“Good.” Hades is brisk. It sounds like he’s walking somewhere. A voice passes by in the background of the call and fades out. A door clicks shut. “We need to talk about Demeter.”
I turn my back on Ashley and go around to the other side of the island. My stomach knots and doesn’t release. What he’s said to me is so fucked up I can’t process it. We need to talk is not something Hades says to me. Not something Zeus says to me. We don’t need conversation from each other. That’s one step away from needing emotion, and we don’t—we don’t. And not about Demeter. “No.”
“Yes. She’s getting to the guards.”
The last time Demeter lost it, she went big. She killed Zeus’s assistant, blew up his whorehouse, and kidnapped all of his whores. Brigit almost died, too. And Zeus wouldn’t let me snap Demeter’s neck. I had her in my hands. If you kill me, you’ll never find it. He put her under house arrest with her home and her flowers. I let her live, and then he let her live, and now—
Getting to the guards means she’s getting them on her side. It’s a real issue. Demeter is the most fucked up of us all, and there are certain people who can’t resist her. If she can get to the men being paid by Hades and Zeus to keep her there, she can convince them to do things for her.
I lean over the sink and stare blankly out the window. “Why is that my problem? She needs to be put down like a rabid dog.”
I glance over my shoulder at Ashley and the dog, who doesn’t have rabies.
“You’re the best man for the job.” His tone is light, but I know a challenge when I hear one. I know an offer when I hear one, too. It would be full circle. It would end the circle. “Are you going to come and do it?”
“Maybe I would if I had a fucking ship.”
A pause. I hate these pauses of his. It means Hades is noticing something. Considering it. His awareness is his least attractive and most unsettling quality, except for his eyes. “It’s not going well, then.”
“No, it’s not going well. By this rate I’ll be able to sail in three and a half years.” I’ll be dead long before then. I can’t survive that long without my ship. I’m not sure I can survive to the end of the night. Sun glints on green leaves outside the window, and beyond that is a blue stretch of sea that pulls out a feverish desperation from somewhere behind my heart.
“Do you need help?”
Need, need, need. Hades is circling a dangerous place with his questions. A place I don’t want to go. I don’t know why he’s pushing. This isn’t the way we do things. I bail those fuckers out, and they leave me alone, and that’s it, that’s all. Because I don’t want anything more from them. Because I didn’t end things at the farmhouse until it was too late. Because I didn’t try hard enough.
I can’t think about that. I can’t feel this guilt. I don’t feel it. I force myself to stand up tall. “Why? You going to fly out here with all your tools and do it yourself?”
“My, my. Someone woke up on the wrong side of the berth.”
“Is there a reason you’re still on the phone or do you just like to be annoying as fuck?”
“Ashley’s tired of your bullshit, isn’t she? Trouble in paradise.”
I look over my shoulder again and find that Ashley has now made the dog a pull rope toy out of one of the fancy bathroom towels. “I’m not sure she’s cut out for this life.”
I’m not sure she’s cut out for me. I’m not sure I can live up to her, even if she keeps choosing me. Even if she keeps wanting me the way she does, with her big blue eyes and her trust and her softness and all the things that make her too good for a person like me. Too innocent, despite everything I’ve done to her.
Hades’ silence gets louder. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
As a hurricane. As gale force winds. I could destroy her, but I’m already pulling myself apart for her. I want her too much, and too badly. I’m a heartbeat away from falling for her, and I can’t. I can’t do that. I’ve already given up my ship. My pride. My identity. How much more will she strip from me before she’s done? It doesn’t matter if she meant for it to be that way. It’s happening anyway. I’m losing pieces of myself. They’ll float away like debris on the water and I’ll never see them again.
“Poseidon.”
“What?”
The whole conversation is happening an ocean away. I slip my hand in my pocket and pull out the pearl I keep there. Lately I’ve been carrying one with me always. I hold it up to the sun, and for the first time I see how the shine has worn off. How the granules, the atoms that my mother once touched have been rubbed away and given to the sea.
“We can be there in a matter of hours.”
“I have to find her,” I answer distantly. It’s the wrong thing to say, but it’s the only thing I know right now. I have to find my mother. I have to know what happened to her. The quest to find her is the only thing I have left, and the only thing that will make sense of what Ashley’s father shouted at me the day I lost the Trident.
Hades does not ask who I’m talking about. “You have to get some sleep,” he says.
“I’m wide awake.”
I’m not. I’m so tired my bones ache. I hate that he knows that. Knows anything. But it’s also a strange relief. One I won’t get used to.
For once, he doesn’t argue with me. “You’ll send a message when the time comes.”
“No idea what you’re talking about, you obnoxious bastard.”
“You’ll send a message.” He’s not insisting so much as he’s ordering. Hades. Ordering me.
I’ve been fighting forever. Putting up a fight is my one talent and my profession. But right now, I can’t do it.
“Yes,” I tell my brother. “Fine. Yes.”
8
Ashley
Things are not better the next day at the shipyard. In fact, despite the visible progress they’ve made on the ship—even I can see it—Poseidon’s mood is black and stormy. He and the shipbuilder stand in the shadow of his still-unnamed ship, having a conversation that seems like it’ll become a fistfight any second. It seems like that, but it won’t. Things are like that here. They simmer, but they don’t come to blows. Not on Haven Island. I don’t know if that’s the real name of this place or just what the pirates call it.
Buddy follows me away from the ship to a long, low warehouse situated between the ocean and the trees. I didn’t notice it yesterday because it’s half-hidden behind where Poseidon’s ship is being built, but it’s there. The line of workshops at the forest’s edge are for smaller projects. Not the warehouse.
I take one step inside and stifle a moan at the cool air. It’s hot as hell on the pavement outside. Even the gravel sections of the shipyard aren’t any cooler. The ocean breeze doesn’t make a dent in all that industry. It’s nicer in here, though just as busy as outside.
There are huge spaces inside for assembling delicate parts of ships that can’t sit out in the rain, and men come and go from those pieces in a constant stream. Long worktables are arranged on either side of the room. Directly across from me is a row of offices. I can see screens through some of the windows. Computer screens.