Broken God (17 page)

Her eyes are wide and terrified and I know now,
what she Saw.

I turn to look at Delphi’s brothers and make a
silent promise.

My girl will never face this again. Never look at
her family, the ones she loved, and See their future.

“Don’t run,” I mutter, tugging Del closer, and she
laughs, a low moan into my chest. I press a kiss against her hair.

“What?” Dealph demands, his eyes furious and I
flash a smile, deadly and insane, and repeat myself.

“Don’t. Run.”

One will. I don’t need to ask. I stretch my power,
let it brush against Del, just softly, and it’s there. A death in the dark, and
my sister, gilded in silver and crimson blood, stalking through the moonlit
forest.

 
A dashing
body, gold tipped wings and my sister’s screams.

I huff a sigh, and lean down. Tilt Del up to kiss
me. “Stay here, sweetheart,” I whisper, and I hear her brothers shouting, so
very distant.

She nods. I whisper against her lips, a breathless
apology and she shudders, nodding against me. Feel her tears on my palms. I
take the heartbeat to wipe them away and wait for a weak—gods, so weak—smile
twist up her lips and then I’m gone. Yanked away by the furious brothers who
should never have come here. She makes a noise, choked and I see red when I see
the younger brother—what is his name—holding her, restraining her.

Power flares from me, a hot wave of fury and
blinding sunlight and plague, twisting on a note of music that screams into my
sister’s hunting dirge, and the world shatters into primal force.

Running. We’re all running. I can hear Del’s
screams, the grief that rises like a ghostly song and it speeds me on my way,
her brothers chasing, and the howling of my sister’s hounds behind us.

Faster, cousin.

Thunder cracks and lightening doesn’t follow, and I
know he’s close.

Rain and rain and screaming and rage, and I feel so
very alive.

Don’t run. Don’t run.

I still, on a wide open cliff, and they’re upon me,
slamming into me, all the rage of a mortal man, and I want to laugh as they
tear at me, want to tell them it will never touch me.

Only one mortal can touch me, and she is weeping in
a cave miles behind us.

I laugh, wild and crazy and taste blood and mud and
rain when Dealph kicks me, spinning me through the mud and then.

Hermes!

I scream my cousin’s name, but it’s too late.

She comes from the rain like a nightmare brought to
life, silver touched and fierce, a bloody smile on her lips and rage in her
eyes. A primal goddess demanding her due. For a moment, as the human men lean
over me, and the rain falls, and I am suspended between them and my sister, I
know.

This is everything we will ever be.

This is everything we were meant to be.

She smiles and I greet her, and the ground trembles
under the force of my voice. “Hail, Artemis, goddess of hunt. Well met,
sister.”

She flashes a mad smile, and there is no reason in
her eyes.

Her fingers snap as the wind screams, and she is
screaming rage as her hounds tear Dealph to pieces, and Hermes steals Delphi’s
only living brother.

And far away, she is shaking and screaming grief.

Chapter19.

Heath stops in the doorway.

“You need to not ask. She’ll tell you what she can,” I say,
moving away from him to lean against the wall by the sun chair.

Del curls in Iris’ lap and glares at Heath. She’s on edge,
picking up on the tension in the room, and in Iris.

And it occurs to me, for the first time. Del isn’t mine.
She’s very much Iris’s cat and I am merely the god who found her and brought
her to her mistress.

The cat twists her head and blinks at me, narrow-eyed
acknowledgement of my realization, and then it’s refocusing on Iris and Heath.

“What the fuck, Iris?” he breathes, and Iris laughs, this
high- pitched, crazy thing.

And then she tells him.

Everything.

Heath waits until she’s drifting off, Del pressed against
her side, to even look at me.

“She’s insane.”

“She is,” I agree, calmly. “It doesn’t mean she’s wrong or
lying to you about anything she said.”

“C’mon, dude. You aren’t fucking Apollo.”

I lift an eyebrow. “What do you know about the Greek
pantheon?”

He blinks at me and I wait, patiently. I can outwait this
boy on my worst day, and today is far from that. My Oracle wants him to know
what we are. It matters to her, and I will always give my Oracle what is within
my power to give.

“Um. Zeus. They fucked around in the Trojan War. Lots of
fucking and killing. Hades killed folks.”

“Hades doesn’t kill anyone,” I say, grumpily. “He merely
presides over the realm of the dead.”

 
“Hades isn’t real,”
Heath says, slowly.

“What do you know about the twins?”

“Not much,” he admits, looking faintly embarrassed. Good. He
should be. We’re the fucking Moon and Sun. Not knowing about us is just insulting.

“Artemis is the goddess of the moon and the hunt, of hearth
and childbirth. She’s the eternal virgin and lives in the forests, with her
hounds and stag.”

“She sounds…nice?”

I laugh. Nice. My sister is a vicious bitch. But then, she’s
a goddess. That comes with the territory.

“Her brother is the god of the sun. Of healing and song. He
can create plague as easily as he can heal cancer. He’s a slut to his sister’s
virginal purity. And he’s the god of prophecy.” I glance at Heath, whose
staring at me, looking spooked. “The twins are actually rather powerful, within
the pantheon. Two sides of the same coin, they stand just below Zeus and his
brothers.” I grin, a quick fleeting thing. “That always pissed Hera off to no
end.”

“Healing,” Heath whispers harshly, and his hands are
shaking. “You can…”

I sober. Nod once. “I didn’t do it intentionally. Any of
this.”

“If,” he says, and his voice shakes, a trembling thing. “
If
you are a
god, how do you accidentally heal someone you’ve never met? How do you do
that
to my
sister?”

“I wanted to make her smile. She was crying, and I wanted to
make her smile,” I say. “My power was…is…touchy.”

He eyes me and then, “I don’t think I want to know.”

I hum an agreement.

“Why is she so…different?”

“Because she has my power living within her. She Sees the
future, and every possible future. It’s…overwhelming.”

He watches her for a long time and then, “I don’t know that
I believe you.”

“You don’t have to,” I say, softly. “But she needs you to
support her.”

His face is troubled, but he nods. “What do I do?”

When I shut the door behind Heath, the sun was setting. My
phone buzzed in my pocket and I glanced down at it.

I wasn’t surprised to see my sister’s name blinking up at
me, and a few texts from Hermes. It had been almost a week since I made an
appearance at new Olympus.

It was difficult for me to be there. The family was like a
skin that didn’t fit quite right, something too tight and constricting, and no
matter how much I twisted in it, I couldn’t get it to be comfortable.

It wasn’t that they had changed. They were my family. Bright
and beautiful and decadent and devious and ever unchanging.

The problem wasn’t that the pantheon hadn’t changed.

It was that I had.

I didn’t fit there, and that stung. It made it hard, almost
impossible, to be with them.

“Thank you,” Iris whispers, stretching in the sun chair.

I drop to my knees by her, and she makes a low noise in her
throat as I press against her knees, her hand coming up to tangle in my hair.
“You don’t have to thank me.”

“You helped. You didn’t think I should tell him, and you
still helped me.”

I shrug against her knee, jostling her just a little. “It’s
what you wanted, sweetheart.”

“Will you take me out?” she murmurs, and I roll my head up
to look at her. There’s a faint red line on her cheeks and across her nose, and
it makes me smile, a little.

She looks young and innocent, impossibly so, and I nod
again, “Of course, Iris.”

Her smile is bright, and blinding. It’s a smile that is
familiar and painful, and strange and new, and it tugs at me.

Falling in love is a slow slide, but it’s a steady thing.

We go to a concert hall.

Not the wild concerts in the open arenas or on the beach, or
even the indie rock concerts in underground bars and clubs. They thrum across
the city like beacons and I feel them tugging at me, a slow pulse.

And none are places I can take her, not with the press of
people and the wild tangle of visions.

She dresses in a jade green sheath that does very little to
hide her slight frame and sweet curves that are familiar to me, now. Her hair
is tugged up in that maddening braided twist that itches for my fingers.

But when she reaches up to bind her eyes. That’s when I stop
her.

“Trust me?” I murmur.

And her pale eyes find mine, and they’re searching. Open
wide and searching, and I want her to trust me.

We’re doing this dance. This maddening dance, where she will
trust me and then jerk away, spooked, and I am left holding nothing, waiting
desperately for her to come back to me.

She’s grinning at me, as I lead her from my apartment.

Our apartment. Somehow it’s become hers as much as mine, and
I smile at that bit of truth. I like her being in my space, sharing it with me.
I like that she’s comfortable here, and that I know I will find her in my sun
chair when I return, my kitten curled in her lap.

Iris eyes me with the curious distance that is so often her
way of dealing with me, but it’s soft. Softer than normal.

And that makes something like hope stir in my gut.

I hadn’t lied, when I told her that I didn’t love her.

But if I were to say it today, nearly two months after she
took my power and became my Oracle.

It would be a lie, or close to one.

A slow smile curls her lips, knowing and cocky, and she
tucks a hand in the curve of my arm.

“C’mon, Apollo. Show a girl a good time.”

Her eyes go wide at the concert hall. Wide and almost reverent
and she breathes my name like a prayer, and desire skitters up my spine.

This, in retrospect, may not have been the best idea I’ve
had in my very long life. I smile at her as I lead her away from the stately
crowds of well-dressed and wealthy, up into a corner box that almost hangs over
the wide stage, and offers us privacy. Here, she can listen to the music and
not be in the midst of all the shining threads of Vision.

Her eyes are soft and warm when she smiles at me, and then
the musicians are playing, and for a moment, I forget even Iris.

Music is my favorite form of worship. More even than the Sun
that channels my power and the visions that race along my skin and fill up my
Oracle, music feeds me.

It soothes me.

To hear them now, playing with utter precision and skill,
rips me away from this little booth with Iris and into a world of worship.

I let my power thread out, let it curl around the orchestra,
and swell, rising with their playing, twisting around them and making them
better
and
drinking it back in, a symbiotic loop that left me gasping next to her.

And she let me.

I could feel her watching, her pale eyes curious, but she
didn’t push. She didn’t tug me back to her side when I leaned forward, my arms
pillowed on the half rail and my chin tucked into them, eyes wide and watching,
as the music swung and swirled around us.

She didn’t demand anything, but she touched me, once, a hand
on my back, her fingers warm through the linen of my shirt, and comforting.

Iris is a mystery, at the best of times. And tonight she is
even more so. She’s silent as we return to the apartment, and I can feel need
humming along my skin like power brought to life. I want to pull her into my
arms and my bed, and she’s distant. Skirting around me as she scoots into the
bathroom and emerges a few minutes later in loose sleep pants she stole from my
dresser and a red plaid shirt unbuttoned over a tank top. It’s vaguely
ridiculous that she can look so fucking gorgeous in such casual clothing. It’s
frumpy at best, and yet Iris tugs at that fucking twisted braid and it all
comes cascading down, and she’s not just gorgeous. She’s breathtaking.

And she still won’t look at me.

She does this sometimes. A silent demand for space as she
withdraws, sliding into pensive with the ease of blinking. It was fascinating
and frustrating by turns and right now, it was frustrating.

Del and I had always been tactile. She liked to be touched,
to be petted and have me ground her visions and power in my own. And I liked to
touch her.

Symbiotic. We were always symbiotic.

But Iris doesn’t want that and I murmur a low goodnight
before I retreat to my bedroom, leaving her in the living room.

I twist in the darkness, anxious, watching the moon move
silver across my floor until I finally drift off to a fitful sleep. And wake to
warmth and movement. Iris is moving against my sheets, shifting closer. She
stares at me for a moment, her eyes shining in the light of my sister’s moon,
and then she kisses me. And I come to life under it, my hands digging into her
hair as her teeth nip at my lip and her tongue fucks into my mouth in a kiss so
filthy and desperate it shakes me.

I am a god, and a slut, and I am shaken by this girl and her
desperate kisses.

The world doesn’t make sense anymore.

Maybe it never really did, and I was merely lying to myself.

She shifts against me, pushing up so that she’s straddling
my hips, her nails digging into my skin, thumb brushing over the open eye
tattooed on my chest, as she sinks down on my cock, and she gasps, this broken
noise that hits me hard, and I tug at her gently. She sobs and rocks against
me, and I can’t see her, in the darkness.

The moon is hiding, giving me this moment of solitude and
privacy.

When Iris comes, it’s with a gasp, and my name spilling
broken from her and it drags my own orgasm from me, a rush of power and
pleasure and I squeeze her hips, until she whimpers and shifts, my cock
softening in her.

She curls against me in the dark, and I don’t ask any of the
questions that are twisting in me, begging to be asked. Instead I press a quick
kiss to her hair and tug her close. Pull the blanket over us and let sleep
claim us both.

But I hear her whisper, when she thinks I am sleeping.