“Shh, now.” She bobbed him up and down, but nothing would calm him, not even the return of her finger.
She carried on walking, Arius’s wails serenading them until they reached the tree-swathed path leading toward the temple valley. Having worn himself out, Arius fell asleep, his tear-stained face resting on her chest. She breathed in the quiet.
Then something darted across her vision. She looked toward the shrubbery. The leaves were still, and there was no sound except the clicking of cicadas. She took a breath to quell the fear that rose like bile in her throat. Then she set off, striding along the path with renewed speed.
Soon her pace grew lethargic with the heat, and she took another deep draught from the waterskin. Mercifully, the trees on either side of the road were becoming denser, dappling the ground with patches of shade.
She stopped. Ahead of them, a cloud of dust was settling on the path, as though someone had just run across it. But there were no other travelers in sight.
“Hello?”
No one answered.
Then a faint crack, barely audible over the cicadas, drew her eyes to the bushes on the left. She wrapped one arm around the sleeping Arius and bent down, fingers curling around a stone. The hairs on her arms were raised despite the heat. Part of her mind was screaming for her to run, another was trying desperately to work out what she found so uncanny.
It was the leaves. There were a clump in the center that were the exact color and shape of the others around them, but they looked flat, like those painted on a fresco.
Then the bush unfolded. She stumbled back, the leaves and branches twisting in front of her, unfurling and blurring into a mottled, green-brown mass. Briefly, she saw the silhouette of a man, before his outline melted away into the foliage. She stood transfixed, wondering if the heat had warped her mind.
Then, where the shape of a head had been only moments before, opened a pair of piercing red eyes. They were even more terrible up close. Ink-black pupils, surrounded by irises that bled scarlet into where the whites should have been.
The stone tumbled from her hand and, almost tripping in her haste, she pelted back along the path. Arius, woken by the movement, howled. She clutched him tighter but kept running, the sound of her own ragged breath blasting in her ears.
She should never have let Alea talk her into taking him to the temple.
Just as she had feared, the shade had come for Arius.
She only slowed once the glade was far behind them and they’d reached the road that wound past the village toward their hut. She sank to her knees, wheezing. Her head was throbbing like it had been pummeled. Arius’s cries had subsided to a whimper.
“It’s all right,” she whispered between gasps of air. “I won’t let it take you.”
Once Arius had been born, she was sure he could not have been fathered by the shade, he looked so human. She smoothed the downy hairs on his little head and wondered if he was just a mortal boy, why was the shade haunting him?
Could Alea be right? Could he really be the son of Zeus?
She glanced back at the path behind them. The air shimmered with the heat of the midday sun, but no dust danced above the track. She kept thinking she could see those red eyes staring at her, but when she blinked, they vanished.
She staggered to her feet. There was a little shrine dedicated to Dionysus only a stone’s throw ahead along the path. After a moment’s hesitation, she paced toward it. Delving into her bag, she retrieved the Thesmophoria offerings and laid them beside the dish of water that sat in front of the shrine, flowers floating on its mirror surface. The visage of the god carved into the stone looked welcoming. Vines crowned his head, and grapes dangled from the curls of his beard. There was a softness to his face and a playfulness to the tilt of his eyes. He looked after Ariadne and the Maenads, perhaps he would answer her prayer. This way, at least she’d kept part of her promise and entreated a god to keep her nephew safe.
She bowed her head and touched her finger between her brows. “Please accept these offerings, Lord Dionysus, and in return watch over Arius and see no harm comes to him.”
Her prayer released into the world, she ran for home.
“That was quick.”
Her mother sat on the hut step, darning a pile of faded tunics.
Danae shut the gate and glanced back over her shoulder. “We didn’t make it to the temple.”
Eleni set down her needle. “What happened?”
“There was...on the road, there was something waiting in the bushes.”
“Was it someone from the village?” Eleni put down her sewing and walked over to them. She untied Arius’s swaddling and took him in her arms.
Danae drew a breath. “It was a shade.”
Her mother’s eyes flashed.
