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I used to dream about art galleries.
Clean spaces. Hardwood floors. Champagne and hushed voices. People admiring the pieces on the walls for their artistic merit and nothing else. Not the artist’s mark in the corner. Not the rumored wealth or danger of her father. Just paint on canvas.
I still love the idea of art galleries.
The reality of art galleries is that they’re a headache.
Cream or white makes inescapably logical sense for a gallery. It puts the focus on the pieces, where it belongs. But Jesus, it’s bright.
Every ritzy gallery in LA has gone with this motif, and it’s hell. Although an artistic rendering of hell would be dark. I’d rather look at brimstone than all this off-white. My head hurt before I got here. Now, an hour into Marie’s show, it spears through my temples and into a dull ache at the top of my spine.
Lovely.
If I owned a gallery, I’d make the walls black. Navy at the brightest. Curators and gallery owners who think it’s only possible to draw attention to art with white walls suffer from a shocking lack of imagination.
Unfortunately, having a powerful imagination doesn’t transform the white walls into anything but what they are. It also doesn’t transform the show from ongoing to over. Marie’s garnered a decent crowd, but not large enough for me to slip away unnoticed.
I don’t want to sneak away. That’s why it’s such bullshit to have this reaction to something as common and innocent as white gallery walls. That’s why it’s so incredibly frustrating to be so sensitive to things like…lightbulbs. Sunlight. Illumination in general. I’m trying to be a decent friend, for God’s sake, and it would be easier if I wasn’t always teetering on the edge of a migraine.
The sensible thing would be to text my driver now and make apologies later.
I type out the text and delete it.
“Daisy!” Marie’s arms go around my neck with nervous force. Champagne sloshes in my glass, but I don’t let it spill. “Thank God you’re here. I didn’t think anyone would come.”
I hug her back, never mind that her body bumping into mine has made the headache worse. “What are you talking about? You have a crowd. These are men with money.”
She pulls away and sneaks a look over her shoulder. “Are they?”
“…yes.” I turn her to face the gallery with a hand on her elbow and gesture with my champagne glass. “The one in the blue suit is a supplier for a luxury interior decorating company. And the man he’s next to—”
“The one with dark hair?”
“Yes, him. He buys his wife fine art as foreplay.”
Marie gasps, her cheeks flushing pink. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“It’s true. And he’s obviously on the hunt tonight. Look at him.”
The dark-haired man studies the pieces on the walls with a gleam in his eyes, ignoring
everyone else in the room, including the artist. Marie’s auburn-haired and unassuming, and she’s been mistaken for a caterer’s assistant once already this evening.
“Do you think…” She drops her voice. “Do you think he’ll buy one?”
“Yes. Watch.”
The man steps closer to one of her pieces. It’s smaller, tucked into the corner of the gallery, but I know exactly why he’s attracted to it. Marie’s other work is like her. Bright. Kind. Unassuming. She does landscapes, which I’ll freely admit doesn’t sound like the kind of thing a man would buy as an erotic gift, except that these landscapes are different. Not because she’s chosen unique subjects, but because of the light.
Marie’s pieces are sunny and warm. They’re bathed in a summer glow. It makes me jealous. Not of her, but of the light. I’ve never been able to spend as long as I wanted outside in the summer. As a child, I forced the issue more often. All children think they can be invincible if only they believe it hard enough.
I’m not invincible. If I spend too long in the sun, or in the light at all, my own brain will remind me of how fragile it is.
So Marie’s landscapes make my chest hurt. They’re paintings of a warmth that will always be out of reach.
Other people, like the man who wants a piece for his wife, see that gold haze and feel nostalgia. They have wonderful memories in light like that, and I’d bet most of those memories aren’t bookended by being in pain, and being sick, and finally blacking out.
The dark-haired man shakes his head like he’s waking up and reaches for his wallet.
“Oh my God.” Marie clutches at my arm. “I don’t know what to say. If he comes over here—I don’t know what to say.”
“He’s not going to come over here.”
Her grip relaxes. “What?”
“He’ll buy from the owner, not from you. But don’t be surprised if he comes over afterward to talk to you about the piece and shake your hand.”
“But it’s—but that one—”
“He picked out the moody one.”
“I didn’t think anyone would choose that one,” she whispers.
“It’s okay,” I whisper back. “It’s great work. It will make great foreplay.”
“Daisy, it’s a painting of an approaching storm!”
“Haven’t you ever had
an orgasm?”
Marie dissolves into laughter. “Oh, no. I’m never going to make it here.”
“You already made it here.”
“I mean…here.” She waves a hand at the men and women attending her show. All of them have money. I can tell by the clothes. By the way they stand. By their faces as they take in the work. People born to wealth have a certain kind of aura. I would know. “I’m not like these people. I’m not even like you.”
“Ouch.”
She puts a hand on my arm, apologetic. “I just meant this is easy for you. You know what to say. You know all the jokes to make.”
“I would save the orgasm jokes for friends.”
Marie’s eyes light up. “Are we friends?”
I laugh like it’s a hilarious joke, but a little part of my heart dies. “Of course we are. That’s why I’m at your show.”
“Of course we are,” she echoes.
Of course.
The gallery owner calls to Marie, and she squeezes me, a tight, close hug, and lets go. “I’m so glad you came. If I don’t see you, I’ll text you, okay?”
“You’d better.”
She flits off into the gallery.
I smile after her, hyperaware of my expression. Marie doesn’t think anyone noticed her, but everyone in the room saw her come over to hug me, and now they’re taking the opportunity to stare.
I’m used to the staring. On average, it takes people thirty seconds to figure out what’s wrong with me, and another thirty seconds to figure out if their eyes are playing tricks. To wonder what kind of a freak I am. Then, if I’m very unlucky, they’ll connect me with my dad.
Don’t misunderstand me. He’s one of my favorite people in the world. Nobody has a better dad than I do. But when I’m recognized as his daughter rather than a woman with monstrous eyes, some people feel entitled to ask questions. Sometimes personal questions. Sometimes, if they’re particularly pushy, they’ll make requests.
Usually, those requests involve delivering a message, or arranging a phone call or a meeting. They’re too scared to ask him themselves. They’re not afraid to bother me.
I’m not into that.
So I make zero eye contact with the people in the gallery. I put my champagne glass on an empty standing table and slowly, casually make my way to one of the gallery assistants. One of Marie’s bigger, more expensive pieces reminds me of the beach where I learned to swim, so I buy it and give the assistant the address to deliver it to my house.
It doesn’t matter that we’re not really friends. It stings a little bit, but it doesn’t surprise me. My childhood was beyond excellent, as far as childhoods go, but from what I gather, I spent more time alone or with my parents than other people. I had a close circle of friends, and my family, and by the time I left New York to come to California it was easier to stick with what I had.
Explaining myself to someone new is exhausting.
I text my driver, Shane, who doubles as my bodyguard, that I’m ready to leave. He’s just sent me a thumbs-up emoji when my phone rings.
My cousin Artemis is already talking when I accept the call, drifting into an out-of-the-way corner so I can close my eyes.
“—can’t do that. I’ve said it so many times, and I know you heard me, so, like—”
“Artemis. Artemis. Did you mean to call me?”
“Oh my God, Daisy, of course I meant to call you!”
“Sorry.” I can’t help laughing at how all-out she goes. “It sounded like you were arguing with Apollo again.”
“I am arguing with Apollo again. That doesn’t mean I can’t talk to you at the same time.”
“You can text me. Seriously. Don’t interrupt your argument on my behalf.”
“You shh. I’m not interrupting anything except Apollo insisting that I haven’t told him—”
Apollo’s voice, muffled in the background, interrupts her.
“I am right,” Artemis insists to him. “You will not win this battle.”
I catch a barely audible put your money where your mouth is.
“Hi, Apollo,” I shout into the phone, wincing at the sound even as I do.
“Hey, Daisy,” he shouts from the background of the call.
“You’re not going to win,” I whisper-shout back. Ironic, since winning battles of diplomacy is his literal day job.
“I know,” he answers, and then he laughs, which makes Artemis laugh, which makes me laugh, too. Which makes me wish, not for the first
time, that I lived in New York with my cousins and my parents and my aunts and my uncles. It makes me wish I didn’t have to hide. It was never my plan to live at home forever, but it gives me a pang of homesickness and regret that I have to live in California now. Verbal battles would make a nice change from the one raging in my retinas. Except I can’t go back, no matter how much I miss them.
“Are you ever going to get somebody else to fight with?” I tease Artemis. I’ve known her since we were babies, and she’s always stuck close to our family, too. Especially once her dad adopted Ares and Apollo when we were six.
“No,” she answers, prim. “I prefer a well-matched opponent.”
“You don’t act like I’m well-matched,” Apollo says, close to the phone.
“Is it worse than that?” I drop my voice like I’m about to question her about a terrible secret. “Will you die without him? Is there a ticking clock the moment he leaves the room?”
Artemis laughs, and then laughs harder, and it’s…actually kind of forceful and weird.
“Um…are you okay?”
“She’s going to snort-laugh herself to death,” says Apollo, directly into the speaker. I’m sure I’m imagining any weirdness in his voice. It’s probably the sight of Artemis ugly-laughing. A rare thing to see, since she’s normally the definition of beauty. She has her dad’s golden eyes and her mom’s supermodel looks. I’m only a little jealous.
Of her, and how good she looks with Apollo, who has dark hair and blue eyes. They would make the perfect celebrity couple if they weren’t best friends.
Some people might argue that they’re siblings, but they’re not blood related, so if they choose to be obsessed with each other, all I can do is tease Artemis relentlessly about it.
“She’s still going,” comments Apollo.
“Get away,” chokes Artemis. It takes her a few beats to regain control. “I’m trying to ask Daisy about her art. What did the gallery guy say?”
The gallery guy is a curator I met with earlier this week after months of persistence on his part. He saw one of my pieces in the catalog for a charity auction and has been asking for a meeting ever since. I finally agreed, mainly because daytime meetings are going to be beyond me soon, and I don’t want to explain why.
It was a mistake. He liked the wrong work. I offered him a car-sized study in all the
shades of black that exist, so many more than most people ever notice during the day. It’s studded with orbs of light that allow a further range of tones to celebrate the dark. He didn’t even give me a chance to begin explaining how personal the piece is before pulling out first one, then another of the wrong paintings to crow over instead.
“He said my work is great.”
I make my voice so sparkly and positive that Artemis snorts. “Daisy. Come on.”
“He said it was transcendent. He said it was like nothing he’d ever seen. He wants to arrange a show.” These are all objectively good things, but they make my stomach feel like an empty pit. I don’t want to be celebrated for the art I have no control over. Even if it is the only kind I’ve made for the last few years.
“I knew it! I knew it! When’s it going to be? In LA, right? I’m flying out.”
“Don’t.” It comes out too fast. I massage my temples with my free hand, willing the pain and panic out of my voice. “I mean—it’s not a sure thing yet. I haven’t given him a date.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” Because if I have an in-person show at a gallery, my entire family is going to come to LA. There won’t be any stopping them. They’ll come to the show, and they’ll see my pieces, and they’ll know.
They’ll know.
“I feel weird about it.”
“Everybody’s going to love your work.” Artemis uses the same confident, reassuring tone she always does. “We already love your work. A lot of people already love your work.”
Artemis hasn’t seen my work. Not my real work. She and the rest of my family have only seen my display pieces. The few I’ve sold. The few I’ve put up for auction, or donated.
Letting them see my real paintings in a bright-white hell gallery would be…uncomfortable.
But not as uncomfortable as letting them see me.
I’m in California for a reason. My family doesn’t need to worry.
“I know you do, I just—”
My phone buzzes.
Shane: Out front.
Coming in to get you.
I move toward the gallery exit and exchange fake-brisk nods with him. Shane is ultra-professional, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a few inside jokes about how weird the idea of a bodyguard is.
“I know,” I tell Artemis as we go out into the night. The heat feels heavy. My head gives a deep, painful throb. Shadows in the corners of my vision say I should’ve left Marie’s show already. “I’ll think about it. It’s not that—”
Shane wraps one arm around me and shoves. My periphery warps again.
“Jesus, Shane, what—”
“Keep your head down,” he barks. A bang rattles my skull, sending a shooting pain through my temples. It’s so strong that my vision goes, my knees wobble, and Shane manhandles me across the sidewalk toward my black SUV. Another bang makes my brain short-circuit. That hurts. A woman on the sidewalk screams. People run, shadows blurring. Shane shouts over his shoulder. I’m dimly aware of him wrenching open the back door and putting me inside. He climbs in after me, launches himself into the front seat, and drives.
The acceleration knocks me against the seat. My phone skids onto the floor. A muffled thud on my side of the SUV sends me scrambling for the other side. “Shane. What was that? What was that?”
“A bullet.” The light from the navigation screen hurts, so I cover my eyes. A phone rings over the SUV’s sound system. My heart races in the dark, pain rising and rising. I’m not letting this happen now. Not now.
Deep breaths, I tell myself, as though it’s ever worked before. As though I could get one in through my shaking anyway.
His call connects to the man who heads up my full team. “Report.”
“This is Shane.” His voice is loud and clear and the hurt reverberates like a bell. “I have Daisy in the car. There was a shooter at the art gallery.”
“Injuries?”
“No. She wasn’t hit. But I need backup at the house.”
My vision goes fuzzy, like static, the pattern imprinting on the dark. It’s a harsh, wai
ling pain in my head, like an alarm that won’t turn off. I want to scream, but the sound gets choked off. No, damn it, no—
Shane, I try to say.
I’m sick on the floor of the SUV instead.
The last thing I hear is Shane. His terse reports are broken up by my failing brain.
“—seizure.” A sound like static. “—at the house before—” More static, and then: “Daisy was the target. Yes. I’m sure.”
Then the darkness closes in.
It’s not a dream.
It’s not a nightmare.
It’s worse than that. It’s nothing, pitch-black nothing, forever and ever and ever.
2HERCULESMidnight, we meet again.
There was a time in my life when I slept whenever I could. Thirty minutes in a quiet public park. A nap in class, if I had to be in school. When our apartment was free of the sounds of my mother’s clients.
When I didn’t have to be awake to drag the assholes out by the shirt collar.
My time in the Army only played into the pattern. Boot camp did its best to turn me into a morning person. Ran on that schedule until I joined the Green Berets and parachuted into shitshows all around the globe, and what the fuck do you know? I was right back where I started, sleeping when the opportunity presented itself.
I pull down on the heaviest resistance band that’s commercially available, gritting my teeth against my stubborn shoulder, and keep an eye on myself in the mirror.
My body no longer gives a fuck about conventional sleep schedules. There’s no fighting it, so I have come to the gym in my building to run on the treadmill and zone out to loud music while I complete all the exercise reps recommended for my shoulder.
It’ll never be the same. That’s not what the exercises are for. Their purpose is to head off muscle atrophy and work on my range of motion.
I hate these fucking exercises. Hate them. But I’ll do them, because I couldn’t die when Ollie and I hit the ground. That would’ve been acceptable. I’d have traded my life for his.
Instead, I got to keep living with a shoulder so fucked up that I got an honorable discharge and a ticket back to the place I was trying to avoid.
My phone rings, cutting off the music in my headphones.
I keep tension on the band and tap my headphones to answer. It doesn’t matter who it is. Nobody calls about anything good past midnight. Best-case scenario, it’s nobody who considers themselves family.
“Hercules.”
“Hey, prick. Do you have to answer my calls like I’m some peon in the mailroom?” No such luck, because the voice on the line belongs to my brother—adoptive brother—Ares.
“What do you want?”
“Listen. Dad’s going to call you. Don’t do your usual thing.”
“Fuck off. I don’t have a usual thing. And—Dad? That’s cute.”
Ares clears his throat. “Right. Zeus, the man who housed us and raised us until we left for—”
“Shut the fuck up. Why are you calling to warn me about a phone call?”
“Because I’m a decent human being, unlike you.” This teasing, dry-humor motherfucker. “I thought you’d want a heads-up, since you’re not going to like—”
A two-toned beep a
lerts me that Zeus—Dad, for fuck’s sake—is indeed calling. “Time’s up.” I switch calls, disconnecting from Ares. “This is Hercules. What’s your emergency?”
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Zeus, my not-Dad says, as if he can’t hear that I’m using full sentences and was obviously not in the middle of a REM cycle.
“You didn’t. I’m at the gym.”
There’s an exceptionally brief pause, during which Zeus is probably debating whether to mention that it’s almost one a.m. “I’m glad you’re up. I need you to clear your schedule and take a job for me.”
I release the band on a count of five and pull it back again. “What job? If somebody hacked into your shit at the shelter, that’s not—”
I’m interrupted by an enormous crash in the background of the call, followed by shouting.
“You pirate-ass motherfucker. I’m so fucking done. I will end you.” My not-Uncle Hades.
“You’ll have to try harder than that, sweet pea.” My other not-Uncle Poseidon.
An even louder crash. Wood splinters.
Zeus sighs. “Hades, you’re paying to replace the table.”
“If you think for one second that I won’t tear this house down with my bare fucking hands—don’t touch me, Poseidon, I swear on the graves of every—”
“It’s a hug!” bellows Poseidon. “I’m trying to hug you! It’s an expression of comfort, you obstinate asshole.”
“I don’t want a hug, I want to find that motherfucker and snap his—”
Hades’s voice fades, like he’s chasing Poseidon elsewhere. I can almost see Zeus in his house—in the house where I lived for a year and a half, which doesn’t make it mine—on the other side of the city. He’ll have his thumb and index finger to the bridge of his nose. He’ll still manage to make his exasperation charming. He’ll be trying his best to temper the mood in the room. I don’t know how he does it. Could be sheer force of will. But if Hades and Poseidon are at each other’s throats in Zeus’s house, then…
Things are not good.
“This is a mindset issue,” Zeus says, mostly to himself. “Mindset.”
“Want to fill me in on why your brothers are in a fight to the death?”
“It may surprise you to hear this, but that wasn’t a mortal battle.”
“Oh? What was it?”
“That was Poseidon doing me a favor. Hercules, I need you to get on a plane. There’s been a situation with Daisy.”
My heart falls out of my chest. I haven’t moved from the bench, but the adrenaline rush is as powerful as it was in the field. My face goes hot, then cold, then numb. If she’s dead—
“Daisy who?”
“Hercules.”
Heavy footsteps speed into wherever Zeus is standing, and there’s the sound of a collision, one body against another. ...
