Medea
I LEFT HIM. Scrubbing my hand over my face didn't make the words go away. I should have teleported back to the dining hall immediately after the peace negotiations went wrong. Everyone was waiting for me while those seconds ticked by. Seconds where the gods could descend on this island and destroy us if I'd misinterpreted their promises.
Instead, I'd returned to the small cabin I shared with Jason to write in my journal. I curled up on my bed with its fluffy white comforter in my familiar room that always reminded me of the inside of a tree with all its wooden accents. Sunlight poured in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, offering an unrestricted view of the ocean beyond the cliff the cabins backed up on. I felt safe here. My reaction made less sense the more I thought about it, so I just stopped thinking about it. Maybe I was in shock. Maybe not. All that mattered was that I needed to think, to process what had just happened. And I thought best by writing.
My stomach twisted into knots as I wrote the words again. I. Left. Him. Jason deserved it. He deserved worse. Once upon a time, he'd been my knight in shining armor. My savior. But then he turned out to be a worse captor than my mother had ever been. She might have farmed me out for magical parts, but at least she was honest about using me. He'd pretended to love me, to trust me, to respect me—all while tampering with my birth control and cheating on me with one of my only friends.
Well, I showed him. She was dead, his children aborted, and now Jason was in the hands of his worst enemies. What a week.
I burst out laughing, glad Adonis, the only other person in the room, lost consciousness when we teleported, because man, I sounded nuts. My peals of hysterical laughter bounced off the textured walls, becoming ever more shrill.
Mad.
I'd worried for months that my misgivings about Jason were proof of insanity. Paranoia brought on by a childhood where I'd never learned to trust. And now I lost it? Hell, no.
Struggling to compose myself, I leaned against my wooden headboard and returned my attention to the journal. The gods were reasonable. The only thing they wanted was for my people to stop trying to kill them. Oh, and to return the gods we locked up for medical experiments.
Made perfect sense to me, especially since their leader, Persephone, had the power to destroy the earth and make it new. We didn't stand a chance against them.
They could tear through the weak shield protecting our island in a second. I had. A sense of urgency thrummed through my body, changing my writing to a hastened scrawl. The feather comforter stuck to the back of my sweaty legs as I shifted position so I could hunch over the journal and write faster.
But Jason asked for time to think over their terms. What was there to think about? They could unmake us! Instead, they were sitting across the table, offering us all the assurances we wanted.
The gods couldn't lie. That knowledge kept me sitting on my ridiculously soft comforter instead of teleporting into the dining hall. I'd made an exchange. They wouldn't attack. Hopefully.
I hadn't actually bothered to stick around long enough to see if they accepted my exchange. But why wouldn't they? Jason was our leader. He was easily worth two hostages.
No, I wasn't worried about the gods descending on us. That was just a lie I told myself to avoid the truth. I wasn't afraid of facing the gods. Not really. I was afraid of my own people.
Were they my people? Or were the gods?
I glanced down at the person lying on my wooden floor. Silver-white hair covered a colorless face. But if I ignored his coloring and the overall sense of wrongness permeating from his unconscious frame, I recognized him. I'd seen that face every day in the dining hall for the past few months.
