I stole my foster dad's car.
I want to be clear that I felt bad about this.
Not that bad. But some bad. A reasonable amount.
Gary is a decent person. He coaches little league on weekends and makes actual pancakes on Sunday mornings, and has never once said anything mean to me in two years of me living in his house and being genuinely difficult to deal with.
So yeah. I felt bad.
I left a note on the kitchen counter that said borrowed the Civic, will explain later, sorry, — Jason, and then I took the keys off the hook by the door and did not look back because looking back makes things harder and things were already hard enough.
Demi was waiting on the corner.
She'd changed out of her school uniform into regular clothes. Jeans. A grey hoodie. Sneakers that looked like they could handle actual terrain.
She looked at the car.
She looked at me.
"Did you steal that?"
"I left a note."
"That's not a no."
"Get in the car, Demi."
She got in the car.
Here's the thing about driving when you don't have a license.
Technically I've been operating vehicles since before vehicles were invented. Chariots. Divine conveyances of various kinds. Once, memorably, an eagle. The mechanical principles aren't that different.
The speed limits are new though. And deeply disrespectful.
"You're doing forty-three in a forty," Demi said.
"I'm aware."
"The speed limit is forty."
"I know what the speed limit is."
"You're breaking it."
"By three miles per hour."
"Still breaking it."
I looked at her.
She had a notebook open on her lap. Already writing in it. She'd been writing since we hit the highway and I had no idea what she was putting in there and something told me I wasn't going to love it.
"Are you taking notes?" I said.
"I'm organizing my visions."
"You're—" I stopped. "How many have you had?"
"Since September? Or since this morning?"
I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.
"Either."
"A lot," she said. Which was not the specific answer I was looking for but was probably the honest one.
She kept writing. I kept driving. The Columbus suburbs flattened out into highway and the kind of midwestern nothing that goes on for longer than seems necessary.
I hate the midwest. Some things are consistent across lifetimes.
"Where exactly are we going?" Demi said.
"West."
"That's not—"
"I know it's not specific. It's what I have right now."
She considered this. "What are we looking for?"
"My brother."
She was quiet for a second.
"Which one?"
I glanced at her. "What do you mean which one."
"You said brother like it's complicated." She had her pen hovering over the notebook. "Like there's more than one and you haven't decided which to look for first."
I didn't answer.
She kept looking at me the way she looks at problems she's already halfway through solving.
"The crack in the cafeteria floor," she said slowly. "The Drakon. The lightning coming out of your hands." A pause. "Your mythology essay."
"What about it."
"You didn't get a B-minus because you didn't know the material." She said it like she'd been sitting on this for weeks. "You got a B-minus because you kept writing things that weren't in the textbook. Things that were too specific. Too personal." Another pause. "Like you were correcting it."
The highway went by.
"Your name isn't Jason," she said.
"We covered that."
"Your name is Zeus."
I said nothing.
"Is it," she said. Not quite a question.
I kept my eyes on the road for a long moment.
"...Yes," I said.
She wrote something in her notebook.
"Okay," she said. "So. Two brothers. Poseidon and Hades."
"I got an A on that essay by the way."
"Good for you."
"Unlike some people."
"I'm going to need you to let the B-minus go."
"I didn't give you the B-minus. Mr. Peterson did."
"Mr. Peterson," I said, "is going to feel very embarrassed about that someday."
Demi made a small sound that might have been a laugh. She covered it quickly by writing something in her notebook.
I let her have that one.
Two hours in, somewhere in the middle of Indiana, she had a vision.
I knew because she went completely still.
Not asleep-still. Rigid-still. Eyes open but not seeing the highway in front of us. Seeing something else, somewhere else, her pen frozen halfway through a word in her notebook.
I glanced over.
Her eyes were silver.
Not the dark brown I'd been carefully not thinking about since September. Silver. Deep and old and absolutely not Demi.
Whoever was having that vision — it wasn't the girl who corrected my essays.
I pulled over.
Not immediately — I found a proper exit, used the turn signal like a law-abiding person who definitely had a license, pulled into a gas station parking lot. Then I put it in park and waited.
Thirty seconds.
She came back.
Blinked. The silver drained out of her eyes between one second and the next — gone, just brown again, just Demi again. She looked around. Got her bearings like someone surfacing from deep water.
I didn't mention the eyes.
Filed it away.
"Vision?" I said.
"Vision," she confirmed.
"How bad?"
She looked down at her notebook. While she'd been under she'd drawn something without knowing it. The pen had moved on its own across the page.
A bridge.
Water underneath.
And something in the water. Big. Patient. Waiting.
"There's a bridge," she said. "On the route we're taking. Something's under it."
"Something or someone?"
"Something." She looked at the drawing. "It's been there a while. It's not — it didn't feel like the Drakon. More like it's settled in somewhere and made it home."
"How far?"
"I don't know. The visions don't come with mile markers."
Fair point.
I looked at the drawing for a moment. She was good. The lines were confident and exact in a way that didn't match the shaky handwriting on the rest of the page.
"We'll take a different route," I said.
"Can we?"
"We can try."
I pulled out my phone — Gary's phone, actually, which I had also technically taken, adding it to the list of things to apologize for later — and rerouted us around the bridge.
New ETA: added forty minutes.
Demi was still looking at her drawing.
"Does this happen to other people?" she said quietly. "The visions."
"Not like yours."
"But to some people."
"Some." I pulled back onto the road. "Mortals can be sensitive to divine energy. See things. Dream things. It's usually vague though. Symbolic. More like feelings than images."
"Mine aren't vague."
"No," I agreed. "They're not."
She was quiet for a moment.
"What does that mean?"
I kept my eyes on the road.
"It means you're probably not entirely mortal," I said. Which was the careful version of what I actually thought.
She absorbed this.
Wrote something in her notebook.
"Okay," she said.
Just okay. Like I'd told her the weather.
I have met actual gods who handled unexpected information worse than that.
We stopped for gas and Demi bought snacks. Her own money. She got me exactly the right chips without asking.
I noticed.
She ate her granola bar and looked out the window at the flat Indiana nothing and said: "Tell me about your brothers."
"Why?"
"Because we're looking for them and I don't know anything about them except what's in the textbooks and you just told me the textbooks aren't entirely accurate."
This was reasonable. I hated that it was reasonable.
"What do you want to know?"
"What are they like?"
I thought about that for longer than the question probably warranted.
"Poseidon is loud," I said finally. "Takes up a lot of space. Feels everything at full volume and doesn't understand why everyone else doesn't." I paused. "He's warm. He doesn't mean to be, it's just what he is. Like — you know how some people make a room feel different when they're in it? He's like that. Except the room is usually slightly damp afterward."
Demi smiled at the window. "And Hades?"
The name landed differently. Heavier.
"Hades is quiet," I said. "People always got that wrong — thought it meant cold. It doesn't. He's just — he's the kind of person who listens more than he talks. And when he talks you realize he was paying attention the entire time you thought he wasn't."
"You miss them."
Not a question. A statement. Said gently, which somehow made it worse.
"I don't—" I started.
"You went very quiet," she said. "You miss them."
I did not confirm this.
I also did not deny it.
Outside: flat. Flat. A billboard for a steakhouse. Flat.
The sky ahead of us was doing that thing again. The subtle wrong thing at the western edge. Not dark enough to call storm clouds. Just. Wrong.
Something was out there.
Something was already in motion.
And somewhere ahead of us — past Indiana, past all this flat midwestern nothing, in a direction I could feel more than calculate — my brother was out there living some kind of life he didn't remember choosing.
Hold on, I thought. Not a prayer. Not quite.
Just hold on. I'm coming. I know I'm late. I know. Hold on.
The highway went on.
The sky stayed wrong.
We drove.