Memory Game (Hound of Hades Book 2), page 16
I hoped Ellarose didn’t go exploring in the woods one day and run across a sight that would turn her off hiking forever. Then I remembered that wouldn’t be an issue for much longer.
When I got back, Bastian was where I had left him, his face pressed against the crack in the wall. “I half-expected you to go in there and drive off with her while I was gone,” I said.
“I don’t need to. I know you’ll change your mind.”
Remember what I said about his terminal case of idealism?
Through trial and error, we found a way to both look through the crack at the same time. It involved me crouching down on the floor while Bastian stood over me, hunched at an awkward angle, his chin practically resting on my head. His angle wasn’t the only thing about this that was awkward. Imagine needing to cuddle up close to the person you’ve been trying to forget about your unwanted feelings for, while knowing they’re in the exact same position as you, feelings-wise. Now imagine the only thing you want from them physically is a nice relaxing cuddle and maybe a kiss, but you know—no matter what they say to the contrary—that they’ve imagined the two of you in bed together. Probably more than once. Probably right this second. Now imagine you also have to focus on a mission you never wanted in the first place—the same mission he’s trying to stop you from completing—and you need to account for the not-at-all-distant possibility that you might need to turn on him at any time, or vice versa.
I’d probably found myself in a less comfortable situation once or twice in my life, but right now I was finding that hard to believe.
Not only that, I was beginning to wonder if the Mackenzies had moved on since Ellarose had sent the letter. Either that or they never used their kitchen. Even if we had only been here half an hour and not the hundred years it felt like, we still hadn’t seen a flicker of movement, or even a light turning on.
“I need to get closer to the house.” I started to pull back.
Then a woman walked into the room. I couldn’t see much about her from up here, only that she was wearing glasses and an apron and a smile much too carefree for someone who had attracted the attention of the gods. She pulled a stew pot out of a cabinet and began filling it with water, bobbing her head to music I couldn’t hear.
She turned around. A second later, a girl stepped into view. She was taller than Cecily, her hair shorter and fuller, and her clothing was more denim- than rainbow-themed, but she looked just as young, just as harmless. If anything, her face looked less worn and guarded than the other girl’s as she laughed at whatever her mom had said.
I hadn’t expected her to look so young.
She climbed up to sit on the counter, and swung her legs until her mom playfully swatted her with a towel to make her get down. Her mom set a cutting board in front of her, and she started chopping.
Her tawny skin and the bounce of her hair reminded me of Ciara. The way she moved reminded me of a younger Laurie, when she was going through her gawky phase. There was nothing about her that made me think “divine.” Nothing that made me think “dangerous.”
The woman moved aside so the girl could mix the vegetables she had chopped into a bowl. Ellarose was right in front of the window now. With the extra boosts the Guardians had given to my gun when they had crafted it, I could easily make the shot from here. Bastian knew it too—I felt him shift, pretending to stretch his back as he lowered his hand to be level with my head. I knew he could knock someone out instantly with a spark of power. I also knew he could fry my brain with pure magic if he wanted to. I hoped he was only considering the former.
I had told him I would take a look at the girl for myself. But how was I supposed to tell anything about her from here? All I could see was a kid. I couldn’t look inside her to see the danger lurking under her skin.
It would be better for everyone if I just did it now. Before I had a chance to think too much about it.
I had never tested my speed against Bastian’s before. I knew he was strong, but how fast could he move? Could I get the shot off before he dropped me?
I slid my hand down toward my gun. Bastian stopped leaning against the wall to rest his hand on my shoulder. That wasn’t just preparation; that was a warning.
The girl said something with a grin. Her mom laughed.
She was about the same age as I had been when Charlotte had taken me horseback riding. I had a flash of younger me sitting in the mud, face buried in my hands as I cried. If I had been born with divine power, I might have used it then, in a rush of anger and embarrassment. That didn’t mean I would have deserved a bullet to the head.
Yes, and so what? Everyone I had ever killed for Hades—everyone human, at any rate—had been ten years old once. Some of them had laughed at their mom’s jokes, or sat on the counter swinging their legs, or cried in the mud. And none of those people had been lighting other people on fire from the inside at eight years old. It had nothing to do with whether or not Ellarose deserved better than this. It was a matter of whether the world could afford to have her in it.
Her mother pointed at the stove. The girl skimmed her hand along the surface of the burner. Flame burst up to skim the ceiling, and settled down a second later to a steady glow. The girl took a mock bow before placing the pot on the now-lit burner.
There it was—the proof. The stories in West Carson had been true. Ellarose Mackenzie wasn’t an ordinary human.
Behind me, Bastian tensed. He knew I had seen it. He knew what it meant.
I kept lowering my hand, inch by careful inch. Bastian’s hand tightened on my shoulder. I ran through three ways I could put him on the floor and give myself the time I needed, and dismissed them all as too slow.
I should have been unconscious by now. I wasn’t. Why? Did he really think I wasn’t going to do it? Was he going to trust his idealism more than the evidence of his senses?
The girl started to walk away from the window. I needed to act now, or I would lose my chance.
And then, instead of the scene in front of me, I saw Jade sitting across from me in Sacred Grounds. Handing me that damn piece of paper.
If Hades had sent me, the girl would have been dead by now. I wasn’t sure what that said about me, or whether I cared. That was just how it was. As much as I preferred to avoid sticky subjects like worship and devotion and what it meant to serve a god, I trusted Hades, I had chosen to fight for him, and I was willing to sacrifice a lot for him—even, if need be, the parts of my morality that I had once thought were unshakeable. Hell, I had given up a guaranteed place in the swankiest part of the afterlife just to come back and do this for a little while longer. I was Hades’s weapon, his hand in the mortal world, even when that meant crossing lines pre-Marked me had never imagined I would cross.
But I didn’t come back from the dead—twice—so people could offload their dirty work onto me, and keep their precious hands clean and their temples safely irrelevant. I had taken that paper and accepted Jade’s refusal to give me more information. I had tracked down Ellarose and found a plausible reason for Mnemosyne to want her dead. I had tried not to think too hard about the fact that something was clearly going on that I wasn’t privy to. I had let myself be used, because I needed those memories altered, and Lissa needed the information that only Bastian could access.
No more. I was done.
If Hades wanted me to complete this mission, he could tell me himself. Until then, I was making my own decisions. Mnemosyne wanted Ellie Mackenzie dead? She was welcome to try.
With a sigh of resignation, I stood and pulled back from the wall. “In about a week, we’re both going to be dealing with a PR nightmare. And once that documentary comes out, it will only get worse. You should probably start preparing now.”
Bastian dropped his hand from my shoulder. He didn’t say “I told you so.” He was better off for it—if he had, he would have learned something new about Marked reflexes.
“And I expect that information about Osiris.” I tried my best to sound terse and commanding, like I was the one who had won here. I knew I wasn’t fooling anyone.
“You’ll get it,” said Bastian. “I’ll put in a call as soon as I’m sure Ellarose is safe.”
Unbelievable. “You know the shape Lissa is in. Put the call in now.”
“As soon as I’m sure Ellarose is safe,” Bastian repeated. He gave me another one of those apologetic looks that would have been a lot more tolerable if they weren’t sincere. “I’m sorry. You wouldn’t trust yourself either, in my position.”
I could still hear Lissa’s barely-aware voice in my memory. I wanted to argue. I at least wanted to rage against him in my mind. I couldn’t. He had no reason to trust me. If he wanted to be one hundred percent certain Ellie would be safe, the only thing I could do was make that happen.
“I don’t expect you to get me into the temple now, of course.” Bastian sighed. “I should have known this chance was too good to be true. Hearing Mnemosyne’s name made me forget that the price for making deals with gods is always too high.”
I gave him a grim smile. “I’ll get you inside that temple. Don’t worry about that. I have a few questions for Mnemosyne myself.”
I peered through the wall again. Ellie and her mother were dancing together now, holding hands as they jiggled and swayed. Maybe I should have been able to see the demigod there instead of the child. Maybe it shouldn’t have mattered where the mission had come from, or what Mnemosyne and her Marked were keeping from me. Maybe my hesitation would have earned me one of Colin’s lectures and that second year of training he always used to threaten me with.
I wasn’t sure it mattered.
“I’ll get you in,” I repeated. “Right after we save that girl.”
Chapter 19
Whatever she looked like on the outside, Ellarose Mackenzie was half god, and that put her among the top five most dangerous people on the planet. If I gave her a reason to, she could burn me up with a touch. Along with the house, and Bastian’s car, and Hades’s temple, and possibly half of New York City by the time she reached her full strength.
So of course the most logical next step was to walk up and knock on her door.
Bastian stood behind me, red sparks dancing at his fingertips. “You might want to tone that down until you see an actual threat,” I muttered as I waited for the door to open. “We don’t want to scare them off.”
“They’ve both seen more impressive power than mine.” But the sparks faded, although he kept his hands tensed at his sides.
I knocked again. I heard muted voices from inside the house, but the door didn’t open.
Just as I was about to tell Bastian it was for the best, since knocking on a demigod’s door was probably not among the smartest plans in the universe, the door squealed on its rusted hinges. It opened barely far enough for the woman I had seen in the kitchen to peek her head out, her brow a single line of suspicion. “What do you want?”
No stories this time. I had run through a dozen possibilities, and discarded them all. I had given myself a new objective—make sure no harm came to Ellarose unless absolutely necessary. If I was going to protect her, hiding out in the shed wasn’t going to cut it; Bastian and I needed to be by her side. We needed her—and her mother—to trust us, and if she was going to trust us, we had to trust her. And that meant we had to be honest—or at least as honest as possible.
“I’m guessing you’re Julia Mackenzie. It’s nice to meet you.” I gave her a little wave. “We know your daughter is a demigod. I was sent to kill her. I’m not going to do that. We want to protect her against the people who are after her, and we can probably manage that a lot better than you can, so we’d like to sit down and talk with you about what we need to do and how.”
I took a breath and waited for Julia to let us in, or slam yet another door in our faces, or possibly pull a weapon.
Instead she stared at us as if I had told her we had crash-landed our flying saucer in her backyard.
“Excuse me,” she said, as if she wasn’t sure whether to be offended or simply confused, “what did you call my daughter?”
My expression mirrored hers. “Are you telling me you didn’t know?”
“My daughter may be different, but she’s not some… some creature out of mythology.”
“‘Creature’ is a bit harsh. Scary-powerful half-divine being is more like it.”
“But you’re still talking about myths. Stories. My daughter is flesh and blood.”
“So are the gods. At least when they want to be.” Maybe I should start simpler. “The gods are real. So are most things out of mythology. Your daughter can do the things she does because her father was Ra, the Egyptian sun god.” Maybe I just didn’t get it because most things sex-related eluded me, but how on earth did someone get into bed with a god and not know it? Just talking to one for a couple of minutes was enough to make me dizzy.
“Look, I don’t know what kind of crazy religion you come from, or what you want with my daughter, but I was raised in the church.”
One mention of the gods and everyone thinks you’re in a cult. “Yeah, your god exists too.” I left it at that. I didn’t think giving her the full story of her god would help endear her to me. “But so do all the others.”
She started shaking her head, and kept on shaking it until I was afraid I had broken her. “I met Ellie’s father on a business trip. We were staying in the same hotel. He happened to be sitting next to me at the bar, and I liked the look of his eyes. I never saw him again after that—I never tried. I knew I wanted my baby, but I also knew I didn’t want to tie myself to someone I’d only known for a few hours. It’s not the most original story, I know, but it’s mine. No gods, no myths, just a handsome stranger and a few too many glasses of wine.”
“I’m guessing he neglected to mention the whole god thing.” And that “a few too many glasses of wine” had to be a bit of an understatement. It would have taken more like a few too many bottles to get me to overlook the presence of a god. Divine power isn’t exactly subtle.
Julia’s head was still shaking back and forth, back and forth. I was beginning to suspect she had gotten stuck that way. She opened her mouth, and I could tell before she spoke that whatever she said was going to be another denial.
I cut her off before she said anything. “We both know what your daughter is capable of. Do you have a better explanation?”
Finally, her head stopped shaking. “Sure. She’s like Earthheart.”
I blinked. “Who?”
Bastian answered for me. “Earthheart. From the Green Guardians. I read a few of those comics when I was a kid. They were a Superman knockoff with an environmental slant. They never really took off.”
“I always thought their storylines had a lot more depth than Superman,” said Julia. “What about Phasar and the Hurricane bringing down the Crimson Tower? You can’t tell me that didn’t bring tears to your eyes.”
“They had some good writers,” Bastian conceded. “But the characters never had the same staying power. How many times has the Superman character been reimagined? How many people’s imaginations has he fired up enough for them to say, I want to write about that guy? Can you say that for Earthheart?”
I looked from Bastian to Julia and back again. “The point is,” I cut in when it looked like Julia was going to argue, “she’s a demigod, she has a truly frightening amount of power, and if she’s going to survive the next few days, you need to tell us everything there is to know about her.”
Julia still looked skeptical.
I pulled out my gun. Bastian tensed for a second, until he realized what I was doing. I held it out to Julia. “What am I holding in my hand?”
“Is this a trick question? There’s nothing there.”
“Now get your daughter, and ask her what I’m holding.”
“If you think you’ve found some clever way to get your hands on my daughter—”
“Just do it. If you think I’m going to try and run off with her, keep her as far back from the door as you like. But ask her the question.”
Julia hesitated for a second, then turned to yell over her shoulder. “Ellie!”
Ellie appeared almost instantly. I was guessing she had been listening to that entire conversation. Oops. If I had suspected she didn’t know what she was, I probably would have chosen a different way to tell her.
Well, now they both knew what I had to say, whether I liked it or not. Now all I had to do was prove it. “Are you Ellie?” I asked her to be friendly, even though I already knew who she was.
My attempt at friendliness backfired. She instantly took on a suspicious expression that mirrored her mother’s. “I thought you said no one knew we were here,” she said to Julia.
“This woman has a question for you,” Julia said, in the tone adults use when they want to convince kids that some tedious or painful ordeal is actually the most fun they’ll ever have in their lives.
I held out my hand to Ellie. “What am I holding?”
Ellie shrank back. “She’s got a gun, Mom.”
Julia looked at Ellie, and back at me. “I don’t understand.”
“Give me your hand.” After a breath, Julia did. I rested her fingers on top of the gun, letting her feel the solidity of it.
“Only people with some connection to a god can see it,” I explained. “Like me. And your daughter.”
Julia pulled her hand back. “So you figured out how to do some kind of magic trick. Congratulations. That doesn’t prove anything.”
