“It’s not fair!”
The look on their father’s face would have quelled anyone with a brain.
Sadly, Archie was missing that vital organ as he continued complaining.
Finally, their father cut him off with one sharp glower. “And I don’t care, Archimedes. Now step aside and let them leave.”
Urian sighed at the glares he collected as he and Trates, along with two other Daimons, left through the shimmering portal with his mother.
Out of the four of them, he was the only one who could command the limani portals that led to and from Kalosis. A gift not from their father as the others all assumed, but from Apollymi herself when he’d been a boy. Oddly enough, his father hadn’t questioned why the goddess had bestowed it upon him. Rather he accepted it without comment.
Urian had never asked when Apollymi told his father about that gift, and his father hadn’t volunteered it. Instead, his father had just accepted the fact that one day Urian had shown up with the key to open the portals and not once had they spoken about the what-for or why.
But then his father was good at that. Especially when it came to the gods. Stryker barely questioned anything the gods did.
Not wanting to think about that, Urian closed his eyes as they fell through the vast nothingness that bridged the worlds together. He hated traveling this way. It left him disoriented and sick to his stomach. But it was the only way to leave Kalosis.
When they finally arrived and stepped out into the dark human world, it was near a small, stone cottage on the edge of a majestic Greek cliff. A huge full moon lit the olive-scented landscape with buttery shadows that danced across a dark, crested sea. Because it’d been so long since she last saw anything more than the dull, dreary gray of their realm, his mother gasped. Tears filled her eyes.
“Mata?”
She placed her hand on his shoulder as the wind blew her pale blue veil from her hair so that her blond curls sprang free from her braids. “I’m all right, Uri. They’re tears of joy that your father remembered the details of my home from when I was a girl. It looks just as I told him so many times.”
Grateful that she was happy, he carried her case toward the small cottage door. It was nestled in the midst of a good-sized farm that should sustain her quite well. There were apple trees aplenty, along with a small vineyard and livestock. He could hear the cows that would easily provide her with the milk she loved to drink that had been so hard for them to procure for her in Kalosis.
He headed to the cottage and opened the wooden door for her, then pushed it wide with his elbow.
She went in to inspect her new home while he waited outside and set her case on the ground at his feet.
The Daimons who’d come along to help secure her moved to stand at his side so that they could peer inside the cottage. “May we come in, akra?”
She turned toward them with a smile.
“Nay!” Urian snapped the moment his mother opened her mouth to say aye.
The smile on her face died instantly.
As did the joy.
He quickly tempered the anger in his tone as he used his foot to push her case through the threshold. “Never invite a Daimon or Apollite into your home, Mata. Remember that you are always safe inside the doorway. We cannot enter so long as you haven’t granted us permission to be there.” Another curse of his grandfather to ensure that they couldn’t go where the gods didn’t want them.
Something that left all of them feeling even more unwanted and outcast than they already did. All it did was ram home that they were less than humans. Less than animals. In the eyes of the gods, his people were the lowliest of life forms, unfit for even the most basic form of shelter or care.
Their lot in the world was to be spurned and ridiculed throughout their absurdly short lives.
“But, Urian—”
“Nay, Mata.” Tears choked him at a necessity he hated that would keep him from his mother forever. Yet it was for her protection. “Not even I’m worth it. We will meet elsewhere when I come to visit. I beg you to keep your home safe. Fromallof us. Even me.”
Because the truth was that when the hunger was bad enough, when the day came and he went Daimon, she wouldn’t be safe even around him and he knew it. No human soul could ever be safe near a Daimon.
No matter how much they loved them.
Tears flowed down her cheeks as she realized that he had no intention of ever staying with her. That he didn’t trust himself not to give in to the Daimon that he would one day become. She returned to stand outside with him. “I will miss you so much! Won’t you stay?”
He crushed her against his chest, wishing to the gods that he could. “I have no way to eat here.” It would be even more difficult than it’d been for her to eat in Kalosis. At least there, the Charonte and Apollymi had shared his mother’s diet. There had been a variety of food for her to choose from. Maybe not milk, but most other things had been in abundance.
An Apollite or Daimon in the human realm was only asking for trouble as they needed another of their kind to feed them.
