Inspire (The Muse #1)(62)
Author: Cora Carmack

My apartment smells musty when I push the door open. I flip on the lights. Or try to anyway. They don’t work. I knew I should have set up auto-pay billing. The floor creaks beneath my feet, and it feels both odd and normal to push the door closed with my heel. There’s a sweatshirt on the couch, still pulled inside out from the last time I shrugged it off as I sat there working on homework. Books are piled on the table. My laptop is still plugged in and open, the screen dark.

This place is a museum for the life I lost.

A trip through the kitchen reveals more reason for the smell. There’s a moldy bag of bread on the counter. Unwashed dishes in the sink. I don’t even want to open the fridge to discover what the last three months have done in there.

I drop my purse on the floor, and lean against the counter. I thought it would hurt more coming back here. I’d anticipated it being like a knife to the chest, which is why I’d gone to a bar first. Maybe I had a little more to drink than I thought. That would explain the numbness.

I’d never had to be drunk to face my past before.

“To new experiences,” I mumble, raising an imaginary glass.

Exhausted, I sink down onto the floor right there, leaning against the kitchen counter. Specks of dust float in the beam of light coming in through the window, and I watch them through dry eyes.

Three months ago, I left this apartment behind. I cut ties and ran because I couldn’t face him. I knew if I came back to my apartment, he’d follow me, and what could I have possibly said?

I knew if I saw him, if I talked to him, I would be tempted to stay. I told him once that I was selfish enough to want him despite the risk, and that hadn’t changed. Still hasn’t. Three months, and I still wake up thinking about him. Go to sleep wondering what he’s doing. I pick up my phone, hovering over the screen. I can’t even put a number on how many times I’ve thought about calling him, hoping I’d get his voicemail, just so that I could listen to words, any words, out of his mouth.

I spent the first week after I left practically catatonic. I checked into a hotel, and I never even left it long enough for them to clean the room. I stayed in bed, raiding the mini bar or ordering room service when the hunger pains got strong enough to break through the haze I was in. The next week I spent driving. I’d head back toward Austin one day, and then change my head and drive in another direction the next day. It wasn’t until the third week when I sat down and began to think.

First, I wrote down as much of Bridget’s prophecy as I could remember. She said something about my keeping secrets, and that I would lose him to them. That I knew well enough already. But she’d also said something else about a reunion.

And the line I clung to, even though I knew it was foolish and harmful to hope:

To be made whole, all must first be lost.

I was intimately acquainted with the all being lost bit. It was being made whole that I wanted to know more about. Because as hard as I tried to leave this place behind, as many times as I’ve told myself that Wilder is better off without me, that we’re both better off, there’s one thing I just can’t shake.

The thread.

Fate.

It didn’t fade. No matter how far I drove. Not with time. Not with distraction. Not for anything. We’re still connected, our futures tied together for better or for worse.

So I spent another week traveling, popping into dive bars and art galleries and coffee shops for the occasional inspirational quick fix. And I thought about being made whole. And what that might mean.

Whole.

It wouldn’t be enough to just be with Wilder, though I did feel like I’d lost half of myself to him. To be whole would be to be normal. To live without secrets. Without this curse or gift or whatever it may be.

For me, to be whole is to be human.

Throughout history there have been humans deified by the gods. Heracles. Ariadne. Psyche. Io. Some earned their spot in Olympus through accomplishments. Others were gifted it due to love. Still others found immortality through bargains or accidents or manipulation.

But the other way around? That is not a common story. There had been a centaur that was said to have given up his immortality when he suffered a wound that could never be healed. Some of the myths say he made a bargain and gave his immortality to free Prometheus, and agreed to take his place in the underworld. Instead, he was honored and placed among the stars as the constellation Centaurus.

But the way the myths have been told and twisted and fictionalized over the years, it’s impossible to know the truth of the past unless you were there. And even so, I have no wish to give up this world for the underworld or the stars. Not yet anyway.

I would gladly take death at the end if I could have a true life first.

But I don’t have the power to grant myself that kind of choice. Only a greater god, perhaps only Zeus, could make that kind of bargain. And it would be a deal, no doubt about that. I’d have to give something up or make a promise or complete a task, but as soon as the idea took root in my mind, I was unshakeable. I would make any bargain, do anything to have the life with Wilder that my gut said it was possible to have.

But you can’t make a bargain with someone you can’t find. I don’t exactly have the greater gods on speed dial. And my attempts to find the few other minor deities that still inhabit the earth in the hopes that one of them might have some clue, some connection to help me … well, those had been nothing short of a disaster so far.

Just like me, they learned long ago how to hide and survive among humans. I started with my sisters, trying to track them through historical records from identity change to identity change, inheritance to inheritance, assuming that they must live the same way as me. But one by one, I lost the thread on each and every one of them. They’d hidden their tracks too well. I tried researching artists with a quick rise to fame, but in the Internet age, there are more of those than I can possibly count. I watched YouTube videos and scrolled through hundreds of thousands of event photos hoping to catch sight of a familiar face in the background of just one.

Nothing. If my sisters are anything like me, they stay away from fame, from anything that might get them too much attention.

I visited cities known for their artist populations. New York. Los Angeles. New Orleans. Las Vegas. I tried smaller creative-friendly cities. Providence. Santa Fe. New Bedford. Nashville.

Nothing. I didn’t know what else to look for. I could leave for Europe, I suppose. Or Asia perhaps. But it’s a big world to try and find seven people who have spent centuries learning how to hide.