Chapter 10
The pieceof forest Artemis and I own is north of Manhattan and is separated from the farmhouse property where my dad, his brothers, and their sister grew up by a narrow ravine that was probably carved over time by the river running through it. We discovered early on—the first time we came here, or maybe the second—that the ravine is a hard boundary. Not because we’ve ever been prohibited from visiting the farmhouse or the land that surrounds it, but because it’s wrong over there. It’s impossibly still and silent for a tract of land that’s mostly field and forest and a small lake, and there’s this feeling in the air.
“It’s like when someone screams,” Artemis said that night in a shaken whisper. “And then they stop.”
It was exactly like that. There is no sound, but the space it left behind is still there.
I climb out of my SUV in one of the two gravel parking areas on the edge of the property and close the door quietly behind me. Just as quietly, I retrieve my bow and quiver and sling them into their various places. I twist from side to side, testing the give of my clothes—dark, sturdy but with plenty of nylon/Spandex stretch, reinforced in strategic places—and find that every piece of the pants and shirt and close-fitted jacket are where they should be.
It’s well past sunset. A dark, cloudless sky hangs over the trees. We’re far enough from the city that the light pollution doesn’t obscure the stars.
Artemis is nowhere to be seen.
But she’s here. I know she is. I just don’t know where.
Part of me relaxes, because this is part of our game.
And part of me sharpens under the adrenaline of a mutual hunt.
I remember how she tasted in that aircraft carrier alcove and how her nails bit into my skin and the way she sounded—fierce and adamant and mine.
I should not think of the other things I want to do to her.
It doesn’t matter that my ring is on her finger. I shouldn’t want to mark her with my teeth.
I’d never forgive myself for that.
I would probably never forgive myself.
And would Artemis, when she realized what she’d done? When she realized who she was with?
Now’s not the time for thinking, so I adjust my grip on my bow and enter the woods.
Last year’s leaves crinkle gently on the forest floor as I move. Half of them are soggy, disintegrating into the soil. New plants are already beginning to surface. When summer comes, this patch of forest will be thick with green and loud with the cacophony of wildlife. Hunting will be harder in some ways and easier in others. Droning insects tend to make my mind wander, but when everything is humming and buzzing and chittering, it’s far more noticeable when they stop because someone—Artemis—has crept by.
For now, the forest is peaceful. A cold, fresh breeze rustles the branches. I stay light on the underbrush and listen for silences where they shouldn’t be. Those are subtler gaps in the spring and the fall, when the woods are still waking for the year or settling down to sleep.
The moon overhead is split by the branches, then whole. Split, then whole. A trick of perspective. The moon is always whole. Nothing has managed to touch it yet. Not enough to break it apart.
There are no signs that Artemis has been here, which is to be expected. This isn’t a game we play because we’re unevenly matched. This is a game we play because nobody else comes close. Artemis doesn’t give herself away unless she wants to be given away, so I’m aware—with every step I take—that I might be walking into a trap.
Then again, I might find her before it springs shut.
I listen for Artemis the same way I have since the day I came to Zeus’s house. To my father’s house. Sometimes, when I’m starting to wake up, I can smell the contrast between the life we ran from and the one we landed in.
Sometimes, I’m sure that when I open my eyes, I’ll be back where I started, with a man’s voice in my ear and a chain rattling stubbornly in the next room.
Zeus’s house smelled like chocolate when we walked in. It was Christmas Eve, and the air was saturated with sugar. They’d been baking cookies. Cook, who came with Poseidon from his ship and considers it a mortal insult if anyone suggests that he stop cooking for all of us, had made chocolate peanut butter fudge.
What if I’d let her arrow touch me that night?
What if I’d jumped at the last moment and let it hit my chest?
Would that have fixed everything?
Either way, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t let it touch me. I closed my hand around it, looking into Artemis’s eyes. It felt like a challenge, like everything else felt like a challenge. The soft beds and the clean clothes and the welcoming smiles were practically daring us to refuse them like a mirage in a fairy tale.
Did I refuse the arrow when I caught it in some ironic twist of fate?
I don’t know.
In the moments afterward, there was heat. In my blood and in my muscles and in my face. Not like an episode. Like excitement. Like a thrill.
The arrow didn’t have anything to do with what happened after.
Unless it did, and the world is more mysterious than we ever could have guessed.
The breeze changes directions and whispers across my face. There’s a hint of Artemis in it. Sweet. Clean. Pure.
Not ruined, like me.
I follow it.
Other people would probably consider this a disadvantage to Artemis in a playful hunting scenario, but it’s only a disadvantage if it’s one-sided.
It isn’t.
Not for the first time, I wonder what Artemis follows when she senses me.
I can only imagine it’s dark, like oil in the ocean. A stain you can’t get out, but you would if you could.
I’m getting closer.
It’s not a trail in the underbrush or broken branches that tells me so. It’s the energy in the air, growing stronger but somehow—somehow—using the wind as a disguise.
At the edge of a clearing, I stop and breathe as slowly as possible.
Which is exactly the moment my phone rings.
Buzzes—I’m not the kind of madman who uses a ringtone—and it can only be someone in my family, Delphi, or a person calling my private work number.
“I’m not a man who much cares for waiting,” the senator greets me.
“And I’m not a man who much cares to be rushed.” I don’t bother to mask the irritation in my tone. He’s ruined my stalking.
“Unfortunately, you’re out of time for dilly-dallying over your cares. When should we expect you at the airfield? My pilot is fueled and waiting to take you to Mociar.”
It’s so, so quiet, which is how I know I didn’t mishear him, even though my first reaction is that none of this applies to me.
I don’t take orders.
I don’t leave the country.
And I very much don’t deliver myself into the hands of someone else’s security.
Talking out loud, on my phone, during this game is a dead giveaway. I can feel Artemis getting closer. Not as close as the ghost of Senator Walsh’s breath on my neck, that shadow twisting his features.
Five.
“I’m not the man for this job, Senator.”
“On the contrary, Apollo. You are the only man for this job.”
Four.
“Well, you’ll have to make do with someone else. I’d say it’s been a pleasure, but?—”
“There’s the matter of the assets, of course.” I go so still even Artemis might mistake me for a tree.
Three.
“Which assets, Senator Walsh?”
“I don’t know how I can be more clear. This is a simple issue of transferring assets at the border.”
He hadn’t mentioned the border before.
“How many of these assets are people, Walsh? Because there are only a few reasons I can think of that an opposition party would abduct citizens of its own country.”
“Abduction?” The Senator laughs, and for the first time, there’s something else in his voice. Fear? Uncertainty? I can’t tell. “No one was abducted, Apollo. That would be a war crime.”
“Yes. It fucking would be a war crime.” I lower my voice, hoping I can at least keep Artemis from making out the words. Trafficking is a violation of the Geneva Convention even if you aren’t actually at war. Some things, Zeus had said, looking more haunted than I’ve ever seen him, make you pray the gods punish evil. Or consider taking it into your own hands.
“We understand each other, then. It’s imperative to do what we can to ease the tension in Mociar so that the democratic process can sort itself out.” Whatever I heard in his voice before is gone. Walsh is back in sound-bite mode. “This is an opportunity for you to not make the same mistake twice.”
Daisy’s words echo in my ears. It makes my skin crawl to have them heaved back at me by this asshole.
Two.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’m quieter still.
“Oh, I think you do. The military dictatorship you put in power in Rathbek has been known to get quite heavy-handed with civilians. And, all things equal, I think you’d prefer to keep that between us. Nasty bit of business if it got out.” There’s a shuffling sound over the line, like he’s flipping through papers. “How long do you think it would take you to broker a similar negotiation in Mociar? A week? Two? I suppose the faster you work, the fewer risks you take.”
One.
“It’s not—I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” As though I can convince him it matters when I don’t believe it myself.
“No one needs to know.” He’s patronizing now. “We both want the same thing. We’re on the same side. And think of what a hero you’ll be, keeping all those innocent people safe. You’ll be drowning in pussy. How is Artemis, by the way?”
The sound of the grenade I’d been waiting for, in the end, was just that. No boom. Just a few words in a silky voice. All it would take to blow up my entire life is her.
Senator Chris Walsh is right. It would be a nasty bit of business if word of my involvement with the military takeover in Rathbek got out, but not for the reason he thinks. There’s no doubt that my think tank’s reputation would take a hit. Maybe even a substantial hit. And I wouldn’t be tapped for backchannel negotiations for a period of time.
But reputations can be fixed by strategically deploying donations to targeted causes and, more crucially, by glowing at the right people with the full force of my ability. I would do that if it meant I could keep hacking away at the problem of world peace. Keep shoveling penance into the void left behind by all those favors.
It’s Artemis finding out that matters to me.
Would she feel differently? I don’t know. The kinds of negotiations I facilitate aren’t a guaranteed success. Everyone who does enough government business knows that things go wrong more often than they go right. That’s half the reason countries send various representatives to hammer things out behind closed doors. If the general public knew how frequently the wheels came off in even the simplest discussions, there’d be widespread panic.
Artemis and I have discussed this in plenty of depth. She wouldn’t panic if she learned that I tried something and it didn’t turn out as planned.
But if she did feel differently, and she did want to leave…
If all she wanted was to never see me again…
That’s not a choice, is it? For us, it’s not a choice.
And that would be the end.
There would be nothing left.
“Have a nice flight, Apollo.”
I end the call, shove the phone in my pocket, and get an arrow notched in the same heartbeat. Something shifts in the wind, barely a sound, and I turn my head just in time to see the arrow.
The only choice is to drop mine and bat Artemis’s arrow out of the air. It lands with a wet, muffled smack.
The phone call—the blackmail—is a lead anchor to my past, dragging my future under too. She shoots me right into the present, where I don’t have time to think or do anything but register the second arrow. Artemis is mostly a shadow at the edge of the clearing—dark clothes, hints of gold in her hair, bright eyes—but the arrow is a break in the air, hurtling at me.
It brushes by with a slice of pain, like a paper cut or a paring knife across my biceps.
We’ve never.
She’s never.
Her eyes are locked on mine just like they were on Christmas Eve, just like they’ve always been, and I’m nothing but startled heat.
Artemis did that on purpose.
She cut me on purpose.
The bright line across my biceps throbs, cooled by the night air coming through gash in my shirt. Both of us are wearing custom clothes from the same company. They’re made to stand up to hunting each other through the woods, and Artemis just?—
My heart has replaced all my other organs. I’ve never been this full of adrenaline in my life. There’s so much of it that I don’t know I’m stalking across the clearing until I’ve taken several steps.
“You’ll pay for that.” The words come out of me in this shocked, almost gleeful tone that I don’t recognize.
“Oh?” Artemis answers. “Will I?”
I’ve heard challenges in her voice before, but this one gives me the jolting sensation that I might have been wrong about her. That I might not have known her at all.
Or—
Have I not wanted to know?
She notches a third arrow just as I reach her, and the hell with falling back. The hell with letting her shoot at me a third time. I abandon my bow, get inside her guard, and knock her bow out of her hands.
And kiss her like I’m capturing her. Like I’m not going to let go.