Fated (The Bloodstone Saga 2)

She held up one lone survivor. A delicate globe that my father had brought me from a business trip to New York. The statue of Liberty stood proudly in the middle, holding up her torch. I had gotten it when I was eight, back when my dad was still my hero.

I crossed the room and took it from her, sitting on the edge of my bed. She sat beside me, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. I leaned my head against her, inhaling her familiar perfume.

"Speaking of your father, honey, I’ve been trying to get a hold of him. I have a dentistry conference this weekend and I wanted you to spend the weekend at his house. But he hasn’t returned my calls yet. Maybe he’s out of the country on business."

Or maybe he just doesn’t give a fig, I thought. But I didn’t say it. It pained my mother to no end that he had lost all interest in me. And it pained me too. I couldn’t figure out if it bothered him so much that he wasn’t a big part of my life anymore and so he just didn’t want to remind himself of that by hearing the details of my life, or if he actually just didn’t care.

Surprisingly, even with Harmonia’s memories returned to me, my mortal memories still bothered me. My mortal father could still cause me pain. Curious. I turned to my mother.

"Mom, seriously, that’s not necessary. I’m 17 years old. I’m perfectly capable of staying by myself for the weekend." Seventeen going on two thousand. Too bad I couldn’t mention that.

"I know," she sighed. "And it’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just that I worry. What if there’s another earthquake?" She looked around my dismantled room. "I don’t want you home alone in that case."

"Mom, I’ll be fine. I wasn’t even scared. Honestly."

"Hmm. Okay, maybe," she murmured. "And maybe is a maybe, not a yes."

I smiled. "Okay. Maybe."

"I don’t think you should go to school today," she announced as the room shuddered once again with an aftershock. "It would make me more comfortable to have you at home. And besides, you have a mess to clean up."

I looked around. That was an understatement. It looked like a train had hit my room.

And from somewhere amid the chaos, I could hear the muffled ring of my phone. I knew it was Gavin, calling to check on me, so I scrambled around trying to find it. My mom pulled it out from under my broken lamp and handed it to me.

"I’m going to get ready for work," she said. "Have a great day. I’ll call you later."

I nodded as I answered my phone.

"Are you alright?" Gavin asked, not bothering to even say hello. I smiled at his obvious concern.

"Yes, I’m fine. My room is trashed though. How about you?"

"I’m fine. My room’s fine. You know" his voice turned suggestive and I could practically see him waggling his dark eyebrows. "If you need someplace to sleep, my bed’s available."

I laughed. "Right. Your mom would love that."

"Minor hurdle," he replied with a grin.

I knew he was grinning. I could hear it. I absolutely loved his smile. It was the sexiest thing on earth. Thoughts of how we had spent so many afternoons in Cleopatra’s palace in Alexandria invaded my thoughts and distracted me. I could still practically feel the taste of his lips and the feel of his rock-hard muscles beneath my fingers. This wasn’t helping.   I forced my thoughts away from the pleasurable ones with a sigh.

"Speaking of moms, mine doesn’t want me to go to school today, so you don’t need to come pick me up. I’ve got to stay here and clean up this mess."

As I spoke I looked around and groaned. What a disaster. My fingers itched to pick it up right now. The clean freak in me was about to emerge with a vengeance.

"Hmm. Staying home, huh? Need some help?" Gavin’s husky voice was hopeful and oh-so-sexy and I felt myself waver. Then I thought the better of it.

"I’m thinking that if you came over, I wouldn’t get anything done."

"Well, you would, but it wouldn’t help your room," he conceded. "But I miss you. I need to see you today. Want to grab some dinner tonight?"

"Absolutely," I replied. "Just not that Italian place."

"Agreed," he replied. "No arguments there. I’ll come by after school. I love you."

"I love you too."

"By the way thanks for the late night text. What’s up with that?"

I knew he would ask.

"I don’t know. I just couldn’t sleep and I wanted to be close to you."

"Hmm. Okay. Well, I love you more than life, too. Now get some work done and I’ll see you soon."

I sighed as I hung up the phone. I loved everything about him. His face, his voice, his sweet soul. It was astounding that the millennia hadn’t changed him a bit. I briefly wondered if it had changed me, as I stooped to pick up the clothes that had scattered from my drawers.

As I moved, my bloodstone swung away from me and clanged into my dresser. I clutched it and tucked it back into my nightgown. I focused very hard on trying to remember the detail surrounding it, but my memories of it were murky and I knew that was how the Moirae wanted it.

The bloodstone was powerful, so they didn’t want me to be able to harness that power. Yet somehow, I had a sneaking suspicion that my necklace, the necklace in the legends, was tied to my bloodstone in some way. I could just feel it.

I stared at the pile of dripping glass heaped in the middle of my floor and sighed yet again.

What a mess. I so wished that it was already cleaned up. I needed to make a research trip to the library and I didn’t want to waste hours cleaning up earthquake debris.

Within the breadth of one second, before I had barely even finished my thought, the glass was gone. The wetness that had saturated my carpet was completely dry, not a spot, not a stain. I gasped.

How had I done that? I glanced around my room and saw the shattered pieces of glass in my wastebasket next to my desk. What the heck? I had briefly pictured my floor as the clean area that it had been- and all of a sudden, it became that way. Ho-ly crap.

My gifts. Harmonia’s gifts. They were coming back to me.

I focused hard on the rest of my room, picturing my dresser upright and my clothes neatly folded within its drawers. It instantly became so. It didn’t happen in front of me in a blur of motion, it was justthere. One moment it was a mess, the next moment it was clean, as though it had always been that way. I swallowed. What else could I do that I hadn’t remembered yet?

It was both an exciting and a petrifying thought.

I wished that the Moirae had allowed my memories to come fully back to me. I could remember bits and pieces of my life as a goddess, but nothing very cohesive or concrete. Just brief flashes. Gavin as Cadmus his voice, his smile. It was the same. His touch on my back, his kiss on my neck. I could remember those things. I could remember scant flashes of life on Olympus, but no details. It was frustrating.

Regardless, I needed to put that out of my mind and focus on the present. I needed to learn more about the necklace of the legends Harmonia’s Necklace.

I grabbed some clothes and ducked into my bathroom, stopping short in front of the mirror in awe. My face had indeed transformed. It was subtle, not something you would be able to put your finger on. It was more like a vague radiance. My face had gotten thinner and more elegant, losing the baby fat that I had still been carrying in my cheeks. My vivid eyes remained the same. I turned from my reflection, yanking my hair into a ponytail before I grabbed my car keys.

I was at the library 10 minutes later.

As I walked through the hushed halls, I felt as though I was being watched. It was unnerving because every time I turned around, there was no one there. No one seemed bothered by the earthquake from this morning. I passed a few racks of books that had been disturbed, but library aides were busily re-shelving them. Apparently, there hadn’t been any real damage.

I passed the coffee bar, inhaling the rich scent of roasted fresh coffee beans before I entered the main hall. I loved this library. It felt elegant and familiar with its dark wood panels and cozy lamps. I had been coming here since I was a kid. As I turned the corner, though, a hushed murmuring enveloped me vague whispers. I whirled around, but there was no one there.

And no one around me seemed as though they could hear it. I continued on to a tiny reading nook, trying to ignore the voices.

Dropping my stuff into a chair, I punched "Harmonia’s Necklace" into the nearest resource computer. A plethora of book choices popped up and I scribbled them all down. I spent the next five minutes filling my arms with books on mythology and then settled myself into an overstuffed leather chair to pore through them.

There were conflicting stories. Some said that no descriptions of the necklace were available, while others said that it was a two-headed serpent. And while I couldn’t conclusively rule that out, it didn’t feel right. I didn’t think it had been a snake.

I kept reading, filing each bit of information away as I read, but nothing was earth-shattering. It was all stuff that I already knew. My step-father had created a necklace to gain revenge on my mother for her infidelity. Unfortunately for me, he gave me the necklace, not my mother. So not fair. I was supposed to be cursed for all of eternity because of my mother’s actions. What the books didn’t contain though, was the fact that Zeus had contributed his own blood in order to make my necklace so powerful. The idea of how powerful it really was was alarming.

I fingered my bloodstone. With each breath I took, I was more and more convinced that somehow, the bloodstones were  Harmonia’s Necklace. The Fates must have somehow managed to use the one stone from my necklace to create more necklaces, one for each Keeper and one for each of the Fates. Hephaestus could have done that for them- he was the blacksmith to the gods. He could create anything which might be why they kept him chained to their door.

And realization fell on me like a ton of bricks. Of course.  They kept Hephaestus near because they needed him. My necklace had been tied to me, which must have been the reason that they had chosen me to be a Keeper. They needed its power, but in order for them to access it, I still needed to have possession of it in some form. They needed me.

I remembered Lachesis’ words when I was in Alexandria, right after I had lost my bloodstone. The bloodstones were made from one stone. One. When one is lost, we all suffer…Our power as a whole should not be diminished because of the carelessness of one, should it?

Oh my god. She admitted that the stones came from one stone. Their power was diminished because I had lost mine. And I was the key. I felt like I was going to hyperventilate.

I sat hunched over trying to breathe to make sense out of the craziness. I was a goddess. I had been cast into doomed mortal lives because I had been given a cursed necklace made from Zeus’ blood. Life was not fair.

As I attempted to breathe, I caught a glimpse of movement from in front of me and I lifted my head. An ethereal woman was descending directly from the ceiling in front of me. She literally seemed to float down until she was standing one step in front of me. I looked around again. And yet again, no one seemed bothered. No one was staring or pointing or running and screaming. They couldn’t see her. Interesting. I wasn’t afraid. I could tell that she wasn’t here to harm me. She had an air of serenity surrounding her.