But she was just staring out the window, her profile thoughtful, a little distant. Maybe I should have said something, like point out how well she was doing—positive reinforcement and all that good stuff. But the words weren’t there, and every time I glanced over at her, her expression hadn’t changed.
As the tires smoothly ate away the miles, my mind wandered to those moments outside of the SUV, to how her body had felt pressed against mine. There was no denying that I was physically attracted to her, and while she was a different type of girl than I normally went for, I wasn’t surprised by wanting to get in her pants and between her legs.
It just wasn’t something I should act on. But not acting on it wasn’t looking too good. It had only been a handful of days since I’d first seen her and not nearly as many hours that we’d been together, and I was already feeling my tenuous grip on restraint slip. I wasn’t known for my self-control, especially when it came to something I wanted.
And yeah, I wanted her. Wanted her in a way that was purely physical and inherent to who I was. And it was official. Apollo was a bigger idiot than I realized for putting his daughter under my guardianship, knowing everything he knew about me.
I laughed out loud at that.
“What?” Josie asked, looking at me.
Grinning, I shook my head. “Nothing.”
She was quiet for a moment, then she blurted out. “I forgave Erin.”
The statement caught me off-guard and I glanced at her again. She was staring at me, the hollows of her cheeks pink. “Okay.”
“Do you think that makes me, like, too forgiving?”
As I coasted around a slow-moving van in the passing lane, I smirked. “I’m probably not the best person to ask, Joe.”
“Why, Sethie?”
My smirked turn into a grin. “I hold onto grudges. I feed and water them, growing them into happy little pools of bitterness.”
“Well, that sounds fun and lovely.” She shifted in the seat, stretching out her legs. “I don’t see the point in holding onto grudges, because that happy pool of bitterness will turn on you and start eating away at you.”
Already was.
“It sucked that she lied to me, but she’s still my friend. She was still there for me,” she said. “And that’s what matters. Anyway, I guess some of this is kind of cool,” she went on, “I mean, there’s this whole world existing right alongside ours, interacting with ours, and we’ve had no idea. It’s like something in a movie or a book. Like Hogwarts coming alive.”
Yep. I called it. Totally into boy wizards.
“You’ve read Harry Potter, right?”
I snorted. “No.”
“Seen the movies?”
“Nope.”
“Been to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter?”
I laughed. “That would also be a no.”
“I’ve never been there either, but still.” She twisted toward me so fast, it was a surprise she didn’t choke herself on the seatbelt. “Have you been living in a cave?”
“I’ve been busy,” I replied as I checked the rearview mirror. “You know, fighting automatons and saving the world.”
“What’s an automaton?”
“Something you do not want to see,” I said, and when she huffed, I sighed. “They are one of Hephaestus’s creations. He’s like the ultimate blacksmith. He can create just about anything. Automatons were basically half-robot and half-bull. They breathed fireballs.”
She turned back to the windshield. “That doesn’t sound like any fun. How do you even pronounce his name? Can I just call him Hippo?”
I laughed under my breath. “We call him Hep. He hates it, as much as he hated Ares for sleeping with Aphrodite while they were married. Ever hear of unbreakable chain and net? It’s real. He used it to catch the two of them getting it on.”
“Oh. I…I thought Aphrodite was with Adonis or something?”
“Aphrodite has pretty much been with everyone. She even hooked up with one of the Sentinels I know, and he ended up with a nice scar as a reminder of the no-touchie-touch policy.”
“The Sentinels… You’ve mentioned them before.” She tapped the Nook on her knee. “You said they were mostly the halfs, right?”
“Yeah. Now the Sentinels are more of a mix of pures and halfs.”
The Nook continued to bounce. “And the Sentinels are like the godly version of the army?”
“Something like that. All halfs go before the Council—well, used to. A lot of this has been abolished for about a year, but back in the day, at the age of eight, we went before the Council—twelve pures who oversaw each of the Covenants, which are schools near the largest communities, and it was determined if we were to train to become Sentinels or to go into servitude. I obviously went into training. We got basic education, but it was more focused on different styles of fighting and defense, ranging from hand-to-hand combat like grappling and krav maga, to basic martial arts, to gun and dagger play. There’s thousands of Sentinels. Used to be more…” Before I helped kill a whole truckload of them.
“So you’re a Sentinel, too?”
“Yes. And no. First and foremost, I’m the Apollyon, but I was trained just like any other Sentinel. Probably pushed harder, and I was never really with them. Even when I was in classes with the others, I was always separate somehow.”
“Why?” she asked. Obviously the quiet game was officially over.
A huge part of me had no idea why I was telling her so much. “The halfs and pures knew what I was. They knew I was different, and since I could easily knock one of them into next year, it didn’t make them real comfortable around me. Neither were a lot of pures. Everyone liked to stare when I was around, but people didn’t get too close.” Unless the pures and halfs were female, most steered clear of me. All except the few connections I’d made with those who’d been at the Deity Island Covenant, and I hadn’t seen any of them for over a year.
The Nook stopped moving. “You really didn’t have friends growing up?”
“I had no one,” I admitted, surprising myself.
“No one?” she whispered.
I glanced at her, and she was staring at me, not with curiosity but with a visible need to understand, to relate. It was written all over her face. Maybe that’s why I kept talking, telling her things only one other person knew. Maybe it was because I thought, out of everyone I’d ever known, this girl…she’d understand. “The very second I opened my mouth and took my first breath, my pure-blooded mother—and using the term ‘mother’ is a fucking joke—handed me over to a caregiver who was as warm and fuzzy as Medusa. She hadn’t wanted me. You see, relationships between halfs and pures were forbidden. We knew it was because of the potential for an Apollyon, but it’s also because halfs have always been looked down on, but my mother… There was no great love affair between her and whoever my father was. She liked getting it on with the help, until she got pregnant by one of them. Then not so much. She probably would’ve drowned me in the Mediterranean Sea.”
She gasped. “No, she wouldn’t have done that.”
“Pures did that all the time, Josie, and that would’ve been my fate if it hadn’t been for the god who came to her before I was born and told her what I was.”
“God, that’s just terrible.”
My hand tightened on the steering wheel. “Then I became her party favor. For years, I only saw her when she wanted to see me—twice a week for dinner and whenever she wanted to tote me around society parties as her special son, the Apollyon. No one called me that then, but everyone who saw me knew what I was. It was my eyes—the color gave me away. I’d been a prop then, the equivalent of a fucking expensive and rare handbag. Stared at. Whispered about. Touched. Stroked. Then stored away until she wanted to impress more of her pure friends, who had lost respect for her the moment she’d gotten pregnant by a half-blood, but probably wanted to gawk at my ass. Needless to say, I grew to hate pures.” I cut myself off, dragging in a deep breath. “Anyway, I wasn’t allowed to address her as ‘mom,’ but by her given name, ‘Callista.’ Mommy Dearest would shit a brick if she knew the truth—that I wasn’t supposed to be the Apollyon. Maybe she had known. Either way, there’d been no friends. The only toys I’d found were ancient things that no kid wanted to play with, and then I went before the Covenant. They’d taken one look at me, knew what I was, and I was taken away from the Cyclades Islands and sent to the Covenant in England where I began my education. From there, I was shipped to the Covenant in Nashville.”
I paused, caught up in memories. That had never been a good place for me. “I haven’t been back to the Islands since that day, and I was eighteen when a Minister at the Covenant in Nashville informed me that my mother had been found dead.”
That had sucked.