My chest tightened until I was positive it would explode. My lungs couldn’t hold anything else and even though water poured out of my mouth, pooling around my hands and knees, drenching the cold stone beneath me, I couldn’t expel enough of it to get a breath.
It was never-ending. I might have been able to play this game for a few minutes, but Nix could keep this up until I was a blue corpse, water-logged and lifeless.
“Enough,” a strange familiar voice commanded from far away.
Sunbursts spotted my vision and a sharp ringing resounded in my ears. My fingers clawed at the harsh ground as I tried to find some purchase. Panic suffused every part of me, even while I welcomed death.
So be it, I thought.
“Enough!” the voice bellowed, shaking even my drowning bones to the core.
At once, the water was pushed from lungs. I coughed and vomited and emptied every ounce of sickly saltwater onto the floor, collapsing on top of it in pathetic weakness.
Nix bent down to drag me to my feet. With his hands wrapped roughly around my waist, he set me in front of him, practically vibrating with the promise of his wrath. “Mine,” he rasped through a strangled voice. “Mine or nobody’s. I will send you back to the sea where I will rule you from your grave.”
“Never,” I hissed. My throat was raw and so tender, but the fierce words would not be held back. “You might be the god of the sea, but I am not yours. I am the force of nature that will unseat you from your throne.”
He leaned into me, his voice pitching low with fury. “I am the ocean.”
My heart hammered in my chest when I replied, “And I am the flood.”
“Ivy,” someone snapped.
I turned to the voice I recognized, stepping away from Nix on unsteady feet. I wobbled, but managed to keep my balance. Smith stood before me in a toga so brightly white that he seemed to glitter beneath the still sparking lightning overhead.
His grim smile told a story I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. “Are you finished?”
The crowd of gods and goddesses erupted with surprise. All around the room people called out, “Zeus!” Some of them in outrage, some in shock, some with approval.
Hera slumped back in her chair, completely shaken by her husband’s appearance. “It’s truly you, my husband?” she asked with breathless wonder.
He seemed reluctant to take his eyes from me, but he turned to Hera with a small, playful smile. “Yes, my queen.”
“But how you’ve changed.” Her fingers brushed over the back of her neck, a slight tremble barely visible quivered through her torso. I thought she would be excited to see him after all of the time he had been away, but more than anything she seemed nervous. Her dark eyes darted around the room without landing anywhere for long, except on Smith. And she straightened her back compulsively, as if she was getting ready to run.
“I went through… mortality,” he admitted with a chuckle.
Furious protests exploded around the temple. The crowded room shrunk beneath the ego and anger of the collective Pantheon. The gods pressed closer to me, anxious for Smith to explain. They demanded answers and would have crushed me underfoot had Nix not stepped behind me. He ordered them to move back. Reluctantly they complied.
Smith held up his hands and pushed them toward the floor in a pacifying gesture, “Worry not, my friends. My immortality has been restored. I am once again… Zeus.”
Nix didn’t say anything even though plenty of his brothers and sisters shared their opinions. I could feel his tension skyrocket, burning through the thin atmosphere, pinging from the stone columns to the sky overhead. His body thrummed with quiet rage.
I realized how well I knew him as I stood there next to him. I could anticipate his frustrated facial movements and the clenching of his fists. I instinctively felt his mind spin with everything that had happened in Omaha, everything that happened right in front of him. My mother had married Smith at Nix’s command. Smith had gone through mortality under Nix’s nose. Smith’s power, his money, his prestige… all of it belonged to Zeus.
I knew the second Nix’s thoughts dipped to Smith’s protection of me. His enlarged muscles contracted and swelled until he stood three inches taller. I wondered if Nix was remembering Honor too, and how Smith had done everything in his power to keep Honor out of Nix’s filthy reach. And the god-killer that my mother had in her possession the night Nix tried to rape me, had no doubt come from Smith, who had brought it straight from Olympus.
Nix had missed everything, every little piece of this complex puzzle until this moment. And now his brain worked furiously to put everything together. I sensed his struggle to hold his fury in check. Nix had become a foaming volcano. His blind madness was barely caged in the hulking mass of his body. He wanted to kill someone.
And that someone might end up being me.
Nix wasn’t alone in his confusion. There were pieces to this puzzle I still didn’t understand.
If no one knew that Smith was Zeus or that he’d fathered a child with my mother, how did they recognize him here? He hadn’t changed more than Nix had. Sure, he was taller, broader, more muscled and wore the same kind of toga that everyone else did. But for the most part, his features were the same.
I recognized him immediately.
And what did it mean for my sister that her father was the king of the gods? If she was part goddess, part Siren, how did that affect her powers?
