covencraft 04 - dry spells (23 page)

“You’re mortal. I’m not,” Seth said simply.

“Oh.” Her shoulders sagged. She’d been hoping there was some kind of secret or trick. Her connection to Lily was feeling further and further away every … day? She didn’t know how long they’d been in the Dearth, but each moment, it was harder to sense where Lily was and what she was doing. It was harder to feel what she felt. At this rate, she wasn’t sure what would be left by the time they reached the Gorgon.

“So what is between you and the prissy Englishman?”

Seth’s voice startled her out of her thoughts and her knee-jerk reaction was to tell him to mind his own business, but he
had
just shared. Jade sighed. “Nothing. I don’t now.” She shrugged one shoulder. “He’s my boss.”

“He’s more than that.”

Jade supposed he was, but she didn’t know what. She thought at times she wanted to find out, but then other times it made a sick feeling coil in her stomach and she wanted to hide. “Maybe. It’s complicated.”

Seth laughed and Jade wanted to punch him in the shoulder.

“I’m serious.”

“I’m sure you are. It’s always complicated. Unless it isn’t. And when it’s not…” He sighed again. “Well, sometimes the complications are what make it worthwhile.”

Jade squirmed in her seat a bit. She didn’t want to think about her complications. She went out of her way not to think about her complications. No matter how many times Lily tried to bring it up. And when Lily had been gone… Jade closed her eyes. It shouldn’t matter. It was the past. Why did people have to dredge up the past and ‘deal’ with things? It was over. It wasn’t like she was permanently stuck there. Like she was still there that night. Trapped in an apartment, unable to get away, unable to get out, with his heavy, solid weight.

She opened her eyes and took a deep breath, staring again at the hood ornament. Thinking about things wouldn’t change them, wouldn’t fix them. The past was the past.

Except for how it kept looming over her.

“I don’t see how my complications will make anything worthwhile,” she managed, still working on keeping her breathing slow and steady.

“Maybe you’ve got to resolve them first.”

Jade made a face at Seth. “Thank you, Dr. Freud. But you don’t know jack shit about my complications.”

He was silent for several minutes before he spoke again. “Do you know how the Gorgon got her powers?”

Not understanding his shift in topic, Jade was wary. “Uhhh. I think she was cursed? Or punished. By one of the gods, I can’t remember who.”

Seth made some kind of a face that Jade couldn’t decipher. “Most popular myths tell of Medusa being raped by Poseidon in the temple of Athena. Enraged, Athena turned Medusa into the creature she is today. Hair made of serpents and a face so horrible that those who looked upon it would turn to stone.”

Jade’s stomach clenched at Seth’s words, her mind immediately sticking on the one word in his narrative that was painfully intimate to her, though she never allowed herself to think of it, or even speak it.

“Why would she be punished?” Jade asked, feeling her face grow hot. “She didn’t do anything. She was the victim.”

“Why indeed,” Seth murmured. “That’s not what happened, however. Though it is the tale that made it through history. It gets translated and examined time and time again, but no one every really pauses to think about if it makes sense.”

The drink Jade’d had at the saloon sat heavy and thick in her stomach. She made herself look away from Seth, staring out the passenger window, trying to unfocus her gaze so she wouldn’t see her own reflection looking back at her. “What really happened?”

“In some myths, she was already married and forsook her vows in order to be with Poseidon and that’s what Athena punished. In other myths, she boasted too often regarding her exceptional beauty and dared to call herself more beautiful than the goddess and that’s why she was punished. But the reality is, the gods are not so concerned with human morality nor with petty feelings of envy or jealousy. It was not Athena that was angry, but Medusa. Having been violated by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, she was enraged with Athena. How could she have let this happen? Wasn’t her temple to be a sanctuary? She called down the goddess and demanded justice for what she’d suffered, for her pain and humiliation.”

Jade blinked quickly, her throat burning. She looked to her lap and saw her fingers curled into tight fists. She carefully unwound them, forcing them to lay lax in her lap.

“Medusa,” Seth continued, “commanded Athena to punish her uncle, the sea god Poseidon. Athena could not.”

“Could not or would not?” Jade asked, not really sure she spoke aloud until Seth replied.

“It didn’t matter to Medusa. Athena said there would be no punishment for him. Something about Greek politics and family, blah blah blah. It’s all so complex once you get into that tangled family tree. Inbreeders, the whole lot of them.” Out of the corner of her eye, Jade saw Seth wave his hand carelessly. “Although, I suppose me saying that is the pot and the kettle.”

He seemed lost in his own thoughts for a moment and was silent. Jade needed him to finish his story. She had to know what happened.

“What did Medusa do?”

Her words liberated him from his reverie. He took a deep breath. “If the goddess Athena would not punish Poseidon then Medusa demanded recompense. She would never be a victim again. Athena would turn her into the most feared creature ever. She would be so hideous and powerful that men who dared to look upon her face would be turned to stone.”

“She asked for her powers.” It was unnecessary to say out loud, but the words slipped from her mouth anyway. It hadn’t been a curse Medusa had fallen to: it had been a request fulfilled. A gift.

“She did,” Seth agreed. “And she’s been a Gorgon ever since.”

Jade found some loose cuticle skin with one of her fingers and started worrying and tugging at it, knowing she should leave it alone, knowing she wouldn’t until she’d torn it free and it left a sore, angry wound that would take days to heal. Or maybe since she was in the Dearth, she’d feel nothing - only see the gaping would left behind. If she’d had someone to demand justice of when… when…. She shut her eyes. If there’d been someone to tell, someone to grant her wish afterward, what would she have wished for? Medusa’s wish fit inside Jade’s heart all too easily. She could see herself demanding to become fearsome and horrible. People would describe her as horrifying and dreadful. But those words would travel through the air, into her ear and her brain would hear them turned from ‘horrifying and dreadful’ to ‘safe and protected.’ Her mouth was dry and her hands shook. She took a deep breath, trying to be as silent as she could.

“Has she… do you think… did she ever regret it?” Jade chewed at the inside of her lip and then raised her hand to her mouth, tearing at the loose bit of skin on her finger with her teeth. She’d been right. She did rip off a section, but it didn’t hurt. She looked down at saw the bright reddish pink section. She could imagine how it would burn when she made it home.

“No. No, I don’t think she ever has.”

Jade had learned a lot about reading people’s tones and expressions. She’d had to living with her father. She’d read once that living with an abuser made children hypersensitive to those around them, able to pick up on small cues or inflections of voice.

“Is that why you broke up?” Jade could almost feel the regret and melancholy in his words. The same way the demon language often stung her ears and made her wince, his tone now was heavy, like a lead blanket; the kind they put on you at the dentist, a weight draped across her chest.

“Why don’t you let yourself have feelings for your Englishman?” he countered. His tone wasn’t aggressive, but the change of topic still made her blink in surprise. She couldn’t not answer. Not when he’d just been so open with her.

Jade shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Possum. You’re very good at lying. But you know full well what the answer is.”

Again her mind flashed back to a moment in her past, Lily’s past. Their past. Unable to get out from underneath the heavy weight of a man, feeling shock, surprise and pain. She hadn’t known the body could feel so much and yet seem so far away at the same time. Outrage, humiliation, fear, all heightened by adrenaline coursing through her veins, through their veins - hers and Lily’s. A moment, a lifetime. She and Lily had always had a seamless transition between selves; one was in charge, then the other. But in that moment, both of them jockeying for control, trying their hardest to escape, to fight back and neither one able to do it.

A low level hum engulfed the car, the very frame of the mechanical beast vibrating with it. It ran through her teeth, feeling like she’d just bitten down on tinfoil and couldn’t unclench her jaw.

Seth reached over and pinched her on the elbow; the only tender skin on that bony protrusion snapped between his thumb and forefinger. She automatically tried to pull away and he pinched harder. “Your magic, Possum. Get it back under control. You’re like a comet in the dark desert sky. A beacon. We’ll get swarmed by all sorts of unsavories if you don’t pull it back.”

If she focused on the pain in her elbow, on the small sliver of skin, then she could clear her mind. That pain was easy. It was quantitative. It was only the small spot of her left elbow and it was being pinched. If the pinching stopped, the pain would linger for a moment and then go away. It may bruise, but that too would fade and in a short while she probably wouldn’t remember it at all. A non-event. Jade could feel her magic come back inside her, like a fishing line reel, coiling up tightly again, waiting for the next time it could be free.

“So. Again. Why don’t you let yourself have feelings for your little friend?”

This time she was able to jerk her arm away, but only because Seth had loosened his grip. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

“Don’t I?”

With a sharp jerk of the wheel, the car juddered to the side of the road, the brakes squealing and gravel ricocheting up into the undercarriage. Seth turned, moving like liquid, draping an arm across the seat, his hand right behind her head, one arm braced on the wheel and then he leaned into her space, impossibly close given the distance that should have been between them in the large car.

“I know all about your troubles, little Possum. You may have mortals confused with your blank stares and flat tones, but I’ve been alive for thousands of years and sadly, your story is not so rare and unusual. Indeed, you’ve just learned of another creature who’s suffered similar to you.”

She opened her mouth to protest at the comparison, to argue against what he said he knew. To simply deny, deny, deny whatever she could for however long she could.

“Despite my better judgment, I am sort of fond of you,” he said, his eyes trailing over her. But it was similar to the way people looked at dogs or cats. She got the impression that Seth would be perfectly happy to keep her like a houseplant; silent in the corner, needing some food and water every now and then, but mostly just a thing to pass by and admire. “It really is too bad you’re mortal.”

Jade felt every bit of her mortality at the moment, between the long journey and the saloon, Mnemosyne and now the car ride and Seth dragging up more memories. As each memory was pulled to the front of her mind, it dug its talons into her grey matter, trying to claw its way back into the dark recesses.

“You’re tired. We’ll talk more later. Go to sleep.”

“I’m not tired,” she argued, immediately feeling like a four-year old and wanting to take the words back. “You said in the Dearth there’s no food, no drink, no biological… things.” Fuck, her brain was a mess. “I’m not tired.”

“Human brains are a mishmash of biology, emotions and processes. Your brain isn’t tired. Your mind is.”

Ugh, that kind of made sense and she was angry at him for it. He was right - she was tired. She felt it. Not in her body, but just inside her. Like at any moment something small or inconsequential would happen and she would either burst into tears or start screaming in anger. But sleeping? Next to Seth? She didn’t know if she could do it.

“I’ll wake you when we get closer. Or the sun will wake you when it comes up.”

“When will that be?”

Seth shrugged. “I don’t know. Time isn’t regular here.”

Jade pushed herself deeper into the passenger seat. Seth wouldn’t hurt her. Would he? He needed her. Didn’t he? Or could he get whatever it was from the Gorgon? After all, if Medusa was his ex, then surely he must be able to look at her without turning to stone. And even if it had been a bad breakup, he could probably get what he needed. Would the curse be broken then? Or did it need Jade to complete it? Then again, if he was going to hurt her or kill her, it’s not like she needed to be asleep for that to happen. He was stronger and faster. Seth could kill her at any time. But there was something so vulnerable about being asleep. She crossed her arms over her chest. She wasn’t exactly comfortable, but if she reclined the seat and maybe shifted a bit, she might be able to sleep. But how would that work, exactly if her biological processes were all sort of on hold?

“Fucking Christ, I can feel your brain’s wheels turning. There’s no deeper meaning. There’s no trick. Just go to sleep.” Seth pounded a palm on the steering wheel for emphasis.

Jade reached down to the side of the seat and found the lever, tilting the seat back. “Fine. I’m sleeping.”

“Sleeping witches don’t talk.” He added something under his breath that she didn’t catch, but she could hear enough of the tone to know it wasn’t flattering.

Lying back, Jade turned her head slightly to look out the window and then immediately looked away when she was faced with the stark, unending blackness that was sky in the Dearth. Instead she focused on the sound of the wheels on the road, the faint wobble of light from the radio, and a clanking noise that came regularly from somewhere under the right rear wheel. She started counting the clanks, her mind wandering at about two hundred and thirty-something when she started dreaming of a beautiful young woman being swallowed whole by the sea only to be spat out again, hair writhing and eyes black. Black and as endless as the sky.