Over the last few months, this story has slowly been making its way into the world one chapter at a time.
Now it finally has a face!
Huge thanks to Nosheen for creating a cover that genuinely feels like it came from inside the story itself. She somehow captured the exact tension I wanted at the center of the book: mythology, power, and collapse.
Check it out:
New to the story or need a refresher? Begin with the prologue:
“Look at all the colors,” Apollo said when he conjured himself back into the prison cell.
He manifested in front of his wall of instruments, light still clinging to him from his morning labor. He gestured toward the sunrise palette he had painted on the sky. It was difficult not to like a man who noticed color or even spoke to that internal experience.
It was significantly more difficult to like a man who controlled your exits.
“Are you locking me in here?” Jaden stared at him, defiant.
“Of course not,” Apollo laughed softly. “I’m only taking some precautions to protect you. Anyway, I went heavier on the amber and vermillion for you this morning since I know those are your favorite colors.”
Apollo leaned in for a kiss. Jaden leaned backward.
“Protection from what?”
“I thought that was evident. Not all of us gods are friendly, Jaden. Some are territorial and jealous. And some would take what is mine simply to prove they can.”
There it was.
Mine.
“Take me from you?” Jaden asked. “You make me sound like I’m your possession.”
Apollo’s expression shifted. Just slightly. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I meant safe.” His voice gentled. “I meant that I don’t intend to lose you.”
“And when was I supposed to leave?”
“You are always free to leave. All you have to do is ask.”
“If I ask? Maybe this is hard for you to understand as a god, but you don’t get to decide what I do. I am my own—”
Suddenly Artemis walked over. First of all, she came out of nowhere, appearing in front of Apollo’s collection of lyres, which was infuriating. But second, as soon as she did, Apollo sealed Jaden’s lips, froze him in place, and slid him out of the way with a casual swish of the hand.
“You’re needed in the official meeting room,” Artemis said.
“What for?”
“It’s Iris. She wants to talk to all of us. Said it was an emergency.”
“Do you know what it’s about?”
Artemis shrugged. “It’s a message from Hera, but she won’t say what it is until we’re all gathered.”
Apollo sighed. “I guess it can’t be helped.”
Her eyes flicked—once—toward Jaden. “What do you want to do with him? Athena made her stance pretty clear the last time.”
“Since when do you care about what Athena wants?”
Artemis turned away. “All I’m saying is she has a point, Lolo. Things change when humans are around. They make us act differently somehow.”
“I’ll leave him here for now,” Apollo said. “He’s not going anywhere.”
The twins faded from the room as they continued to talk about Jaden as if he were furniture, debating why anyone would choose to be human since it was such a dense experience of reality.
How strange that only last night (was it last night?) that Jaden lived for those moments when he found himself lying next to Apollo and could lean against his shoulder or wrap one of his legs over his. All to feel the brilliance that hummed beneath the god’s skin. Just skin. Which was hard to look away from as Apollo glowed—softly, luminously.
Yet whenever another god entered the room, something shifted. The brilliance narrowed. A sudden dimness settled between Jaden and Apollo, and it became too easy to disappear into Apollo’s shadow.
Immobilized, Jaden’s entire body felt like flesh turned concrete; he couldn’t move a finger or blink an eye. Even breathing felt restricted.
He retreated inward. Not into panic. At least not yet. He dropped below it.
There was a place he knew how to reach. A banked center that was a quiet pocket beneath everything else. He had found it before, insulated from slammed doors and sirens and hands and shouting. When the world grew sharp, he stepped there and waited.
Apollo’s divinity did not follow.
It pressed at him, certainly. Jaden felt it along the surface of himself like sunlight on closed eyelids. But it could not reach where he had gone.
I could tell you why.
I won’t—not yet.
But Apollo couldn’t have, even if he’d felt Jaden’s resistance.
Inside that depth, something answered as a pulse gathered slowly. Sensation returned in increments. First, a tremor in Jaden’s wrist. Then a flicker behind his eyes. His lungs remembered their rhythm.
Jaden’s fingers tingled and his jaw unclenched. The weight of the divine command thinned enough for him to slip past its rules. When his stone skin dissolved back into flesh, he did not dwell on the miracle of it. He had never tolerated the horror-movie fool who paused their escape to study the mechanics of their cage. Now it was his turn to yell at himself to grab his things and keep it moving.
Jaden told his body to move. It obeyed.
He crossed the room in three strides. The luggage first. Then the urn.
For a hot second, he remembered wanting to stand over the canal and shake her into the water. Not now. He tucked the urn into his backpack. Whatever he felt about her, her remains were still his.
The camera last. Always the camera.
He rolled the advance lever out of habit. The click steadied him. Mechanical. Real. And he lifted the Minolta to his eye.
Jaden had noticed that every time either twin appeared or disappeared, it was always in front of the wall lined with Apollo’s instruments. The lyres, the violins, the flutes, all arranged in meticulous rows. There was nothing unusual about the wall. At least nothing his eyes could detect. Nothing through the lens either.
Except the light meter. The thing had died years ago, but there the needle was, clear as day in the viewfinder, moving and measuring the amount of light coming into the lens. The wall was saturated with it.
Jaden stepped closer. He extended his hand where the meter surged, and his fingers met resistance. Something thin. He brushed against a slightly greasy texture, like shea butter worked into skin. The faint scent of earth and sun-warmed oil rose into the air.
Familiar sensations, things he hadn’t come across since he was a kid, reminded him of mothballed memories. Over the years, Jaden had lodged certain things in the permanent past, packed them at the bottom of the box. He hadn’t been trying to hide them so much as those memories were obscured beneath all the things that came later.
Jaden pressed harder. And heat traveled through his palm, not burning or painful, but something alive.
He closed his eyes, and he was six again. Snow packed into his coat sleeves, socks soaked through after making snow angels. He’d come inside, teeth shattering, and climbed into the oven after turning the knob as far is it would go. The heat had gathered around him then too. Gentle at first. Then thick. Enveloping. Something lush and heavy that made him grin.
Until the oven door flew open.
“What’s wrong with you, huh?” his mouther had shouted. “You crazy?”
Just as the heat had dissipated when she yanked him out, the warmth from the wall withdrew.
Abrupt.
And just as he had been pulled out of the oven, so too was he pulled from the hall.
***
It’s time to reverse this chariot for a moment. We both need some questions answered, don’t you think? Let’s forget about Amsterdam for a second, and we will travel back in time to Davis Court instead. I’ll be watching from the sidelines with my last sips of wine, of course, and we will see what we see.
To the east and west, highways curved like concrete arms, sealing the neighborhood in its embrace. To the north, train tracks hissed and shrieked at all hours, slicing the air with metallic insistence. The last distinct boundary was an eight-block stretch of vacant lots to the south—mostly derelict brick houses and a stubborn convenience store—with a cemetery as its terminating vista.
Davis Cart once blended into Richmond, but now it was carved out of the city.
Jaden lived on a block dominated by identical two-story apartments relentlessly repeated in groups of five units. Iron fences separated each cluster, and those fences became law. He was only allowed to skate between two specific posts that marked off the units where he lived.
Other kids roamed where they pleased. He often watched them from the front porch with envy as they rode bikes or jumped rope.
One day, the world came to him. A group of his classmates barreled through his patch of sidewalk, and one of them smacked him on the back.
“Tag—you’re it!” yelled Tank.
Jaden recognized Tank as one of his few peers that didn’t make fun of him or tease him. The spirit of the moment grabbed hold of Jaden. And he pushed off and chased. Laughter and hollering ricocheted off the pavement while he was part of the gleaming pack of new playmates.
Until he got to the iron fence.
He stopped. It sure felt like every head turned at once.
“You coming?” Tank called.
“He won’t do it,” a girl said, emerging from the cluster. Jaden also knew Sabrina from his class, but for different reasons. She was the most vocal of his new teasers. Today, she looked different. More feral somehow, with her hair wild from running and a sharp gap between her teeth that could spit out insults. “He’s a momma’s boy. Gotta do what Mommy Lady says.”
They all shared a snicker.
“No, I don’t.” Jaden clenched his fist.
Sabrina crossed her arms. “Prove it, den.”
The problem was that a cord of nerves tightened in his stomach each time he moved toward to the fence. Every inch closer made the cord work its way down and bind his feet, thick as rope.
They didn’t have to face his mom.
But more laughter was on the other side. Acceptance in this new group made him desperate. And, at least, something was happening.
He looked back at his front door and estimated he had a small window before his mom would check on him again. She had been silhouetted in the doorway only a handful of minutes ago, admonishing him to wear his knee pads in her classic posture. It all started with her neck and trickled down to her hips, her limbs like creased cardboard, ready to unleash maternal wrath if he dared cross any lines. And Mom had a knack for finding something she disapproved of in the simplest things.
I’ll be back in ten minutes, Jaden bargained with himself.
And what a glorious ten minutes they were as he and the mob of kids stampeded further down the street. They buzzed toward the rough-hewn corridor of houses with broken and boarded up windows, the vacant lots peppered like bruises on the broken limbs of Davis Court.
Jaden felt light.
Fast.
Chosen.
It was exhilarating to burst after the kids on roller skates. They screamed and scattered at sharp angles, hid behind trees, or darted up crumbling steps to avoid his hands.
Actually. It wasn’t ten minutes.
Eight minutes passed. Right before Jaden was going to skate home, but not without finally tagging Sabrina—definitely with an extra shove—a flat pop snapped the air. Another followed, then the sound multiplied as it bounced between buildings, everywhere at once.
Something struck the tree beside them with a sharp thwack.
Bark jumped.
Jaden half-turned toward it. He went down hard instead.
Tank had yanked his legs from under him, veins surging across his massive-looking arms like vines.
“Crawl! Behind the house!” Tank yelled as another pop made brick grit spit from the side of an abandoned house.
Nothing made sense as the three wormed around to the back of the lot. Jaden felt a sharp, slicing burn across his forearm, quick and violent.
He crawled anyway, curling up when brick met his spine.
He stayed low and held his head like the others. Each distant pop folded into the memory of another day, another gun. The day his father was shot. The noise of both days pressed in, and Jaden dropped below them, landing in that narrow interior place that did not echo. The gunfire thinned there, muffled, as if heard through water.
Those five minutes stretched like an hour.
“It’s over,” Tank said at last.
“Dang boy, you almost got shot!” Sabrina pointed out and laughed as Jaden uncovered his head and looked around.
“Be nice, Sabrina,” Tank said. “He ain’t been caught up in no shootout before.”
Her high little laugh didn’t fool Jaden anyway. Underneath her giggle, they both knew that they lived in a place where death didn’t creep but lived openly on the streets. At nine, Sabrina simply wasn’t in shock about that fact any longer.
“C’mon,” she said, helping Jaden get to his feet.
We’re going to be friends now.
It wasn’t spoken. It was in the way Sabrina brushed off some of the dirt from Jaden’s clothes and gave him the once-over to confirm that he was okay. It was in Tank scanning the street before they moved, coupled with the reliability of his size. His height alone made Jaden feel that Tank was a small tree stuffed into kid form. But still just as sturdy and steady.
Jaden decided against telling either one of them that he did get shot. He reasoned the bullets had been rocks even though rocks didn’t go through your skin. And wounds from rocks definitely weren’t supposed to suture themselves up. But one’s imagination could run wild during the chaos of taking cover.
There was something different about Jaden, and something was certainly coming toward his life to which he was certainly oblivious. We’ll give him some time with his newfound friends.
Then she will come for him. Oh, how she’ll come.
P.S. I’ll be opening a small number of early reader spots soon for people interested in reading the full novel ahead of release. More on that soon!