Page 53 of The Ruin of Eros

I don’t know where he goes at night, where he sleeps, if he sleeps. I move blindly, without instinct.

“Demon!” I shout, but my voice comes out strangled. “Where are you? Answer me!”

He knows what happened. He must know.

It’s not real, I tell myself. And yet another voice, deeper inside, disagrees.

It’s real. All too real.

He said he searched for my family. He said they were not in Sikyon. That they were gone.

“Are they dead?” I hurl the words into the darkness. I don’t stop moving, I can’t. “Answer me:are they dead?”

I take each turn at a run, the thin torch-flames my only light. It doesn’t matter: I see nothing but the visions in my mind.

“You will not hide from me!” My voice rises and cracks, hardly human. “Answer me, what has become of my home!”

And then, there he is. A dark form in the darkness.

“Psyche…”

“I saw it. I saw Sikyon. In the window.” I sag like a reed. My face is wet. My voice is pleading now, as though he can save me from what I’ve just seen, but beneath it I feel rage, readying the next wave.

My voice shudders no matter how I try to control it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How could I tell you such a thing?” His tone is steady, abominably so. How can he address me so evenly, even now!

“How could younottell me?” I shout.

“Listen to me,” he says. “I did not see them among the dead. There was a quake in the earth, as you have been shown: the mountain fell. When I went to seek out your people, I found a scene of devastation there. But more fled the town than were killed, Psyche. That is what I am trying to tell you.”

I stare at him.

“What are you saying? They are alive?”

“I’m saying I did not see your father or sister among the bodies, or hear word of their death.”

I slam my hand against the wall.

“In other words, you offer me nothing! My family may be dead, may be alive! They lie buried under all that rubble, for all you know!”

“There is very little in life that is certain,” he says, carefully. “I am telling you what I know. The rest we must wait for.”

His voice is cool, logical. Free of all emotion. But images flash through my mind: limbs, helpless outstretched hands, dusty and lifeless under fallen stone. Sounds of wailing and keening that echo through ruined streets. How can he speak this way! How can he try to—tophilosophizeabout such horror?

And then I realize something else.

Aphrodite’s husband is Hephaestus: the blacksmith of the gods, the one whose flaming forges lie below our mountains,ever-ready to erupt. The one whose hammer and anvil rattle the bones of the earth. But they have never rattled Sikyon before.

“This isn’t coincidence, is it?” My voice shakes.

The demon told me before now: if Aphrodite heard she’d been thwarted, things would go badly for us. They say Hephaestus is devoted to her. That he does anything she asks.

“It’s retribution, isn’t it? It’s because of me.”

He is silent. I want him to tell me I’m claiming too much, that it’s arrogance to imagine I’m the reason for all this. But he doesn’t say that.

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