Chapter 19
I’m not ready.
Sorry, but, like, I’m just not ready. I was ready to go hunting the first time, and I was ready to miss that deer and let my Uncle Hades kill it for me, and I was ready to be fine afterward. I was ready to go back the next time and do it right. I was ready to take deep breaths and remember all the things I learned and let him talk me through all the cuts and the resistance and having to push through.
But I’m not ready for this.
Nothing.
Is working.
Nothing.
Somehow, I thought the hardest part would be getting Apollo out of that clearing and to a hospital. Any hospital. But either Daisy or Delphi—or both of them working together, I don’t know—had that solved before I had to think about carrying him off the mountain myself.
And I would have.
But that helicopter landed in the clearing like a miracle, and maybe that’s when I wrecked it for us, because I thought he’s saved. I thought the worst is over. I thought everything gets easier from here.
I can’t stress how wrong I was.
That became apparent in the helicopter, while a physician and two paramedics from the German army tried to get Apollo’s fever under control.
And I just?—
I thought they’d be able to do it.
But there was never a break in their clipped information exchange. Their hands never stopped moving. It never stopped being the emergency that it was. I didn’t have to speak German to know that things weren’t getting better.
What was I going to do? Interrupt them to see if someone could explain the situation to me in English? They didn’t have to. Apollo was dying of a fever right in front of me.
He’s still dying of a fever, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
The helicopter flew for longer than I thought it would. It landed at a hospital in Germany—which one, I couldn’t tell you—and now the nightmare is happening in a German hospital instead of on a helicopter or in a clearing on a mountain.
Placing an IV was the struggle of a lifetime. By the time they brought in the third nurse to try, Apollo had rolled over on his side and was trying to hide his arm from her. A fourth nurse finally managed it, but Apollo promptly ripped it out. Since they couldn’t give him anything through the IV, they settled for injecting a massive amount of what I think is Tylenol.
Which did nothing.
Same for the cooling blanket. Same for the ice packs they tucked around him in the bed. Same for a bathtub filled with ice.
It’s awful, because everyone here is being so kind. Even when the nurses speak to me in English, I have trouble understanding what they’re saying, but they’re gentle, and they’re careful with Apollo, and it just feels like it should be working. When people are that good, their efforts should make a difference.
I know life doesn’t work that way. If it did, nothing bad would ever have happened to Apollo in his entire life. And more bad things would have happened to me, because I am objectively less good than Apollo.
And we’ve been here so long.
We’re in the hospital so long that my family arrives. Our family arrives. They had enough time to fly from the United States and land in Germany and get themselves to the hospital.
I’m still awake, and Apollo is still dying, and it’s chaos.
Castor and Pollux burst into the hospital room and fling themselves at Apollo for glancing hugs, followed by Calliope and Orion. Calliope kisses Apollo’s cheek and retreats with tears in her eyes. Orion pats Apollo’s arm and follows Calliope. Daisy and Hercules come to me first while my parents bend over Apollo’s bed, telling him they love him.
“I don’t want to go to Vegas, Dad,” Apollo says, and for a minute I think I’m going to watch my father lose his mind in front of everyone. The last time he looked this scared was when Daisy’s killer nightmare thing was happening.
But he covers it.
“You don’t have to go to Vegas,” he says, smoothing his hand over Apollo’s hair. “Of course you don’t have to go.”
“I’m not joining the Navy,” answers Apollo, so I don’t know if it matters to him that everyone is here at all, because he can’t tell what they’re saying.
And then Ares bursts into the room, and it’s all I can do not to freak out with heartbreak for him. He is beside himself. It’s a funhouse mirror of how he was at Calliope and Orion’s party, when he was flustered because he was late.
Ares isn’t flustered now. He’s enraged, and obviously terrified. He stomps through the hospital room with his fists balled at his side and when he sees Apollo in the hospital bed, he makes this sound like?—
I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never heard anything like it. And then he completely loses it, shouting at the nurses to do something, shouting at three different doctors to do something to save his brother with tears leaking out of his eyes, and it takes my dad and Poseidon to talk him down. If they weren’t here, I think Ares might tear the hospital apart. I think he’d be strong enough to do it. For a long time, I thought Hercules was the angry one. He was angry when he first came to my parents’ house, and angry when he left for the military, and angry when he came home after he was wounded. He was angry until he and Daisy got together. Maybe she was what he needed to calm down.
I used to be what Apollo needed, and now the only real tool I had—my presence—is worthless.
Poseidon finally lets go of Ares, who comes back to the side of Apollo’s bed, drops down into a chair, and reaches for his hands.
Apollo looks at his brother.
Everybody else has melted away. I should—I should give them some space, too, since nothing I’m doing is helping.
Holding Apollo’s hand isn’t a cure.
“I won’t leave this time,” Ares says to Apollo as I cross behind him. “I know I left you before, but I’ll kill anybody who tries.”
Tries what?
I don’t know, and I don’t ask.
I go out into the hall.
Uncle Poseidon is several paces away with my dad, my mom, my aunt Brigit, and Uncle Hades. Poseidon’s talking to three doctors in rapid German. He listens to what they say, closes his eyes, then repeats it to my dad in English.
Hades detaches himself from the circle and comes to me.
The second he’s close enough, he opens his arms and folds me into a huge hug.
And I’m, like, fine. I’m not the one who’s hallucinating and dying. I’m not the one that nobody can save. I’m great.
I have about half a second to realize that I’m going to freak out before it happens.
The sobs that come out of me are embarrassingly loud. I don’t want my parents to have to deal with this. They have enough going on, and Apollo needs someone smarter and less panicked than me to confer with the doctors and figure out if there’s something else we’ve missed. Uncle Hades ushers me into a room nearby with two sofas and a table in it, then stands quietly and rubs my back while I sob all over his shirt.
I just need thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. Maybe two minutes. I just need to sob at the top of my lungs so I can get it out, and then I’ll go back to Apollo’s bed and?—
And I don’t know.
I’ll be there.
It’s been longer than two minutes—perhaps five—when I sob-scream I don’t know what to do into Hades’s now-damp shirt.
“I can’t do this,” I add, in case he didn’t get how helpless I was. “I can’t do this! I don’t know what to do!”
“It might not be up to you,” he says.
“It is up to me!” I cry. I sound absolutely wild, but I can’t stop. “We’ve been together this whole time! It’s always been me and Apollo!”
“That doesn’t mean?—”
“You don’t get it!” I pick my head up off his chest and look him in the eye. “We have been together. Ever since they came to live with us!”
“Like…” My uncle has the tiniest crease in his forehead. “You’ve been…dating?”
“No!” I howl. “We’ve been together. We’ve had to be together. Because we get sick if we’re apart too long. You have to have seen that! You have to have noticed! You notice everything! We have to be together.”
“Okay,” he says, and oh my freaking fucking God, he didn’t notice. “You get sick in what way?”
“Fevers. They start as fevers. And then, like, it progresses to not feeling well. But we never let it go that long, because nobody wants to feel like shit! That’s just not something people want!”
“No.”
“It’s been happening since I shot that arrow. Maybe I should shoot him with another arrow.”
A pause.
“What arrow?”
“The Christmas arrow! The one I shot at him at Christmas!”
Hades’s face softens. “Artemis, you were six.”
“I’ll shoot him with an arrow if that’s what it takes, and don’t you dare say I wouldn’t.”
“I would never say that.”
“It’s been going on since I was six,” I say, softer, because maybe if I say everything out loud, that will solve the problem. “I saw him. I thought he was beautiful. I shot the arrow. I didn’t know I had a crush on him. I didn’t even know what that was.”
“You were six,” he says again.
“We kept it a secret because we didn’t want any of you to worry. And now look.”
“The secret is out,” Hades says with a sigh.
“And on top of everything else…” I swipe my sleeve over my eyes. I’m still in my hunting clothes. Still with some residual blood from one of the guys. It sprayed farther than I thought it would. “It stopped working.”
“What stopped working?”
“We would just…be close together. And hold hands. And then we would feel better. But it stopped working. I’m right here. I’ve been here this whole time, and he’s still?—”
I sob some more.
Until another thought occurs to me.
“How did you get it to work?”
Hades blinks. “How did I get what to work?”
“You and Aunt Persephone. Daisy said. She said she could do something to your energy so you wouldn’t get headaches. How did you get that to work? Like, she saved you. The other day. Because of the solar storms.”
Maybe Apollo is reacting to the magnetic storms. Maybe I’ve missed something enormous about him, and he’s more like Hades than I thought. Apollo is so sunny, but maybe he’s not the sun at all.
Hades puts his hand on my shoulder and shakes, very lightly.
Oh. I forgot to breathe.
I start breathing again.
“That’s different,” he says, after a minute.
“You and Aunt Persephone? Well, obviously you’re different people, but how different can it be? We’re all different people. That’s what humanity does.”
“Persephone has her own…” He makes a circle in the air, indicating that his word choice might not be accurate. At least, I think that’s what he’s indicating. “Power. And I have mine.”
“Okay?”
“It’s not like your mother and father. Or Poseidon and Brigit.”
“How do you know that?”
“Through observation,” he says.
“Then how does Persephone do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t say that to me,” I snap at him. “Everyone keeps saying they don’t know. And that’s not going to be enough. Nobody knows how to do anything. That’s, like, humanity. That is all of humanity. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to throw up our hands and let Apollo die.”
There is a silence during which Hades’s black eyes don’t tell me anything about what’s going on in his head. Damn him for that.
“I would imagine,” he says, finally, “that the way things work between me and Persephone has to do with a certain…bonding element.”
“Bonding element? Like rope? Like handcuffs?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Not like that.”
“Like fucking?”
Another brief pause.
“If I recall correctly, it was during a…private time we spent together.”
I fling my hands up into the air and pace away from him. “Well, fuck! Because we’ve already done that! If fucking was the cure, then he’d be cured right now! Sorry to ruin your life with that information! I probably should have said it quieter, but it’s too late now! It’s too late for everything! God! If it was as simple as fucking, I’d be in there riding him to kingdom come!”
“I have no doubt,” says Hades, gently.
I throw my head back and stare at the ceiling.
“I can’t believe that’s all you had to do. Just hop in the sack, and boom, bonded or whatever.”
“No sack,” he says, with extreme delicacy. “I seem to recall a chair.”
“This is the worst day of my life,” I yell at him. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!”
That’s something I can only shout at Uncle Hades in this moment. Worse things are happening to Apollo.
“What’s the best thing that ever happened to you?” Hades asks.
“Every single time I’ve seen Apollo.” This is an easy question. “Ever since I shot that first arrow at him.”
“Has he ever shot one back?”
“No.” I pace around in another tight, furious circle. “We’re careful when we play our games.”
“Please,” says Hades, holding out a hand to stop me. “Tell me you don’t shoot arrows at each other during these games.”
“We do! Sorry! But we’re, like, really good at it, so we never hit each other! Except once, and that was on purpose!”
Hades covers his eyes with his hand.
“It was fine. And it was on purpose, because he was hiding from me.”
“You hunted him to a hiding place and shot him with an arrow?”
“No. He was hiding truths from me. About things that were going on. And then he finally told me, and it was, like…it wasn’t fine, but it wasn’t that bad. It was all understandable. It’s the whole reason we’re here.”
“So you shot him,” says Hades, slowly, like he’s coming to the solution. He isn’t. Arrows don’t have anything to do with this. “But he’s never shot you.”
“Never.”
Just then, Apollo’s CEO and assistant Delphi, who’s been his friend since college, bursts into the waiting room. “Did you figure it out yet? The circle?”
Uncle Hades and I both stare at her.
“Oh, come on, please tell me you figured it out.” She looks rumpled and exhausted, her hair in a bun that’s falling to pieces. “Please.”
It doesn’t make any sense.
It shouldn’t help at all.
But when Delphi says that, something clicks.
So you shot him, but he’s never shot you.
For most of my life, I’ve thought that shooting arrows was a one-and-done thing. There was no other arc. Nothing shoots an arrow back at you.
Nothing except a man who’s your equal in literally every way. The only man who’s good enough to chase you through the woods and shoot arrows near you, but not into you, for fun.
That first arrow wasn’t a full arc, was it?
Apollo is just like me. We play those games in the woods because we’re the same.
There’s something he hasn’t told me.
We came here because of those aerial photos, but that wasn’t blackmail. Those were a map. The other photos were blackmail. The other photos with a very young Apollo in them. The photos that made him look like he was being eaten alive.
Across the hall, Apollo screams.
All of us move. There’s a collision in the doorway of the hospital room, and I don’t know which member of my family I shove out of my way. I just push until I’m at Apollo’s side.
He screams again, then stops and throws up bright red blood down the front of his already-bloodied hospital gown. Ares keeps him upright, but his face is the color of ash and he’s shaking. Or they’re both shaking.
I’m not sure what happens next. Yelling, I think. A lot of yelling. I’m on the bed with Apollo, wiping at his face. He doesn’t seem to recognize me. His eyes start to roll back in his head, and then there’s a lot of shouting, and a high-pitched shriek that I belatedly understand is every alarm in the room going off.
Which is what happens when someone’s dying.
And then someone reaches past Ares and takes Apollo’s shoulder and holds.
It’s Uncle Hades.
I find him in the crowd of my family. “What are you doing?”
Apollo blinks. He blinks again. He focuses on my face.
“I’m crushing his heart,” Hades says. “As gently as I can.”