“Not that I mind the underside,” I added, flushing a bit as I remembered that not so long ago, I very much minded it.
I could admit to being wrong, however. I spent enough time there in the last few weeks to dispel most of my distrust towards the underground part of our city and its inhabitants.
Kleos was right: the entire system up in the vale, littered with half-truths and baseless accusations, was designed to keep us segregated and suspicious of our peers. I took a lot longer to accept that than my best friend or Gideon, because, well, I mistrust everything and everyone until proven wrong.
Like the unconscious man I was talking to. Was he even asleep? I didn’t know how a god could be comatose in the first place. Not unless they wanted to be. Weren’t they allegedly all powerful?
A little voice at the back of my head asked meare you?
I told it to shut up. I wasn’t a real goddess. A twelve-year-old could take me out with a minor spell unless I was protected by Kleos’s magic.
This man, thisthing, had managed to crash through shields made by Athena herself.
If he’d been normal, he would have died on impact—if the fall hadn’t killed him first. There would have been so little left of him they could have fit him in a jar. Hell, if he’d been a particularly sturdy vampire crossed with a dragon shifter, he would have been crushed by that fall and by the shields surrounding our city, shields Zeus had needed to destroy before being able to reclaim this entire world.Zeuscouldn’t find a workaround for these wards. And Cas went through them.
Cas wasn’t even bruised. His body was—well,ridiculous. Piles of muscles, chiseled like a granite representation of Adonis. Even at rest, they flexed, hiseight-pack taut, his thick legs tense, as though he might stand and set off at a run any second now.
Come to think of it, maybe passing through the protections around Highvale was the reason the poor guy passed out. I shook my head, not wanting to accept the simple conjecture at face value until I had proof, one way or another.
The machines hovering over his body beeped, and I watched strange veining, reminiscent of lightning strikes, ripple along the toned biceps, shoulders, neck, ribs.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen them, or heard them disrupt his readings. Over the last week, I’d come to his bedside at least once a day, and I’d seen them at least three times. The first time, I asked a passing healer. She sniffed and informed me that patient confidentiality overrode my curiosity.
Bitch.
Healers didn’t like me for several reasons. First, I was Kleos’s best friend, and they loathed her for her inerrant ability to heal without process, logic, or research. But my feud with their professions predated my relationship with Kley. Once upon a time, I used to be their patient. No, that wasn’t the right word. There was nothing wrong with me at the time. I used to be their lab rat. Hells, I was the reason why the now-quiet machines currently hovered around Cas while his lightning marks faded in the first place.
They couldn’t use the usual medical equipment, hooked into veins, because they couldn’t pierce my skin. So, they had to use their brains to come up with a way to monitor my vitals. First strike against me. The second was that after years, they didn’t manage to come to any conclusion as to what made me what I was. And my third and biggest offense was the fact that at age seven, I asked for the tests to stop.
I smiled a little, remembering that day like it was yesterday.
I didn’t always spend all my time here—my foster parents brought me to be examined on a regular basis. When I was a baby, it used to be every day, then three times a week, beforescaling it down to once a week. All my life, that had been my norm, so I never questioned it until I started elementary school.
I didn’t get along with any kids there, too scared of their magic, while they were terrified of the possibility that I might rip their arms off by accident. And I could have. But I listened to their conversations enough to realize that they spent their weekends with their families, hanging out with each other or traveling, rather than stuck in a boring hospital room, running on treadmills that often broke under my weight, no matter how much magic they used to strengthen them, breathing into tubes, standing still while machines scanned every inch of me.
I tugged the sleeve of the blond, hulking man on our way to the hospital one day, harder than I normally would have. He and his wife were the only ones I didn’t have to be careful with.
“What’s up, cupcake?” he asked me.
“Why do I have to go to testing?”
He tilted his head. “Because no one really know how to take care of you, love. If you get sick one day, they want to be able to help.”
“I never get sick.” That was true. Even the most virulent of diseases bypassed me entirely.
“So far. You might one day. Besides, you know how strong you are. People who are this strong—if we do something bad, they have to be able to stop us.”
“I’m getting tested because I’m bad?”
“No, no,fuck,” he swore, never able to hold his tongue, even back when I was little. “A little help, here?”
My foster mother shrugged. “Why? The kid’s right. The tests are fucking stupid. They are no closer to answers now than they were when she came to us seven years ago. And clearly, she’s fine. Healthy. I say it’s time to put an end to it.”
And that was that.
The healers argued, raised their voices, stomped their feet, until Demetria lost her cool, causing a shockwave of darkness that reminded them all who,whatshe was.
They were silent then.
