Page 38 of Seph

A spasm of pain crossed her face, and words seemed to struggle out of her full lips. “The acolytes had left. The children were gone already. Hades took them home. He always made sure Seph and I had a few days together without interruption, right before she left. I would... I would have been coming to see them anyway. Their anniversary party. They always had a festival. Offerings of milk and wine made to the dead—so, of course, down in the Underworld, there was such feasting and revels. Even up in the mortal world, the veil thins...” Demeter put her cup down and stared through the steam rising from it, eyes luminous and staring at something far away.

It seemed to Simeon that an icy wind whipped through the house, and fine lines of gray began to appear in Demeter’s hair again. “So, it was just the two of you?”

She blinked, and the light left her eyes. They clouded. “N...No. No, he came to visit. Suddenly. I didn’t know he was coming, but then again, no one ever does. You can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want. I’ve asked him over and over to just leave us alone...”

Hail pelted against the window, and the wind shrieked.

“Who?” Emily demanded.

Demeter’s lips trembled. “Zeus.”

Chapter Twelve

Emily looked at the clock in the dashboard of the Mustang. Six. The clock read six, as in SIX, in all digitized letters, no numbers. “Simeon? Is it only six at night?” It felt later. Much later. But, then again, they had been hanging out with an immortal (beautiful, curvy, healthy-looking) goddess who had lost all concept of time.

They sat with Demeter for three cups of tea, some rhubarb pie, and a plate of scones. Scones that Demeter served while wearing her summer-goddess body, fresh out of her immortal goddess oven. Simeon kept looking at her with a look Emily was all too familiar with.

He looked at me like that once. Naked lust and longing. Sometimes I still catch a flash of it in his eyes, but not often. I told him there was never going to be anything between us.

I’m not jealous.

Confused and a little envious, maybe, but not jealous.

“I took my mum scones like that after I got my first proper job with Heatherington. Cook let me have the extras, and I took them home to her.”

“Simeon! The clock?”

“Huh? No, it’s about midnight, Luv. In—” Simeon stopped talking. The Mustang’s clock suddenly flickered. FIVE.

“What’s five? Is that incoming souls or something?”

Simeon’s pale skin was somehow an even starker shade of white. “Five days until November 1st, at midnight. Immortals tell time based on deadlines, I guess. Never noticed before.”

Five days until Simeon might die in the permanent way. Until she would never see him again. Never see Mr. Minegold again, either. Her heart twisted, and her brain stopped cold. She felt an eerie “the world is wrong” sensation. It was too familiar, the one she’d had when her mother never came back to get her, the one she had when her father screamed at her for almost dying because she wasn’t smart enough to figure out his wordless challenges, and the one she had when her father was taken, not by a vampire but by his own addiction.

She should say, hisotheraddiction.

It was the shattering feeling of nothing making sense and not knowing what to do, or how to fix it—and knowing she was never allowed to show her confusion. Confusion was weakness, food for the enemy.

Simeon was still talking, like nothing had happened, like they hadn’t just shaved off a day of precious searching time.

“Didja notice how she seemed real unsure about time? Every time we mentioned it was a thousand years or we got down to the nitty-gritty, askin’ for clear details, she faded in and out of reality. It reminded me of my grandmother. She passed when I was just a little thing, but she lived with us for a bit. People did that back then. They wouldn’t stick you in a home. The family would rally ‘round and sit by the bedside, even if you were dirt poor.” Simeon shifted in the car’s seat. “ I’d come in and read my lessons to her, poetry and Latin. Grandmother would do that, what Demeter was doing. One minute it would be ‘time for tea and why weren’t there any boiled eggs’, and the next she’d be talking about how I’d better hurry or I’d never see Perceval passing in his coach.”

“What? Who?”

“The Prime Minister when gran was young. She’d skip back to childhood, back fifty years, in the blink of an eye.”

“She was old. It sounds like she had dementia, but I guess they didn’t say that back then?” Emily shrugged, privately touched by the idea of a little Simeon in old-fashioned clothes, reading to his ailing grandmother.

“Demeter is ageless.”

“Yeah. A goddess and a vampire could totally hook up, why not?” she muttered to the seatbelt.

Simeon pretended not to hear her. “Does it seem to you like Demeter’s memory was off? I don’t think it was age, Emily. I think it was a spell or something.”

“What could keep a goddess from accessing her memories for a few centuries?” Emily didn’t buy it.

“What could keep a goddess hidden for just as many?” Simeon challenged. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll talk on the way.”

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