Broken God (14 page)

Chapter
16.

My uncle scares the
shit out of me.

He always has.

Father is flashy,
all brute power and lazy skill, nothing to be impressed with. Poseidon is fury
and crashing waves, but my sister pulls the tides, and I am
the sun,
untouched by his
raging storms.

But Hades.

Hades is the end of
all of us. Even the gods will die, and go to Elysium, and Hades will rule over
us.

It’s a bitter pill
to swallow, and it’s made the pantheon nervous around him.

Sometimes I wonder
how lonely it is, to be the god of the underworld.

I think that’s why
he chose Hermes, to teach. Because even an undying, unchanging god gets lonely,
and Persephone
spends
as much time away from him as she
does
with him. There
is
a dysfunctional
marriage if ever I saw one. But it worked for them, for whatever reason. Even
now, my uncle loved Persephone to distraction, and she adored him, even if she
does
desert him for six
months to sit at her mother’s side.

But Hermes. Hermes
was an eternal child, prone to stealing and running from trouble and playing
small useless jokes. He was the opposite of Hades.

He was
laughter where Hades was serious, fast where my uncle was slow, thoughtless
where the Underlord was deliberate.

He was
calm when Hades was fury. Peace when Hades wanted war.
 

When
Hades first picked
Hermes
to sit as his apprentice, I think the entire pantheon was
surprised. We all knew how flighty
and unpredictable
the messenger god was.

But he
proved us wrong, and Hades still gives us a smug smile, when the flash of
Hermes'
serious side peeks
through, and silences all of us.

I am
absurdly proud of my cousin.

It
doesn't hurt that Hermes is loyal to me and Artemis, for his own
reasons
that he's never bother to explain. I quit
asking. It's enough to know that his loyalty is complete, and it extends, in
some part,
to
Hades.

Hermes
is the apprentice, but he is still a god, and he will not permit Hades to move
against us. So when we pull up to new Olympus, it makes perfect sense to go to
him. That we would reach out to the strongest and appeal to him for aide.

We send
Hermes, first, because Hades has few sentimentalities, and they seem to be
limited to Persephone and Hermes.

And his
fucking dog, but we don't talk about that because no one should coo over a
bloody
,
fucking MONSTER.

The
house is changing, still adapting to fit our needs and our moods. As I wander
down the hall to Artie's bedroom, I take note of the gilded columns, the wide
marble hall and the girl strumming a fucking harp in the corner.

"Gods,
tell me that wasn't Aphrodite."

Artemis
rolls her eyes and shrugs. "She likes the adoration."

I groan
and drop my head back. "She's a fucking diva," I snap. My half-sister
won't like it, but I don't like playing bitch boy to her when she decides her
pet of the week needs to be pampered. That had happened enough in
the past
to last a lifetime.

I slide
into the bedroom Artie claimed and smiled. She hadn't removed my touches, not
yet. The forest still allowed the sun to seep through and the smell of summer
was almost as heady as the scent of dead
things
decaying underfoot.

For a
moment, standing here, with Artie watching me with a half-smile and a hungry
gleam to her eyes, I forget we are in a home where
our
family is a few
feet away and I am recovering from years of regret.

For a
moment, it feels like we are children on an island, and innocent. Gods in our
mountain, and powerful. Everything we have not been for a thousand years.

I feel
like myself, and with that, it is so easy to fall into step with her.

She’s worried,
still, but I think she will always worry about me. It’s her nature, to care for
me. We decided, a long time ago that we wouldn’t kill each other, and even when
we fight, we care.

It makes us
different from the others, and that difference is what makes Hermes like us.

And, gods willing,
Hades.

He's always been
fonder of family than any of the others, and we're hoping it holds true now as
well.

We wait for an
hour, my raven shifting impatiently on my arm, and Artie sitting like a folded
pretzel, her eyes closed as she meditates. Here's what they forget to mention, when
they talk about gods and shit. When they talk about immortality and how we live
forever, they forget to mention the endless march of time and the lack of
things to fill it.

There are only
so many times you can read your way through the greats of literature, only so
many languages to learn, and instruments to learn.

I hate
inactivity. It always
lets
my thoughts
wander too much, and now isn't the time to think too loudly.

So it's a relief
when Hermes taps on the door and shoves it open. I open my mouth to greet him,
and Hades steps into the room behind him, a wave of darkness wrapped in robes
and wearing a bland expression. His gaze flickers over both of us, my sister
and myself, and then he huffs.

"Hermes
thinks there is something I should hear, from you."

"Uncle,"
Artemis says, her voice surprisingly steady.

My sister is a
goddess of Death, in her way. It makes sense that she wouldn't feel
uncomfortable around the god of the underworld.

Me. I hate the
fear curdling in my gut, twisting through me like a hot wave.

"Why don't
you tell me what the hell I should know, and why I shouldn't drag you in front
of your father, nephew," Hades says, looking at me.

But for all that
his words are cold and demanding, his tone is warm and almost inviting. Like he
wants to know and is curious about me.

That rubs my
nerves smooth.

"You've
heard the prophecy
?"
I ask, quietly.

Verifying something
I already know. Every single member of the pantheon has heard the prophecy.
Even if I wanted to keep it to myself, it was about all of us, and it spread,
from Artie and Hermes to the entire fucking family.

Hades inclines
his head, just a little. Acknowledging my words.

"It's
coming to pass," I say, simply.

I’ve never been good at avoiding her. I like her too much,
like her bright smile and the way her mind jumps so quickly and unexpectedly.
It’s hard for me to stay angry when all I really want is to curl up in her arms
and the soft spun sheets of her bed and let the rest of the world fall away.

The pantheon is fighting, Aphrodite and Ares pitched against
Artemis and Athena, and I am hiding from them—both of my sisters—in a dirty
brothel, where the girls are eager and the boys are comfortable on their knees.
And the wine is surprisingly good.

I spend two weeks there, drunk and avoiding my sisters,
watching Hermes fuck his way through the brothel, and venturing out with him to
pickpocket the masses.

Bastard is a god, with the wealth of Olympus at his
fingertips, but he steals.

He’s always preferred to steal.

Ah, well. We all have our vices and powers.

But after two weeks of nothing but debauchery, enough that I
am vaguely surprised Dionysus hasn’t ventured down to join us, I come to the realization
that I am bored.

And I miss her.

I miss my Del.

The girl in bed with me with slow smiling eyes and lips that
look fucking amazing around my cock…she’s too shy, too demure, too fucking
worshipful
to be a good substitute. I don’t want worship. I want the
only girl who will tell me no, and laugh while she does it.

I want my Oracle.

It takes another week after that, sulking and stewing in the
realization that I have to go crawling back to her, before Hermes loses his
temper.

Granted, I ruined a robbery, and his favorite whore, a dark
-
eyed boy with nimble fingers, is caught before we make our
escape, so I suppose he has some right to be angry.

If he got one of
my
handmaidens arrested, I’d probably be pissed off too.

“Get the fuck out of Rome and go back to Delphi
,” he
snarls. “Go fix whatever the hell you broke with your Oracle
and leave me to my thieves. Or so help me father, I will call your sister.”

I glared at him. Artemis was in a foul mood with her ongoing feud
and she didn’t want to play mediator between me and Delphi, even when she was
in a good mood.

“I don’t want to,” I say, petulant.

“No, you
do
want to. You don’t want to admit that you were wrong, and you
sure as fuck don’t want to be the one to make the first move, but the options
are limited here, cousin. She can’t leave Delphi. Go. Fix this. Or go annoy
Heph. I don’t care what the hell you do, Apollo, just get the hell out of
Rome.”

Hermes stormed out of the room, shouting for his little
whores, the ones he was forming into a band of thieves, and I was left in
silence and the nagging knowledge that he’s right.

I want to go back home.

I’ve wanted it since I arrived in Rome, and I’m being
stubborn and godly.

I’m fucking acting like Zeus.

That, more than anything else, makes me move.

I am dressed and slipping out the door within the hour, and
even though I am a god, and the god of the sun, I walk. I steal a horse and I
walk when I can’t do that, and I sleep in the ditches alongside the road.
Sometimes a hound paces alongside me, and sometimes a raven sits on the curve
of my horse’s back.

And sometimes I am alone.

But not really. Not ever really.

A god collects companions, even when he seeks solitude.

It takes me two weeks, to make my way from Rome to Delphi, a
sure sign I’m not using my power. Artemis, were she not fighting with
Aphrodite, would mock me for my slow progress. It is a type of penance. I make
no illusions to myself that it is anything less.

When I reach the small city that has sprung up around the
Oracle, I breathe a sigh of relief, and it feels like the city breathes it with
me, a tension I hadn’t realized I was carrying slipping away. I am bearded now,
and dirty from the road, and happy, if tired. I blend, easily, into the crush
of humanity that seems to gather around my girl. It makes me absurdly proud, because
even if she is a manifestation of my own power, people are here for
her
. Because she is a good Oracle. For a half a day, I wander
through the supplicants, and bask in the low level worship and the adoration
they heap on my girl.

Until word comes that the Oracle will see no one else, and
the handmaidens retreat into the temple.

She finds me. Because of course she finds me. She comes
wrapped in rough robes and her hair hanging wild and tangled, nothing like the
effervescent girl with lost and dreamy eyes that so many know as the Oracle.
This girl is cold and imperious and sharp
-
eyed. And relief, relief that seeps from me and her as she
sits herself, messy and graceless, next to me in the dirt. I play my lyre and
she leans against my shoulder and it feels
right
. Comfortable in a way that I haven’t been able to find since
I fled Delphi. “I missed you,” she says, finally, and my eyes squeeze shut. I
press a kiss to the top of her head and she sighs, snuggling closer. Cuddling
without interrupting my playing. She stays like that as the day winds around
us, and the supplicants drift past, giving us a wide berth, and I find my calm.