Chapter Eight

After school and the most scatterbrained planning time she’d endured for at least five years, Willa trudged from her Jeep to her front door, so weary she could hardly pick her feet up over the cracks in her cement walkway.

The day hadn’t been physically exhausting. It would have been easier if that had been the case instead of her being all peopled out. She didn’t mind the kids so much. After working with them for so much of her adult life, she had become more or less immune to their energy. It was all the nosy teachers who kept stopping by to borrow this or that all through third and fourth periods, and then after school when she’d been trying to update grades in the system.

They were all so obvious. They wanted to know who that man was who’d been in her classroom. They’d seen him around town, but wanted to know how she knew him. He obviously wasn’t an MMS parent, so what did he want? Was he single? Was he coming back?

She couldn’t answer the first question. The second, she could only provide a partial answer to: “He’s not married.” Yet. As for the third question, Willa vehemently hoped not.

Diana hadn’t commented on the visitors, but her cheeky smile was easy enough to translate. She had a predator’s sense of hearing. Of course she heard every whispered, “Welllll? Who was that?” And fortunately, Diana wasn’t much of a chatterer. She’d kept herself busy cleaning out the storage room and had even escorted Finn Graham to the nurse’s office when he somehow managed to slice his finger while adjusting his music stand.

Sixth grade band was far too often a blood sport.

“You can go . . . to wherever you’re staying,” Willa murmured to Diana, whose booted feet padded along behind her.

“I think you and I both know why I’m here, so no.”

“You’re gonna stick to me like glue, huh?”

Diana bounded up the steps beside her and slouched elegantly beside the doorbell before smirking. “I wouldn’t say like glue. After all, I’m technically supposed to be here keeping an eye on my brother, not you.”

“Don’t let me hold you up.” Willa turned her key in the lock, pulled it, and searched the ring for her deadbolt key. King gave a plaintive “woof” inside the house.

“Coming!” she shouted at him. To Diana, she asked, “And why are you monitoring your brother, anyway?”

“Long story short, my father has trust issues.”

“You’re adults.”

Diana grimaced, and the creases at the corners of her mouth deepened. “Thanks for the reminder, though I didn’t need one. OG has been reminding me daily for the past twelve years.”

“OG?”

“That’s what Blue and I call our father. Stands for ‘old and grizzled.’”

“Fun.” Willa snorted and shouldered the door open.

King’s nails clicked in cringe-inducing staccato atop the hardwood floor she’d probably need to refinish soon as he danced his usual “Yay! You’re home!” jig. “You’re such a dork,” she murmured to him as she scratched behind his ears.

“OG will recall Blue at the slightest provocation. He can’t afford to be embarrassed when he’s got a big territory merger on the line.”

“A merger?”

“Yep. I guess he wants that to be his legacy. Expanding the Shapely perimeter.”

“And how does your brother feel about that? I pegged him as opportunistic, but . . . ” Willa gave her head an incredulous shake. “Not like that.”

“I think Blue cares about the merger about as much as he cares about MAC’s new lipstick collection.” She added in an aside, “Which is amazing, by the way.”

Willa quirked a brow. She’d have to take Diana’s word for it.

Diana knelt in front of King and gave the underside of his chin an assertive tickle. “Well, hello, handsome.”

He turned his big head in her hands and gave her a “Walk me” whine.

Willa sighed and dropped her keys onto the console table and tucked her bag onto its low shelf. “Some guard dog.”

“Oh, I don’t bother most dogs, for whatever reason. They can’t stand Blue.”

“I noticed.”

Diana grabbed King’s leash from the coatrack and clasped the hook onto his collar.

If it were possible for a dog to swoon, King certainly did then.

“So . . . ” Willa said as King pulled Diana to the door. “If Blue fails spectacularly here, you’ll tell your father?”

Diana shrugged. “Haven’t decided yet. Depends on what’s good for Blue.”

Interesting.

King took off at a run the moment his paws hit the walkway, and Diana jerked into a sprint after him, shouting, “Whew!” as she cleared the gate to the sidewalk.

Shaking her head and laughing in spite of herself, Willa grabbed her mail off the floor and then scanned through it as she made her way to the kitchen.

She was sliding her finger beneath her musician’s union dues reminder envelope flap when she suddenly realized that she hadn’t turned on the kitchen light.

Her routine in late afternoons was always the same. Walk into the kitchen. Turn on the light. That part of the house was situated next to the neighborhood’s largest shade tree, and it got dark fast in the afternoon.

“Did I leave the light on?” she murmured, squinting up at the fluorescent panel. The room was exceedingly bright for natural illumination.

It was off. So were the stove light and the nearby hallway light. The window was dark.

Cold sweat beaded down the sides of her temples as the hair trigger in her brain activated her fight-or-flight response.

Run, it said, but she was in her own house. That was supposed to be her safe place. That was supposed to be where all her best hiding places were.

“Oh no.” She set the mail down and gave her head a hard shake. “No no no.”

She’d thought she’d been free of him. She’d told him to leave her alone, and she’d believed he’d taken the command to heart, but she should have known better.

Apollo indulged his whims as he saw fit, and when he saw fit. He was the only entity that she knew who could illuminate a room just by standing in it, and that light would linger long after he’d left.

He’d been in her house.

Her father had been in her house while she was away and had touched her things.

She may have been seeing red, but as she struggled to control her breathing, she could see the bright spots of golden heat on everything his warm fingertips had glided over. The impressions would fade in time, but her horror that he’d molested her space when she wasn’t there wouldn’t.

Paralyzed with indecision, she curled her toes into her shoes and clenched her fingers into fists.

Please be gone.

She needed him gone. He always left her in worse straits than she’d started in. His gifts to her always turned out to be curses or punishments she suffered vicariously for the woman who’d rejected him and then died before he was done being cruel.

Her nails bit deeper into her palms as she moved slowly to the back of the little house. It was quiet. The hall dimly lit. Illuminated lines on the chair rail as though he’d glided his fingers along them as he’d casually strolled. They stopped halfway down the hall in front of the guest room.

He’d touched that door, too. His marks were on the knob, his golden handprint atop the door’s white paint.

Quiet inside.

Wringing her hands, she looked down the hall into the living room, hoping to see a glimpse of King coming back into the house dragging his leash and Diana chasing after him. At least King would bark. At least he could annoy Apollo into leaving. Apollo abhorred pandemonium that wasn’t of his own making.

But they weren’t there.

No one was there, except her, and whatever was in that room, if anything.

All other sounds beside her uneven, shuddering breaths and tentative footsteps faded into the background, spotlighting her perennial, necessary solitariness.

The weight of her secrets was as heavy as Mount Olympus on her shoulders, and there wasn’t a soul she could let help her carry them. He would drive away her friends, her lovers if she ever had any—anyone who she loved in some way—to ensure her misery, and theirs as well for daring to stand with her.

She knew his ways. Had witnessed his cruelty firsthand. He hadn’t cared enough to rescue her when Spain’s Inquisition ruled that she should be burned alive for heresy, and he could have. Her hell had lasted for a week before they’d lit that pyre, but sometimes she wondered if she were in a different kind of hell—the one that had all the memories. Especially the memory of her father looking at her with such disgust when he finally bothered to check in.

 “So, you survived, then,” he’d said solemnly as though it were a pity that she had.

For a long time, she’d wondered if it was.

“You should have called for me,” he’d said. “Perhaps I would have intervened.”

He wouldn’t have. She’d called him before, when her friends and cousins had been arrested. She’d pleaded for his help. His way of helping had been to make them disappear for good.

She hadn’t let anyone get close since.

Please don’t be in there.

She raised a shaking hand to the knob, and then jerked it back.

She didn’t know how she’d react if he was in there, and that seemed like something she should figure out quickly. If she confronted him with bold words and her chin held high, he might even believe the things that came out of her mouth.

She raised her head. Took a breath.

She turned the knob and pushed the door open before she could send a message to her brain to disregard that order. But her eyes closed as the door slammed against the stopper and the sounds of her frantic breaths hammered in her ears.

She didn’t know how long she’d been standing there, sweating and gasping and petrified.

She only knew that some time later, Blue’s voice was in her ears, murmuring, “Hey. Willa.”

He had his hands pressed to her shoulders, his fingertips notching into the blades. Touching her and too close, but that didn’t matter when Olympus was already crushing her. “Willa.”

“He’s . . . He’s going to . . . ”

“Who?” He bent, ostensibly to meet her gaze, but she wasn’t seeing straight. Her gaze kept getting pulled toward that unnatural light, and Blue didn’t seem to notice it. “I called your name five or six times, and you’re acting like you can’t hear me. What’s wrong?”

“Destroying everything. That’s what he does. Everyone thinks he’s so benevolent, but he just does what he wants.”

“Who?” There was insistence laced through his voice. Not the annoyed kind he was susceptible to when he was dealing with the likes of the Lamarrs, but a concerned kind of insistence. She hadn’t heard that from him before—hadn’t thought he was capable of it and didn’t know what it meant that he was. “What happened to you? You’re shaking like a leaf.”

“That’s . . . why I’m so tired?” She nodded with resolution. “Yes. Can’t keep up. Always so nervous.”

Blue didn’t say anything. He smoothed his hands down her shoulders and then back up. If not for him, she might not have been upright. Her legs were noodles. Her back tight with tension.

“Is . . . he in there?” She swiped her forearm across her wet forehead.

“Who?” Blue asked softly, forehead creasing with concern.

“No names.” She swallowed and shook her head again. “Never say names.” On the rare occasion she communicated with her half-siblings, they didn’t say “Apollo.” They all knew who the being in question was without being direct. Her hands found the bottom of her shirt and wrung it as her gaze tracked to the open door. “Is . . . anyone in there?”

Letting his hands drop from her shoulders, Blue poked his head into the room and looked left and then right.

She was suddenly cold. Shaking again, so hard she had to put her back against the wall and brace her trembling hands against it.

“There’s no one in here. What happened? Did someone break in? The door was unlocked, but I figured you’d let the dog out or something.”

“D-Diana has the dog.” Apparently, they were still out on their walk. Willa glanced at her watch, but couldn’t read the face because either her wrist was moving too fast or the rest of her was. She couldn’t have been standing there for more than five minutes, but even a minute lost to catatonia was too long. When it had happened to her mother, the other nuns had thought she was possessed. She wasn’t. She simply hadn’t been built to persevere, and Willa had inherited that trait from her.

“Can you see the light?” Willa whispered, canting her head toward the room.

“What light?” Blue was still in the bedroom. “The nightlight plugged in beside the bed?”

“No, the . . . on the dresser. And the walls.” Apollo had touched the corner of a picture, perhaps straightening it on the wall before moving on to fondle the knickknacks on the dresser.

“No,” Blue said, stepping back into the hallway. “I don’t see anything. Are you—Shit. Hold on. Doubt this’ll work.” He grasped her by the shoulders, and suddenly she was warm inside and the shaking tapered off.

“All right?” she finished for him, staring at his Adam’s apple. “No.”

Never all right.

She hadn’t been all right since birth.

Just like before, he squeezed her shoulders, pulled her out from under the mountain a bit. She shouldn’t have let him, but she was too tired to stop him.

“Come sit down.” He said soothingly, but then he touched her back in the place that always triggered a reflexive throwing of her elbows and momentary blindness as she fought her attacker.

Blue wasn’t an attacker.

She couldn’t stop flailing though, because if she stopped fighting, she would die. She’d made the mistake of not fighting hard enough once and had ended up having her feet roasted and body stretched on a rack—all because she couldn’t tell lies the way the inquisitors had wanted. She couldn’t say what they needed to hear. She was too much like her mother that way. Too honest. Afraid of where lies might get them, because certainly they were worse than the truth.

Vaguely, she registered her flying hand striking against warm, firm flesh, and Blue’s hiss of pain.

Then constriction.

Blue wrapped his arms tightly around her body, and then firmer until she couldn’t thrash anymore. She could hardly breathe, and that was probably her fault because hyperventilation was so close.

“Let . . . go of me,” she said breathily and tried to squirm out from his grip.

“Not until I’m sure you’re not going to hurt yourself.”

“I can’t breathe.”

They’d done that to her. They’d placed linen into her mouth and poured water down her throat to tease her with suffocation so she’d confess her sins, but she hadn’t had any besides being born to a mother whose people were Moors and who apparently hadn’t assimilated in Granada well enough to avoid the attention of the Inquisition.

Willa had never learned which neighbor had reported her for heresy. She never found out who thought she was worthy of investigation for choosing not to eat pork. No one in her family ever had. She never learned who thought that in spite of the fact that her mother had been a nun, Willa was a bit superstitious, and why wouldn’t she be? Her father was a Greek god. She knew more of the divine than any of them ever would.

“Please . . . let go of me,” she whimpered and then slumped in his embrace as he loosened his arms.

He didn’t let go of her, though. He simply propped her against him. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he said in a near whisper. Somehow, he managed to straighten her up without reverting back to his punishing grip. “Are you scared someone’s here? I don’t hear or smell anyone, but if you want me to look around more and see if there’s someone here, I will.”

She shook her head hard. “I . . . don’t want to know.”

“There’s no need to be reckless. Let me look around so you’ll have peace of mind.”

He didn’t understand. No matter what he did, she’d never have peace of mind.

She already knew Apollo had been there. He’d popped into her house unbidden as though he owned everything, probably looking to “clean up” her life again and erase everyone important from it. But if Blue investigating meant that he’d let go of her and go away so she could fall apart in peace, she’d agree to anything.

“Go. Do what you have to,” she said.

“All right. Stay put.” He leaned her against the wall as though she were a mannequin lacking the ability to remain upright on her own, and he must have been right.

As he walked to the bedroom, she was afraid to move even her fingers or to pull in the deep breath she desperately needed. Instead, she stared vaguely toward a golden smudge on the wall and begged her body not to jerk at every footstep Blue made in the room.

“Cool coin,” he said after a couple of minutes. “Looks like real gold.”

The words hardly registered. Willa closed her eyes and let her body sag down the wall. She pulled her knees against her chest and put her head atop them. That made her feel smaller, and less visible—like she could hide from anything as long as she didn’t move.

“Willa?”

The floorboards creaked. Bedroom to hallway.

She didn’t need magic to know Blue was looming over her or that he’d knelt. When his breath touched the side of her arm, she flinched, because that’s what she did. Her reflexes didn’t work the way they were supposed to and hadn’t for a long time. Maybe they’d never been quite right, and her torturers had only magnified what was already wrong with her.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s all right. There’s no one in there. I’ll check the other rooms to be sure, but I’ll be surprised if I find anyone. I don’t smell any unaccounted for visitors and can’t hear anyone moving but you, me, and the squirrels on the roof.” One of those sonorous cello chuckles resonated in his chest. “You need to trim back that damned tree, by the way.”

She rocked, back and forth. Back and forth.

“Willa.”

What does Apollo want now?

“Willa.”

He can’t just . . . show up here. This is my place. My home.

Why didn’t he bother one of her brothers instead? He’d always liked them more. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the god’s rear end wasn’t shining from all the kissing up they did.

“Okay, then.” Blue shifted his weight. Swallowed loudly. “I guess I’ll just finish looking in these back rooms and then get you something to drink. Stay put.”

She didn’t give him a response one way or another, but he left anyway.

That was what she’d wanted, but it didn’t make her feel any better. If anything, standing alone again made everything seem suddenly worse.

She only ever knew peace when she was on the oblivious cusp between wakefulness and dreaming, or when she was too busy to think.

She needed to get up and do something so she didn’t think.

She just had to talk herself into it first.