Chapter 6 #3
Hesitantly, I leaned forward, tentatively reaching out my hand to rest on top of his, half expecting him to push me away.
He didn’t, and we both stared silently at our hands for a moment as the physical ache and exhaustion I’d been battling with all day slowly seeped away.
“I should have corrected the assumption that I don’t want you right away,” I said softly, my skin almost humming at how good it felt to not feel drained for a moment.
Riot snorted dismissively. “Don’t lie on my account, Gracie. No agathos wants to be bonded to a daimon.”
“I couldn’t lie even if I wanted to. We don’t have to think of ourselves as a daimon and an agathos right now. We can just be Riot and Grace.”
He gave me a dubious smile that didn’t reach his eyes, but flipped his hand over to give mine a quick squeeze before we resumed our dinner.
“So, uh, what did you do today?” I asked, internally cringing at the awkward question. Why did I always sound so dorky? Why couldn’t I sound cool and unaffected?
Riot’s lips twitched as he glanced up from his dinner, looking across the table at me like I was adorable. Which was kind of nice? I’d had some very un-adorable thoughts about him though, and I half wondered if they were one-sided.
Though he did say that thing about kissing last night. Kissing in… other places.
“A friend, I guess, asked me to help out at his tattoo studio for awhile, so that’s what I’m doing at the moment,” Riot replied, steering my thoughts in a more wholesome direction.
“You guess he’s a friend?” I asked with a frown.
“We’re not really designed to maintain friendships,” Riot said cynically. “Everything is usually an exchange. A deal.”
“That’s kind of sad,” I replied, thinking of my friendships with the girls I’d grown up with.
Though they had mostly fallen by the wayside, hadn’t they?
They were busy with their families and couldn’t relate to me.
Plus, as much as I liked them, I couldn’t exactly trust them the way friends were supposed to trust each other.
I could never tell them about this.
“It is what it is.” Riot shrugged.
“So what did you do before?” I asked before taking an unladylike bite of my grilled cheese. Mother would faint.
“I’m not sure you really want the answer to that question,” Riot chuckled.
He was so easy to talk to, sometimes I found myself forgetting he was a daimon at all, even with the red and purple eyes.
But I had the feeling whatever he was referring to would serve as a sharp reminder.
Riot watched my face carefully, sighing in defeat when I didn’t back down, then set down his sandwich.
“My dad sells drugs. It was assumed from birth that I’d go into the family business, like he had growing up.”
“Oh.”
Riot gave me a wry smile that didn’t meet his eyes. “It wasn’t something I ever wanted to do. A few months ago, I refused to sell anymore. It’s been...a point of contention.”
I was torn between feeling sympathy for Riot’s plight—I knew what it was to not live up to a parent’s expectations—and horror at the lives he’d potentially damaged. Ruined, even. I was a bad agathos, but I was still an agathos, and everything in me rejected the idea of human misery in any form.
Riot was watching me carefully, his eyes guarded, as he waited for a more substantial response than “ oh ”. I wasn’t quite sure what he was expecting—possibly for me to kick him out of my apartment? His expression certainly said that.
“But you don’t do that anymore,” I settled on eventually.
“I don’t.”
“Okay, well, that’s...I mean, so long as you’re not doing it anymore—”
“It would be a mistake to think of me as the good guy, Grace. I’m not,” Riot said flatly. I could feel his self-loathing like blades against my skin, but even if I couldn’t, it was written all over his face.
“We’re more than the sum of our regrets, Riot,” I told him softly.
Riot’s eyes suddenly sparkled with amusement, and even though the rest of his features were unchanged, it transformed his entire face.
I thought that dark and brooding Riot was the most tempting, but the faintly amused Riot blew him out of the water.
If he smiled, really smiled , I might spontaneously combust.
“We’re not really wired for regrets. I feel guilt, which is pretty undaimonic in itself, but I don’t have that urge to do anything differently that I’m told comes with the sort of regret humans feel. If I got the chance to go back in time, I wouldn’t change anything.”
He looked momentarily frustrated, like he was struggling to conceptualize the idea, which I could understand. We both lived on the periphery of the human world, we used their terminology, their ideals, but we weren’t entirely human and we physically couldn’t process emotions the same way they did.
Apparently for daimons, it was emotions like remorse that were off limits. Agathos couldn’t lie, cheat or steal, and we weren’t meant to experience anger and bitterness the way I seemed to.
It definitely wasn’t lost on me that Riot was an unusual daimon and I was unusual agathos. If this connection was the result of La Nuit’s interference, she was a good matchmaker...
“What about you? Do you have regrets, Gracie?” Riot asked in a low voice, tilting his head to one side.
Did I have regrets? The chilling silence after my spur of the moment prayer to the Goddess of Night sprung to mind. The sudden darkness as the candle extinguished, and the realization that I may have bitten off more than I could chew.
“Not yet,” I replied, the answer coming surprisingly easily.
I’d followed the rules my entire life no matter how miserable they’d made me, how wrong they’d felt, and I didn’t regret that either.
I’d tried . Whatever happened with Riot, whatever this was, it made me wonder how much longer I could walk the tightrope of my community’s expectations of me and the darkness inside that urged me to seek something more.
There was a very good chance I would regret that choice.
I insisted on cleaning up since Riot had cooked, and left him in charge of picking a movie for us to watch.
It all felt weirdly domestic, but I sensed we were both leaning on that domestic normalcy.
Everything else was weird and unexplainable, but when we were sitting around watching television, we could pretend for a while that it wasn’t.
By the time I came out to join him, the reprieve I’d gotten from being apart from him during the day seemed to be over. My body was back to feeling achy and restless, and it definitely seemed like this was the way soul bonds were pushed together. Right? What else could it be?
I wanted to cuddle him. I’d felt his emotions. What else could it be?
Instead of acting on my suspicion, I sat at the opposite end of the couch and hugged a pillow to my stomach.
“So…” I began, picking a loose thread on the cushion I was holding like a snuggly shield. “Do you do a lot of cocaine?”
Riot choked a little on his own spit, shooting me an incredulous look. His messy black hair had fallen forward over his eyebrows, and I squeezed the cushion tighter, resisting the urge to push it out of his face.
“Er, sometimes. I guess. Can’t say I’ve been asked that question before,” he muttered, though his mouth twitched like he was amused. I could feel his amusement, brushing against me like soft, ticklish feathers. “The daimons are descended from different lines. The original lines. Did you know that?”
I shook my head silently. It made sense, the agathos were descended from original lines too, but we were all mixed together now.
“I’m from the Moros line.”
The hatred that Riot brought to that statement felt like shards of ice against my skin. It was the strongest emotion I’d felt from him yet, and even without the connection between us I would have been able to tell how much it affected him. It was like the light in his eyes had switched off.
“What does that mean?” I asked carefully.
“The Moros personify impending doom. We are designed to lead humans to their destruction. That’s our job.”
At that moment, I wished there wasn’t a connection between us.
I didn’t want Riot to feel the way I was responding to his admission.
The horrified nausea that churned in my gut that such a job existed.
The pity and outrage warring in my mind that Riot had been given such a horrendous mission, and his goddess hadn’t even had the compassion to remove his conscience.
He was being eaten alive by guilt, that much was obvious.
“Most daimons are descendents of the Moros line,” Riot continued in a monotone voice, not looking at me.
“The Keres are the next most common. They like violence. The Philotes are rarer even though their thing is fucking. The Oneiroi are almost extinct. They do mystical dream shit. There are others, but those are the ones I’m most familiar with. ”
Death, violence, sex and dreams. That was…something.
If my mother had been present for this conversation, we would have needed the smelling salts.
There wasn’t a single doubt in my mind about that.
While what Riot was saying was everything I’d been programmed to hate, that hungry darkness in me, my monster, was curious.
It rose up at his words, like a beast sniffing out its dinner.
With more forcefulness than usual, I shoved it back down. Be sweet.
“We have lines of descent too,” I replied, desperately scrambling for a response that wouldn’t make Riot feel worse.
“Kindness, purity, and charity?” Riot asked drily, glancing at me.
“Close,” I admitted with a grimace. “Intelligence, moral virtue, piety, self-restraint, mercy, and glory. Those are some of the prestigious ones anyway. All agathos can ease pain, but they inherit one special gift too. Since the lines are mixed, the ability we inherit can seem random. ”
“Are you going to tell me yours?” Riot asked, seeming genuinely interested.
“It’s not a glamorous one,” I replied with a tight smile. “Eutychia. I can give humans good luck.”