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The sobs that come out of me are embarrassingly loud. I don’t want my parents to have to deal with this. They have enough going on, and Apollo needs someone smarter and less panicked than me to confer with the doctors and figure out if there’s something else we’ve missed. Uncle Hades ushers me into a room nearby with two sofas and a table in it, then stands quietly and rubs my back while I sob all over his shirt.
I just need thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. Maybe two minutes. I just need to sob at the top of my lungs so I can get it out, and then I’ll go back to Apollo’s bed and?—
And I don’t know.
I’ll be there.
It’s been longer than two minutes—perhaps five—when I sob-scream I don’t know what to do into Hades’s now-damp shirt.
“I can’t do this,” I add, in case he didn’t get how helpless I was. “I can’t do this! I don’t know what to do!”
“It might not be up to you,” he says.
“It is up to me!” I cry. I sound absolutely wild, but I can’t stop. “We’ve been together this whole time! It’s always been me and Apollo!”
“That doesn’t mean?—”
“You don’t get it!” I pick my head up off his chest and look him in the eye. “We have been together. Ever since they came to live with us!”
“Like…” My uncle has the tiniest crease in his forehead. “You’ve been…dating?”
“No!” I howl. “We’ve been together. We’ve had to be together. Because we get sick if we’re apart too long. You have to have seen that! You have to have noticed! You notice everything! We have to be together.”
“Okay,” he says, and oh my freaking fucking God, he didn’t notice. “You get sick in what way?”
“Fevers. They start as fevers. And then, like, it progresses to not feeling well. But we never let it go that long, because nobody wants to feel like shit! That’s just not something people want!”
“No.”
“It’s been happening since I shot that arrow. Maybe I should shoot him with another arrow.”
A pause.
“What arrow?”
“The Christmas arrow! The one I shot at him at Christmas!”
Hades’s face softens. “Artemis, you were six.”
“I’ll shoot him with an arrow if that’s what it takes, and don’t you dare say I wouldn’t.”
“I would never say that.”
“It’s been going on since I was six,” I say, softer, because maybe if I say everything out loud, that will solve the problem. “I saw him. I thought he was beautiful. I shot the arrow. I didn’t know I had a crush on him. I didn’t even know what that was.”
“You were six,” he says again.
“We kept it a secret because we didn’t want any of you to worry. And now look.”
“The secret is out,” Hades says with a sigh.
“And on top of everything else…” I swipe my sleeve over my eyes. I’m still in my hunting clothes. Still with some residual blood from one of the guys. It sprayed farther than I thought it would. “It stopped working.”
“What stopped working?”
“We would just…be close together. And hold hands. And then we would feel better. But it stopped working. I’m right here. I’ve been here this whole time, and he’s still?—”
I sob some more.
