A Beautiful Evil (4 page)

A piece of metal hit me in the chest and landed in my lap. “What’s this?”

“Thought you’d like it.” Dub shrugged and went back to his sorting.

I picked the ring off my lap with two fingers.

“It’s got a crescent moon on it,” Crank explained. “Like your tattoo.”

I touched the small black crescent moon tattooed on my right cheekbone. I also wore a platinum moon on a black ribbon around my neck. New Orleans was once called the Crescent City, and I’d long ago adopted the symbol as my own because it reminded me of my mother, and the place I was born.

I held the ring out to him, trying not to let it gross me out. “Well, thanks for the thought, but I kind of draw the line at wearing something pulled off a dead person.”

“Says the girl who inhaled Alice Cromley’s toe bone,” Henri muttered with his mouth full.

I shot him a smirk. “It was a bit of ground-up bone; it’s not like I sucked down a whole toe.” As I looked away I caught Sebastian’s small smile. He shook his head at Henri and then resumed eating.

“Relax. I got the ring from a house in Audubon Place,” Dub told me. “You know, the big white one on the corner.”

“He found it helping me clear the house of rats and snakes,” Henri said. “Some of the Novem families are moving back into those behemoths. I think some of them used to live there. But you watch. They’ll be coming into the GD next, and then we’ll all be screwed and have to live in the ruins.” A string of what I could only guess were French curses flowed under his breath.

I rolled the ring around in my hand. It was heavy, made of silver and inset with a pale crescent moon cut from some kind of pale bluish stone. “I like it. Thanks, Dub.” The ring fit on the middle finger of my left hand. I left it there and finished eating.

Henri cast a glare at Dub, his irises flashing that odd hazel-yellow color. “We were
supposed
to leave the contents alone. You’d better hope the Novem doesn’t have any records of what was in that safe in the closet, or I’m out of a job. And if I am”—he pointed his spoon—“you and me are gonna go round.”

Dub rolled his eyes, let out a disbelieving snort, and grabbed a bowl.

While I wasn’t originally a fan of Henri’s bossy attitude, once I got used to his surliness, he was an okay guy and he had a gruffness about him that I liked.
He could definitely use a shave and a haircut
, I thought. And those eyes of his were sleek and arresting, like a predator’s. . . .

“This isn’t half bad, Henri,” Crank managed through a mouthful of rice and beans.

“Wait till you see the mess I left in the kitchen.” Henri propped his feet on the corner of the table, looking pretty damn pleased with himself. “I cook. The infants clean.”

Dub’s narrowing eyes lifted as he dropped the spoon into his bowl, a look of pure irritation on his face. “You suck, Henri. You don’t have to make such a big mess every time. We know you do it on purpose.” He flopped back, bracing against the chair behind him and dragging his bowl with him.

“Yeah,” Crank muttered. “Thell me about it.”

Henri chuckled and took a bite of his food—happy now that he’d annoyed the young ones in true big-brother fashion.

After we ate, I helped clean up the chaos in the kitchen. Dub and Crank chattered nonstop as Sebastian and I worked silently. Every once in a while he’d smile at something they said or shake his head. His mood seemed way better than it had when Violet first disappeared.

Once the kitchen was decent, I went upstairs to my room on the second floor, where a small fire already burned in the marble fireplace.

Probably Dub
, I thought as I shed my blades and then clothes.

The great thing about the old mansions? En suite bathrooms. And though no one drank the water without boiling it, we were able to shower and use the toilet. The main water lines were working, and so as long as the pipes coming into and out of the house were undamaged, water was available.

I showered, noticing a few light bruises—courtesy of Bran—and then dressed in pajama pants and a T-shirt. After twisting my wet hair into a knot, I settled onto my sleeping bag.

“I can get you a mattress for the bed, now that you’re staying,” Crank said, peeking around the doorway.

“The sleeping bag is fine. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“It’s no trouble. If I come across one, I’ll snag it for you.”

I smiled. “Okay, thanks.”

I lay down, the room dark except for the fire, tucked my hands behind my head, and watched the shadows dance over the plaster medallion on the ceiling, wondering how my next day at Presby would play out.

“O
UR NEWEST STUDENT AT
P
RESBY BRINGS ATTENTION TO AN
important subject . . .”

Oh great, not another one.

I let my forehead fall onto the top of my desk with a loud thunk. I’d been singled out all day by teachers in nearly every class. I guess yesterday, being my first day, they’d all given me a break (all but Bran), but today, apparently, I was fair game.

“. . . and while I intended to cover the Wars of the Pantheons later in the semester, I think perhaps now is a better-suited time, especially in light of recent events. Today we’ll discuss Athena. She is, after all, our enemy, one we’d be wise to study. So, who can tell me about her?”

Mrs. Cromley, of the Novem’s Cromley family of witches, presumably, and professor of history, leaned her slim hip against the desk and folded her arms over her chest. She was in her early forties, maybe. Pretty. Had that really intellectual look about her.

Someone spoke up behind me. “Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom, warfare, strategy . . . um . . .”

When silence reigned, Cromley encouraged the rest of the class, “Chime in. Anyone.”

“Justice.”

“Strength?”

The room went quiet again, so the professor finished. “She was the goddess of the arts, agriculture, crafts like weaving and metalworking, skills, culture. . . . Athena was, and still is, intensely interested in culture and civilization. She prided herself on being a part of not only Greek civilization but every subsequent civilization thereafter. If you think she speaks only Greek, ignores mankind, and walks around carrying an olive branch, think again.” A few students chuckled at that.

Cromley pushed away from her desk and walked slowly back and forth. “Since we are her enemies, it’s safe to say she knows everything there is to know about us. How we think, the things that are important to us, what we eat, how we talk, our modern weapons and technology. This is no stuck-in-the-ancient-past goddess. Her art is strategy, and she didn’t get to where she is now by being stupid or too lofty to immerse herself in our way of life. Athena is cunning, highly intelligent, and powerful. She was a champion of heroes and mankind until”—she stopped moving and paused for effect—“sometime in the tenth century, when she killed Zeus and took over his temple, and the War of the Pantheons began. Can anyone tell me why she did this?”

Interested, I glanced around the room. Most of the students were older than I was by a year or two, this being a college-level course, and yet none of them seemed to know the answer.

“The truth is,” Cromley finally said, “no one knows. No one knows what caused the rift. Only that it was swift, brutal, and absolute. Some say it was a power struggle long in the making; some say it was a betrayal. Some say that time has a way of reshaping the gods, slowly turning them from good to bad and back again over thousands of years. Cycling through personalities, if you will.

“It was during this long war that Athena began turning our ancestors into what we call
, the Greek word for ‘monster.’ In fact, it is known that she made an entire army of minions to aid in her cause in the war, many of whom were killed in the battles. She targeted mostly vampires, witches, shape-shifters, and demigods because their natural abilities allowed her to make
of great power. She took witches and made them into harpies. She used shape-shifters to create all manner of monsters. She kidnapped demigods to form into her immortal hunters. And she used humans as well. All this, as you can imagine, led to our banding together and taking a stand against Athena. And when some of her own
turned against her and joined us, we have been on her Annihilate’ list ever since.”

The ancestors Cromley spoke of had branched off the human evolutionary tree a
long
time ago and evolved into humans of a different kind. Vampires, witches, monsters . . . And I’d learned during my short time in Athena’s prison that the prisoners had three classifications: Borns, beings born of power, such as vampires, witches, and shape-shifters. Mades, beings made or turned into something grotesque by The Bitch herself. And then there were the Beauties, those of rare beauty who simply inspired jealousy. Beauties would become Made at some point to satisfy Athena’s ego. Medusa had been a Beauty.

In the darkness of Athena’s prison I’d been asked if I was a Beauty. The thought made me snort, because take away the hair and eyes, and I was left with an average face. Not ugly. Not gorgeous. Just normal.

“Ari.”

I blinked. “Huh?”

Cromley frowned at me. “I was informing the class about your ancestors. The gorgons.”

“Oh . . . ,” I said slowly, looking around and wondering what she wanted me to say about it.
Um, yeah, it totally sucks being cursed and knowing one day you’ll become a disgusting snake-headed monster.

Athena had hunted each of my female ancestors, and for what? For being what
she
created them to be? Because she was afraid of the power she’d mistakenly given them? Just the thought of it made my blood boil and my hands ball into tight fists.

Cromley decided to continue her lecture without my input, which was good because I wasn’t sure I could speak at that moment.

Athena had cursed the once-beautiful and devout Medusa and made her into a gorgon, all because some shithead of a god raped Medusa on the floor of Athena’s pristine seaside temple. Had Athena blamed the god? Hell, no. The goddess of
justice
had blamed Medusa and cursed my ancestor’s beauty so that it became something so hideous that just one glance at her face would turn another to stone.

Only, Athena had forgotten to exempt the gods from Medusa’s power.

The goddess of wisdom had created a god-killer.

And once she’d realized that, she’d charged Perseus with killing her creation, which he did. But what neither of them had counted on was Medusa’s child, who had been hidden away—a child who was cursed like her mother to have strange eyes and hair the color of moonlight, a child who would follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a monster in her twenty-first year, the same age Medusa had been when she was cursed.

And so it began, from mother to daughter, all the way down to me.

And according to the curse, I had less than four years left.

Sometime before my twenty-first year, I was destined to birth a daughter, be hunted by the Sons of Perseus, and either commit suicide like my mother, be killed, or turn into the monster I feared most.

But I wasn’t like all the others before me.

I was the daughter of a gorgon, true. But my father was a Son of Perseus, a hunter who tracked down and destroyed Athena’s monstrous creations.
hunters. This had apparently made me into a different kind of freak, one who didn’t need to “mature” at twenty-one or become a monster in order to turn people to stone. I could do it now with a touch.
Not that I’m any good at it.