“No one has died because of you,” she said, running her fingers through my hair and brushing it out of my eyes. “Even if you don’t pass, it won’t be your fault. As long as you do your best, everything will be all right.”
“But how can I do my best when I don’t even know what the tests are?” I shoved my hands between my knees. “How am I supposed to do this?”
She wrapped her arm around my shoulders. “Everyone believes in you except for you, Kate,” she said gently. “Maybe that should tell you something.”
Even if everyone believed in me, that didn’t mean they were right, and it didn’t mean I would succeed. All it meant was that on top of everything else, I had to worry about disappointing them, too. Or in Henry’s case, forcing him into early retirement from his entire existence.
“But you do like him, don’t you?” said my mother after several minutes passed. I craned my neck to look up at her, surprised to see real concern on her face.
“He’s nice,” I said warily, wondering where she was going with this. “I think we could be friends.”
“Do you think he’s cute?”
I rolled my eyes. “He’s a god, Mom. Of course he’s cute.”
A wry smile spread across her face. “It’s about time you admitted that he’s a god.”
I shrugged and looked away. “Kind of hard to pretend otherwise now. But he’s nice, so I guess as long as he doesn’t try to turn me into a pile of ash, I could get used to it.”
“Good.” She hugged me and gave me a kiss on the temple. “I’m glad you like him. He could be good for you, and you shouldn’t be alone.”
I sighed inwardly, not bothering to correct her. If it made her happy to think I liked Henry like that, then so be it. She deserved a little happiness before I became such a disappointment.
I expected the days in Eden Manor to drag, but instead their repetition made them go by quickly. Calliope and Ella helped me get ready in the morning; Ava always sat on the edge of my bed, talking animatedly about her latest conquest. After a few short weeks of dating the guard, Xander, she’d moved on.
“His name’s Theo,” she said, so excited that she could hardly sit still. “He’s gorgeous and tall and smart, and he says I have the prettiest eyes he’s ever seen.”
In the mirror, I saw Ella’s expression harden. “Stay away from him,” she snapped. I tried to turn around so I could see them both, but Calliope held my shoulders down, not yet finished with my hair.
“Why?” said Ava haughtily. “Is he your boyfriend?”
Ella narrowed her eyes. “He’s my twin.”
I sighed. If I had to put up with this for the next five months, I was going to do something drastic.
“So?” said Ava, crossing her arms. “He likes me, and I like him. I don’t see the problem.”
How Ava could look at Ella’s face and not cower, I had no idea. But Ava was going to be Ava no matter how long Ella glared at her.
“If you hurt him, I will hunt you down and kill you all over again, and this time I’ll make sure you won’t have some pretty little afterlife to come back to,” snarled Ella.
I opened my mouth to tell Ella exactly what was going to happen if she even tried, but Ava cut in before I had the chance. “And what if he hurts me?”
“Then I’m sure you’d have done something to deserve it.”
From then on out, Ava and Ella could barely stand to be in the same room together. I couldn’t blame them.
Slowly I adjusted to my new reality, and Henry was right. Once I accepted that maybe this all wasn’t just one big crazy joke, things got much easier, and I didn’t constantly exhaust myself trying to rationalize the incomprehensible.
While I still didn’t like the idea of the guards or Calliope testing my food—a job which Ella strongly encouraged Ava to take over—pretending I was stuck in the eighteenth century helped me come to terms with everything that was happening around me, with the exception of my strange relationship with Henry. As the weeks passed, the evening quickly became my favorite part of the day, aided by the fact that I didn’t have to listen to Ella and Ava bicker all the time. We talked about what I’d done that day, though even when he tried to distract me, it never escaped my attention that we never talked about how his day had gone. I taught him how to play my favorite card games, and he seemed to enjoy learning, asking me polite questions and not interrupting my rambling responses. Sometimes I worked up the courage to ask him questions as well, which he would answer vaguely, if at all. He still refused to tell me what the tests were, but to his credit, he seemed eager to keep me as comfortable as possible.
Everything about my day was timed. Half an hour for breakfast, which was always full of my favorite foods. I didn’t gain weight, and that only gave me an excuse to eat as much as I wanted. After breakfast, I had five hours of lessons, where I studied mythology, art, theology, astronomy—anything Irene thought I needed to know. Daydreaming wasn’t an option either, being her only student, and she seemed to develop a distinct lack of compassion about what I was and wasn’t interested in learning. Still, there was one plus: at least Calculus wasn’t on the curriculum.
We spent an inordinate amount of time on the Olympians, the Greek gods who ruled the universe and who would decide my fate.
“Most people typically think there were only twelve,” said Irene. “But if you look carefully throughout history, there are fourteen.”
The significance of that number wasn’t lost on me. Fourteen Olympians and fourteen thrones. They would be the ones deciding my fate, and because of that, I paid extra attention to my lessons about them, as if knowing everything I could would somehow give me a leg up.
I learned about Zeus and Hera and their children; the children Zeus fathered with other women, as well as Athena, who sprang fully-grown from his head; about Demeter and her daughter, Persephone; and about the role Hades played. This was Henry, as my mother had mentioned, and it was strange to balance mythology with the knowledge that to these people, this was history. That apparently Henry had really done all these things. But the more I learned, the easier it became to accept it, and once Irene was sure I knew as much as I could about the members of the council, we moved on to other myths. But the Olympians were always present in those stories, too, and it did nothing to help calm my nerves.