We Will Rend Read online

  Callie kissed her boyfriend on the cheek. “Of course, you can. I’ve seen you in a fight. Not only is it alarmingly sexy, but I do feel safe around you. Also, I like to think I could kick a little ass if needed.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Aster said, walking her further into the living room.

  “You get the house all set up?” I asked the visitors, looking up at the stairs to make sure Verin wasn’t around the corner.

  He hadn’t reacted too badly to finding out they had bought his old house. In reality, it would be good to have them so close. He knew that. The thing was, it didn’t keep him from avoiding that house at all costs. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have wanted to go into the home my beloved parent had been murdered in. Of course, I’d never had a beloved parent.

  “All done,” Aster said. “Dad set us all up, so we’re not wanting for anything. For once, everything is nice and calm and comfortable.”

  His words shouldn’t have sent a twinge into my heart, but there it was anyway. It happened every time I saw the little brother that we never got. Callie had casually mentioned to us that the gods had intended for Aster to go to the same orphanage as me and Kizzy, and I could only imagine it had been so I could protect him. I never got the chance to, so he spent his life being treated like crap by a selfish mother. I knew it wasn’t my fault, but it was my fault. When they intended for me to be his protector and I didn’t do it, how could it not have been my fault? But I had always been good at failing. I only needed to look at Kizzy to know that. I only needed to remember why my in-laws were gods in the first place. Everything worked out, but only after I’d fucked up.

  “We should have a house party,” Jasmine suggested. “We can invite the gods we don’t hate and have a ton of food.”

  “Would Verin go for that?” I asked. “I doubt Juniper would. It took convincing to get her to let us have the pool party.”

  “We could get them on board.”

  I doubted it, but I didn’t fight her on what she wanted. With the utter hell she’d been through with her siblings, the last thing I wanted to do was deny Jasmine what could have been some relief. Not to mention how well she’d been doing with her sobriety. She deserved some fun.

  Jasper and Kizzy wandered out of the kitchen, and I suppressed a brotherly twitch when I saw her on his back, her legs wrapped around him. I could still pretend a dude hadn’t been getting up close and personal with my little sister.

  “Hey,” Kizzy said. “We were about to go see a movie. Did you guys wanna come?”

  If they all went together, then they would have been in less danger from a potential attack. Micha didn’t have his bow with him, but he would look scary as hell to any person who looked his way. He was massive, though not as massive as me. Jasper had been getting bulky too. Not that the girls couldn’t hold their own, but someone might have been more willing to try something with them before learning how big a mistake that would be.

  “Juni!” Jasmine called out. “Verin! You want to go see a movie?”

  In seconds, we saw Verin walking down the stairs. He stopped halfway, looking up at Juniper. “I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  Her hands went to her hips. “I was about to deep clean the bathroom.”

  “You did that three days ago.”

  “Dust takes no vacations, Verin.”

  “Yes, luv, but you should. We can get dinner after. I promise that once we get home, I’ll stay up with you all night while you bleach the bathtub. Then you can blissfully pass out in my arms while I enjoy you without pajamas on.”

  Jasper shook his head, sighing at the floor.

  Juniper looked up at the ceiling, put out with the whole world. “I have a schedule I work off of. It’s a nice schedule. One with numbers and colors on it, and it’s very easy to follow.”

  She went on, but Verin marched himself up the stairs to get her. She put up no fight when he threw her over his shoulder and brought her down the stairs again. He stopped in front of the door, looking rather pleased.

  “So, we’re going to the movies,” Juniper said. I tried to detect how she felt about it, and she only had the slightest anxiety about her chores not getting done according to her schedule. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t be waiting for her when she got home again.

  “We are,” I agreed, and then looked to Jasmine. She opened her arms to me the exact same time I went to grab her. She got put up on my shoulders for a ride outside, and I rather enjoyed it when she started combing her fingers through my hair.

  Aster looked at all of us, then smiled at an unsuspecting Callie who said, “Yay!” when he picked her up, cradling the girl in his arms. She wiggled her feet, putting an arm around his shoulders. I’d never seen someone so happy to be held.

  We started marching out of the house, Jasper and Kizzy first, then me and my lady, Aster and his, Verin and Juniper, and Micha was last. He had the smallest of frowns on his face, and I felt the flicker in his aura. He bushed it off, the feeling of loneliness leaving him as I hunched down with Jasmine, so she could lock the front door.

  “We look like weirdos, don’t we?” Juniper asked as we started walking to the cars. Only a few people were outside at the moment, but we did get some interesting looks. We had a parade of guys carrying ladies, after all. They were just jealous.

  Callie beamed, her legs wiggling in the air again. “Maybe we do, but it feels right for us. What’s the point of being alive if you can’t unashamedly be super weird sometimes?”

  “I agree so much,” my girlfriend said. “I happen to like being a weirdo. We have more fun.”

  She wasn’t wrong on that one.

  Jasmine

  D etermination would win out. I knew it would. I’d been determined to beat my alcoholism, and I had. I had been determined to get Zander and out-woo him, and I had. I felt determined now, and I would manage to get these stupid god powers to work for me the way they worked for Juniper and Jasper.

  “You look like you’re trying to find the square root of orange,” my brother said.

  I opened my eyes, huffing out a breath and glaring at him. The three of us stood in the backyard. Well, four of us, since Verin had followed Juniper out when I made her agree to help me.

  “Thanks, Jasp,” I said, glaring at my brother. “I love how you say so many helpful things.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, smirking.

  I laid back in the grass to stare up at the gray sky. It hadn’t started raining yet, but I knew it would. I didn’t know how I knew, though. Did I know because we lived in Seattle and predicting rain was kind of like saying that birds had beaks? Or, could I predict the rain thanks to my goddess like abilities to see into the future? I didn’t know, and that frustrated me so much.

  “You’re thinking too much,” Juniper said.

  I turned to look at her. She sat on the concrete; her feet tucked up against her body to avoid getting grass stains on her tennis shoes. She had her back pressed against Verin’s legs and he kept rubbing her shoulders.

  Juniper and I looked almost exactly alike. We both had brown hair, though mine had been cut short. It’d grown out a little bit so that it went just past my chin now. Hers hung most of the way down her back, and Verin had taken to playing with it whenever she got distracted. Jasper also had the same dark brown hair, though he kept his only a couple of inches long. Juniper and I had the same soft features that we had gotten from our mother, whereas Jasper looked more like our father, only less dickish.

  The thought saddened me, but I pushed it away.

  The easiest way to tell Juniper and me apart was our eyes, though. She had one honey brown eye and one gray eye, whereas I had one ocean blue eye and one gray eye. The sign of the seers, those gray eyes. Jasper’s other eye was green.

  Much like Jasper, Juniper had been looking better lately. She’d gained about five pounds, and it looked good on her. She panicked the other day when she realized this. Juniper had also thrown out all her old clothing and had taken to wear
ing colors. Today she had on a blue dress that went down to her knees. I thought it looked good on her, though I knew Verin’s was usually the opinion she took the most seriously.

  He had been good for her, but also not so good for her. When Verin’s mother died, he’d gone on a rampage, killing people. Some of them had deserved it, but not all of them. The rest of us felt cautious about him since then, even though we had kind of forgiven him for it. As much as one can forgive someone for mass, justifiable murder. Except for Juniper, who had never seemed bothered by this in the least.

  She’d just shrugged and said that he wouldn’t do it again.

  But hey, as long as he didn’t try to murder us in our sleep, it would probably turn out okay… I hoped.

  Ah, my life is so fucked up.

  I shook my head, turning back to Jasper. “I’m concentrating. I need to figure out how to do this.”

  “Why?” he asked, truly baffled. “If I don’t time travel again, I would be perfectly fine with that, believe it or not. I really didn’t like getting stuck in the past…” He glanced at Verin briefly before looking away. When we got turned to gods, our powers changed and while my siblings had learned some control over those abilities, I had not.

  I threw my hands in the air. “But it would be so cool to go into the future for a couple of minutes. Could you even imagine what I would see?”

  “I’d rather not,” Jasper said.

  I huffed, then turned to my sister. “Juni, back me up here.”

  “Well…” she said, also looking unsure of herself. She glanced back at Verin, who shrugged one of his shoulders. “I think that I’d rather clean out Nemo’s pool than take even a peek into the future, let alone go there.” She had the good grace to look apologetic.

  “Ugh,” I said, flailing my arms and lying back on the ground to stare up at the sky some more. “You are the worst gods. I mean, you don’t enjoy our power, you don’t bother using it for fun stuff. What’s the point?”

  Verin snorted. “Juniper is the best goddess.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I sighed some more. “Okay, fine. But think about it like this… if I don’t get a handle on my godly abilities, then I could vanish with no warning. I’ll just pop into the future, probably in the middle of a crowd, and then get stuck. I’ll have to wait for Erebus to show up and help me out, and then we’ll owe him a favor.”

  They all paused.

  “I don’t think you’ve ever made a better argument,” Jasper said.

  Juniper agreed immediately. “Let’s see if we can’t get you into time travel.”

  I grinned. Erebus, the primordial embodiment of darkness, was something that we all wanted to avoid. He liked chaos a little too much for us to trust him, for one thing. For another, I just got the feeling that none of us were real to him. In the sense that he didn’t see us as people but as bugs that did something interesting every now and then.

  Which, come on, scary as shit.

  I sat up while Juniper started talking. “You need to let your instincts take over,” she said. “If you think too much, then what your brain believes should be happening will get in the way of what actually happens.”

  I blinked at her. “That makes no sense.”

  She sighed, shifting position. Her shoes almost touched the grass and she pulled her feet back immediately. Verin went back to rubbing her shoulders. “What she means is that you’re trying to force the power to listen to you, instead of allowing it to do what it needs to do.”

  “Yes,” Juniper said, pointing at her fella. “What he said.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Okay… So, I should think of the future and let myself go?”

  Jasper shrugged. “That sounds about right to me. Not too far into the future, though, if you don’t mind?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Why?”

  “Well, if you think of tomorrow and go there, then we’ll see you tomorrow, even if you can’t get back,” Jasper explained. “It’s not like with me, going to the past. If you get stuck in the future, then we’ll eventually see you again.”

  I pointed at him. “That’s smart. You’re a smart man.”

  “Thanks,” he said, dryly.

  “Also,” Juniper said. “If you manage this, do you think you could avoid, I don’t know, destroying something while you’re in the future. Just don’t mess with anything.”

  I huffed. “You have no faith.”

  “I have faith,” Juniper argued. “I have faith that you will make a complete ass of yourself and then we’ll have to clean the mess up.” She grinned at me.

  My eyes narrowed. “Just for that, I’m going to make cinnamon toast tomorrow.”

  “Oh gods,” Juniper said.

  I always made such a huge mess when I used cinnamon on anything. I didn’t know why. It just got everywhere.

  I closed my eyes, breathing out. My body relaxed, but I couldn’t quite lose the expectation that I had in the back of my mind. My siblings had both managed to figure out some aspect of their power, though I felt certain we had more to us than that. I just hoped that I’d be able to catch up. I didn’t like feeling left behind.

  I concentrated on the thought of tomorrow. It felt really strange, to focus on something so vague. It wanted something more obvious to focus on. Like what I would do to Zander when he got home later, or feeding Nemo. Something solid and real. Tomorrow was just a thought that people had. Plans that could get wiped out in the second before a car crashed into them, or some such thing.

  Stop thinking so much, I chastised myself. I mean, c’mon. You spend most of your time lying on a gorgeous man, and now you wanna be a scholar?

  I tried letting go, stopping my thoughts, and even loosening the hold I had on my visions. I could control them now so that I had visions when I wanted instead of when they wanted to come. That kind of control and power felt so good. I never had to be talking to someone that I liked and then get a vision of them dying later that day again. It brought so much security to my life.

  But I loosened my hold on it so that I could figure this power out.

  And nothing happened.

  I groaned so loudly and obnoxiously that both my siblings laughed. Then I let my spine go and laid on the ground again. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “I am an all-powerful, gorgeous goddess, and I can’t even travel into the future. What kind of joke is that?” I crossed my arms over my chest, glaring at the sky. “Why am I not wreaking havoc as we speak?”

  “I’m personally glad you aren’t wreaking havoc,” Jasper said, which had me glaring at him. He shrugged. “You wreaked havoc as a human. Let me have a break now, Jazzy.”

  I sighed. “You never understood me.”

  “I think he does. That’s the problem,” Verin said, sounding amused.

  “Maybe Zander could help you with the letting go stuff,” Juniper offered, not sounding like she believed that he could. “I mean, he could calm you down and stuff, right?”

  “Maybe,” I said, unsure if he actually could. Zander’s compulsion only worked on demigods some of the time, and I was a full-blown goddess. Could he do anything to me? It seemed unlikely in my head, but I didn’t want to think about it. Zander always acted funny with my god powers.

  He didn’t seem to want me to try anything. That was why I sat in the backyard with Jasper, Juniper, and Verin while Zander and Kizzy did the grocery shopping. It had been interesting, getting Jasper to agree to that. He usually went shopping with Kizzy. He liked it, for some reason.

  I had to assume it had everything to do with the company and nothing to do with the shopping itself.

  Either way, Zander had taken off and I had another thirty minutes or so before I would have to give up for the night. Which I didn’t want to do, but I wanted to deal with Zander’s weirdness even less.

  I frowned at that thought. He hadn’t told me that I couldn’t do this. He hadn’t even tried to stop me, now that I thought about it. He just got tense whenever I started doing something that i
nvolved my abilities or involved me leaving the house. I didn’t know what to think about it other than Zander would be upset to know that he had been bothering me lately.

  I sighed again, pushing up on my elbows. “Has Zander been getting your nerves?”

  Jasper cocked his head. “Not really. He and I don’t spend a lot of time together, to be honest.”

  Verin nodded. “Yeah, he avoids me like the plague.”

  Juniper looked down at the ground, chewing on her lip.

  I opened my mouth to ask her the same question, but I changed my mind before I said anything. If Zander had been bothering Juniper, she would have let us all know by now, usually by screaming at him until he left her alone. My sister knew how to get stuff done. Not as well as me, of course, but no one could be as good as me at everything. I tried not to smirk about that as I sat up.

  “I should try one more time before they get home,” I decided. “Maybe I’ll finally manage to pop into the future and find out what your babies names are going to be.” I smirked at Juniper.

  “Shut up,” she said, lightly kicking me. “I’m not having triplets anymore. That would be an insane thing to think.”

  “Eh,” Verin said.

  “Oh, my gods,” Juniper said, throwing her hands up in the air.

  “All right, let me try to go into the future so that I can come back with lots of knowledge that will get me into all kinds of trouble.”

  “I think you’re my favorite,” a voice said from behind us.

  I launched to my feet in surprise and ended up pressed against Jasper, who’d also jumped up. Juniper and Verin were also up so that we made a huddle of terrified, powerful beings. That didn’t make me feel stupid at all.

  Erebus sat in one of the lawn chairs that Juniper had finally let us get so that we could hang out with Nemo more comfortably. He had his legs crossed at the ankle and had a bowl of Starbursts in front of him. Erebus looked as beautiful as any god, but colder somehow. His dark eyes didn’t hold much emotion, and his voice sometimes sounded dead. Today, his black hair had been slicked back, which made him look like a movie villain from the eighties.