, pushing toward shore. “Nobody’s there to have your back. If you get fucked, we’re all fucked.”
“My brothers are there.”
“You don’t even know them.”
That’s what I always say, if I bother to mention them at all, and it’s always a lie. I do know them. I can’t help but know them. And so I knew, when I picked up the phone, that it was bad. I still don’t understand what the fuck Hades was talking about. All I know is that they’re all at the farmhouse. All of them. Hades. Zeus. Demeter.
And Cronos.
“I have to go.” Caspian’s been talking, but I haven’t been listening. It’s impossible right now, when even the feel of the driveway beneath the tires makes my skin crawl.
My stomach turns. I throw the car in park and get out before I can drive away. It’s all still here. The big white farmhouse. The big red barn. The black outline of the forest against the night sky. In the distance the lake laps at the shore and I can taste it on my tongue even now. Dirt and muck under a layer of fresh water. Silt that would get kicked up when Cronos held me under.
Steps from the wide front porch is what can only be called a scene, lit by the moonlight and a single bulb burning by the door. The rest of the farmhouse is dark.
Eleanor, her hair gone completely gray, weeps at the foot of the stairs. When I first came here I thought she had to be old, because of the gray in her hair, but it’s obvious to me now her hair went gray from the stress. She can’t be fifty yet. Hades and Zeus tower over her. Both of them look like they’ve come from an office somewhere, Hades in all black, Zeus in a crisp white shirt and dark pants. Neither of them has a jacket. I’m underdressed in battered jeans and a T-shirt—what I was wearing when Hades called. Hades has one big hand on Eleanor’s shoulder—she looks so small, compared to him—and one finger stabbed into Zeus’s chest.
They’re fighting.
Quietly.
I don’t understand. I don’t belong here. Not with them, and not at this little slice of hell. I have no idea why the sea wants me here, where I’m landlocked and everything hurts. Every step feels like tripping a sunken explosive. The night air sets off old guilt and fear and longing.
I want to run, but instead I stride across gravel and grass and join them. “—the only one with any leverage,” Hades is saying. “With either of them. If we don’t find out what the fuck this is—”
Zeus bats his hand away and scowls back at him. I don’t recognize it on his face. Hades, yes. Zeus, no. He’s a man of sharp, beautiful smiles. A trap in human form. The scowl looks devastated. If I didn’t know better, I’d think his eyes were red from crying. I’ve never seen Zeus cry. “I don’t care what happens to her.”