But looking for Demeter has sweat beading at the collar of my shirt and sick waves rolling through my stomach. Hades called again after he ran out of places on his list. A tension in his voice gives away that he’s done, at his limit. On the walk back to his place he tells me that Demeter started out running wild through the city. She fought with Zeus at the whorehouse and disappeared into the bars, and if she gets any further into the city’s underbelly, she’ll die there.
All the guilt I tried to kill at the farmhouse has come back, heavy on my spine. I do not think about the farmhouse, or about Cronos, or Demeter’s blank face while he pushed her head into the comforter.
I can’t stop thinking about it now.
It was obvious to me as soon as I saw them together. Obvious that it had been going on for years. Obvious that it was not consensual. Obvious that it was enough to chase a person out of their mind and stomp on the remnants.
“What the fuck,” I say again, and go for the door.
It’s unlocked, swinging on its hinges, and no one inside looks at me. They’re ghosts, pale and high, bodies slumped over couches and chairs or sprawled on filthy carpet. Two people fight in the kitchen. Hissing like cats. Shouting. A tug at the back of my mind says to get the hell out of here. Get back to the sea, where it’s clean.
I don’t owe my brothers anything. Don’t owe Demeter and her daughter anything.
Except for this.
She’s not in the living room, or what used to be a den but is now full of half-burned books and garbage. The calendar on the desk is patched with dried blood. Pirates have a reputation for filth, but it’s not an accurate one. A well-run ship is a clean ship, and my ships are always cared for. It’s the only way to make real money. You can’t lose people to fistfights and infected wounds and spoiled food. The only people who should die on the open seas are sick fucks like the ones I go after when I’m not building up the shipping side of the business.
This place turns my stomach.
The stairs crack under my feet as I climb them. No Demeter on the first floor. I don’t want to find her here, but I don’t want to have to tell Hades I failed.
I open doors on people fucking. One couple is trying to fuck but they’re too high to do it properly, which would be funny if it weren’t so sad. If the room weren’t so disgusting, and they weren’t so skeletal.
The last door leads to what passes for a master bedroom in a place like this, and when I put my hand on the doorknob, I know.
It swings open under my hand and Cronos sneers at me, his mouth an ugly slash. He’s leaning over her, he’s—
He’s dead. I killed him. Several blinks banish him from the room. There’s no bed, no chair, no farmhouse window.
Only a filthy mattress in one corner and a glassy-eyed Demeter on top of it.
She is not alone.
One man is kneeling over her on the mattress, his hands on his belt, and the other has one of her hands in his, shoving it listlessly down the front of his pants. “Oh, fuck,” that one says, and drops his hand. The one who’s about to fuck her mouth doesn’t register my presence until I pick him up by the back of his shirt, carry him out by the fabric, and throw him down the stairs.
When I come back, Demeter’s curled on her side on the mattress, her hair a wreck and her silver eyes blankly horrified.
I hate her. For what she did to me, and to Hades, and whatever she did to Zeus to make him look the way he did at the farmhouse. Whoever she killed to make him look like that.
I hate her, and I can’t leave her, because this is bigger than hatred. I crouch down next to the mattress.
Demeter looks at me through tears, her focus sliding off my face. “I hate you,” she breathes. “You took him from me. And now you’re here to kill me too.”
Her words are slurred. Broken. Her body’s limp on the mattress. She’s high, and there’s no use trying to explain anything to her now.
“I’m not here to kill you.”
Her lip quivers. “Then what? To deliver a message from Zeus?”
“There’s no message.”
She bursts into tears. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” she sobs. “I did do it on purpose, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t think she would die.”
There’s no telling who she’s talking about or whether it’s real. “It’s time to go. Okay?”
Demeter pushes herself up on one arm, but she’s crying so hard, and so high, that she loses her balance and tips forward.
I catch her. And I don’t want to touch her, don’t want anything to do with her, but she’s not walking out of here. She’s not good for anything right now. She’s too eaten up by grief and years and years of being assaulted by her own father.
There’s no one else to pick her up and carry her out, so I do it. Demeter doesn’t put up a fight. She sobs on my shoulder. I send a single message. Where do I take her?
Hades sends back an address. They’re waiting for you.
“I can’t keep living,” Demeter says.
“You have to,” I answer. “You have a daughter.”
“She’ll end up just like me,” she sobs. Her voice is wrecked. She is wrecked.
“Probably not.”
“Zeus hates me.”
“Yeah.” It’s the wrong thing to say, but it’s the truth. “For now he does.”
She babbles something about Hades, something about plants.
We’re going to a rehab center in the city. No cab is going to stop for us, so I carry her there. It’s blocks and blocks and Demeter cries the whole time, cries like someone’s hurting her. Like this is killing her. Every block is an improvement on the last. The buildings get nicer and nicer until we’re in a part of the city with room to breathe. The lots here have lawns.
The address Hades sent me to is a low, white building with careful landscaping around the circle drive out front. The sun is rising over a chestnut tree in the yard. Birds sing in the branches, waking up for the day. Two people, a man and a woman in uniform, stand out front.
“We’re here.”
Demeter struggles to pick her head up from my shoulder, but her eyes go wide at the sight of him. “No,” she screams. “You can’t leave me here.”
I shush her on instinct. I don’t know what else to do. “It’s a good place. And I’ll help you.”
“No you won’t. You hate me.”
Can’t deny it. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll still help you.”
I carry her toward the entrance, where they’re waiting to take her. I scan their faces and find compassion there. At the front of the building I put Demeter on her feet, but she won’t let go of me. She seems small now. Almost helpless. “How?”
She’s still high, still unsteady, so I have to put both hands on her face to get her to look at me. “I’m not going to give up on you.”
Tears slide down through the filth on her cheeks. “Then don’t leave me here.”
“I’m going to leave you here,” I tell her, because I am. “But these people won’t hurt you. And afterward, I’ll get you a place. With lots of room and trees. Somewhere far from the city.” I don’t like this promise, because it’ll mean I have to find property, it will mean working with Hades or Zeus on it, since I won’t trap myself on land for this. I can’t. “You’ll have a house there. Your own house. Somewhere safe.”