I gasped. Both hands flailed around for support, something, anything to keep me from falling backward. I gripped the end of the rough coffin.
A perfectly preserved, very beautiful Creole woman lay inside.
Alice Cromley.
Her dress was in decayed shreds, but her skin and hair looked like she’d been put in the stone coffin only hours earlier.
“This is impossible,” I whispered.
A chuckle made me turn away from the macabre scene, to find Sebastian grinning at me with one black eyebrow raised. “After all you’ve seen? Vampires. A goddess. A harpy.”
“Yeah, and every single one is impossible. Just like this.”
Sebastian’s chuckle sounded wrong in our current predicament. “Not in New 2. In New 2 anything is possible.”
“Even defeating a Greek goddess?”
Sebastian unzipped his bag. “We should hurry before the sun rises.” He pulled out garden shears.
“Jesus.” My stomach went from tense to sickened in a flash.
“Guess that means I’ll be doing the honors.”
Apparently he hadn’t expected anything else, because he was already turning toward the coffin. He leaned inside and lifted Alice Cromley’s bare foot. I noticed she was missing a little toe.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I turned away and flinched. The snap of bone between the shears bounced off the marble walls. Any minute it would wake the dead. The angry dead, angry for defiling one of their own. I almost fled the tomb.
“Quickly,” Sebastian whispered, sitting down with his back against the sarcophagus and pulling out the mortar and pestle from the backpack, skinning the small toe bone and then drying the piece and dropping it into the bowl. He began grinding, glancing up to see me on my feet and standing very still. “You want to know or not?”
I swallowed, forcing down the panic and fear that made my limbs numb and weak. Everything in me was shouting, Run. Run far, far away from this dark, nightmarish scene and never look back, never remember. But instead I sat woodenly on the floor as Sebastian continued to grind the tiny piece of bone.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew the contents of that bowl were going to find a home inside my body. But I didn’t think about it. Just watched and let my mind go blank.
Seventeen
AFTER SEVERAL LONG MINUTES, SEBASTIAN TAPPED THE PESTLE against the rim of the mortar bowl, sending a minuscule shower of bone powder back into the bowl. “Hold out your hand.”
My nostrils flared. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My gaze locked onto Sebastian’s, his gray eyes deep and unreadable. A tick flexed his jaw. Just one, but I saw it. Then he reached out, grabbed my hand, and dumped the contents into my palm.
“It freaked me out too,” he said quietly. “But I’d do it again, if I needed to. It’s just bone. Dust. No taste at all. It’s like inhaling a pulverized rock.”
“Pulverized rock,” I repeated. Pulverized rock. I can handle that. I’m strong. Can handle anything. Yes, anything.
I trained my mind on the small quarter-size amount of powder in my cupped palm. Pulverized rock. I brought it closer, heart pounding against my rib cage, leaned down, and then inhaled.
It swept through my nasal passages and hit the back of my throat, grainy and . . . like rock, as Sebastian said. It gagged me. Too dry against an already arid throat. I couldn’t swallow. It clumped together. My stomach gave a sickening wave, wanting to vomit, sending the signal to my throat just as my vision swam and a tingling sensation surged through my body, snaking under my skin like lightning.
The tomb tilted, rolling over like a carnival fun house.
The side of my face hit the floor. No, not the floor. Sebastian’s hand, which softened my landing and then gently slid out from under my cheek.
My eyes were fixed, my view on the long glow of the candle, which sat on the floor, Sebastian’s knee in one corner and the shadowed bone boxes in the darkness beyond.
I was frozen, completely paralyzed, but my mind kept rolling, kept circling slowly on the fun ride. My eyelids grew heavier and lower, finally able to close in a burst of white.
Bright flashes.
Bits of color. Glaring colors. Shimmering whites and vibrant blues.
The sun’s reflection blinking and beaming off the sea, beaming off smooth marble.Broken voices.
Snapshots of a Greek temple, jutting up from the rocks by the sea. Beautiful, this place. So beautiful.
Inside those perfect columns, white hair flies out, waving like a flag in the breeze.
My chest tightens. Fear flows through my system, propelled by the realization of what is happening. That it feels as though it’s happening to me. The horror as the woman with the white hair jerks away from the large hand holding her arm. She loses her balance and trips as she flees inside the temple. She’s too scared to feel the pain of her fall on the hard, unforgiving mosaic tiles. She turns, scooting back on her bottom, desperate, as the large figure looms above her.
She knows.
He wants her, and there is no way to stop this.
His hand reaches down and slowly pulls the hem of her dress up over her thighs. There is nothing she can do, nothing at all as the figure above her speaks soothing, foreign words adorned with power, the kind of power that tells her to keep her eyes down and not look into his face. That would surely mean death.
My fists clench, my entire body goes rigid and numb.
A slow, furious scream builds in the deepest part of me, born of rage, injustice, and fear. It tears from my throat, ringing with desperation and denial.
From some small, dark place in my mind where I can still reason, I know what is happening to the woman. But I refuse to experience those emotions, so I brace myself against it, against the power of Alice Cromley’s clairvoyant bones, and fight hard, closing my mind to the emotions even as I see the flashes of the woman’s rape in my mind.
And then it’s over.
The woman on the floor curls up and weeps, her silvery hair spilling out in an arc on the colorful mosaic floor, her white gown bloodstained along the curve of her bottom, her body trembling.
My anger becomes hotter, taking on the anguish of the scene in my mind. My throat closes, and my eyes and cheeks are wet.
Another bright flash consumes the image.
A voice. A voice so familiar that it sends chills up my spine.
Athena.
I know the voice, though not the words. Those are like his. Foreign, but not hidden in false comfort. The images bounce quickly. And the words are brutal, condemning, and righteous. Disbelief slides into me like honey as I feel the woman’s shock and a deep sense of foreboding. The goddess is blaming her for the rape in the temple, for defiling Athena’s sacred place.
The woman pushes herself to her feet, sore, confused, heartbroken to be forsaken by the goddess she has worshipped and loved since childhood.
I see through the woman’s eyes. Athena’s feet and the bottom of her robe. Never her face. Not permitted to look upon the face of the gods. And then the curse begins. The words issuing from Athena’s mouth are no more understood than before, but there is no mistaking this moment. This is the moment that the air charges and snaps with primeval energy, where it curls around the woman, rustling her gown and lifting her hair. This is where her eyes, her beauty, her hair are her downfall, where a vengeful and unjust goddess takes out her petty jealousies on an innocent, peaceful woman.
First raped and now blamed.
The woman screams as the very air itself enters her body, an air alive with Athena’s words of power. It invades her skin, her organs, and her bones. It reshapes and brings forth ugliness and poison. The searing pain rips from her throat in a guttural, primal scream that makes me stop breathing. I feel this pain. But I know it is nothing like the real thing. She bends at the waist, and her stomach empties its contents onto the mosaic tiles. Pain has taken her vision. She no longer sees, only feels. Her scalp burns, breaking open in jerks and tears. She reaches up to grab her blistering head, but her hands are bitten by something. Painful bites. Over and over and over again until she is consumed by merciful blackness.
Breathe, I tell myself. My heartbeat pounds like a frenzied ritual drum, echoing inside me. Trapped.
Another flash takes me from the white temple to a dark cave. A shadowed place. A place where candlelight flickers on the walls, and the screams and pants of the same woman echo through the hollow place.
So much agony.
And then the cries of a newborn child as it is carried through the darkness by its mother, a new mother racked with the pain of childbirth. Heart pumping. Limbs so weak, but her will so strong. To save this child. To get this child away. Away. She weeps hot tears and her heart breaks with each step, with each step closer to abandoning her child.
But it’s the only way.
She’s been hiding for many months, and soon they will find her. And when they do, they will have no mercy on this child. This child born of woman and god.
I moan, my own voice reaching beyond the images to my ears as the child is laid at the doorstep of a small stone farmhouse.
And then the woman flees. Heart racing. Body weak and bleeding from childbirth, the warm liquid running down her thighs as fast as the tears roll down her face. She’s done. This act of saving her child has broken her more than anything that Athena or the god ever did.
She returns to the cave, to the small nook where her child, a daughter, first breathed life, and she digs her hands into the earth to cover the afterbirth, to hide any evidence that a child has been born. And then she lies down like the monster she is to wait for the hunter.
This time she won’t hide, won’t run or fight. This time she will let him take her head as the others have tried to do. She is tired, too damaged to go on.
She doesn’t know how many nights and days she lay there on the cold, rocky ground of the cave, but she knows immediately when another invades her space. She lifts her head and shivers as the monster in her wakes. Her hands feel for the small candle and flint, and she lights the wick.
Shadows lick and writhe on the walls, revealing a man in battle gear creeping closer. His hand flexes around the hilt of a short sword. His other hand lifts a round shield as he approaches the candlelight.