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“This is the worst day of my life,” I yell at him. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!”
That’s something I can only shout at Uncle Hades in this moment. Worse things are happening to Apollo.
“What’s the best thing that ever happened to you?” Hades asks.
“Every single time I’ve seen Apollo.” This is an easy question. “Ever since I shot that first arrow at him.”
“Has he ever shot one back?”
“No.” I pace around in another tight, furious circle. “We’re careful when we play our games.”
“Please,” says Hades, holding out a hand to stop me. “Tell me you don’t shoot arrows at each other during these games.”
“We do! Sorry! But we’re, like, really good at it, so we never hit each other! Except once, and that was on purpose!”
Hades covers his eyes with his hand.
“It was fine. And it was on purpose, because he was hiding from me.”
“You hunted him to a hiding place and shot him with an arrow?”
“No. He was hiding truths from me. About things that were going on. And then he finally told me, and it was, like…it wasn’t fine, but it wasn’t that bad. It was all understandable. It’s the whole reason we’re here.”
“So you shot him,” says Hades, slowly, like he’s coming to the solution. He isn’t. Arrows don’t have anything to do with this. “But he’s never shot you.”
“Never.”
Just then, Apollo’s CEO and assistant Delphi, who’s been his friend since college, bursts into the waiting room. “Did you figure it out yet? The circle?”
Uncle Hades and I both stare at her.
“Oh, come on, please tell me you figured it out.” She looks rumpled and exhausted, her hair in a bun that’s falling to pieces. “Please.”
It doesn’t make any sense.
It shouldn’t help at all.
But when Delphi says that, something clicks.
So you shot him, but he’s never shot you.
For most of my life, I’ve thought that shooting arrows was a one-and-done thing. There was no other arc. Nothing shoots an arrow back at you.
Nothing except a man who’s your equal in literally every way. The only man who’s good enough to chase you through the woods and shoot arrows near you, but not into you, for fun.
That first arrow wasn’t a full arc, was it?
Apollo is just like me. We play those games in the woods because we’re the same.
There’s something he hasn’t told me.
We came here because of those aerial photos, but that wasn’t blackmail. Those were a map. The other photos were blackmail. The other photos with a very young Apollo in them. The photos that made him look like he was being eaten alive.
Across the hall, Apollo screams.
All of us move. There’s a collision in the doorway of the hospital room, and I don’t know which member of my family I shove out of my way. I just push until I’m at Apollo’s side.
He screams again, then stops and throws up bright red blood down the front of his already-bloodied hospital gown. Ares keeps him upright, but his face is the color of ash and he’s shaking. Or they’re both shaking.
