Chapter 15

“Fuck!”

Pain.

All I feel is pain.

I’m going to die. This is it. This is the end.

“Alira?” Hermes’s voice echoes somewhere above me, but I can’t find the strength to turn my head to look.

Everything hurts. My blood is boiling, and my brain is too big inside my skull and my bones are on fire.

“Did someone have too much to drink last night?”

My shoulder digs agonizingly into the hard floor as I somehow summon the strength to roll onto my back. It’s too bright in here. I can’t open my eyes.

“What did you do to me?” My voice scrapes against the walls of my throat like razors, my ribs squeezing my lungs too tightly with every breath.

His laugh makes my ears ring, and my stomach turns sour. “Let you have too much autonomy around the Nectar, apparently.”

My eyes finally grate open, and I squint against the blinding sunlight spilling in through the window. “How bad was it?”

His head pops over the edge of the bed, and his curls frame his face in a golden halo that makes me want to punch him. How dare he look so put together while I’m struggling to breathe.

“It wasn’t awful,” he says in a tone that screams It was awful. “Do you not remember anything?”

“I remember exactly nothing,” I respond, my voice as dry and cracked as my throat. “Please tell me I didn’t make a complete idiot out of myself.”

“Well…” His lip quirks as he raises his eyebrows suggestively. “You and Artemis bonded quite well.”

My joints creak as I push up onto my elbows. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His tongue darts out to wet his lips as he continues to look at me like I’m the most pathetically entertaining thing in the world. “While Callie was off teaching the rest of the ladies to dance on the bar, you and Artemis were fashioning hunting knives by the fire.” His eyes narrow. “Who’s Josh?”

Josh. Ex-boyfriend. Very messy. Very much do not recommend Josh. “Why?”

His smile cracks open, and those dimples make me want to punch him. Again. “You carved his name into a knife and told Athena you would start a war for the chance to see it buried in his belly.”

A groan bubbles in my throat and dies out before it makes it out of my mouth. Or maybe it’s hangover vomit.

“Sounds about right.” Scrubbing a hand over my face, I sit up to glare at Hermes where he’s reclining sideways off the bed. “What about you? Where were you during all of this?”

He digs at a bit of dirt under his nail and avoids my gaze. “Taking bets with Dionysus over who would pass out first.” His eyes flick up to mine. “Astonishingly, you managed to make it through the night at least somewhat lucid.”

What a douche. He just let me make a fool out of myself at a literal gathering of gods. Dangerous gods, if what he said before is to be trusted.

“Wait.” I push myself up to stand on wobbly knees, I immediately regret the pressure that pulses inside my skull. “Didn’t you say Olympus would eat me alive?” I ask, my voice trilling into a posh accent as I mimic him. “Why the hell would you let me go off and act like an idiot?”

His eyes roll as he flops onto his back, his wings stretching out under him. “I would’ve stopped you if things dipped into any dangerous territory. You were having fun and everyone was behaving themselves.”

“What about—”

Aphrodite. The snarky, beautiful goddess that Hermes was apparently sleeping with at some point. Or maybe is sleeping with. Oh god, how do I even bring that up? Should I bring it up? I definitely should, but…

My belly gurgles, and I can’t tell if it’s the hangover or the jealousy I can feel growing with the pressure behind my eyes.

I should just say it. It’ll eat me alive if I don’t and I have way too much to worry about outside of whether or not gods and goddesses sleeping together counts as cheating and if what we’re doing is even something that can be cheated on.

A deep breath, a painful twinge in my belly, and, “Are you sleeping with Aphrodite?”

His head snaps up at my question, his eyebrows drawing inward in a What the fuck did you just say expression. He just stares at me a moment too long, his lips parting as he tilts his head.

“No,” he finally drags out, “I am not sleeping with Aphrodite.”

Something like relief, or maybe guilt washes over me at his answer. “Were you sleeping with Aphrodite?”

He shakes his head a little, his eyes pinching shut. “What’s the—” The heels of his hands press into his eyes— “Why are you asking?”

His reaction tells me he was absolutely sleeping with Aphrodite. Great. Awesome. Love that.

“It’s just what she said last night.” Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I press my fists into my thighs. My mind is stuck on a thousand images I definitely don’t want in my head, but I can’t help it.

She’s Aphrodite. And I’m...me. Freckles and frizz and a nose I inherited from my absentee dad.

Why the hell would he want to be with someone like me when he could be with someone like her?

His hand on mine startles me out of my thoughts. He’s rolled onto his side, his head propped up on a fist.

“It was a long time ago,” he says softly, like he’s trying to coax me down from a roof. I’m not that emotionally fragile. “And it wasn’t anything…meaningful.”

His tone is doing jack shit for my already abhorrent mood and just pisses me off even more. I look down at the little crescents my nails left in my thighs. “She made me feel like an idiot,” I say, aiming for nonchalant and landing somewhere around strangled. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

His brows raise and, for the first time ever, he actually looks kind of angry. Maybe at me. Not that I care. I’m angry. I don’t even know if I have anything to be angry about, but goddammit I’m not happy.

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He gnaws at the corner of his lips before answering. “The other gods were watching. You have to be able to stand up for yourself here if you want any sort of respect.”

Wow, that feels a little like a dig. Stand up for myself? Against literal gods? That feels more like suicide than social politics. “Right.” My lips pucker as I try to gather the thoughts bouncing around inside my brain. “So, what should I have said, then? Should I have pointed out how you’ve obviously moved onto bigger and better things? Because we both know that’s not true.”

His eyes soften at my words, but I can’t find the energy to match him. My lips pull into a scowl as I continue. “I mean, what do you think that does to my confidence in whatever the hell we’re doing? We’ve known each other for, what? A few months?”

A deep frown pulls at his mouth, his expression turning into something horrified.

“A few months that mean everything to me, Alira.”

His eyes turn glassy as he watches my eye twitch. God, why am I so mad? It feels like every single other possible emotion I should be feeling is being consumed by white hot anger.

His chest rises and falls as he takes a deep breath. “I have known Aphrodite for thousands of years.” He sits up and takes my hand. I want to pull away from him, storm out, be anywhere but here. But, I fight the feeling and instead watch the way his thumb traces circles on the back of my hand.

“If I wanted Aphrodite, she would probably let me.” Awesome. Thanks for letting me in on the Hermes thirst train. “But I don’t. I hardly even tolerate her. I can’t explain everything in a way you’ll understand, but some things have to happen.”

An empty laugh punches out of my chest painfully. “That’s the most douchebag line I’ve ever heard.”

His shoulders deflate. “No. No that’s not what I mean.” His brow furrows as he visibly tries to find the right words. Then he clears his throat and sits up a little straighter, a little more uncomfortable looking. “There are certain…aspects of life that have to be…created…for other things to align.”

My eyes narrow. I have no fucking clue what he’s getting at.

He continues anyway, despite my growing confusion. “It wasn’t about us. It wasn’t even personal. It was… divinely mandated, in a way that barely makes sense to me either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He scrubs a hand over his face and lets out a sharp sigh. “Alira, this is so hard for me to explain to you. Do you really want to know?”

“Uh, yeah.” After all that, absolutely. “I’m pretty sure I have to know now.”

A shaky breath stutters out of him. “Okay, but you’re going to hate it.” His posture squares off. “She gave birth to Hermaphroditus. It was a fated arrangement, not any sort of love commitment. Without her birthing him, gender roles for humanity never would have lost their rigidity and Dionysus would probably still be wandering earth waiting to find his purpose in the realm of naked women.”

That’s too many words, not enough space. My head’s going to explode with all that exposition.

I run it over in my head a few more times. Hermes slept with Aphrodite. Not because he wanted to, of course, but because he had to. To create Hermaphroditus? What the hell is a Hermaphroditus?

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Pulling my hand away from his, I slink backward. “You have a child with her!”

He blinks a little too slowly, and he flounders for a moment as if this is the last thing he thought I would latch onto. “I—you didn’t—” His lips pucker then his mouth opens and his head cocks to the side. Complete system failure, apparently. Then finally, “Yes? You didn’t know this?”

“No!” Launching off the bed, my eyes search the room for something, anything, to distract my mind from the thought. It doesn’t work. “We’ve already established that I don’t know any of the Olympus lore. Why the fuck would I know that?”

“I don’t know!” He stands as well, pacing in a little circle like he’s just as brain scrambled as I am. His wings open and close as if he’s deciding whether or not to dodge his emotions yet again. “I didn’t think anything of it. We all have kids. I thought this was common knowledge.”

My hands clench into fists again as I scrub them over the thin fabric of the dress I never changed out of. “Well, you thought wrong! I had no clue there were little Hermes babies running around here. That’s kind of really weird, dude.”

He rolls his head around on his shoulders. “It’s not weird. You’re making it weird. It’s not as if there’s babbling toddlers I’m avoiding fathering. They’re older than you by multiple thousands of years! Being the bearer of a god is much different than being a human parent.”

“It sounds pretty much the same!” Holy shit my head hurts. This is way too much to handle. Am I going to be some screwed up kind of step mom? I don’t want that for myself. I don’t even like kids. “Did you just knock her up and then leave? That’s, like, the opposite of making me feel better.”

“No!” His fingers dig into his temples like he’s trying to massage out a headache. “I am an incredible father. There’s multiple retellings of the time I brought Pan to Olympus and paraded him around because he was so beautiful! I make beautiful children, Alira, and I was a damn good dad.” He presses his hand to his chest, like he actually means it. “I love my kids!”

I’m going to lose my fucking mind. I can feel the circuits frying, and it won’t be long until the whole motherboard crashes. “You have multiple kids?” He stops moving, and just gapes at me. “With who?”

“With people who will never matter to me the way you do,” he says in an overly melodramatic voice. “I procreated for the sole purpose of making a life the Moirai deemed necessary.” His tone dips into something more serious, less freak out screaming. “Not because I was in love, not because I was overcome with lust. Simply because it had to happen.”

His jaw clenches, and my resolve shatters a bit at the edges. Dammit, he’s good at doing that. I don’t want to not be angry, but his face is too sincere for me to keep the emotional high.

Instead, something like sadness creeps in between the cracks in my unfounded rage. “Have you slept with other humans?”

He doesn’t even try to hide the way his face falls. The way he deflates. The way his wings drag.

I already have my answer.

“Did you tell them you wouldn’t leave, too?”

He takes a step toward me, his hand reaching out. I take a step back. My stomach knots. I’m either going to puke or cry or both and I don’t want any of those things to happen.

“How many?” I ask, my voice dropping low as I try to hold back the tears building somewhere deep in my throat.

His hands open and close, and he blinks rapidly like he’s holding back as much as I am.

“Four.”

Four. Four. I’m number five, if he’s even telling the truth.

My lungs are suddenly too small for the sob that wants to explode out of me. I’m not going to cry. He doesn’t get to see me cry.

“Were they fated, too?” I don’t want the answer.

He shakes his head, and something in me crumbles. “No,” he says softly, breathlessly. “The children they bore weren’t destined by The Fates.”

I clench my teeth until it hurts. Why would he keep this from me? “If there’s been four others before me, then what am I?”

His eyes fall shut again and he bows his head, his wings pulling around his own shoulders like he wants to disappear completely. “You are everything to me.” His voice is barely more than a whisper, barely held together around the wet sound of unshed tears. “I would’ve walked away from Olympus entirely if you’d have asked. I nearly did after you kissed me.”

He swallows, then licks his lips. “That’s why I was gone. I went to Hera and asked for Iris to take my place in the Pantheon. I don’t want something you can’t be a part of.”

Dread creeps into my bones and sends a long shiver down my spine. I believe him, but I don’t entirely care. I can’t. I know what this is. I know how this kind of emotional manipulation works. I can’t let myself feel bad for him right now.

“Those are a lot of pretty words to dress up what you’re trying to hide from me.” Even as desperation pulls at his features, I steal myself and say what I need to. “What was your plan? To just knock me up and move on?”

“What?” His knees nearly buckle as he takes another step towards me. I cross my arms over my chest as he reaches for me again. “No. No. I—” A sharp intake of breath and it sounds like a lie. “That’s never even crossed my mind.”

Of course not.

Why would the idea of sleeping with me cross his mind?

I’m thinking in circles and my head hurts and I’ve got an Olympus sized hangover and I can’t do this.

I can’t do this.

Taking a deep breath, I feel my lungs squeeze too tightly in my chest.

“I need you to leave me alone right now.”

I don’t give myself the chance to see the look on his face before I turn and leave his room, slamming the door behind me.

Out in the open hallway of the Pantheon, I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing or what I’m trying to do. I just need to be away from Hermes, away from whatever the hell just happened in there.

My brain is reeling and my feet are moving too quickly for my eyes to catch up, and—

I crash into something solid, and my feet stumble.

A head of blonde curls whirls around to look at me, and two strong hands grip my shoulders to steady me.

“Are you alright?” he asks, his voice like a soft guitar in the early morning sun.

“Sorry,” I exhale too quickly, wiggling out of his grasp. My gaze remains on the floor as I take a step back. “I didn’t see you, Apollo.”