They Will Not Be Silenced Read online

  Burning Willow Press, LLC (USA):

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  This edition published in 2019 by Burning Willow Press, LLC (USA)

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  ©Nicole Thorn and Sarah Hall, 2019

  ©Edd Sowder, editor, 2019

  ©Sarah Hall, cover design, 2019

  ©Lori Michelle, The Author’s Alley, interior formatting, 2019

  OTHER NOVELS BY NICOLE THORN & SARAH HALL

  (Seers & Demigods series)

  We Will Gain Our Fury

  We Will Change Our Stars

  We Will Heal These Wounds

  We Will Bleed

  (Way Down Below series)

  Way Down Below

  Follow Me Down

  We All Fall Down

  Down We Go

  Double Down/Down & Out

  Down in Flames

  Bitter Dreams

  Nicole Thorn continued Kezia and Zander’s story with “We Will Not Be Lost”, a special tale included in Crossroads in the Dark III: Monsters Under Your Bed, an anthology released in 2017.

  CHAPTER ONE:

  This Feels like an Obvious Trap

  Aster

  MOM DROPPED ONE of the boxes holding my paints. She frowned at it as if the box were to be blame. “What do you have in all these boxes? They are so heavy.”

  I walked over and picked the box up. It might’ve weighed five pounds, since I didn’t have actual cans of paint in there. “Just some art supplies and whatnot,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t decide to throw my paints out. Again. The last time, I’d spent about two hours dumpster diving, looking for what I had lost.

  Mom rolled her eyes. “I couldn’t have had a normal son? One that likes to play sports, or, I don’t know, drive fast cars?”

  I actually really liked fast cars. I thought that my father had something to do with that. However, if my mother knew, she would take away my keys. As a son of Apollo, I felt like losing my keys to my human mother would be more embarrassing than pretending I didn’t like cars.

  “I’ll just take this upstairs.”

  “Oh, will you?” Mom asked, sneering at me. “That would be helpful, and we both know how you hate doing that.”

  I cleared my throat and started up the stairs to the new apartment. It felt blissfully quiet in there, since Mom stayed downstairs, and I took a few seconds just to be happy about that. I missed the quiet of the farm we had lived about five years before. We’d only been there six months, but it had been a great six months. There had been plenty of places where I could hide from my mother, but I’d also had even more places to hide any art that I did, so she couldn’t throw it out when we had to move again.

  We moved often. Whenever Apollo found us.

  I set the box down in my new room. The apartment only had two, but we didn’t need more. It had also come furnished, so no need to rent a trunk, or anything. We’d been able to fit everything that we owned into the two cars, and we drove here from California.

  I’d liked California almost as much as I liked the farm. It was always bright and sunny, which felt good to me. Now we lived in Seattle, where I would be lucky to see the sun every few weeks. It did not feel great there. It felt closed off, kind of suffocating. It made it hard for me to have the same enthusiasm for the place that Mom did.

  Well that, and how we ended up owning an apartment building.

  “Aster!” Mom shouted from the front of the apartment.

  I shuffled through the boxes and out of the room. Mom stood in the doorway, holding the biggest box from the car downstairs. “Really, you’re the son of a god, but you make your mother do all the work?” she barked. “Come and get this box from me, or do you want me to throw my back out too?”

  “Sorry,” I said, rushing over. I took the box from her, then set it down on the kitchen counter. It had all of our plates in it, so if she had dropped it, then we would have been in serious trouble.

  Mom shook her arms out, scowling at me. “Damn right, you’re sorry. We’ve moved how many times, and you still make me do all the work? You could have all those boxes up here in a heartbeat, but no, you still make your poor, middle-aged mother do everything for you. It’s sad, really. You’re seventeen now. Almost eighteen. You shouldn’t be acting like this.”

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  Mom huffed. “Well, go get the rest of the boxes, while I start unpacking everything in here.”

  I turned toward the door, but paused, shuffling my feet. “Hey, Mom, are you sure that taking this place was a good idea?”

  “Oh my god, this again?” she asked, rolling her eyes. “We’ve been over it, Aster. We had nowhere else to go, and sometimes, good things do happen. Haven’t you ever heard the saying don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?” She turned to me, raising her eyebrow. “Well, that’s what this is. A gift horse. Let’s just celebrate our good fortune while we still can, all right?”

  “All right,” I said, turning away.

  I didn’t trust it, though. Mom had gotten a letter when we had been ready to move again, saying that she had inherited an apartment building, already full of tenants. If she wanted to be the landlord and run it, then the building was waiting for us in Seattle. She’d taken the note and ran with it.

  I couldn’t help feeling like this had been such an obvious ploy to get us to Seattle, and that made me nervous. Not that I could talk to her about it anymore. She’d just snap at me, and then I’d be stuck in my room until she calmed down enough to stop throwing things.

  Not that they could hurt me. Demigod healing kept me from being bruised for longer than a couple of seconds. Still, if one had never been hit in the head with a microwave, then one didn’t have the luxury of calling me a wuss. Even though I felt like a wuss. And kind of acted like a wuss.

  I brought the next load of boxes up, carrying seven of them at once to get through it faster. This might’ve been a mistake, since I ran into a teenaged girl inside. She watched me carrying the boxes with huge eyes, her mouth slightly open. “You’re pretty strong, huh?”

  “It’s all clothing!” I called over my shoulder, hoping she wouldn’t notice that three of the boxes had the label books on them.

  I hustled on up the stairs as fast as I could. Once in the apartment, I set the boxes down. Mom rolled her eyes. “Now you’re just showing off.”

  I ignored that as I rushed back downstairs to get the next load. That girl had vanished, so I could breathe a sigh of relief as I loaded up on three more boxes. I brought them in, then made the trip for the last six. When I got back upstairs, Mom had started opening my books, and I silently hoped that she wouldn’t decide I had too many and insist I got rid of some.

  “Well,” she asked, two seconds after I set everything down. “Are you done, or are you going to help me put things away?”

  Mom flopped back on the couch after she got the kitchen organized. I put everything in the boxes away. Most of it went into my room, since all the books belonged to me. I had to stack the
m on the floor until I got a new bookshelf, but I had gotten used to that. I knew how to stack them so the books would take the least amount of damage possible. Then I started to put my clothing away. I got about halfway through it before my mother called from the living room. “Aster, get in here! You have to help me put away these boxes, dammit.”

  I found my mother unwrapping things and setting them down on a coffee table with water rings covering every inch of it. The thing looked older than my father, and I hoped that Mom wouldn’t make me sand it down and repaint it. I hated doing things like that. Especially here, where I’d have to stand on a tiny balcony in the rain to do it.

  She looked up at me with a sour expression on her face. I had the same brown hair that she did, though hers had started getting shot through with gray. It had waves to it that made hers look bold, and made mine look messy. Other than that, the two of us didn’t look much alike. I had blue eyes where she had green ones. Mom was short, plump, and plain looking. I took after my father, and the gods never looked plain.

  I looked the way my father did whenever he visited us. They could change their appearance at will, but Apollo usually kept the same appearance unless he had reason to change. I stood well over six feet, with a thin, lanky body, sharp and hard features, with the same piercing blue eyes that he had. Mom said that on him it looked handsome. On me, it looked creepy.

  I didn’t know what that meant.

  “Put them away,” Mom said, gesturing to the things that she unpacked. I picked them up, moving them to shelves as needed. I started to collapse the empty boxes while she rearranged everything that I’d put on the shelves.

  When she finished, a smile broke out on her face and she turned to me, not losing the smile for once. “Look at it!” she said. “We’re finally getting settled. Oh, I know we’ve only been here a few hours, but doesn’t it already feel like home?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She adjusted one of the knickknacks, then shook her head. “I do hope that it takes a while for your father to find us here. I mean, what would a sun god be doing in the middle of a rainy city, anyway? He’d hate it here. I think we’ve got at least six months before I have to find someone to manage the building for me. Even if I do, I’ll still have the income that owning the building would get me!” She clapped her hands, the grin getting even wider. “If it’s enough, then I won’t have to work again!”

  “I thought you wanted to do that anyway?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes, her shoulders slumping. “What, you think that I should work? That I should earn my keep. Well, mister, the one who needs to earn their keep is you. I own this building and put a roof over your head. You should pay me for food and the utilities that you use up!”

  I put my hands up. “You just said that you wanted to work, Mom. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I stammered, unsure of how to recover.

  She huffed, shaking her head. “Here I am, trying to enjoy something new and amazing and there you are, ruining it for me. I swear, I don’t know where you get this kind of behavior from. Your father never acted this way. He was such a lovely man, until he revealed who he really was. Then I couldn’t stand to be around him.”

  She sniffed and threw her hand out. “I’m going to my room to organize my things better. I hope you think about what you’ve done.”

  She banged her door closed hard enough to rattle the dishes in the cabinets. I rubbed the back of my head, trying to figure out how to apologize to her. Instead of worrying about that, I went back to my room, to finish putting my things away. Even if I apologized to her, I knew she would get angry with me for something else. It didn’t seem worth it.

  As I stood in my new room, I couldn’t help feeling that something was off. Not just the fact that this was obviously some kind of trap. Something about the city itself felt off. The second we’d driven over the border, everything felt tense, more powerful. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why or how.

  Shaking my head, I pushed all those thoughts out, and started stacking my books once again. I figured that if something truly wrong was going on in the city, I would’ve known. My father would’ve told me when we saw each other last.

  And getting my mother to leave this potential goldmine would be like prying a tooth from a lion’s mouth.

  I set the paranoia aside and tried to settle in my new home.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  The Writing on the Sticky Notes on the Wall

  Callie

  “ . . . DAMN, ARES ALWAYS looks so good in leather . . . ”

  “ . . . Did you really need to sleep with her? I mean, I was right here, you ass . . . ”

  “Well I happen to think that it looks better with grass instead of stone on the ground. And if they try and get rid of the grass again, then I’ll explode the flora in their body . . . ”

  I shook my head, clearing the conversations I didn’t want to hear. That happened sometimes, when the gods weren’t paying attention. Things would bleed through that they didn’t want me to hear, but I needed that. Sometimes, the gods wouldn’t tell me stuff I needed to know, and an accident was the only way I could learn what was important.

  I paced my bedroom, listening in on a talk between Ares and Aphrodite. My cheeks burned when it got inappropriate, and I went back to pretending I couldn’t hear it.

  Jumping up and down, I started counting the bouts of thunder outside. One, two, three . . . I kept doing it until my head went quiet. Then the thunder boomed when I didn’t expect it, making me lose my balance and hit the floor.

  “Bleh,” I said, pushing up on my hands and getting to a sitting position. I was barely on my butt when both my mom and dad came into the room. Dad came in first, and he pulled me up to my feet.

  “You okay, kid?” he asked me.

  I smiled at my dad, waving my hand in the air. “Yeah, don’t even worry about it. The gods were getting loud and I had to distract myself so it would get quiet again. I fell.”

  My poor father’s dark eyes seemed so worried as he watched me. I looked a lot like him and barely anything like my mom, other than the shade of orange on my head and being only a couple of inches over five feet. Dad had dark auburn hair, while mine was a brighter orange that now went past my shoulders in a mess I could never tame. My eyes were straight black though, which I’d gotten from my mother’s father, I’d been told.

  Mom entered the room, also staring at me with worry. She leaned against my bedroom door, chewing on her nails. She always had that look on her face, thinking there was something wrong with me.

  “Did you by any chance take your medicine today?” Mom asked. “It might help with the voices.”

  They wouldn’t help, because the voices were real. I told my parents that a million times, but they didn’t believe me. They thought I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had, but that didn’t make me any less sane.

  “I told you I don’t want to take it,” I said. “It makes me sleepy.”

  Dad put his arm around my shoulders. “Sleep might be good for you. You’ll feel better.”

  I sighed, unsure of what to say. No matter what I said to them, they wouldn’t believe me about the gods. They’d even met my demigod friends, as well as the seers. Nothing could convince them short of magic, and I didn’t really have any.

  “I have to stay awake,” I said. “Something is going on, and I need to listen out for information. None of the gods are talking to me about it, and I don’t trust them. I feel it in the pit of my stomach, Daddy.” I pressed my hands there. “Something really bad is going to happen to my friends. I hear so much crying, and bones breaking.”

  “Nothing is going to happen,” he said. “Everything is going to be fine as long as you take your pills.”

  “He’s right,” Mom said. “If you don’t want them, then maybe we can talk about you going and seeing a therapist again. You can pick from a few if you want.”

  “That’s not what I need,” I said. “I
need to talk to the gods and find out what’s happening with my friends. Something is coming for them. For me. For everyone like us. You don’t understand. Bad things are going to happen.”

  My father rubbed his eyes, taking a long breath. “There is no such thing as the Greek Gods, Callie. I know you believe it in your heart, but it’s not true. I don’t want you getting yourself into some kind of trouble because of this.”

  A little zip of an image popped into my head, and nothing else existed around me. I ran from my father to my desk, grabbing a pen and my stack of sticky notes. I had to write it down before I forgot the picture.

  I drew out gates as best I could. Gates, and water, and a boat. I was no artist, though. I didn’t need to be, as long as I remembered.

  “The water is warm,” I said as I scribbled. “Everyone is looking for something cold. No, not because it’s cold. Coins. Cold coins in the warm underground. They need three of them, but they don’t really need them. Just wait there. Sit on the rocks.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dad asked.

  “I don’t know,” I whimpered, ripping the note from my pad. I stuck it on the wall with the hundreds of others that all said something different. “I can see it. Smell it. I don’t know what it is. If I listen, then someone might tell me.”

  My parents exchanged a look, and I knew what it meant. They thought I was having an episode, so that meant they wouldn’t want me leaving the house for a while. They already kept me locked up most of the time, not letting me do more than go shopping with them.

  When the Oracle, my parents pulled me out of school. Getting up in class and prophesizing a few times tended to turn heads. I’d switched to home schooling, and it worked out when my father had been transferred to Seattle. He got a massive promotion at his bank, and it had been too good to pass up. They moved me here, where I soon met my demigods and seers.

  “How about you focus on school?” Mom suggested gently. “It might relax you.”

  “I finished already,” I said. “I only have to do that essay on the American Revolution and then I’m all done with everything for the year. Did you know that all that stuff in our history books is wrong? It started when Athena—”