Page 33 of Grave Curse

Oh God, I remembered this. I didn’t want to, but I remembered it as if it had just happened.

“He had Radar and Popcorn hold me in place, forcing me to watch while he threw billiard balls at you. Ostensibly to teach me a lesson because I’d done something wrong. But really it was just to torture both of us. You know, for fun.”

I closed my eyes. That day had been a nightmare, like so many others I had endured. That was the day everything changed with the only family member I’d had left, leaving a raw wound on my soul that had never healed.

“You didn’t spill a single drop when he threw those balls at you so damn hard he broke the wood paneling behind you. The sound of those balls crashing into the wall was so sharp, so jarring, yet you never even whimpered. Then…” I heard him swallow, and I wished he would shut the hell up, just stop and let the past stay in the past because I hated remembering it. “Then he hit you. Right in the stomach. I thought he’d killed you because you just sort of… folded onto the ground. And all the while you never made a sound.”

I thought Hades had killed me too, the pain had been so great. As I’d watched that red number-three billiard ball roll away while I lay in agony on the floor, I remembered how I’d actively tried to die. I held the breath that had been knocked out of me in the hope that I would just stop being alive, because I didn’t want to be in pain anymore. Hours later, when I’d come to with a broken rib and spitting up blood, I wept out of sheer disappointment that I was still stuck in Hades’s hell.

That had been the first time I’d been badly injured by Hades. It had also been the first time my mother seemed to fully realize that I, her only child, wasn’t in a safe environment. Yet, as much as she seemed to genuinely care about the agony I was forced to endure at the hands of her man, she hadn’t cared enough to separate from that psycho in order to save me. She’d even refused to take me to a damn doctor out of fear of losing Hades, her heroin connection.

That terrible day was what had done it for me and my mom. In fact I never called her “Mom” again, crystalizing the final, toxic stage of our relationship. Audrey had come to love her fix more than me, her own goddamn daughter. That was the daywe’d both been forced to face it. I’d burned with an unforgiving rage, and I never let an opportunity go by without letting Audrey know exactly how I felt about her.

Even now, years later with the mind and maturity of an adult, the ocean of guilt I carried nearly drowned me if I thought about it for too long.

“That was the first time I noticed how you’d go mute, but it wasn’t the last,” Tyr went on, dragging me from that remembered pain. “Whenever Hades would terrorize you or Audrey, you’d just go so…fucking… silent. Like, unnaturally so, with not even a peep or a whimper escaping you. It’s like…I don’t know. You go to a place so far down deep inside yourself that not even your voice can find you. But your eyes are a different matter. No matter how silent you’d become, your eyes would always scream at me to help you. To save you. To fuckingdo something. But I never did.” A sigh heaved the chest I rested against. “I guess it tracks that you’d hate me for never saving you when you needed me the most.”

“You were only sixteen when I got hit with that number-three ball.” Whew. Finally. I’d be whispering for a while, but that was to be expected. “A baby against a monster who was trying to provoke you into a fight so he could justifiably murder you. Loki would have been next, and then Hades probably would have sold Hel to sex traffickers. That’s what he said he wanted to do with her to get her out of his hair. And you did kill for me,” I added, swallowing in the hope of making a bigger noise than the weak-ass whisper I currently had going on. “Four years later, you killed Popcorn because you knew what I was going to do to myself. Though I still don’t know how you knew.”

“I could see in your eyes that you were just so fuckingdone. Done with all the stupid bullshit my uncle was putting us through, done with waiting for things to somehow get better. Just…done. I’ve always been able to read your eyes.” The armsaround me tightened and he turned to press his mouth against my brow. “Welcome back, by the way.”

Aww. “Thanks.”

“Where do you go when you go so quiet?”

“I’m right here. It’s like… When I get scared, I don’t want to be noticed by any of the gods around me, so everything in my throat sort of freezes up. I can’t help it. It just happens, and it takes a while for everything to thaw out.”

“The gods?” A frown began to darken his expression, like a thunderstorm rolling in. “Is that how you think of Hades?”

“My mother taught me to think of all you Colgraves that way.”

His eyes widened. “Even me?”

I nodded. “In the beginning, before Audrey became a hardcore junkie and still cared that I existed, she told me stories about all the gods—Odin, Hades, Loki, and Ares or Tyr, depending on the pantheon she was focused on. She also gave me a book about the old gods to show me how real they were. Sure, it was one of those kid-level Golden Book types, but it left an impression. At that age it’s hard to distinguish fantasy from what’s real, and to make it all the more confusing I knew an Odin and a Tyr and a Hades, the very same gods that were in that book. For a long time, I really believed that’s what you all were.”

“You don’t believe that now.”

I nearly laughed at the typical Tyr response. It was more of a command than a question, like he expected me to jettison that crazy shit from my memory banks on his say-so. “There was a lot my mother taught me that wound up being pure garbage,” I said without really answering. How could I explain that while the grown-up me understood the Colgraves were human and far from godlike, the child I’d once been still reacted on a visceral level with fear and awe? It was crazy and I knew it, just as I knew it would only piss him off, so I was better off keeping it to myself.“I guess it was around puberty when I began to realize I was on my own, since Hades had turned Audrey into his official zombie sex slave. I’d look around the Clubhouse and Odin’s bar, Rooster Juice, trying to study what worked when it came to survival in Hades’s hell. Ultimately I decided the only way to live life was to act like the gods around me. I wasn’t one, but if I yelled enough and got in people’s faces, and threw my weight around like it meant something, it usually did the trick. Being a pretend-god was almost as good as being one.”

He stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I shrugged.

“That’swhy you lose your shit when things go sideways?”

“Hey, watch it. I never lose my shit, thank you very much. I always know what I’m doing. I call it being a pretend-goddess.”

“Holy fuck. Holy fucking fuck.”

“I don’t think you can sayholy fucking fuckwithout being laughed at.”

“I can say whatever the hell I want,” he muttered absently, still staring at me like he was in some kind of shock. “I’ve got a news flash for you, Snap. I’m not a god, and you’re not a goddess. You’re the hottest, most beautiful woman I’ve ever known or will ever know in my lifetime, but you’re mortal, just like everyone else on the damn planet, you got that? You can get hurt. You can be killed. If you fall off a ladder, you could break your fucking neck.”

Oh, wow. He thought I was beautiful. And hot. Will wonders never cease. “To be fair, the ladder was your fault. I was doing just fine, hanging Grimmy up without a—”

“Grimmy?”

“We named him Grimmy. The point,” I went on when he just stared at me, “was that I was perfectly safe until you barged in and nearly killed me. What the hell is wrong with you?”

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