Chapter 6
No one stops talkingonce I’ve told the party about our engagement. They get louder and closer, and I paste a smile on my face and watch while party guest after party guest coos over Artemis’s ring—which is not, of course, Artemis’s ring at all, it’s Daisy’s engagement ring, a fact that seems to slip past everyone who looks at the black diamond on Artemis’s finger and exclaims that it’s just the thing.
It is not just the thing. A black diamond is just the thing for Daisy. You wouldn’t know that by how Artemis shows it off as if I really did buy her a ring and ask her to marry me instead of bypassing the part of the relationship where you fall in love and admit it to each other and slyly hint that you might want to bring vows into the mix and eventually one of you—that would be me, in this imaginary scenario—gets down on one knee somewhere special to the two of you and stumbles through an even more significant confession while the other person’s eyes fill with tears and says yes, yes, of course I’ll marry you, it’s what I’ve always wanted and you frolic off into the sunset without the black hole of shame that’s eaten you from the inside for as long as you can remember.
Hypothetically.
Theoretically.
Couldn’t be me.
The party presses in. Three older women in glittering gowns surround Artemis. Daisy steps to her side, which keeps her from being closed in. This is helpful for me, since my primary goal at the moment is to keep my pinky wrapped around Artemis’s so we don’t lose contact.
I’m not afraid of losing contact, except for being terrified that if I let go, my brain will turn to scrambled eggs from a fever nobody can put out. I can’t tell if the heat under my collar is from another episode lying in wait or from my body belatedly realizing what I’ve just done.
Everything about is going to be a thousand times more conspicuous now. Artemis and I have been as normal about each other as it’s possible to be. We didn’t want to make a point of not touching each other in the event we’d have to do it in front of our family, so it’s certainly not unheard of for us to stand close, and sit close, and be close.
Now I’ve caused a scene at Calliope and Orion’s aircraft carrier birthday party and I don’t trust my body to stay alive if I let go of her.
I focus on projecting a general glow at the people around us. One that says I’m pleased to have staggered through the crowd like a madman to defend my adoptive sister from the clutches of a Senator who is the rising star of his political party and apparently has presidential ambitions—a classic threat.
Ares and Hercules follow the swell of the crowd over to me and pop up out of it like tuxedoed buoys.
“Congratulations, Apollo.” Ares claps my shoulder like he’s sixty years old. “What the fuck happened?”
“Yeah.” Hercules crosses his arms over his chest and surveys me, his abundant tattoos peeking over the edge of his collar. His obvious superhuman strength only adds to the daytime-accented tuxedo, and the curly golden hair pulled away from his face makes him look like he stepped out of a sunny vacation in Mykonos. “Something you want to tell us?”
“Something you want to tell us?” I ask Ares. “Are you the only one who abandoned the theme?”
Ares gestures to his red pocket square. “I’m sure you’ve heard of Mars, Apollo.”
“The rest of us came in pairs.”
“Castor and Pollux are here as Castor and Pollux. That hardly counts.”
“It’s celestial,” Hercules puts in.
“Mars is a celestial body,” Ares answers. “And?—”
“He did come with a pair,” says Hercules.
Ares blanches. No, he didn’t. Our lives aren’t as on top of each other as they once were, but he’d have told me if he was bringing a date to Calliope and Orion’s gala. He’d have had to if he wanted to avoid the kind of spotlight I’m currently standing in with Artemis.
“Why aren’t you with him?” Hercules continues, giving Ares a pointed glance. “Those details could not have been accidental.”
“What details?” I ask, since Ares looks like he’s seen a ghost and Hercules hasn’t caught on yet. He’s on tiptoe, searching the crowd for a man who’s apparently here with Ares.
Hercules huffs. “The rovers.”
Ares stares harder. “Rovers?”
“Mars rovers. I heard him when we were coming through. His cufflinks are supposed to represent Spirit and Opportunity.”
“What did he sound like?” Ares demands.
Hercules blinks at him. “You don’t know what your own date sounds like?”
“This isn’t about me. This is about Apollo’s surprise engagement,” says Ares.
“Now it’s about you, and where you disappeared to all day. Dad was so worried,” Hercules scolds. “And you missed playing the Xbox.”
“Shut up. There was no Xbox. No one brought an antique game system to get their nails done,” Ares argues, glancing at the crowd out of the corner of his eye.
“How would you know? You weren’t there. Neither of you were there.” Hercules leans in. “You could have just said you were in love with her,” he tells me, matter-of-fact.
Hercules has gotten more comfortable with treating us like brothers since he and Daisy got engaged. Right now, I’m finding it profoundly unsettling. This heat is not a fever. This is the embarrassed scorch of finding out that everyone—or at least Hercules—thinks me being in love with Artemis is obvious.
“That’s not what it is.”
“Fuck off,” Hercules answers. “They’re not going to kick you out of the family. And they’re not going to kick you out for having a secret Mars-rover date, Ares, so stop looking so scared.”
“I don’t look scared.” This, from Ares, is completely unconvincing. He lowers his hand from his collar and puts it faux-causally in his pocket. “And I had a meeting. That’s all it was.”
“Really?” Hercules’s eyebrows go up. “You led a protest on Calliope and Orion’s gala day?”
“No,” Ares says flatly. “A meeting.”
“Why don’t we all share secrets?” Hercules gestures around the circle of us in a move he’s blatantly stealing from me. “Since we are part of the same nuclear family, which is when?—”
He steals the speech, too. That part is impressive. I didn’t think he was listening so carefully when I said those things.
“—tell each other things for bonding purposes,” Hercules finishes.
“Don’t.” Don’t ask. Don’t make me explain. Don’t make me think of the Senator’s shadow-face or remember, with a cold pit in my gut, that he’s here at the party and I can’t see him. “Don’t ruin it for Artemis.”
Hercules takes another step closer and lowers his voice. “She’s wearing Daisy’s ring. What happened?”
“I’ll get a different ring.”
Ares and Hercules exchange a glance, and fucking crickets, I do not like being on the other side of this configuration. I’m not the one people exchange glances about. I’m the one who smiles and shakes hands and puts everyone at ease. I’m the world peace guy, not the guy everyone is guardedly concerned about.
If they’re openly concerned, then I’m fucked.
Ares claps my shoulder again. “It’ll be okay. You know that, right?”
I don’t know that. I don’t know what’s gone so wrong with the episodes or why the Senator makes me want to take Artemis and run or why, despite so many favors, my mother died in a hospital bed right in front of me.
What I know is that nobody’s coming to save me.
It won’t be okay in the end. It’ll just be over.
Calliope and Orion’sparty proceeds in a series of still shots. Candles glowing on an enormous cake. All of us gathered around, singing. Daisy and Artemis posing for a series of photos with Daisy exclaiming over her own ring and somehow managing to hide it from the cameras. Those photos will be plastered across social media before the first guest has left the Intrepid.
I’m barely present for the photos of me and Artemis with her parents. My parents. My adoptive parents. Zeus shakes my hand and murmurs a long string of congratulations into my ear. Brigit hugs both Artemis and I tight, beaming.
Did they all suspect?
There are photos of Artemis and Calliope. Daisy and her parents. Daisy and Artemis and her parents. Poseidon holding up a bottle of champagne and saying about time! in a voice that carries all the way across Manhattan. The ripples are moving outward from the Intrepid. They’ll be across the ocean. Mociar is nine hours ahead of us. In the capital city, there’s less than an hour to sunrise. Soon they’ll be going about the business of fighting a coup, as though I haven’t just launched a much more terrifying one here.
Uncle Hades and Aunt Persephone are the only ones who manage to be subtle at all. Daisy whispers to her dad out of range of the cameras. There are no flashes—anyone with the credentials to be at the event is required to use calibrated off-camera flashes and only then if the ambient light isn’t enough. The clickclickclick of the camera shutters decreases when Hades bends his head to listen to his daughter. Anyone with the credentials to be at this event knows it’s better to err on the side of caution than risk crossing a line with him.
Music.
Dancing.
A pair of cufflinks flashing silver. I remember he did come here with a pair too late and can’t find the cufflinks again.
Where is Artemis?
Here.
Where is she?
Still here.
Where?
Here.
And then we’re in some narrow inner corridor on the Intrepid, Artemis marching down the length of the hall with purpose. She drags me into an alcove by my lapels. The music beats in my ears, but her voice is absolutely clear.
“What the hell was that, Apollo?”
Her hands stay on my lapels, and mine go to her waist. I can’t risk letting go. Not tonight. Maybe not ever again.
“I had to.”
“Because of one random Senator? Don’t lie to me. You looked like shit.”
“I had another episode.”
Her eyebrows draw together. “It can’t have been that bad. I barely felt it. Did something else happen?”
“A meeting. With the Senator. He showed up at my office, and then I was—I was sick, Artemis, I was out of my mind.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” She shakes her head, irritated, disbelieving. “Apollo, why didn’t you just call?”
“I don’t know.”
“I could have come to you. And if this is—this has to be something different. They happen at the same time. They always happen at the same time?—”
“Not anymore.”
“Then—”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s going on?”
“Artemis.”
“You don’t know,” she says, her hands moving up to my neck. “You have no idea. You just don’t like it when men talk to me. Is that it?”
“No.” Except I hated when Chris Walsh was talking to her. I hated when he was looking at her. I hated that he was standing on the same aircraft carrier deck with her. “Yes. That was part of it.”
Artemis lets out a sound of pure frustration. “That was part of it? You’re the one who said we would never kiss again!”
“Because you said it never happened!”
“Because I wanted to kiss you!” she shouts, her voice echoing off the walls. “I’ve pretty much always wanted to kiss you. For so long! I’ve wanted to kiss you since I knew what kissing was. And then it was some big, terrible mistake that you wanted to forget.”
“No, I didn’t. No. I couldn’t—you have to understand, Artemis, it’s not?—”
She rolls her honey-gold eyes, her hands tightening on my neck. “It’s not right? Because I’m too young and unserious for you? Because you have to protect me from the dastardly deeds of a hot think tank owner? Because you’re not into me?”
“Because I can’t have you,” I shout back. Half of what we do is bicker. When you’re with someone day in and day out, close to them because you have to be, almost everything is on the table. Teasing. Arguing. Killing time. “I can’t take you from?—”
“Who?” she taunts. “The Senator? You want me to be First Lady?”
“No. You can be that prick’s First Lady over my dead body.”
Artemis is an inch from my face. Maybe less. “So your grand plan was to announce a secret engagement? You told everyone that I’m your fiancée! This is a whole thing now, Apollo!”
“We can tell them it wasn’t real. That it was because I had to protect you.”
“You listen to me,” Artemis hisses. “You can dump me in front of our entire family, if that’s what you want. We can stage a massive, dramatic breakup. But you are not going to tell them that you faked an engagement because you think I’m too much of a child to protect myself.”
“I do not think you’re a child.”
“Don’t you?”
“No,” I get out, and then it’s like the day Daisy and Hercules got engaged. The two of us collide. Artemis claws her way up my torso and hooks her legs around my hips, her moonlight gown hitched up, and the hold I’ve had on my self-control all day sinks like a damaged ship.
I kiss Artemis with teeth. She holds onto me with her nails. The wall only exists to push her up against and lean my entire body against as much of hers as I can. She’s soft, under her dress, her body giving under mine even as she tenses and rolls her hips, letting me feel the bone and muscle and life of her, pressed to the hard parts of me. One of her sharp heels digs into the muscle of my ass with a spark of pain that sends my head spiraling into outer space and back down into her mouth. Artemis angles her foot again. She’s hooked herself onto me with fierce strength, and it feels impossible that someone with such a delicate bone structure should be able to pull at me as hard as I’m pulling at her. We shouldn’t be so evenly matched, but we are.
“What were you thinking?” she gasps, digging her fingers under my collar and scratching. I like the glancing pain, God fucking help me. I like that she’s not afraid to tear into me. Why would she be? I’ve stood up to everything that happened to me before. I buried it, and now the skin on the surface is sensitive as all hell. I want her to scratch it until I can’t feel it anymore. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I just needed you,” I say into her mouth, half-delirious, feverish with relief and guilt, my heart tick tock tick tock tick tocking down to its last beat. She tastes fresh, like a spring breeze and sweet champagne and something faintly salty. “I needed.”
I don’t know what she says after that. The sound of her mouth under mine is louder than my pulse in my ears. It’s louder than the music above us. I get one hand on her thigh and push it up under the bunched hem of her wedding-white dress.
There’s a click from somewhere behind us, and the light in the hall changes color. It seeps into Artemis’s white dress, staining it.
Blood moon, I think.
And then there’s a louder thud and heavy footsteps heading in the opposite direction.
Artemis lets me put her on her feet. I rearrange her dress while she straightens my jacket.
And then I put my hand on the small of her back and bring her out of the alcove with me.
The empty hallway seems to stretch out endlessly. I don’t know where that person and their footsteps went. I don’t care to go searching.
Artemis looks up at me, one hand at her hair, patting it back into place. “Did something happen at the meeting? Was it something he said?”
“He said he wants a favor.” I push back a tendril she missed. Lifting my arm hurts a little less than it did earlier. “But he said it in the tone people use when they’re doing you a favor.”
“Oh, no,” says Artemis. “He did condescension. That monster.”
It doesn’t sound very ominous to someone who wasn’t there. Who didn’t see what I saw. But if I tell her that, I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t have me committed. The episodes have never come with hallucinations before—even if that shadow did seem as real as me.
“Anyone who looks that aggressively bland has to be hiding something. And I’ll have a better chance of figuring out what it is if he isn’t using you as some kind of pawn. Or prize. He’s also doing patriarchy, Artemis. It’s very…” I try to think of a stronger word than bad. “Very bad.”
“Well.” Artemis pats my side. “If it’s that bad, we can just get married.”
“Right,” I agree. “Easy.”