Here, now, in Cason’s mind—there behind his eyes—that lightshow forms a face.
The woman from the woods.
The woman from Sasquatch-Man’s front porch.
The woman who stole his wife, his son.
He feels his blood rush to his limbs, carrying the blue blazes of a raw red rage—he lurches forth, standing on broken legs, the pain lost in the white wall of fury. “My wife,” he growls. “
My son
. Where are my wife and my son?” He staggers over to the metal door, legs barely supporting him—he grips it rattles it, tries to climb over it—
A shock goes through his body. Liquid lightning, burnished gold.
He finds himself lying on his back once more. In the hay. Light smoke drifting from his palms and the center of his chest. The anger robbed from him by the surprise.
Unbreakable golden chain
, says the voice.
Forged by Hephaestus. It traps even the gods.
“But I saw you break it.”
No. You saw it fall away. Aphrodite was controlling the chain with her mind. You distracted her and that was my moment. We won’t be so fortunate again.
“Alison. Barney. What have you done with them?”
I let them go. They escaped me.
“Good for them.” In this, a spike of anger. “Because fuck you.”
I made an error.
“Damn right you did.”
I thought... I thought you’d killed my husband.
“I didn’t. He was my boss. He...” Cason grits his teeth, uses the flats of his hands to push his body backward until he’s sitting up against the back stall wall. “You know, fuck him, too. It’s because of him I’m even here. That any of this is
happening
.”
You’re right, of course. To a point. But I’ve seen inside your head. I moved through your memories and beliefs as if they were my own. Please believe me when I tell you: you’re mistaken about a few things. A few very important things. May I have a few minutes to talk?
“Do I have any choice?”
In this, you do. I’ll be quiet if that’s what you’d prefer. I owe you that much
.
He sneers. The skin of his legs itches something fierce. His toes twitch without him asking them to. “Fine. Talk. Anything to get my mind off the pain.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Truth And Consequence
I
AM A
girl who appreciates determination.
A little about me, then.
Aphrodite despised my beauty. She sent her son, Eros, to me, in the hopes that he would scratch me with one of his arrows when I slept so that when I awoke, I would fall in love with the first horrible creature she placed before my eyes—toad, snake, minotaur, who can say? But the plan failed. Eros accidentally scratched himself with the arrow and fell in love with me.
That was the start of my troubles.
I was just a mortal girl, then. Just a fool in love with a god, a god who was the son of a jealous, overprotective mother who decided she would do anything to keep us apart. She moved hell and earth—separating us time and again, cursing the both of us, ensuring that we could not be together. Illusions and lies. And yet we persisted, and then came the day that I was done with illusions and lies, so I went to Aphrodite in her temple and asked her what I must do to earn her favor.
She set before me task after task, all meant to be impossible. I had to separate grains by hand—thousands upon thousands of them, each impossible to distinguish from the other with the human eye, and so it was that the ants took pity on me and helped me (earning the goddess’s ire in the process). Seeing that I had completed that task, she had me bring to her a snippet of golden wool—another impossible chore given the fact that these sheep were thrice the size of what you and I know, and would crush you against the rocks or buck you off the cliff. And so I waited for them to sleep and instead plucked the snippets of wool from the thorny trees against which they slept.
She had me collect water from a forbidden river.
She had me stalk and behead seven lamia.
She had me bottle the tears of the sea serpent, Scylla.
She had me pluck out the eyes of the one-eyed men and bring them to her.
Those, not in the myths. But true just the same.
Then came the day when she said that the stress of having me in her life had caused her beauty to spoil—“curdled like sour milk,” she said. And so she sent me to the Underworld to reclaim some of her beauty. The only way to the unloving depths was to kill myself, so I leapt off a cliff and died. That allowed me to enter the Underworld and navigate its catacombs, hiding from Cerberus and eating nothing but moldy bread so that I would not be bound to that place. Finally I found Persephone and asked her to gift me with a bit of her beauty.
She complied, and sent me on my way.
That last thing, a trap for my own vanity. I thought to open the box just to see—but contained within was not beauty, but sleep. Endless sleep that consumed me.
But then my husband came. He came to save me. He wiped the sleep from my eyes and took me to a safe place, while he traveled to the Mount to ask Zeus to intervene on our behalf—and the Father God did indeed intervene, and declared that we could be married. To protect me from Aphrodite, he poured for me a draught of nectar and fixed a meal of ambrosia and it changed my humanity to divinity. And, for a time, Aphrodite and I shared a grudging peace.
The point of all this is to say that, to dispel illusions and lies, I had help. I had help from my husband. I had help from the ants. An eagle helped me get the water from the river. Hercules helped me slay the lamia. Glorious Zeus, my father figure among the gods who has now gone from us, helped me marry. Sometimes we require assistance in our quest.
And so I’m here to aid you, by telling you the truth about you, your family, and your so-called ‘friend,’ Frank Polcyn
.
A
SOUND INTERRUPTS
the story.
A snort.
The floorboards of the barn tremble.
Then: the acrid smell of piss.
Cason shifts, tries to stand, fails. Tries again—gets a leg beneath him, finds that it supports his weight, if barely.
Hobbles over to the metal gate. Doesn’t touch it, as getting another shock from the golden chain isn’t a particularly endearing notion.
But he looks.
The barn is huge. Stall after stall. Dimly lit. Cast mostly in shadow. And up above, in the lofts, he sees hay bales and small wire cages. Can’t see what’s in them, if anything at all.
Another snort. And a stomp. Cason feels the vibration in his ribs.
Down the way and across, he sees something shift in a stall. A glimpse of fiery eyes—like drips of molten iron, glowing in the darkness.
He smells a stink like rotten eggs.
“The hell...?”
It’s a unicorn.
He almost laughs. “Okay, really, though. What is that thing?”
I’m not joking. It’s a unicorn
.
Then: a whinny. Buried in the cry is the sound of children screaming.
“I thought unicorns were nice and sweet. Little girls love ’em.”
They were once creatures of rare purity and innocence. But this is not an innocent time. Purity is a legend. Unicorns are... different, now. The Barn is a place where things are kept so they don’t... escape. Like me. Like you. Like the—
The animal slams itself against the stall door, then bleats in pain—Cason imagines the thing just shocked itself, just as he had done before.
Like that unicorn
.
“Jesus.” Cason retreats back into the stall, weary and scared.
Jesus has no part of this. May I continue?
“Go for it.”
T
HE FIRST THING
you need to know:
Frank Polcyn is not your friend.
He is not who you think he is.
I see the story he tells you: his wife taken by Aphrodite. He, a man going against the gods to save his wife, but tortured and tormented in the process.
I know Aphrodite. She is my mother-in-law. Since the Exile, she has taken it upon herself to act outside of Zeus’ purview and keep me away from my own husband, so that, in her words, “he may be happy.” And so she kept me like a pet, and as a pet, I saw things.
I saw what happened to Frank Polcyn.
He was a handsome man. Beautiful, even. A shining example of just how perfect humanity could be, given the right random combination of DNA.
Aphrodite wanted
him
in her collection. Not Frank’s wife.
He didn’t even fight it. I’ve seen true love, and I’ve seen how potent it can be. One will move mountains for love. One will deny the gods for love. I did.
Frank did not.
Frank gave in without a peep or a whimper. His wife, left out in the cold. It was him in that motel room, his wife that went to the bar to wait for him. He never went gambling. He stayed there all day long. Praying at Aphrodite’s temple, so to speak.
I know. I watched. Chained up in the corner.
He bent over backwards to pleasure her. He was like a pig at a trough. This beautiful specimen of man—made to beg and grunt and lap like a beast.
Aphrodite loved it. She loves to subvert man. Loves to subvert
love
. Her beauty is what matters to her, and she believes it is the pivot on which all the world turns—whenever she can prove it, she will. She had another chance to prove it when Sally Delacroix—now, Sally Polcyn—came back to the motel and found her husband doing things she didn’t even know could be done between two people. Sally sobbed. Begged him. Tried to pull him away.
She tried to get me to help her. But what was I going to do? The chain bound me.
Sally wept and pleaded, and the goddess just laughed.
Aphrodite told Frank: “Take care of her.”
And he did. He carried Sally outside. Kicking and screaming.
He told her how much he hated her. How ugly she was. How this was all just a game, a scam, a con, how he had found true love. He shoved his wedding ring in her mouth. Made her swallow it. Then he picked her up and threw her in the pool.
The humiliation, all a show for Aphrodite.
A week later, Sally killed herself. Wandered the city, tattered and bedraggled before finally stepping in front of a bus.
When Frank heard, he just shrugged. Then he went back to licking Aphrodite’s body clean.
Ah, but then came the day, as it always does, as you saw with my own husband, when the cat is done playing with the mouse, and so eats it or bats it away.
Aphrodite was done with Frank. She’d had her fill. On to the next.
She threw him away. She disappeared.
But Frank was diligent. And obsessed. As they all are, really—but when most are abandoned by the gods, they live out their lives as empty husks. Not Frank. In Frank’s belly grew a terrible fire, and it took him the better part of a year to find her again.
And he did. He came here.
He found her. Begged to be taken back. Threw himself at her mercy.
His pleas turned grim. He threatened to burn the place down. To tell the world who she really was. He was enraged. Insane. Desperate for her love—the wild-eyed aggression born of rejection and obsession.
But you don’t threaten the gods.
As you’ll learn.
She took this handsome man and she made him ugly.
She did to him as he did to his wife: threw him in the pool, and here his story meets the reality—she churned the waters and made them come alive and had them cut him, flay him, excise lips and nose and fingers and toes, flesh carved away until he was vented like fish gills, bleeding everywhere, made hideous by her affections.
And then she threw him away.
As he did with Sally.
But it did not cow him. It did not send him to die. It filled all his empty spaces with even greater rage. That, then, is what his purpose is, to—
A
SUDDEN FRESH
flurry of gate rattling, snorting, neighing, stomping—
The unicorn is pissed.