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He’s not safe.
A part of my brain tries to argue that he’s just a man. A sitting Senator, but a man nonetheless. He came to my office to ask for a favor and what I saw was?—
Was nothing. It wasn’t real. It was the past casting a shadow onto the present. It had nothing to do with him.
Those thoughts are nothing compared to my furious need to get him away from Artemis. No doubt I look crazy now. I’m too close to the people around me, bumping into them, bouncing off. How many steps left? Not many.
I think she’s with people I know.
Daisy and Hercules.
I think.
Artemis turns, her honey-gold eyes going wide. Her forehead creases with worry. Her eyebrows shoot up. She opens her mouth, and I know what she’s going to say.
She’s going to say Apollo?
Artemis doesn’t say that because the Senator is still talking. His voice sounds like an older man in a room that made my skin crawl, that made my voice knot up like a knife in my throat, that made me want to be dead and know that I couldn’t be dead no matter how much I wanted to be because it would mean that my mother?—
My mother.
I put my hand out, aiming for her elbow. My arm aches from the effort of lifting it. Aches like the muscle has been exhausted several times over and it’s done. It doesn’t care about my attempt to save myself.
My hand slides onto Artemis’s lower back.
I keep the sound that comes out of me behind my teeth. Cool rolls into me like some of the Hudson leaped up onto the deck. It’s like being pulled back from the edge of a cliff. The heat shudders and starts to retreat. Artemis blinks, and that honey-gold color disappears for a heartbeat, then returns.
“And of course,” the Senator finishes. “I’d need a First Lady.”
The pickup line lands on both of us. An entirely different kind of heat erupts in my chest. It’s not a fever. It’s a solar flare. An enormous wave of radiation.
No one seems to feel it but me. There’s no disruption in the party. The music and voices continue, sounding normal for the first time since I narrowly avoided my death in the Hudson.
It’s not often that I have to hold myself back from glowing. I have the sense that if I loosened my grip at all, it would burn through Senator Walsh’s skin and turn all his internal organs to ash.
Instead of turning Walsh’s internal organs to ash, I concentrate on how my hand is on the small of Artemis’s back—not his, he’s not touching her, and if he tries, I’ll cut his hand off and make him choke on it—and face him with a fully intact smile and a confident glow. My fever is low enough that I can pull together a response.
I’ll need a First Lady.
Who does Walsh think he is? What he’s offering is for Artemis to be his First Lady.
The hubris.
His expression falters when I make eye contact.
“You’ll have to look elsewhere for a First Lady.” I give the words the slightest edge of scorn. “Artemis is mine.”
5
ARTEMIS
Oh.
My.
Holy.
Freaking.
