Chapter Eleven
We were dressed to make an impression, and the stakes were life or death. I hadn’t imagined it would play out so quickly. We’d been intercepted and separated from our guides within our first thirty seconds in the building.
“Tell your angel he can wait on the roof,” was Rati’s only acknowledgment of the heavenly presence.
I cast him a concerned look. I still felt the shaking of Nia’s house, the dark skies, the screaming trumpets. I knew he couldn’t be left alone any more than I could.
All he said was, “I have two more days before my brothers are a threat to me. I’ll be all right. You, on the other hand, are not alone.”
Silas cast a discreet look toward Xuan and Priscilla, and I remembered why we’d needed them so desperately. Wards would still be cast. We had power on our side. Even if it came at a cost.
Rati—Shri—hadn’t so much as looked in Silas’s direction as she’d given the command.
She kept Azrames’s hand in her own, two unseen, ethereal beings navigating their way through crowds as she curled her finger for the mundane humans to follow.
We were little more than ducklings following their mother, hoping for the safety of a pond.
As if a pond were any safer than staying on their feet with the landlocked predators.
As if murky waters weren’t full of alligators and piranhas and fishermen’s nets.
Nia looped her arm through mine, the lavender of her bandage-wrapped, long-sleeved business dress contrasting against the crimson of mine.
I was in an eye-catching, femme-forward version of a three-piece suit.
My high-waisted dress pants were tufted and pleated.
After two inches of flesh, a solid, ruby-encrusted, strapless, shapely piece hugged and supported little more than my breasts and the swatch of skin below them.
My matching ruby jacket had no buttons but remained open so that everyone would see the wealth of Adrien’s handiwork.
Nia plastered on a gracious expression, grinning and nodding like the queen at court at everyone we passed. “Smile,” she said through her teeth, eyes still glittering with a politician’s light.
It reminded me that, for all intents and purposes, she and I were leading the pack.
The other humans among us had no idea that I was following, dumbfounded, in the wake of a goddess.
Nia must have picked up on how lost I looked in the single-file march through the crowds of activists who’d come to see Alessia Clovis.
If someone recognized me, I didn’t want to see later footage of me meandering through a public event wide-eyed and flabbergasted with no clear destination in mind.
With Silas cast to oblivion, five of us stashed across two couches in a decidedly unglamorous green room, and Azrames either acting as silent sentinel outside our door or having his face ridden by the most beautiful goddess in all of the pantheons, we had little to do aside from sit and wait.
It was time to overcome my first thinly controlled panic attack of the night.
We had to talk to Alessia—to acquire some tool, some device, some important thing that the men either wouldn’t explain or couldn’t, by virtue of their gender—and we were trapped in a goddamn greenroom.
I twisted my napkin into a thousand tiny pieces.
There was no art on the wall, no distractions, only a television with the live feed of Alessia’s speech.
The stained, aging scent of carpet that needed changing was stronger than anyone’s perfume.
I glued myself to the stream, if only for a distraction.
The TV was large enough to host a Super Bowl watch party, which finally helped me understand sports.
Nauseating anticipation filled me as I watched Alessia walk onto the stage in an emerald, velvet suit, collared top cut nearly down to her belly button with a black, boned bustier conveying power and beauty in one fell swoop.
I couldn’t hear the stiletto footsteps over the roar of audience excitement as she smiled, waved, and made her way to the microphone, but there was something hypnotic about the take-no-prisoners femininity in each high-heeled step.
The camera angle changed, switching to a tighter cut of her head and shoulders as she wrapped her fingers around the microphone and separated it from its stand. She continued flashing wide, grateful smiles as the roar of applause echoed throughout the auditorium.
The light rap of knuckles on the far side of the door tore our attention from the television. A five-foot-nothing stagehand with a headset poked her head into the room. She scanned us briefly.
“I’m looking for a Priscilla Weber?”
Priscilla was on her feet in an instant.
“The building is too warded for deities to enter. Please meet your goddess in the atrium, and one of our greeting entities will escort you both back to the greenroom.” The PA disappeared without another word, leaving us in unhelpful silence.
“I think she means the Duchess has arrived,” Priscilla said to us, eyes wide.
“Go, go!” Xuan urged.
I caught the rolled cuff of Azrames’s black jacket over gray skin as he shut the door behind Priscilla.
He was standing watch, then. The knowledge released a ball of muscular tension that I shouldn’t have been flexing, but whether or not I had any right to my feelings, I didn’t want Shri digging her beautiful talons into him.
I wondered why he couldn’t join us in the greenroom, but I supposed that, given Silas’s banishment to the roof, we were lucky that their rough status as colleagues allowed him in the building at all.
“Thank you, thank you,” came Alessia’s clear, firm voice, silencing the crowd as she began her speech.
“Today we’re here to discuss women’s safety in a violent world, how abuse has grown and become even more insidious as we gravitate into the age of digital assaults and online cruelty.
The world has turned femininity and seduction into blame, robbing women of their agency over the excuse of their appearance, and unless we stand together to change laws, change infrastructure, and curb the tide of public opinion, we will continue fighting these battles three thousand years from now as a war on all fronts. ”
Three thousand years.
The math sickened me. The story of Perseus, mighty hero, famed gorgon slayer for ridding the world of the terrible, snake-haired beast, had been penned nearly a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Medusa had been a survivor of sexual violence not only at the hands of her attacker—blamed for being so beautiful that her loveliness had tempted Poseidon—but by the goddess who had been supposed to protect her and the society in which she’d lived.
Historians and mythology enthusiasts argued until they were blue in the face over whether Athena’s transformation of Medusa had been a curse for defiling her temple or a blessing to protect her from men, but regardless of the lore through which she’d been filtered, she’d become a villain.
Three millennia and counting later, her battlefields were only expanding.
Whatever it was she possessed, whatever magical object we’d been sent to fetch, had to be powerful enough to give her hope. Whatever it was, I knew our fate and safety hung on the whims of Alessia’s approval.
We were now a few minutes into an opening speech so riveting that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.
A startled gasp upon the door’s opening reminded me that my lungs needed consistent inhaling and exhaling.
Priscilla held open the door for Duchess Vapula—who, though now dressed more similarly to those around her, still shined with an otherworldly beauty that made all of us look like comparative ghouls.
I suspected gold was her color, as her pencil skirt and clipped cape once more glimmered in a clean, modern reinterpretation of the gilded goddesses of old.
“Marlow,” she said with a smile, “you’ve bathed.”
Humiliation heated my cheeks until I was certain my face matched my suit.
“So,” the Duchess continued, “I take it from your presence in the back room that Ms. Clovis knows who you are and why you’re here. Are we calling you Merit?”
Kirby said, “You’re not sneaky, are you.”
I looked beyond the Duchess, through the door.
I wished Azrames were in here, not only as a friend and safety net in the whirlwind of gods and the supernatural, but because he would know what to say.
He’d been the one to hack for our tickets, and I wasn’t sure how he’d done it.
He was also better at keeping my spaghetti plate of lies straight than I was.
I had no idea whose name these were under, how Shri had identified us… She had, however, called me an author.
“Merit, please,” I told the Duchess.
Be reverent.
Even if he wasn’t in the room, his lesson remained. My high-roading with humans wouldn’t fly when speaking to those who came from other realms. I would do well to remember as much, whether talking to a demonic Duchess, a lust goddess, or a gorgon who…
I looked from the emerald suit on the screen to the Duchess. “Medusa died,” I said simply. At the curious looks from the others, I did my best not to sound like an idiot. “In her story, in all of her stories, she gets beheaded.”
“Did she?” the Duchess responded, disinterested.
She gestured for a glass of water from the depressingly sparse refreshment bar, and Priscilla was quick on her feet.
She fetched a cup, and the Duchess took a delicate sip before saying, “Who told you that? Did a member of the Hellenic pantheon write her account? Or was it Homer, Ovid, and Hesiod? Are these texts from those who’ve been called Medusa and Medousa, Neptune and Poseidon, and Minerva and Athena, or are you getting your histories from three contradictory male humans between Greco-Roman empires who wrote poetry and fancied themselves important? ”
My face fell. I sank backward into the woefully uncomfortable chair.