The Immortal Game (book 1) (10 page)

He told her that he felt the pain of conflict and combat—and with it the highs of glory and triumph. The two battled inside him. He was caught between the adrenaline of the fight and the agony of war’s destruction. His anger ramped up wars on Earth, and wars on Earth raged within him.

“I feel hate and prejudice. Anguish and fear. Loss and desperation.” He twisted the old pitted ring he wore.

She tried to keep her eyes steady. She wanted to know. She wanted to be strong.

“But I feel the adrenaline of it, too. The ferocious raw nerve. The pure thrill of knowing
you’re not dead
. The feel of being
alive
.”

She nodded. She knew that feeling. It was the euphoria of realizing the cord had caught, that she was being thrown back up into space, that she was alarmingly alive.

“I feel it all at once,” he went on. “One pulls me in, the other makes me want to claw my way out.”

A heat rose into her chest thinking of all of that, going on inside of him.

“Today it’s quiet,” he said. “Oddly so. Today I don’t feel any of it.” His face was serene. “
You
do that to me.”

A small smile flitted across her lips. She shook her head. “Hmm?”

“Everyone has energy,” he said. “We all feed off of it. We all respond to it. But
our
energy, yours and mine, it runs
together
. Like two streams meeting to form a river. That
feeling
, when I touch you, or hold you, or kiss you.” He smiled. “It’s harmony. And it’s rare.”

They talked well into the afternoon. Ash told her that Sage was really Athena, the goddess of knowledge, come to Earth in the vibrant information age. She was drawn by new technology, but she wanted to preserve old technologies too: paper and books. She knew they would soon be forgotten.

Langston was Apollo, the god of poetry, music, and healing. Ruby winced when she heard that. Those things were good and right and true. But Langston felt all wrong. Ash told her that Langston hadn’t always been so callous and malcontent. He was in love with a nymph, a being that was long forbidden to them, like
all
mortals were forbidden.

“Why?” she asked, but her mind had already jumped to the obvious conclusion.
She
was forbidden.

“With mortals everything is now, in the moment. Gods have forever. What we don’t do today, we can do tomorrow, or in a thousand years. Mortals only have today, and they know it. It makes them very …” He smiled. “… seductive.”

She saw the pictures of her life marching up the stairs on the other side of the front room. Her first lost tooth, an elementary Thanksgiving play, high school graduation.

Ash was the one who taught her to live in the moment, not to spend all her life living for some unknown future. And here he was, a
god
.
Immortal
. Do gods even have a life? Wasn’t a life a finite thing?

“My father, Zeus, could never fight that seductiveness. He could never fight the immediacy of humans. Hera, my mother, was jealous. She took her anger out on the women he cheated with and their children.”

Ruby remembered reading about Zeus’s famed infidelity and his notorious temper in her mythology class, but what of Hera’s temper? She couldn’t remember.

“Sometimes Zeus didn’t know about these reprisals, and sometimes he didn’t care. Sometimes other gods interceded but …” He paused. “It was a heady time for us all. We reveled in humans and their lives. We intervened where we wanted, and sat back to watch the results play out.” His voice became quiet. “Chess, but with people.”

Ruby remembered his assertion that you could tell a lot about a person by how they played chess. Hadn’t the gods played rough?

“For thousands of years Zeus chased and bedded the women of Earth. Eventually he saw how much it hurt Hera. But he couldn’t control it. Gods have desires, and ambitions, and tempers, like people, but more intense.

“In the end the only way Zeus could keep himself from the women of Earth was by separating himself from them. Eventually he forbade all the gods from interacting with mortals. He restricted us to the core of Olympus.”

“Olympus?”
she whispered. “In Greece?”

“No. We moved it a thousand years ago, maybe more.”

Ruby laughed, but Ash didn’t.

“Olympus, the true home of the gods, is not a place like a mountain. It’s created and maintained by the twelve major gods of Olympus: The Olympians. We can dissolve it and recreate it at will. Olympus exists in the astral plane, above the physical world. It sits above a different Mount Olympus, northwest of what is now Seattle.”

“But …” Ruby stammered, “A collective consciousness? You imagined it and it became real?” Her eyes darted to his. “Near Seattle?”

“Zeus doesn’t know Athena, Apollo, and I are on Earth,” Ash said, bringing her back to the more practical and pressing facts. “We visit Olympus often and avoid suspicion. Some of the others know, but not Zeus or Hera. If Apollo tells Zeus I’m here …” He paused. “If he tells him that I’m in love with a human …” He exhaled a forceful breath.

“What?” she demanded.

“Zeus can be …” he searched her eyes.
“…creative
.” A muscle near his eye twitched.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve read the stories. Right?”

There were so many myths that involved Zeus and she had read them so quickly; the class had been an elective. Then she remembered something about Zeus and an eagle. Something gruesome.

“Prometheus,” she said. Her face went slack. “Zeus punished him by having an eagle eat his liver out of his body every day. And because he was immortal it grew back every night.”

Her next breath shuddered in her chest. This was for real. That could happen. She had seen Ash heal. She had seen his lungs, and his bones, and his skin knit together overnight. What if he were shot again today? He would heal. And again tomorrow. And the day after that. On and on forever. Immortality, she realized, could be a curse.

“We should go to Athenaeum,” Ash said. “We need to find Apollo. I don’t think he’ll think it fair that he’s kept his love a secret and that I should fall in love and refuse to do the same. I don’t want to have to hide. I want you to come with me, but we need to time it right.”

“Where do you want me to go?” she asked.

He looked at her like she was asking him what color the sky was. “Olympus.”

She looked around the room. The blood left her head and everything seemed fuzzy. She stood, with no destination in mind, and soon found herself in the kitchen.

The spilled coffee was splayed out on the yellow wall like a Rorschach, all chaos and confusion. She grabbed a handful of paper towels from the plastic holder near the sink and rubbed at the stain furiously.

She heard Ash come up behind her, but she didn’t turn.

“Ruby, what is it?”

“I’m not going to Olympus.” She rubbed at the spill harder than was necessary. The towels were soaked through with the aromatic coffee. She longed for a cup, for the familiar taste and the warmth of the mug in her hand, for something to be normal.

He bent down to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She felt their connection, but she ignored it and kept scrubbing with the useless towels. “Ruby, I want you to be with me. I want to face Zeus. I want you to live on Olympus.”

The softness of his voice did nothing to soften her mood. She was supposed to just take this all in as truth? Uproot her life and change everything for him? She was supposed to face the wrath of Zeus, whatever that meant, so
he
didn’t have to hide? She gritted her teeth until the muscles near her temples throbbed.

“Can’t you clean up this mess like you did with the blood?” she spat. “Can’t you turn it to dust?”

“Ruby calm down. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Well, tell me then. How does it work exactly? Because I don’t understand any of this.”

He let out a long sigh and ran his hand through his curly hair. “The blood is a part of me,” he said. “I’m immortal because my chemical bonds are strong. Stronger than any human’s. Stronger than the ones holding this house together. Stronger than the ones in the rock we climbed yesterday.

“The only thing stronger than my chemistry is my will. I can will for my molecules to fly apart, but their chemical bonds will always pull them back together.

“It’s how I can disappear from this kitchen and appear a second later in a coffeehouse blocks away. It’s how I can heal from a mortal wound in a night. It’s why immortals never get sick, or cough, or even sneeze. Our bodies deal with anything foreign immediately.”

In her mind she saw him at the coffeehouse on Fremont, waiting for her. She felt the memory of the sharp pain in her knee as she leaned on the bullet his body had rejected. Weakness and exhaustion flooded into her and she felt the sting of tears in the corners of her eyes.

“I willed for those blood molecules to dissipate,” he said. “My body has already made new cells, like anyone else’s would, but faster. The old molecules will join all the others in the universe.” He shrugged and smiled weakly. “I’m useless with coffee.”

She sank to the worn linoleum and began to sob. He sat next to her and tried to pull her hands away from her face. When she finally let him, he put his large palms on her cheeks and wiped at her tears with his thumbs. His eyes were dark and full of worry but the energy that came off of him was as smooth as water over worn stones.

“I’ve got you,” he whispered.

EIGHT

Ruby noticed the change on the street as soon as she and Ash walked out of her house and turned toward Athenaeum after cleaning up the coffee. Portland had been getting back to normal after the bombing and she was used to seeing people out, but today they were everywhere. Music came out of open windows they passed. She recognized John Lennon’s voice streaming out of one. “Imagine all the people …”

They rounded the corner to Hawthorne and she saw that there was practically a party on the bigger four-lane street. People stood in loose groups on the sidewalk, talking and laughing. The road was full of cars honking, with passengers waving and half-hanging out of windows.

Ash reached for her hand. He slid his silky fingers down in between hers so that they were meshed together like fabric. A group of four women passed. They had peace signs painted on their cheeks in different shades of lipstick. A flag with a picture of the Earth taken from space hung out of one of the apartments above the storefronts.

What had happened? What had they missed?

She felt a tug on her hand and looked up. They stood under the green awning of Athenaeum, her second time there that day. Would Sage and Langston still be angry? Would Sage hate her now? She was pretty sure Langston already did.

Everything inside the coffee shop was familiar, but new. The Ambrosia Bars were real ambrosia, god food, and the owner was the goddess of knowledge. Ruby scanned the shelves of books. There were hundreds, maybe thousands. She saw people buying coffee from Sage all day, but had she ever seen her sell a single book? Ruby didn’t think so.

Sage stood behind the counter filling an order for two women. The three of them chatted and laughed. Ruby felt relief that Sage was in a good mood, but the feeling left when she spotted Langston sitting at a table across the room. He was reading something from his black journal to a woman Ruby recognized from her genetics class. Langston’s eyes darted up and caught Ruby’s.

She looked away.

The two women left with their coffees. From the corner of her eye Ruby saw Langston stand and say something to the woman from genetics. She also left, with a surreptitious glance backward.

As soon as the door closed, and the four of them were alone, Langston spoke, his voice loud. “You can’t be serious.” He looked at Ruby, but he didn’t say more.

“Just try not to make this about you.” Ash’s eyes bored into Langston.

Langston closed the distance of half the room in two strides and towered over Ash. “
I
won’t risk it.”

Their faces were inches from one another’s. “
You
don’t have to.” Ash looked to Sage then. “The risk is mine.”

“Ash …” Ruby began, though she didn’t know what she might say to keep them from fighting.

Langston laughed. “You haven’t even told her.”

Sage walked toward Langston. “Apollo,” she glanced to Ruby.

“She knows,” Ash said.

Langston sneered. “I can’t believe your stupidity, Ares. A human?” His eyes rolled up. “Really?”

Ruby’s cheeks burned. She thought of the odd assortment of women he paraded around with. He seemed to like humans well enough himself. She almost said so, but her fear of him held her back.

“Look,” Sage said. She picked up a folded newspaper from the table next to them. She opened it to the front page. The headline was simple and bold: “Cease-fire.”

Ruby’s eyes flew to Sage’s face.

Sage began to read. “In early morning diplomatic talks, the Allies and the Rogues have come to what many were thinking was an impossibility, a signed cease-fire. The document is effective immediately, and for the duration of peace talks …”

Langston looked from Ruby to Ash, then to Sage, but he said nothing and turned away.

Now Ruby understood the people in the street, the music, and the honking. After more than a decade of war, there was hope of peace.

“I felt it,” Ash said. “I thought it was Ruby. It
is
Ruby. This—” He took the paper from Sage and held it up to Langston, though he was still turned away from them. “—this is what she does for me. And, yes, I will risk
everything
for her.”

Langston walked further away. His head was down. Ruby wasn’t sure what the cease-fire meant, beyond the obvious. She didn’t know what it meant to
them.

Sage turned toward Langston. She spoke softly. “Think of Kissiae. Think of what it could mean.”

Ruby saw Langston’s shoulders rise up, tightening. “It could mean we all end up being the next Prometheus or the next Kronos,” he said. When he turned his blue eyes were cold and icy. “Have you forgotten about the prophecy, my vision? This is proof. I will not risk all of Olympus.” He looked at Ruby. “Not for her.” He walked to the door and was through it in the next moment.