Volcanoes (15 page)

I stalked toward him, yanked the offending scrap of cloth o
ut of his hand and stormed into the bathroom.

"What are you doing?" He called.
             

"What? Are you writing an article? I'm washing the blood off." I turned the jets of the shower on and waited for the water to heat up. I could hear fragments of his one-way co
nversation behind the door but frankly, if he couldn't wait until I was in the same room, he didn't need to be listened to.

Finally the water was the right temperature and I stepped into the steamy warmth. I'm not going to lie - the water felt amazing, esp
ecially with the hell of a day I'd just had. It was the perfect ending and I couldn't wait to get under the covers
–
even if I had to wear that poor excuse for a nightgown.

My fingers dug into my scalp as I scrubbed shampoo into the mass of hair and my ey
es closed in utter bliss. Okay
–
that felt good and the events of the day melted away under the ministrations of a good scalp massage.

"You should be careful. You could slip and fall in here."

I yelped, tried covering the important naked bits, got soap in
my eye and slipped on a soapy patch of water in my haste. My legs floundered, trying to find a solid purchase but failed. The wall met the back of my head with a resounding crack and my tailbone was rammed up through the top of my skull as I hit the grou
n
d. Tears sprang to my eyes and I yelled, "Why on God's green earth are you standing outside of my shower instead of waiting patiently in my bedroom? What the hell is wrong with you?"

He shrugged. "I was trying to help you. You looked tired and I wanted to
make sure you didn't fall asleep and drown in the shower."

"You don't drown in the shower, Hephaestus," I growled. "You drown in the tub."

"Okay, I was making sure you didn't slip and fall in the shower," he responded calmly, backing away from the shower s
tall holding his hands up defensively.

Now
, he
’
d developed a sense of self-preservation? I wanted to strangle him and then beat sense into him. Most of all I just wanted to finish my shower in peace. But I knew that wasn't going to happen. I just wasn
’
t th
at lucky.

"Mission failed! Don't you have any concept of personal boundaries?"

"It's not like I haven't seen you naked before, Grace. As a matter of fact, just a few weeks ago, you were tearing around drunk on endorphins naked as the day you were born,"
he parried back with a grin, daring me to refute his words.

I was nearly crying with frustration. Really
–
what else was going to happen that could possibly make this day worse?

I wish I hadn't tempted Fate like that. I should know by now that she doesn't
like me much - every time I give her any semblance of an excuse to fuck things up further, she does.

"Mom? Are you okay in there?"

Shit. "I'm fine, bubby," I called out, glaring at Hephaestus.

"I thought I heard you yelling," he responded. The knob on t
he door jiggled and I realized that Hephaestus had locked it. My eyes widened and I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation.

He grimaced and shook his head frantically. Oh, he had some explaining to do.

"I slipped and stubbed my toe on the tile." I w
as hoping the kid would accept that and leave it alone.

"Mom, you gotta be more careful. You don't have your nanites keeping you healthy anymore and you're getting old. You're kinda fragile."

I closed my eyes. God help me get through this life.

"I'm not
any more fragile than I was before this happened." The longer I stood there, the colder the shower got and the more tired I became. I discarded my modesty and stood up, shooing Hephaestus out of the way.

I still had shampoo in my hair, but I wasn't going
to stand here wet and naked with a man that I wasn't sleeping with in the room and my kid on the other side of the door.

"Hold on a second, baby.  I'll be out. I have to rinse the shampoo."

"Okay Mom. I'll be right back. I wanted to show you something and
I forgot it."

"Okay, sweetheart. I'll see you in a few."

I waited a few moments before I blasted Heph. "Why in the world would you lock the door? Why are you here? Get the hell out of my bathroom. Oh my God! What if Dylan had found you in here with me? Th
e kid's confused enough as it is without the misconception that I'm getting naked with you." The words were running together and it was a miracle that he could even make sense of them.

"That is a fair statement," he said calmly before pushing me back unde
r the spray - which was now lukewarm.

I flinched but let the soap run out of my hair before turning off the water and stepping into a proffered towel.

"None of you have any decency when it comes to my boundaries. You're always walking in on me in the sho
wer, popping into my house when I'm trying to have quiet time
–
or
–
or stealing my damn car."

I'd devolved into waving my hands around like a diva doing a sing-off, but he stayed silent and let me rave like a lunatic while he towel dried my hair.

Before
I realized what he'd been doing, I was dry, dressed and wrapped in a robe. I stopped the muttering and shook my head. "Thank you," I whispered. "It just occurred to me that you keep getting stuck with the duty of cleaning me up and dressing me.  I've bee
n
terribly ungrateful."

He smiled and shrugged. "I seem to be getting better at it. You haven't called me anything worse than an asshole in the last fifteen minutes."

I nodded. He had a point. "You can't just walk in on me while I'm in the shower, though. Y
ou grasp that, right?"

He paused in thought, and then nodded. "Yeah, you're right. We don't really have the nudity hang-ups that humans do so it didn't occur to me that you'd have an issue. I apologize for that and I'll knock next time."

"That's all I'm as
king for," I replied with less venom.

"I do need to talk to you, though. It's about your son."

He immediately had my attention. "Go. You don't have much time before he comes back."

"Actually it's best that he's here when I do it so I'm going to come back i
n through the front door."

Okay, this had me ridiculously curious. What in the world would he have to say about Dylan that he wanted the kid there for?

I shrugged in agreement and waited a few seconds before opening the door so he could leave.

Dylan was j
ust coming into my bedroom as I left the bathroom and I smiled at him. "Hey kid. What did you want to show me?"

"Well," he started with a shy smile. "There are two things. First," he whipped a small package out from behind his back and held it out to me. "
There's this. I made this for you today."

Perhaps it was the look on his face or the still grubby hand holding out the 'prize,
’
but I was brought back to the first day I ever picked him up from school. Someone had poured glue in his hair so it had stood up
in a wild mess, and streaks of paint crisscrossed his face, giving him the appearance of a war-mongering barbarian.  In his little hands had been a wad of paper, painted blue and red.

"For you!" he'd cried, his face full of artistic pride.

I still had th
at wad of paper (which had turned out to be a duck) on my desk at home.

I did the exact same thing I did all those years ago - and every time since. I brought my hands to my mouth in a gasp of surprise and exclaimed, "You made something just for me?"

As
if rehearsed, he nodded and grinned. This time there weren't any gaps in his teeth, or smears of paint on his face
–
but it was precious all the same.

"You must be the best son in the entire Universe," I continued, taking the box out of his hand gingerly
as though I were holding the World's Greatest Treasure.

"You know, you don't have to put on the act anymore, Mom." He was smiling as he said it but a very small piece of my heart fluttered and died a little.

A single tear slid down my face as I beamed up
at him. "Yes I do," I whispered. "I'll do this schtick until you're a million years old, because every single thing you do for me or give me is so incredibly precious."

He flushed and ducked his head in embarrassment. "It's nothing big. I made it for you
today in training."

"I can't wait to see what it is," I replied and opened the lid of the box. Inside was a mound of dirt that had been molded to resemble a volcanic cone, overflowing with fiery red glass that shaped itself over the top and down the sides,
creating a sparkling lava flow.

I gasped. "Oh Dylan, baby - this is beautiful. Also, you're a bit of a sarcastic jerk."

I looked back up at him.  He was grinning so I grinned back. "Yeah, I couldn't help myself," he chuckled.

"How did you do this?"

He
grimaced and opened his mouth to respond when Hephaestus chose to enter the conversation.

"Guess who is taking after his Mother more than we thought?" Dylan jumped a little at the sound of Heph's voice and he wavered between a blush and a sickly green col
or.

Level 10 alarms were going off in my head at the expression on my kid's face. "What happened?"

"I uh..."

"I uh…
what?" I tilted my head and gave him my best 'I will destroy you and your future generations if you don't answer this question honestly' lo
ok. 

"I may have accidently burned Master Hephaestus' kitchen down," he said quietly.

I didn
’
t know whether to laugh or cry. I threw my head back and yelled up at the ceiling, "Really Fate? You couldn't just have left it alone, you bitch?"

When I looked
back down, both of them were regarding me with curious expressions.

"I gather that is why you're here Hephaestus?"

He nodded and opened his mouth to explain, but my hand shot up cutting him off.

"I'm going to sit down and Dylan is going to explain to me
what happened." I limped over to the nearest chair and gingerly positioned myself so that I could keep an eye on both of them. "Speak," I commanded.

"Soooo," my reason for living began. "I was cleaning Master Hephaestus' pantry when a snake jumped out at
me and I panicked."

"A snake
jumped
out at you?" I asked dryly.

He turned beet red before responding. "Okay maybe it didn't quite jump. But it scared me and all of a sudden fire was shooting out of my hands and I didn't know how to stop it or put it out."

He looked miserable and I wanted to wrap my arms around him and tell him that everything would be all right. But it wasn't all right. He'd burned down Heph's kitchen because nobody had stopped to think that with the onset of puberty, he might get more th
an just the Weather powers.

I cradled my forehead in my hands and closed my eyes. "Go on."

"So before I knew it, I was in the middle of an inferno. That's when Master Heph came in and put me out."

I looked up. "Wait. What do you mean 'put you out'?"

He f
idgeted and was about to answer me when Heph interrupted. "He means I put out the fire that was encasing him but I wasn't able to save the kitchen."

"I see. Dylan, are you okay?"

He nodded solemnly and I breathed a sigh of relief. I should have asked that
first. "Okay. So what do we do now?"

"Well," said Heph. "He's going to be helping me rebuild my kitchen so I don't have to eat in the Dining Hall with the squidges."

I nodded. "That seems fair. What else?"

"It seems that Athena either had a wicked sense of
humor, or she could tell that he was going to develop this power, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out why she'd sent him to me as punishment. If this had happened anywhere else
with
anyone else, we could have had a major catastrophe on our ha
nds."

A stab of pain lanced through my chest. God, I missed her. I'd be eternally grateful for the good things that she
’
d given us and would try to ignore the bad. I just nodded in response.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" I knew that there wasn't.
It wasn't like I could shape the stone for his walls or floors or anything at this point. I was utterly useless.

"Actually yes," he replied.