Chapter Twenty-Seven

That place was familiar, but Willa couldn’t remember why. Pretty, gold-tinged clouds, bright sun, and a honey scent on the breeze. All around her were butterflies. She hadn’t seen a butterfly in ages, so she chased after it, not caring that her skirt was dragging against the ground or that when she yanked it up, her legs were exposed.

There was no one else in that place, wherever it was. She could probably run naked and no one would ever know.

She giggled at the thought. “Wouldn’t that be a sight?”

“Safya?” came a woman’s voice, and it brought Willa up short.

“Who’s there?” Willa spun around, butterflies forgotten, seeing nothing and no one. “Hello?”

“How did you get here, Safya?”

“Where are you? I don’t see anyone.”

“You don’t need to see that which you can hear. You don’t belong here. Your head doesn’t belong here in the clouds.”

“My head has been in the clouds for the better part of five hundred years. Just not like this.”

If the disembodied voice had a response to that, she didn’t speak it.

“Where am I?” Willa asked. “What is this place?”

“Here. There. Nowhere. You are welcome here, but you do not belong here. This isn’t for you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are better without it.”

“But I’m not scared here. I’m not nervous. That’s a good thing.”

“Perhaps, but you deserve more than this.”

“Deserve.” Willa scoffed and fidgeted a loose thread at the side seam of her skirt. “That’s a word I don’t hear thrown around a lot where I’m concerned.”

She’d never thought she’d been more deserving of things than anyone else. In fact, she’d come to believe she was less deserving due to her father.

“So many tangled webs dangle from the branches of family trees like ours,” the voice mused. “So many contradictions. Benevolence and malice. Love and apathy. Everything is held together by lust of all sorts. For sex. For excitement. For influence. For power.”

“Trees like ours?” Willa asked. “Who are you?”

Another of Apollo’s bastard children?

Willa wouldn’t even be able to recognize most of them. She only knew the ones who were around the same age as her—her demigod cohort. The rest were too old for her to truly understand.

“It is not yet your time to be here,” the voice said with a sigh. “Get your head out of the clouds.”

“I don’t even know how I got here.”

“There are already too many tragedies in our family’s lore. Do not let him make you the next one.”

“Who? What tragedies? Please tell me something. Anything!”

No response.

• • •

“Quiet for a weekend night,” Blue murmured. He put his foot up on the edge of the fountain at the mission church and watched a fat koi slowly shimmer past.

“Foreboding as hell,” Lance said.

“You don’t have to be here. I appreciate that you are, but it’s not necessary. You can wait across the street or down the block. I don’t want you seen.”

Lance folded his arms across his chest and cleared his throat. “Nah. I’ll be all right.”

“You’re getting reckless.”

“I learned from the best, I guess.”

Blue chuckled and let his foot down to the ground, pulling the coin from the pocket of his slacks. His most fundamental job as alpha was to prevent members of his pack from getting hurt, but Lance’s job as one of his lieutenants was to watch Blue’s back. There was a fine balance of give and take, of small sacrifices and tiny betrayals, that they had to observe. Even if they already knew how the other would respond, they had to say the words.

“Brace yourself, I guess.”

“Sure thing.” Lance bobbed his eyebrows. He was cool as a cucumber, and Blue was glad for it, because inside, he was a roiling disaster, sick with worry that the Greek god wouldn’t give him what he wanted.

No, not what he wanted, but what Willa needed.

Blue wrapped his fingers over the coin and said, “All right, Apollo. Come on out, you demented jackass.”

It’d been quiet before, but suddenly, the world seemed to have been pulled into a vacuum of sound. No insects chirping. No nocturnal scavengers skittering in the alleyways. Even the incessant electronic buzz of the nearby bank’s sign seemed to have been silenced.

Inside Blue, he felt as though a bubble was expanding and about to burst. He put his hand over his throbbing right ear just as the drum exploded.

Clawing at his ear, he watched Lance stagger to the church wall and, groaning, slap his hands to it. “Asshole is . . . trying to force us to shift! Where is he?”

Apollo, sitting with a relaxed, princely posture on the bench near the statue, sighed and rolled his eyes.

The pressure stopped, and Blue swiped away the blood trickling out of his ear.

He should have been afraid, but he wasn’t. He was just mad—angrier than he’d ever been in his life.

“What do you want?” Apollo asked.

“You arrogant piece of shit,” Blue said, hurling the coin at him. “You know exactly what I want, don’t you? You set this whole mess in motion.”

“You are extraordinarily rude.”

“Here we go again with the name calling. You want to start that? Knock yourself out for all of ten seconds. Call me whatever you want. Get it out of your system and have your chuckles. When you’re all done, you’re going to fix whatever it is you did to Willa.”

Apollo put a hand over his heart in faux outrage. “What I did to her? Surely, you must be mistaken. I only gave to her what any immortal would want, thanks to you.”

“Thanks to me? You son of a—” Clenching his hands into fists, Blue turned his back and put some distance between him and the golden god. He wanted to knock that grin off his perfect face, but he withheld the violence for the time being. There was a good chance someone was going to get hurt again, and before that happened, he needed Apollo to promise to reverse the flow of magic he’d sent to Willa.

“For a soothsayer, she’s quite accurate, my Safya.”

“Don’t call her that. Don’t even say her name.”

“She could become a household name, just like Cassandra.”

“Yeah, Cassandra, who if I’m not mistaken, you royally screwed over. You had everyone thinking she was crazy.”

Apollo shrugged. “Small price to pay for infamy.”

“That’s Willa’s father?” Lance asked with a scoff. “What the hell is wrong with that guy?”

“Mind your tongue, dog,” Apollo snapped. “I could break you with a breath.”

“If that’ll make you feel good about yourself, go ahead and try.”

Blue put his hand up in warning to Lance. By no stretch of the imagination did Apollo deserve tender handling, but Blue wanted to keep his trusted lieutenant aboveground for as long as he could. True friends were hard to come by in their world.

“Why would you do this to her?” Blue asked Apollo. “What’s the point? Pulling that magic away from her, in spite of the reason you did it, was probably the best gift you could have given her. She’s not built for it.”

“She picked wrong, didn’t she?”

“What the hell are you even talking about?”

“She picked wrong. Astounding disrespect. Purposeless rebellion, and why? Over a dead woman?” Apollo snorted. “She picked wrong.”

“What is he talking about?” Lance asked.

“Willa,” Blue murmured. “He’s talking about Willa. I could be wrong, but I think he’s saying that she picked her mother over him. Even dead, she’s the safer bet. Isn’t that funny?”

“I would watch my mouth if I were you,” Apollo said, standing, but Blue wasn’t going to be cowed. If nothing else, he was going to make Apollo hear Willa’s side of the story. Someone needed to speak it if she couldn’t.

“He can’t possibly understand why Willa would still honor her mother after all this time,” Blue said to Lance. “He can’t possibly understand that you can’t substitute terror for love and make people believe that they’re equal forms of attention. He doesn’t know what love is.”

“Of course I do.”

“Okay, maybe you do, but you don’t have a bottomless reserve of it. You can’t make it stretch, can you? You didn’t love Ynes, did you? I’d bet my plane that you wanted to control her. She was a pretty thing that made others like you jealous while you had her, but she wasn’t the love of your life by any stretch of the imagination. She was another Daphne for you. Someone who didn’t give you what you wanted in the end. And Willa? Well, she’s no Phaëton, is she? She’s not the child you’d give the sun. She’s the one you want to snatch it away from.”

Apollo lunged at him, and his fist would have made contact with the side of Blue’s head if it weren’t for Lance yanking him away.

Blue was going to let him have the strike—he was going to let Apollo get that anger out and show every one of his true colors—but obviously, Lance had other ideas.

“Take it down a notch, Blue. Don’t forget that your new pack needs an alpha.”

Right.

His new pack. He had more people counting on him than ever before, but he needed to say those words.

“I want to know what he knew and when he knew it,” Blue said. “I want to know how long he’s been setting up this disaster, and if from the day I walked into town, this was due to happen.”

“How small-minded of you.” Evidently possessing moods as fickle as one of Willa’s middle schoolers, Apollo backed away, casually examining the adobe of the mission wall. “I didn’t set anything up.” He flicked away a bit of peeling clay from the wall and dusted his manicured hands on his jeans. “I simply used what was already there. I knew eventually Saf—”

“Don’t even say it,” Blue snapped. “I swear to any god who isn’t you that if you say that name, I’m going to hurt you.” Blue suspected that’d be a difficult feat, but he was going to make the effort anyway.

Apollo rolled his eyes and gave a dismissive flit of his hand. “Willa, then. Eventually, she’d have to find a partner. I didn’t know who it’d be. Prophecy is rarely so specific.”

“And you knew that as soon as she found someone, you’d be able to manipulate her from a distance,” Lance said. Looking to Blue with a moue of disgust, he added, “He plays the long game even better than your father.”

“Yeah, so you know better than almost anyone why I’d have a strong aversion to users.”

“You obviously summoned me here because you want something,” Apollo said, turning. “Your rude manner will certainly make any negotiations fruitless.”

“If you’re waiting for me to kiss your ass, sir, don’t hold your breath. Whatever you did to Willa, fix it, or tell me how to fix it and I’ll do the work myself.”

Raising one pristine brow, Apollo studied his nails. “So you would have me return her to her former pedestrian state?”

“There was nothing wrong with the way she was.” Nothing that he couldn’t help her with. Willa couldn’t be “fixed,” but she could be functional. She could win small battles every day and not even realize that the war she’d been having in her head since birth was still raging on.

“In my experience, alphas prefer not to take weak mates,” Apollo said. “Would you rather have a demigoddess with magic you haven’t even begun to see the extent of yet or a timid, powerless woman who can’t look strangers in the eyes?”

“If I gave a fuck what people thought of me, I would have gotten married to any-damn-body a year ago.”

“What would you sacrifice to restore her?”

“Anything.” The word slipped out of his mouth before he could give the matter proper consideration.

Even as Apollo’s lips quirked upward and he tapped his fingertips together like the perfect archetype of a villain, Blue still didn’t doubt that he’d gotten it right the first time.

He loved that woman more than he ever would have thought possible. His thoughts were consumed by her. He was driven to comfort her, provide for her, be a companion for her.

If he’d been ten or fifteen years younger, Blue wouldn’t have been ready for her. Things often had a way of unfolding on their own schedule, in spite of interference.

“Anything, then.” Apollo tapped his fingertips some more. As wide as his smile was, it didn’t reach the corners of his eyes. There was no joy in it, just the kind of satisfaction that would make a person feel like he’d won, but the win wouldn’t solve anything.

Nothing Apollo did would make Willa’s mother love him. She was gone. The book on her was closed and history couldn’t be changed.

He could pass on his humiliation to someone else, though. Blue knew he’d be the one to bear the humiliation. He knew it before the god opened his mouth and said, “You want her restored? I’ll restore her. All you need to do is pack up your things and scurry home to Nevada. I’m certain your father would be overjoyed by your homecoming.”

No.

Of all the tributes Apollo could demand, that was the worst.

Lance tightened his grip around Blue’s arm, but he didn’t need to. Blue was so stunned, he couldn’t think, much less move. A minute passed before things began to make sense.

He’d be without his mate. Willa would lose her rock. Things in Maria would be up in the air. Even if the Coyotes didn’t immediately get overtaken by a more powerful pack, they’d still be without a qualified alpha. More stress for Willa that she couldn’t negotiate on her own.

“That is . . . That’s the absolute cruelest thing you could do,” Blue said, giving his head a hard shake. “What is wrong with you? Huh? What’s got you so fucking twisted that you’d get off on making people miserable? And your own daughter, at that?”

“She has been a facet of my misery since she was six weeks old. Perhaps when you’ve had five hundred years of reminders about your mistakes, you can lecture me then. Until that time, I believe it’d be more appropriate that you toe the line.”

“I’m not leaving her.”

Apollo shrugged. “Suit yourself. Her fate is in your hands, as are those of all the people she touches on a daily basis.” He narrowed his eyes and toyed contemplatively with one of his long curls. “Odd, the impact one small person can make in a life, isn’t it?”

Lance loosened his grip on Blue’s arm as Apollo turned to examine some detail in the statute.

Shoving his hands through his hair with anger and frustration, Blue turned to his lieutenant and looked at him.

He didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to do.

If he’d never picked up that coin, maybe they’d never be in the quandary, but that didn’t seem quite right. Apollo would have found some other way to share his misery. He would have doggedly pursued a means to spread the torment around. He would have waited as long as he needed to for a plan to play out, because he had countless years to waste.

Blue was just a sucker who’d walked into the mess. Willa was the real victim.

“All I wanted to do was protect her from him,” Blue whispered to Lance, bewildered. “I don’t know if I can.”

“This isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.”

Lance was right. Blue couldn’t have known. Even with years of study about ancient cultures and having read the jaw-dropping tales of the gods’ exploits, he couldn’t have prepared for such manipulation.

He was just a pawn. Apollo’s. His father’s.

He’d tried to take a stand on his own, and he’d failed.

Fuck.

“I’m going to have to let her go,” he said in a fraught undertone. “We’ll all have to go if I can’t stay.”

Blue knew the exact moment the significance of the statement settled into Lance’s brain because his expression, usually so cool and free of emotion, went stark with panic.

He didn’t want to get dragged back to Sparks any more than Blue did, but they wouldn’t have a good choice if Blue didn’t have his own pack. They’d have two options—get reabsorbed back into OG’s pack and toe the line, or to formally tender their intent to dissociate. If they did that, they’d be sitting ducks to every Coyote that crossed their paths. They’d be barred from crossing territories of OG’s allies.

A pack of four wasn’t strong enough when they’d already made so many enemies.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to Lance.

Lance let out a humorless scoff. “Just when we were starting to get optimistic.”

“I know.”

“Take care of Willa. We’ll figure out the rest. We always figure something out.”

“Yeah. We always do.” Blue gave Lance’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze and then turned to meet his fate. “You get what you want this time,” Blue said to Apollo.

The god turned, wide-eyed, disingenuous with his hand pressed over his heart in mock surprise.

“Come off it. We’re going. You’re going to pull that magic off her, and then you’re going to stay the hell away from her. Funny how the gifts you give her tend to always break her in some new way.”

“Fine.” Apollo made a dismissive, go-away flick of his hand.

That did it. Blue hated that word, fine. He hated the lie that was almost always in it.

He could ignore a lot of slights, but having the gravity of the circumstances dismissed sent him over the edge.

His fist hit Apollo’s face more times than he could count, each swing angrier and harder than the last, and he was screaming without words, making primal noises that could have wakened the dead in the nearby cemetery. Apollo didn’t move. His face didn’t break the way Blue wanted it to. No crushing of bones. No blood.

Just a ferocious surge of heat that flared just before Lance yanked Blue back, and then back again when Apollo lunged at him, snarling with his perfect teeth bared.

And then the bastard, with not a single bruise on his face, vanished, leaving his laughter echoing in the courtyard.

I just got fucking played.