Broken God (2 page)

But some of us couldn’t. Some of us were too tied to the world,
too wrapped up in the power that kept us alive

Hades with his legion of dead.

Poseidon with his tides.

Me, with the sun and Artemis with the moon.

Zeus, lord of all of us.

I played the lyre that my cousin gave me so many years ago that
I’ve forgotten most of them.

I’ve forgotten so much.

I am the god of prophecy and I give it to my girls.

To a girl named Del, and all of the girls who wear different
faces and always the same name. I don’t remember how many danced to my tune and
how many writhed screaming under the grip of the future, a curse that they
willingly took from me.

How many girls did I kill with my
gift?

“Brother.”

Her voice is as steady and cool as the breeze at night, and I
turn, leaning into her palm as she pushes the hair out of my eyes. Her fingers
feather through my hair and I sigh. Press a chaste kiss to her wrist and
straighten. Push back the madness.

“Sister,” I murmur and she kisses my hair. Whispers the question
directly into my ear, soft enough that none of our family hears it.
Are you sane?

I swallow my laughter and my madness and nod against her
shoulder. Straighten and look at the family.

Zeus and Hera sit near each other, her a few feet away and
behind.

She’s been pissed about
that
since before I was born.

Father is wearing the visage of a middle
-
aged
man these days. Dark hair threaded through with silver, a bushy beard, and the
pallor of a wealthy man who spends his days indoors.

Directly across from him sits Hades. My uncle looks as he has
ever looked. Tall, with broad shoulders and long black hair that is swept back
in messy waves. It’s the only thing messy about him. He’s dressed in a long
black tunic and cloak, barefoot. A silver chain hangs around his throat.
Everything else in Olympus can change, but Hades never will. He nods at me as
Artemis steers me into my seat, and takes her place at my side. I feel better
with her there, more settled.

Sane, almost.

I giggle, quiet and under my breath, and she tenses, minutely,
and passes me my lyre.

I take it without really making the decision to, and let my
fingers play over it as I drift on the current of song and knowledge.

Poseidon arrives with the crash of waves and the scent of salt
and sea. I smile into my lap, hiding it behind my hair.

Father and Uncle Poseidon are fighting before he even reaches
his seat. Athena is trying to mediate, but she’s just pissing off Poseidon and
then
Hera gets involved and I lean over, resting my head on Artemis’ shoulder.

“Typical family dinner, huh, sis?”

She shakes her shoulder a little, dislodging me and gives me a
look of faint disapproval. I shrug and press another kiss to her shoulder
before I straighten. Flick my hair out of my eyes.

The family ignores us. They’ve taken to doing that since I went
quietly crazy a few centuries ago.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling a little bit saner than I am now, I
feel bad. Artie deserves more than taking care of me. She almost stabbed me
last time I told her that, though, so I’ve kept it to myself since then.

My sister has a fucking temper.

“Know what this is about, cousin?”

I glance at Hermes as he settles himself at our feet. He leans
his head against Artemis’s knee and grins up at me.

The others in the family like to dance around the fact that I am
an oracle again. It’s been the elephant in the room on Olympus since Del died.

Hermes doesn’t give a fuck.

He never has.

I close my eyes and Artemis grips my arm, her touch worried. “
Apollo, don’t,”
she almost hisses.

Too late. I lean into the vision, into the twist of the future
and images that shatter and scatter even as they brush against me. Distantly, I
can feel my sister’s hands, holding me up and the way Hermes is leaping away
from me, chattering loud and bright and drawing the family’s eyes.

I am the dirty secret that we are all keeping.

The Mad God.

The words spill like a bitter
,
bitter pill, sharp and stabbing, glittering shards of the
future spun in a thousand ways and slicing through me until I’m gasping.

If Artemis wasn’t holding me still, I would be twitching and
shaking.

Then, it slams into me.

The truth of this.

Of why we are here, and grief follows, so quickly it yanks me
out of the stream of the future and I keen, a low pitched pained noise that
silences the family.

“Apollo,” Artemis gasps and I curl inward.

Away from her.

Away from them all.

Tears fall, and the sun in her place shudders. My power is
slamming through me, through Olympus and creation like a fucking storm, and I
need to get a damn grip before I tear it all down.

Zeus shouts something, and that—

His voice like a roll of thunder—

Jerks me hard.

I snap upright. My power still raging. At my side
,
Artie makes a low gasp and Hermes whistles.

I straighten slowly and smile, a lethal thing as I stare at
Father. At my uncles and the family that is fighting.

Fuck.

We’ve been fighting for eons now.

Maybe if we had fucking stopped, this wouldn’t be happening.

Too late.

Too damn late for every single goddamned what if.

“You’re leaving,” I whisper into the silence. “You’re all
leaving Olympus.”

The words fall into the still silence. It is rare that I can
shock the gods, but it seems
this
has.

I smile at him. At my father who is staring at me with furious
eyes. I am sane enough, now, to see the rest.

He’s tired.

Gods, he is tired. We all are.

I smile at him, then.
Goodbye, Father
.

A hundred years and more have passed since I sat across from Del
and she whispered the future. A hundred years and more that I have lingered in
insanity and waited.

I knew it was coming.

But it still hurts, when I break my bond to Olympus and plunge
to the mortal world.

Chapter 3

I stand on a street, in a city of ocean and
air and mist.

Father used to call
places like this the in-between.

It’s one of those
strange places where my father and his brothers could stand as equals. I always
found it odd that it was left alone. That they didn’t come here. But I learned
not to question my good fortune, and I settled here, and I was happy.

Artemis said they’d
come, eventually.

And there was the
prophecy circling in my head.

I blink, and I’m
standing outside a tiny temple a thousand years ago.

I can feel the wind
and hear the girls singing my
paeans
.

I blink, and I’m
back in Seattle, and my uncle is watching me.

For several long
heartbeats, I consider bolting.

Wouldn’t be the
first time I did. I dodged Hermes for almost twenty years before he got bored
and quit chasing me.

Hermes isn’t quite
the level of power I’m facing now, so I huff out a sigh and cross the street to
stand in front of my uncle.

Like a fucking
child.

Gods, this sucks.

“Uncle,” I say,
inclining my head.

“It’s been a while
since we’ve seen you, nephew.”

I shrug, not
bothering to deny it.

What, after all, is
there to deny? I fled. I broke my own laws, went insane and fled Olympus.

Doesn’t matter that
the other gods followed less than a century later, and scattered around the
globe, finding power and their own faithful where they could. Doesn’t matter
because I left before Father and his brothers could do it first.

I left and I took
Artemis with me.

“Why are you here?”
I ask, picking at my nail. The polish on my thumb is chipping, and I scratch at
it absently. Watch him from the corner of my eye.

My uncle is,
strangely, unchanged. He looks the same as he did the last time I saw him, in
the Hall of Olympus, while my family screamed and fought.

His eyes, maybe,
are a little bit more tired than they were, then.

Poseidon has always
favored the guise of a middle
-
aged fisherman, with the weathered
,
craggy skin of a
man who spends his time on the wind
-
tossed waves, with long
,
black hair
streaked with gray that tangles in his face, and sharp eyes the color of the
waves where the water gets deep and dark—the dangerous part of the ocean where
Poseidon and his daughters have always lived.

Vaguely, I wonder
what happened to Atlantis and my cousins. If they are still alive below the
waves.

“This is a port
city. My ocean feeds it. I’m more welcome here than you,” he says easily, his
smile tight.

Poseidon is a
territorial bastard. Probably because Father fucked him over when he took the
crown of Olympus.

I thumb over my
cards, and tilt my head back.

Music swells and
the clouds shift, and I stand for a shining heartbeat in a sunbeam, my hair
alight with it, and the music of the city thrumming through my veins, and I
laugh at the sheer ecstasy of it. Poseidon huffs a little, and I grin as I
blink at him. When the power thrums through me this strong, I can almost
convince myself I’m not insane. That the burden of prophecy hasn’t driven me
completely batshit over the years.

I grin at him. “I’m
perfectly at ease with my power here, Uncle.”

“You’re still a
fucking showoff, you know that?”

I smirk, because
duh. I’m a fucking god, for fuck’s sake.

“Your father would
like to see you.”

“Would he?” I ask,
lazily. I pull the cards from my pocket, and shuffle them, spinning one over my
fingers as Poseidon shifts on the busy sidewalk. “How is Zeus? Still kicking
it? Not many pray to the god of thunder these days.”

Poseidon’s lips
tighten. I’ve pissed him off.

Not terribly
surprising. I’ve always been good at pissing off the relatives. Got even better
at it when I went crazy.

“We need you,”
Poseidon says instead of addressing my question.

A familiar voice,
one that has echoed in my head for longer than my madness echoes now. I cackle
as it does, and it
almost
drowns her
out.

You will be their ruin and salvation, and it will be your end.

I shiver and shake
and the cards feel loose and precarious in my hands.

I feel like I am
one stiff wind away from blowing to pieces, and I won’t do that. Not here. Not
in front of my stern
-
eyed
uncle and his constant hope that I will falter.

I smile at him, and
it’s a mad hatter grin, before I turn on my heel.

Poseidon shouts my
name, and it sounds like the roar of the wind and the crash of the waves,
beating futile against the shore, as I leave him behind.

I wasn’t lying. I
love Seattle because it feels like
mine.
So,
teetering on the edge of madness, with the burn of prophecy on my tongue, I
take to the streets, and wander.

Artemis says that
it’s because she is the goddess of the hunt, and I am the god of the sun, and
both are prone to wander, that we like to move around so much. I shrug and let
her spin her theories. My sister is very good at filling up the empty spaces
with emptier words. I’ve learned over the years to let the her and to ignore
the words she spins like silver moonbeams.

She isn’t Hermes,
with
his
fucking gilded
tongue
,
who could talk his
way into or out of anything. But she is a goddess, and sister or no, they’ve
always been tricky bitches.

Still.
 
It’s been almost a year since my sister came
to visit me, and I miss her.

It’ll be good to
see her.

Later.

For now, I tuck my
cards back into my pocket and lean my head back, letting the scent of fish and
coffee and the icy wind off the ocean wash over me.

I smile, a little
drunk on the scents of everything, and turn toward the heart of the city.

The thing I love
about Seattle is that it takes itself too damn seriously.

The coffee. The
startups. The hipster poets who glare from behind their wide
-
framed glasses.
Even the fisherman on the wharves.

Everyone here takes
themselves so fucking serious it’s almost funny. I grin into my scarf, and tug
my beanie down over my ears, and walk, letting all of the beauty of this crazy
,
fucking city wash
over me as I walk.

And if music and
poetry seems to flourish in my wake—well
,
I can’t do anything about that. Except
hide my smirk and whistle a little as I let the city I call home worship at my
feet.

It’s late that
evening, when I finally stumble home. I spent most of the afternoon slipping
from one coffee shop to the next, listening to the thoughts of the humans
there.
 
Listening to the poetry and the
thrum of power it shook loose in my chest.

And to the voice
whispering all of the futures for me, until I squeezed my eyes closed against the
icepick intrusion and shoved a padded headset over my ears, and turned up the
little iPod I never went anywhere without.

It’s a far cry from
my lyre, but it does the job, when I need it to.

It sends me
spiraling into the oblivion that I need.

Music keeps the
voices from being overwhelming and I drink it down like it’s worship.

I am the god of the
sun, which I am most remembered for. And the god of prophecy. My girls at
Delphi earned quite a reputation. What people often forget is I am the god of
plague and poem and song, of healing.

I could lose myself
there. In the hospitals. But.

My power has been dicey
since I went off the deep end of sanity a few centuries ago. I prefer to not
trigger a pandemic, so I avoid the hospitals, and only toy with the dying that
Artie brings me when I hunt at her side.

It’s enough, to
sate the hungry thrum for more that side of my power evokes.

But not enough to
do real damage.

I almost expect my
sister to be in my little apartment when I shove the door open, but it’s quiet
and empty. Artemis is taking her time then. Or maybe I didn’t spiral as
completely out of control as I
first
thought, when I was lost in prophecy and
raving.

I frown into the
darkness, but I’m too tired, and my thoughts are spinning too quickly for me
think about Artie and why she isn’t here.

So I ignore her
absence, strip out of my clothes and fall into bed.

I’m asleep before I
hit the pillow.

I wake to the scent
of death and windblown mountains and icy heat against my back. I roll in bed
and look at my sister, sitting cross-legged next to me, her back against my
headboard.

Artemis has
changed. Last time I saw her, she had long black hair and a loose flowing top
that reminded me of the seventies and the hippies who drew me with achingly
beautiful song.

Now though.

I grin up at her.
“You look good, sis.”

She smiles at me,
her eyes shining in the moonlight that seems stronger with her at my side. “You
look like shit.”

I laugh and lean
against her leather clad leg.

She’s dressed in
black leather, her hair shining silver, cut brutally short and spiky. Silver
hoops dangle from her ears, and a beaten collar wraps around her throat.

I sigh as her
fingers thread through my hair, and murmur into her leg. “I’ve missed you,
Artie.”

She hums a soft
acknowledgement, and I don’t need her to respond.
Don’t
need to hear her
tell me that she’s missed me too. I know.

I let her fingers
play through my hair as the tension that’s been keeping me wound tight
unspools. Until I fall asleep like that.

The first thing I can remember is a quicksilver smile and sharp
teeth.

For a god who has lived for millennia, it is easy to forget
things. It’s expected, even. But I’ve never forgotten that.

I’ve never forgotten that before I knew the heat of the sun or
the rhythm of the lyre or the whisper of poetry, I knew the flash of white
teeth and silver eyes and my sister’s heartbeat, a steady pulse echoing behind
mine.

Olympus was full of gods and goddesses. Some with little power.
Some who were strong enough, almost, to challenge even Father and his brothers.
But there were none quite like me and Artemis.

We were twins, and we needed each other. I was the Sun God; she
was the Goddess of Moon.

We had other aspects, of course. The hunt and childbirth and
chastity. Music and healing and prophecy. But the true strength of our powers
came from the sun and the moon, and in that, we would always mirror each other.
Always need each other.

Always clash, and fall apart and come back together.

We weren’t so different from my father and his
brothers
,
except that we did love each other, which I can’t say with any certainty that
they ever did.

I remember Mother, too.

I remember our drifting island and that we were happy there.
Even then, Artemis was temperamental, her moods waxing and waning with the
moon, and I was, in Mother’s words, as bright as light.

I learned to hunt there, with my sister.

I learned to heal, after she shot a stag and I found it first,
bellowing for breath and dying. I tugged the arrow from its side and whispered
softly to it until power spilled like sunlight from me and the stag snorted and
bolted away from me.

Artemis found me, there, on my knees, with blood on my hands and
she knew I had stolen her prize. She was furious, had raged for days until
Mother quietly calmed her and explained that I was her opposite.

She would kill.

I would heal.

That was our eternal dance.

When Mother finally grew tired of Hera’s weak attempts to kill
her, she sent us to Father and left.

We never saw her after that.

Sometimes I hated her for that. For leaving us to Hera’s fury
and Olympus’ machinations.

But even then, we were more powerful than Leto and we were happy
with each other.

So when we found ourselves in Olympus, being watched by the
other gods.