New to the story or need a refresher? Begin with the prologue:
Jaden woke up feeling as if all the water had been siphoned from his body. Then someone had replaced it with venom.
He catalogued the sensation without panic. Dry mouth. Heavy limbs. A skull-splitting ache that pulsed behind his eyes. He pushed it all to his mind’s back burner because there were more immediate problems.
He had no idea where he was.
For a stretch of his childhood, home had been wherever he and his mother ended up for the night. Borrowed couches if they were lucky. Often the backseat of their car with the windows cracked just enough. He’d learned how to wake up without expecting familiarity.
Still, he’d hoped those years were behind him. That adulthood meant waking with context.
When he tried to stand, a wave of red mist flooded his vision, dropping him back on the edge of the couch. He looked around the large, unkempt room that contained him and the musty aroma of neglect. The floors were covered in a thick layer of dust, and around the dated armchairs and worn chaise lounge, really stuffed in any free spaces, was every kind of musical instrument imaginable. One instrument looked like a horn grafted onto some sort of cello.
Despite himself, the instruments made Jaden feel slightly less endangered. Artists collected like this. Hoarders of sound and potential. It meant someone here cared about making things, not just breaking them.
He searched his memory. The canal houses surfaced in his mind. Golden light. Then nothing.
Movement at the doorway made him look up.
“Not again,” a statuesque woman said. “And who are you?”
Her irritability was as real as the eyebrows she furrowed together. It didn’t help that they were paired with an expression that said she didn’t think much of Jaden, and he doubted that he would improve his standing by introducing himself.
“I’m Jaden,” he said. “You?”
“Athena,” she replied, crisp and precise.
“Like the goddess?”
“Nope,” Athena said. “Nope. Nope. Nope. I am not doing this again. Apollo? Artemis? Can you both come downstairs for a moment?”
Jaden felt an icy pit underneath the sweet notes she floated up to the two names in the house. He tried to pretend that he did not notice.
What he couldn’t ignore, however, was Apollo. When he walked into the room, Jaden found himself stealing little glances at him, trying to sit up straighter and smooth out the wrinkles in his clothes. Generally trying to make sure that he didn’t look like a hot mess in front of one of those faces that was not so much sexy as sickeningly sexy. The defined jawline, the structural symmetry. It all demanded attention.
A stampede of about a hundred and five felines of varying sizes and colors descended the stairs and filled up the room in a rush.
“Great.” Athena rolled her eyes. “Your sister brought her whole entourage.”
Trailing after the last cat was Artemis, a cup of tea in hand.
Jaden noticed something of a fawn in her bashful grace and shy eyes. If he were to photograph her, she would be most at home with trees framing the sides of her face, a fine morning dew at her feet.
“We’re holding an emergency roommate meeting,” Athena said.
“Okay.” Apollo crossed his arms. “We’re all here. What’s wrong?”
“We can’t do it here,” Athena snapped. “Official meeting room.”
“What’s the official meeting room?” Artemis asked, anchoring her hands around her mug while one of the many cats purred at her feet.
Athena had an intensity of expression that gave Jaden the impression that she was refraining, with great difficulty, from biting not just Jaden’s head off, but all of those gathered.
“You look weird. What’s wrong?” Artemis asked.
“Just get in the kitchen.” Athena pointed with a muscled arm. “I want everyone to go in there. It’s procedural.”
Artemis shrugged and followed her brother while Athena slid the stained-glass doors shut behind them.
Even without Apollo telling me about their little powwow, I have lived with Athena before. When she uses that word, procedural, it means the decision is already made.
“We agreed that the house rule was no more humans,” Athena said. “Every time you bring one in, we start falling into old habits like we need all these sacrifices in our names. Worship and commands. And it just escalates into a whole dependency.”
“It’s only until he recovers. I hit him with my bike,” Apollo said. “And I couldn’t just leave him.”
“There’s always some exception with you.” Athena threw her hands in the air. “Sometimes I think you intentionally hurt people just so you can help them. As if you get some sort of sick satisfaction from mending the damage you caused yourself.”
Apollo gasped. “I would never!”
“Yeah, well, observable behavior. Besides, being both a prophet and a healer, it’s not out of the realm of possibility,” she muttered.
“That’s actively insulting. Some of us enjoy using our powers for the greater good, helping others simply out of the kindness of our hearts.”
“And some of us enjoy the privacy of our home. I should be able to walk around in nothing but the aura of my divinity without the side-effect of turning some mortal into a bonfire because you’ve broken the rules and brought home yet another stray.”
“Please, Athena. You want to talk about house rules? Fine, let’s talk about house rules. I didn’t want to bring this up, but I don’t think we have all been pulling our weight around here.”
“What are you implying?” Athena asked through gritted teeth.
“I think we both know who is mysteriously away every time it’s her turn on the chore chart.”
“I do my chores,” Athena said evenly.
“You haven’t touched a broom in a decade,” Apollo protested. “It’s unhygienic.”
“Unhygienic? We’re gods. We don’t need to sweep.”
Apollo crossed his arms. “It’s uncivilized.”
Athena gestured toward Artemis, trying to get her support. “Are you going to say anything, or are you always on his side? If he wants to relapse into old habits, he should do it somewhere else. That same rule breaking is why you kicked out Aphrodite. Why doesn’t it apply to him?”
Artemis glanced at her brother, but the goddess of the hunt did not speak.
I’ve lived with her long enough, too, to know what that silence usually means. Artemis dislikes choosing sides, especially when both are technically wrong. To her, the problem with living with gods has never been the house rules. It’s the gods themselves. We both know how Athena becomes a nagging neighbor when she feels order slipping. And Apollo—well. He has always relished pointing out her deep, deep contradictions.
Athena’s jaw tightened when Artemis stayed quiet. She has never tolerated neutrality well.
“Okay. You two want to keep playing these games?”
“You two want to keep playing these games,” Apollo mocked her. He couldn’t resist.
An eyelid flickered. “That’s it. We are not doing this again!” Athena tore open the kitchen doors. The cats scattered.
Power aligned around the angry goddess, like soldiers taking position.
Jaden tried to stand. His legs failed.
Behind Athena, something passed between the twins. A look too fast to name.
Jaden’s world lurched. He felt himself slip, almost like a hand yanked from a glove. His body collapsed to the floor. Then the room stretched around him, too large, too loud. The smells alone were overwhelming.
“Am I dead?” Jaden asked. Or so he thought. What came out of his mouth was a series of meows instead.
“No more humans around here,” Athena said, already turning away from the crumpled body.
Jaden pressed a paw to his former hand.
As fur met skin, a memory came without warning: his mother’s fingers cold in his own.
He had waited for something then, too. A squeeze. Some sort of sign. And, for a moment, it appeared she would smile for a change and pat him on the shoulder.
Good boy, Jaden. Thank you for trying to stand by me, and I’m sorry for all that I put you through. Pat, pat, pat.
Under the morgue’s fluorescent lights, his dead mother had done no such thing.
She was, of course, off. This whole world, Jaden had surmised early on, was one big on-and-off switch. Now you see it, now you don’t. One moment his mother was alive, the next, she wasn’t. And Jaden knew she had been tired. He knew that being—the “on” side of the switch—required so much effort of her. Therefore, he was not surprised that she took her life and sank into death.
That did not mean that he didn’t cry, that he did not worry about what life would be like without her, or that he did not think about all the memories they had shared. She was, after all, the last remaining link to his childhood, to his father. What her death did mean, though, was that fundamentally, deep, deep down…he thought he would feel sad, even relieved; all he felt was anger.
You left me. That was what burned.
As a cat, instinct rose—to hiss and claw. But each attempt to rebel was met with being herded into the collective. He was shuffled along with the rest of the felines, and the quiet, seething knowledge that something else had ended, and nothing had bothered to ask him if he was ready.