Only Everything (34 page)

“Don’t take that tone with me, son,” my father said. “You sound like a petulant child.”

“That’s because you treat me like a child,” I said. “I’m trying to make a mature decision here. I want to fulfill my commitments to the team, and to the band. I can do both. I know I can. But you don’t even want to let me try. You just can’t stand that I’m not exactly like you.”

My words hung in the air, echoing through the lofty garage.

Tom unhooked his guitar strap. “Maybe we should go.”

“Wait,” my father said.

We all looked at him, surprised. I felt like my heart was about to burst out of my chest. My father looked at the floor, then took off his baseball cap and scratched the top of his head.

“You’re right,” he said.

“I am?”

“He is?” Fred, Noel, and Tom said.

“Yes,” my father replied. “You are trying to make an adult decision. You’re trying to live your life.” He took a breath and blew it out. “You can play in your band and run cross-country. But if your grades start to slip one notch, we’re having a conversation. Understood?”

I was so dumbfounded I couldn’t move. But my heart was darting around my chest like a firework set off inside me.

“Understood,” Fred whispered to me. “Say ‘understood.’ ”

“Understood,” I replied.

My father shook his head and clomped his way across the garage, avoiding wires and amps.

“Universal Truth,” he said under his breath as he opened the door to the kitchen. “What the hell kind of band name is Universal Truth?”

Then the door slammed behind him, and the guys slapped hands and clapped me on the back. I stared after my father, feeling like I could cry and laugh and scream and then laugh some more.

It had actually happened. I’d finally stood up to my father and lived to talk about it. Not only that, it had worked. I grabbed my phone out of my bag and headed for the driveway.

“Hey! Dude! Where’re you going? We still have two more songs to run through!” Fred called after me.

I turned around to walk backward, grinning from ear to ear. “Take five,” I told him. “I gotta call my girlfriend.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

True

Monday morning. It was a new day, a new week. The sun shone and everyone outside Lake Carmody High seemed full of promise to me. Everyone a potential project.

“Looking for your next victim?” Hephaestus asked, staring up at me through mirrored sunglasses.

“Very funny.” I took a breath and drew myself up straighter. “This time it’s going to be much easier. I’ve learned from my mistakes.”

Stacey and her friends snickered as they walked past me. Darla shot me a look of death from the top of the stairs. Darnell lifted his hand and rubbed his fingers together with a menacing stare. At least I had his money in my pocket after cashing my paycheck on Saturday. That was something.

“But you’re still a weird loser with no friends,” Hephaestus said, stating a fact that I couldn’t ignore.

“I’m going to have to work on that, aren’t I?” I replied. “I mean, I
am
going to have to work on it. I have to succeed. Orion’s life depends on it.”

Hephaestus tilted his head. “Maybe you and I should pretend to
date. I
am
totally popular. I could up your stock like
that
.”

He snapped his fingers just as a big white SUV pulled up to the curb. I was about to shoot down his ridiculous idea when the door of the SUV opened and out stepped a tall guy with dark hair pushed back from his face in waves. He wore a dark-blue cotton jacket over a white T-shirt, and perfectly snug jeans. Every girl around us started to drool. And then he turned his head.

“Orion!”

The word left my lips at a gasp. I dropped my bag on the ground next to Hephaestus’s wheel and ran, my knees weak beneath me, my vision blurred. He turned into me and I flung my arms around his neck, my mind desperately trying to understand what my eyes were seeing, what my body was certainly feeling.

“I can’t believe it’s you!” I cried, pressing my hands against his familiar cheeks. Tears of joy spilled over, and I could scarcely breathe. “What are you doing here? No, wait. I don’t care! This is the happiest day of my existence.”

I pulled him to me for a kiss. His lips were exactly as I remembered them. Soft, warm, and just the tiniest hint of salt. It was a moment before I realized he wasn’t kissing me back, and he suddenly, firmly, pushed me away, his hands cupping my shoulders.

“Orion?” I said, looking up into his eyes. They were confused and a little bit scared. Just as they had been on the day I’d returned him to Earth. The day I’d begun to fall. “What’s wrong with you? Are you quite well?”

“I’m . . . fine,” the love of my life mumbled, searching my face. “But who the hell are you?”

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COMPLETE NOTHING!

PROLOGUE

After a time, I could feel nothing save the weight of his feet on my back, one heel pressing sharply between two lower ribs, and the other into the muscle of my shoulder. When he’d first told me to kneel before his throne and proceeded to thrust out his legs to use me as a footstool, I had thought it would be the humiliation that would kill me. But after half an hour, any pride had long since flown through the palace windows. Then it was only the cold, hard marble pressing into my palms and my bare kneecaps. The quivering of my muscles. The pain darting through my joints. I was forced to forget my pride as my brain focused merely on survival, on not collapsing, on refusing to beg for mercy.

It had been five hours, and my resolve was quickly crumbling.

“Orion!” the mighty King Zeus crowed, adjusting his feet, making sure to grind the hard soles of his sandals into my bones. “I know not how you do as a man, but you make for sturdy furniture.”

The guards and lower gods assembled laughed, and Zeus gulped his thirtieth goblet of wine. Another rivulet of sweat snaked its way across my forehead and down my nose until the drop slipped to the tip and clung there, trembling inches above
the pool of perspiration I’d been staring at these last few hours.

When it fell, so would I. There was no more surviving this.

And then, a commotion. Guards shouting. A woman’s voice. A slam, a screech, an explosion. The mighty Zeus rose to his feet, and I collapsed in a heap on my side. My arms and legs curled in on themselves, jerking and seizing of their own accord. Several vile guards laughed over my plight, but I didn’t care. I was free. For the moment, I was free.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Zeus demanded of his nearest protector.

Before the guard could answer, a voice rang out through the lofty chamber, echoing against its vaulted ceiling and surrounding us, as clear as day.

“If Orion is alive, I demand to see him! I demand an explanation!”

“Artemis,” I groaned. And in my weakened state I prayed that she would come save me. Even though she had once killed me. Even though she was the reason I’d spent the last two thousand years hanging among the stars, watching life on Earth go on as if I’d never existed. I prayed to her, the goddess protector of women, of all things. I begged.

“Artemis, please. Rescue me.”

Zeus glared down at my coiled form, alarmed. There was a cacophonous crash as Artemis attempted to break through the wall of armored sentries. Then Zeus flicked his wrist, and I experienced a sensation like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was as if a tremendous cricket bat had hit me square in the face, chest, and knees. I flew backward, through the open doorway at the back of the throne room and that of my cell. I slammed against the back wall of the tiny chamber I’d spent the last week or month or ten years
inside—I had no way of knowing—and hit the floor so hard I was sure no bone in my body had been left intact. I rolled onto my back and moaned.

“Eros,” I whispered, my voice a mere croak. “Where are you, my love? Where are you?”

I imagined her hovering above me, the sun in the sky casting a beatific halo around the long black mane of her hair as I lay back in the soft grass outside our humble cabin. The smile on her lips brought peace to my heart, and as she gently wiped my brow with her fingertips, the relief was total. If only she were here. If only we had never been found, if only we had devised a way to escape together so that she’d never had to make that hideous bargain with the king. If only, if only, if only . . .

Tears stung my eyes, and I bit down on my bottom lip. I hated the broken, shivering slab of flesh that I’d become, begging goddesses to help me, praying, sometimes, for death. I had thought that I was stronger than this. That I could survive anything. But Zeus was an expert in torture. He had seen, quite literally, everything, and he was very fond of reminding me of this fact. Every creative means of delivering pain and psychological damage that had ever been devised by god or Gorgon or human—he had witnessed everything—and for however long I’d been his prisoner, he’d been perfecting every last technique on me.

“Is it true? Does Orion live?”

I lifted my head. Artemis had somehow made it into the throne room. When I turned my head, I was able to see the smallest sliver of the bright white-chamber, past the golden bars of my cell, across the stone-walled room outside it, and through an open archway. I opened my mouth to scream her name.

Nothing came out. And suddenly I was choking. My throat
collapsed in on itself as if an invisible rope was being twisted tighter and tighter and tighter around my neck. Then, just as suddenly, the rope was released, and I was left sputtering and choking and gasping on the floor.

“If you are keeping him here, King, I demand to see him,” Artemis was saying when my coughing subsided and I was able to hear again.

“On what grounds do you make these demands of your king?” Zeus asked, amused.

“He belongs to me!” Artemis cried. “He was my love! I have spent these last two millennia attempting to return him to life, to return him to my side—”

“And you have failed,” Zeus pointed out. “So perhaps, my dear Artemis, he does not belong to you, in the end.”

“Where is he?” Artemis growled.

I saw a flash, and a mighty clatter rang through the palace. The guard at my door fell sideways across the threshold, his eyes rolling back in his head, and my heart began to pound in earnest. Artemis had felled Zeus’s guards. I was both terrified and infused with pure, hot hope. This offense would not sit lightly with Zeus, but it also meant I had a chance. I somehow pushed myself to my knees.

“Artemis!” I rasped, grasping for the golden bars of my cage. “Artemis! Here!”

Again my throat constricted, and I fell back against the rear wall. I sensed the air inside the palace go still. She had heard me. She would come.

But I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

“Orion!” Artemis cried.

My legs kicked out as I struggled in vain for air. I slammed my heels against the bars, rattling them as hard as I could, even as my vision prickled, even as my life began to drain from me.

“Orion? My love! Are you here?”

I heard her footsteps. Heard the cries of the remaining guards as they were flung aside, tossed through windows, slammed against the walls. My fingers clawed at the dirt floor in sheer desperation, trying to pull me closer to the bars, closer to my savior.

Zeus let out a mighty, furious roar. There was another explosion, so close this time the bars and walls shook, raining rocks and silt throughout my cell. She was dead. I was sure of it. And if she was, then so was I. My last hope. Gone. In an instant.

Until, like a vision, Artemis appeared in the doorway, as statuesque as ever in white robes, a gold-and-leather vest adorned with an intricate pattern of roses and stars, and a shimmering bronze crown. She was as beautiful as the day we’d fallen in love, her chestnut hair tumbling in ringlets around her perfect, sharp chin. Her skin was a creamy white, with the merest blush across her cheeks. Her emerald-green eyes widened at the sight of me, and suddenly I could breathe again.

I gasped in air—gasped in life—and reached for the goddess who would save me. I no longer loved her—hadn’t in centuries—but that could be explained later. After she got me out of here.

“Artemis,” I rasped.

“Orion,” she whimpered.

She extended her trembling hand and I felt, for the briefest second, the slip of her fingertips across mine.

And then everything went black.

(Monday)

True

“I’m . . . fine,” the love of my life mumbled, searching my face. “But who the hell are you?”

I gazed into his deep blue eyes and stopped breathing. I knew every green and brown fleck within them. I knew every dream and fear and hope they disguised. And yet they were a complete blank as they stared back at me. Slowly, achingly, a cold terror settled into my veins even as my lips tingled from our kiss. He wasn’t joking.

“Orion, do—do you truly not know me?” I stammered.

He chuckled in an embarrassed way and smoothed the back of his dark, wavy hair as he looked around, waiting for the punch line. I took a startled step back, catching my shoe on the curb. Automatically, instinctively, Orion reached out and grabbed my arm to steady me. His touch stopped my heart, and I stared at his tanned fingers, then into his eyes.