CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
“HAVE YOU INHERITED MY ANGER, fierce Apollōn?” A hand caressed James’s cheek in the professorial antechamber.
Knotted vines snared and twined through the grandiose flora strewn throughout the subterranean cavern.
The torpid, languorous summer air intensated the aroma of pothos in bloom.
Peperomia snaked throughout the magenta rugs, weaving over the walls of primeval artifacts. “You’re shaking.”
James kissed her open palm in return. “You excite me.”
“Truly, you’re not angered with me?” She asked him, suspicious of the complete calm of him.
James had agonized for weeks over the right vengeance. He plotted meticulous methods and techniques to permanently excise her from his life. He descended into a dark chasm of grisly bloodlust he didn’t realize he was capable of; an explosive wrath so destructive, he was becoming her.
It was then he realized, why destroy her when she was perfectly capable of destroying herself?
As the aggressively fragrant candles burned onto the bath waters, the summer recitation had concluded with a corpse sent over from Tiberian College in Mount Arcturus, Montana. James had disarticulated the body, and Wulfram had sent the corpse to the incinerator at the coroner’s office.
Professor Wulfram had halted James in the lecture halls, and James expected the massive, bearded man to ask where he’d been in his intermittent absence for the past weeks in Montana.
Why he had not reported back to the archon eponymous.
Instead, Helmut set his infamously wolfish eyes on him.
That woman has you directly in her sights.
Do not be thoughtless at this time. Tighten yourself.
In Wulfram’s mind of antiquity, their personal grievances were irrelevant to the task at hand.
However, he knew Professor Ilaria spilled first blood.
She had murdered a student without approval, and she’d further corroded her mentorship with her protégé to endanger his future.
His glory. His legacy. If James felt inclined to commit retaliatory barbarity, he held the right.
Let there be nothing that stands between you and retribution with an enemy. Not friendship. Not even blood.
The lustration needed to be committed, as always, petals strewn across the scented waters. James mentally tightened himself.
“I wouldn’t be here if I’d inherited your anger.
” James entered the ivory clawfoot tub. The warmth of the water and heated oils enclosed his body.
He kept his eyes on the serpentine pothos, the convoluted ivy that winded through the high walls, the trinkets of expensive crystal. He stared everywhere, but at her.
“None of this needed to happen.” She soaked the bathing pumice stone, scouring him gently. “I deeply regret our bickering. How foolish it was.”
In order for James to be convincing, he had to interlace the truth. “I contemplated murdering you.”
“I killed the boy out of anger. I see my righteous anger in you,” she murmured softly. “It’s a terrible quality we share.”
Her murderous rage was within him, he couldn’t deny it.
Her capacity for earth-shattering, world-tilting fury was imparted within him.
Athena the warmonger. He’d lashed out in front of Elliott with that exact all-consuming, implacable wrath that churned hatred through his lungs and inflamed every inch of his furious skin.
He’d hurt Elliott deeply to witness his true wrath.
Enraged, he’d been on the brink of committing slaughter without regard.
Connecticut nearly destroyed him completely.
He’d taken a flight to Mount Parnassus in Greece.
He supplicated before in the temple of Apollōn.
He intoned Delphic incantations to Apollōn.
He entreated Apollōn to prophesize unto him.
He beseeched him for visions to bring forth her end.
In a radically bright vision, an oracle as radiant as the sunlight gleamed across the mightful bow of Apollōn himself, Apollōn had prophesied her end to him.
How it must be done with a brazen lion’s heart in Finch’s honor.
For him to be laid to rest with the pride he deserved.
árēs answered his war cry. Apollōn gifted him his war song.
James was in the throes of wrath and grief and, in the wilderness of his depression, he couldn’t even remember where or who he was half of the time. He couldn’t let Elliott see him that way again, therefore, he was rarely in the state after Finch’s wake and funeral.
He couldn’t bear to gaze at Elliott without thinking of the fatal banquet.
He dreamt at night, wishing he could exchange anything with fate to return to the first week of June with him again. To exist in a time before his oldest childhood friend was violently taken from his world. James couldn’t forgive himself for it. As it turned out, he couldn’t forgive her either.
“Enter the bath with me.” He smiled, playfully mischievous, as he’d always been before. As though he couldn’t help but love her in the end. “You need to cleanse yourself of his death. His spirit lingers on you.”
Even after all this time, he couldn’t bring himself to mention Finch’s name. She didn’t deserve to hear it.
“I don’t bathe with my students out of principle. And,” Séverine included quickly under her breath, “half of these students don’t know how to cleanse their souls properly. I can’t imagine they scour their bodies well. A body is but an instrument of the soul.”
“I am not your protégé any longer,” James reminded her with a quirk of his mouth. “I am not interested in a sexual tryst either, if that’s what you are afraid of, my sweet Athena.”
Séverine cherished any relation to the divine.
She relished his soft hums of Homeric Hymns in her ear.
“‘Of Pallas Athena, guardian of the city, I begin to sing. Dread is she, and with Ares she loves deeds of war, the sack of cities and the shouting and the battle. It is she who saves the people as they go out to war and come back.’”[20]
In return, she cupped his cheek gently. “‘I will remember and not be unmindful of Apollo who shoots afar. As he goes through the house of Zeus, the gods tremble before him and all spring up from their seats when he draws near, as he bends his bright bow…Then, like a star at noonday, the lord, far-working Apollo, leaped from the ship: flashes of fire flew from him thick and their brightness reached to heaven.’”[21]
However, James Wilde was not the divine. He was flesh, sinew, muscle, and blood. She never understood that.
For as boundless as her fury was, her sycophancy for horrid brilliance consumed her.
“My love, a sexual tryst with you does not invite fear, it inspires apathy. It would be sacrilege to stain the sanctity of our andragogy. Beyond that matter, I’ve done nothing to earn your forgiveness. I’ve offered no true contrition.”
Her eyes were wet, desperate with repentance and the fervent desire for reconciliation.
She had never been sexually interested in him, but she had always ardently been inspired by him. Séverine was utterly fine with tarring the threads of their andragogy in a show of power and force, but she would’ve collapsed at the severing of their precious thread altogether.
James extended a hand to her. “That’s where we’ve always differed.
There is nothing you could commit that I wouldn’t forgive you for.
You never need to beg me for forgiveness, you’ve already been forgiven.
” His eyes were honeyed as he stole the words out of Elliott’s mouth.
“You’re my favorite person in the world. ”
“As you are mine.”
The water streamed gently into the oils of the bath. “Which is why I came to offer my condolences properly.”
“Condolences?” She bit her lip in thought. “Whyever would I need condolences? No one of importance has died.”
A muscle spasmed in James’s jaw. He surprised himself with how even-toned he sounded to his own ears.
“Of course, there hasn’t been a death that matters.” He chuckled for good measure. “I am truly very sorry that this is the last time we will speak together.”
“Sorry?”
“I’ve selected my successor for your new protégé. Lucy Swann.”
“Lucy Swann?” She repeated, her attempt to recall anything about her palpable.
“The wife of Wulfram’s protégé, the man ever dressed in Yves Saint Laurent with a penchant for Michelin filet mignon?
” Over the years, it’d taken her several attempts to scribble Perseus’s name in ink on her wrist to remember him whenever he was with Wulfram, otherwise she couldn’t bear to remember his name.
It fluttered out of her mind completely.
“Yes. You will love her.”
Her hollow cheekbones were gaunt, her ribs spare beneath her lustration robes.
She’d made nightly deity oblations and observed several weeks of fasting in prayer for their reconciliation.
She assumed James had left because of her, revulsed and revolted by her.
She sensed his enmity. His displeasure in her.
If she permitted Lucy as his successor, would he be willing to stay?
Perseus had a politician bloodline.
Lucy was no more than a future politician’s wife.
Their existence was rather incongruent and foreign with her own.
“Will I truly love her?” She asked, doubtful of the prospect.
“Without reservation,” he promised. “Let there be no secrets between us, yes? She is as motherless as I am. I envy her, for I will miss you greatly.”
She melted beneath his words. “All I have wanted for us is for you to understand we are two rare creatures, you and I. We know each other so thoroughly, yes, it renders secrets useless, my exquisite Apollōn.”
“I prefer Alexikakos. I was foolish to not have seen you as my Pallas Athena.”
His words ensorcelled her and fraught tears speckled against her eyes.
“I beg of you to tell me if I am dreaming. Your words. I’ve waited lifetimes, it feels like, to hear these very words from you, Alexikakos.”
“I have been stubborn, if you can forgive me for everything.” With that said, James drew a knife to sever the ends of his hair, before she stopped him.
She grasped his hands tightly.
“You have forgiven me without need for solatium, therefore I have forgiven you. Yes, I will welcome her as my protégé. She will be to me as if she were of my own flesh.” She embraced the moment with enthusiasm as he rose out of the bath. “Let us welcome the Swanns, yes?”