Greek Revival: Chapter 6

VI.

Ari heard Greg pull into the driveway moments after they’d shut and locked their door. He must have sped the whole way there to make it so quickly. Ari moved toward the bedroom – should I be lying down? Acting sick? – then toward the kitchen – no, I can’t really afford to miss another day of work, I should look busy – then toward the door to unlock it again – why did I even lock it when Greg’s about to be here? – before finally collapsing onto the loveseat and pulling out their phone. Damian had already texted them: ‘testing, testing, 123. this is damian by the way.’

Ari grinned and heard Greg knock on the door.

“It’s open!”

Greg poked his head in. “How ya holding up?”

“You can come in.” Ari put their phone down and sat up. “I’m doing alright.”

“What did the doctor say?”

Ari pressed their lips together, trying to come up with a lie that was convincing and wouldn’t invite follow-up. “It’s mostly just the stress, I guess – I haven’t been sleeping enough, so my immune system and my brain are both run-down. I’m supposed to get extra vitamin C and D and make sure I’m getting at least eight hours every night.”

Greg nodded. “Yeah, you did conk out on my couch at like seven p.m. I’m not surprised you need more rest.” He took a step further into Ari’s apartment, then paused, glancing around. His eyes passed over the floors, which Ari remembered still needed sweeping, and the careful arrangement of all the furniture at right angles to each other, and the shining countertops, and finally his gaze settled on Ari’s shoulders. They realized they were tensing them up around their ears and forced themself to relax.

“It’s… really clean in here,” he finally said.

“Oh, yeah, I like to keep it tidy. I need to sweep the floors, though.”

“Really?” Greg squinted at the floors. “They don’t look dusty to me.”

“Yeah, well, my landlord was in here yesterday to check out the stove and he probably didn’t take his shoes off or anything, so I just figured… anyway. Thanks for coming. I’m doing better.”

“Back at work better?”

“I think so, yeah. I should be.”

“Okay. Can I do anything for you?”

“You’ve already done so much just these past couple days, Greg. Seriously.”

“Yeah.” He wavered back and forth on the spot. “Okay. Ari. Ari Tan, assistant baker, future tweed-wearing, magic-portal-wielding professor. Yes, I was flirting with you.”

“What?”

“When you asked. I was flirting with you. And I’d like to take you out on a date, or at least make out with you, or something, but I’m also pretty damn worried about you. You do look better now, I will say. You look like you’ve got more life in you than you did yesterday. But… I don’t know. It sounds like your doctor didn’t take your concerns seriously, and I wouldn’t want to take someone out if I knew they were gonna be feeling like shit the whole time. Are you actually okay? And do you want to go out sometime? And how badly did I fuck that up?”

Greg finished by letting out a long breath like a punctuation mark.

Oh man, Ari thought. There is no good way to get out of this situation. I do feel better, Greg, thank you for noticing. It’s because magic exists in the world. Would you like to be possessed by the god Hermes? Because apparently I can do that for you, and apparently it’s better than sex. How about dream visions of Asclepius and his annoying snake? I’ve got that too! Just watch out for snakebites, because they will appear on your arm in real life. Magic is real and it’s mostly talking to people who only speak Ancient Greek! Isn’t it amazing, Greg? Isn’t it the worst, dumbest, silliest, most amazing thing you’ve ever heard?

Instead of saying any of this, Ari burst out laughing.

“Oh God, what did I say?” Greg asked, burying his face in his hands.

“Nothing! Nothing – it’s not you – oh shoot – let me catch my breath.” Ari gasped for air. “You didn’t fuck it up that badly. You’re probably right to be worried about me. I haven’t had friends since college, much less gone on a date. But you’re also right that I feel a lot better. I had a good day. I finally have an explanation for why I’ve been so out of it. So, like, it would be alright. If we were going to go on a date. But – I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to date your co-workers. But I guess I’ve never tried it. It’s not that I’m opposed – I mean, oh man, Greg, I really do appreciate it – but… it’s that my life is about to get really complicated, I think.”

“Grad school,” Greg said with a knowing nod.

“Uh – yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, before you knocked I was getting ready to bury myself in translation until bedtime. I really appreciate how much you’ve done for me the past couple days. More than I can really say. I just… I don’t think it would be good to yank you into my whole thing right now.”

Technically that wasn’t a lie.

“No date.” Greg nodded again, pursing his lips. “Okay. Cool. But you are feeling better.”

“I am. A lot.”

“Okay. Also cool. I’ll – yeah, okay. Cool. I’ll see you at work.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Greg turned around, fumbled with the doorknob.

“Hey,” Ari said, just as he opened the door. “It’s not a forever no, okay? It’s just a no until…”

Until I know if it’s safe for you to be involved with me. Until we get Nico back. Until I know who Damian Cappelletti is, or was, or will be. Until I know who I’m gonna be. 

“Until your applications are finished?”

“Until – yeah! Right. Applications. Or thereabouts, anyway. Ask me again someday, okay?”

Greg smiled, the bright, confident smile he had in the kitchen when he was trading jokes with Teddy or teasing Ari, and Ari felt relief swell in their chest to see it again. “You got it,” he said.

He pulled out of the driveway a few minutes later. Ari checked the time: about three hours before they’d have to get ready for bed, at least if they didn’t want to fall asleep on their feet tomorrow. They pulled a container of leftovers from the fridge – their second-to-last one, they’d have to make more food tomorrow, although the idea of feeding themself the old-fashioned way felt almost ridiculous in a world where they could summon gods at will – and ate it without stopping long enough to taste it. They sped through the dishes, their mind on Nico’s magic paper the whole time, tossing their plate and their Tupperware into the drying rack without stopping to shake off the water first. The clean dishes dripped fat globs of water onto the counter.

Ari stared at the water pooling beneath the rack.

I’ve really got to start translating.

They took a step away but felt their skin prickle and their stomach turn, the way they always did when something was wrong in their space. Ari sighed, wiped up the counter with a paper towel, folded the wet towel until it couldn’t get any smaller, threw it away, washed and dried their hands, and walked away with their skin and stomach feeling fine.

Ari’s desk was meant for a child, with a small wooden roll-top and sturdy metal legs. They had salvaged it from someone’s yard sale years ago and it was presently wedged between the loveseat and the wall. They took the ring out of their pocket and set it on the corner of the desk, although they weren’t sure why. Inspiration, maybe. They pulled up the photo of the paper on their phone and zoomed as far in as they could. They opened their dictionary, located their favorite online Greek tools on their laptop, opened their notebook to a fresh page, and began to work. It was slow going. The handwriting was difficult to read even when it wasn’t mirrored. Several times Ari frustrated themself with their failure to recognize a word and looked it up to no avail, only to realize they had mislabeled the boundary between words and were staring at two or three very common words squished together. On multiple occasions, they thought they had produced an elegant translation for a phrase off the top of their head and had to backtrack and re-do it when the second half of the line made it obvious that they had completely misunderstood the first half. It had been dark for some time before Ari realized that they were squinting and straining to see the pages of their lexicon and it was dark for some time after that before they thought to solve the problem by getting up and turning on a light.

By bedtime they had eked out a decent rendering of the words on the page and were a little disappointed to read over their translation and realize that they probably could have guessed most of its contents without bothering to translate it at all. It was a set of instructions, written in surprisingly banal, un-magical language, for two magic spells: one that Ari had creatively titled “Snake Protection” and one they had, even more creatively, titled “Hermes Lamp.”

Nico’s snake drawings, and the surrounding letters and words, were designed to protect against threats both magical and mundane, and the instructions promised the wards would provide safety from ghosts, demons, sickness, and ‘all suffering,’ which Ari suspected was false advertising. The snake was supposed to be drawn on gold or silver leaf or some other thin sheet of metal, which explained the tinfoil. Given that Damian’s insomnia and paranoia had, at least according to Damian himself, vanished inside Nico’s house, the snake drawings were indeed having some effect.

Hermes Lamp was more confusing. The spell began with instructions for a spoken formula – the words written on the scraps of paper that Ari had repeated – as well as referring to a lamp and a boy through whom the god must speak. But the spell made no mention of writing anything down, burning anything, lighting the lamp, obtaining a boy, or even of Hermes’ name specifically, referring to him only as ‘the god’ or ‘lord.’ Maybe those prerequisite steps were assumed. At the end of Snake Protection, the text instructed the reader to ‘add the usual’ to the protective spell, which as far as Ari could tell meant writing down additional all-purpose magic words that were so common or obvious as to be unnecessary to write down. But there were a lot of steps in Hermes Lamp that felt less intuitive to Ari. Why would an aspiring sorcerer assume they had to write down, and then burn, the spoken formula when the instructions only told them to speak it? How would they even know they were summoning Hermes? What if they didn’t like Hermes? Worse, what if Hermes didn’t like them?

Ari zoomed out on the picture of the page. They’d been staring at individual words for so long that they’d forgotten what the page looked like. A ragged, uneven edge ran down one long side of the text, and tiny fibers and shreds of paper still clung to it. It was torn. Which meant it had been torn out of something – a large book, judging by the position of the torn edge and the size of the page.

There was more to Hermes Lamp. There had to be.

And if a single page of dense Greek text held the instructions to two different, and obviously effective, magic spells, how much more magic would there be in a whole book?

Ari swiped over to their text messages and sent one to Damian: ‘I think that page may have come from a whole book of spell instructions. I’m about to go to bed, but can you check the house for any other torn pages that look like the first one? If Nico got the whole book and tore it up to hide it, you may be able to find the rest of it.’

Damian replied right away. ‘on it. talk tomorrow. btw gilbert seems like a real piece of ass.’

And a few seconds later: ‘you know, i meant piece of work... but i was thinking asshole... should not have combined the two. good night a wrist eh or whatever your professor calls you.’

‘Ariste,’ Ari wrote back. ‘Good night.’

Ari showered, changed into their pajamas, brushed and flossed, set their alarm, and slipped the ring onto their index finger on their way into the bedroom. They said a quick prayer to Asclepius – show me more about the book, they thought very hard in Greek at the ring, and do not let your snake harm me again. They were fairly certain of those grammatical structures, and if the prayer didn’t reach the god, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Then, they shut the lights off, laid down, and closed their eyes.

Sleep did not come.

This was strange. Sleep always came for Ari. Typically they tried to outrun or outwit it, but sleep was indefatigable. Now that they had stopped pulling so many late nights and had begun to become fanatical about their sleep hygiene, they had their nighttime routine timed down to the minute to allow for exactly eight hours and ten minutes of sleep, assuming it took them fifteen minutes or less to drift off, which it always did. Tonight, they felt all of their muscles tensed on high alert as they climbed into bed, but that was nothing new. They did their usual breathing exercise: five beats in, hold for seven, out for eight, and unclench part of your body every time you repeat the cycle until you’re entirely relaxed. Before they had even gotten to their shoulders, they felt sleep coming and saw in front of them, as if their eyes were open, a hazy vision of a man with a stick and a snake stepping through their closed bedroom door.

Asclepius approached them, and Ari opened their mouth, ready to interrogate him about Nico’s torn paper. As they did, the god’s head transformed into a massive, hairy, screeching black bat, and Ari woke up with a gasp, flailing their hands in front of their face to shoo the bat away.

They were alone in their room. The same thing happened the next three times they felt themself drifting off. Even when they took the ring off, the bat appeared, although Asclepius didn’t.

Great. They’re doing the exact same thing to me that they did to Damian. Insomnia, bat, the whole nine yards. Unfortunately for them, I might know how to fix that.

Ari swung their feet out of bed, felt their way to the living room light switch, and flipped the lights on. They rummaged around in a kitchen drawer until they found the tinfoil. They tore off a square, took it to the desk, found a permanent marker, and began to draw. Dutifully they copied the ouroboros, the letters, the words, and the symbols from their photo of the torn page onto the tinfoil. They paused when they got to the blank space the instructions provided for the user’s name, then filled in Aristos Tan.

If it’s good enough for Dr. Pryor, hopefully it’s good enough for the gods.

They taped the tinfoil to the wall above the head of their bed, returned everything to its proper place, shut off the lights, and climbed under the covers once again. Sleep came for them in a few minutes, as it always had, and this time it stayed with them until their alarm began to beep the next morning. Ari woke up with a smile on their face.

Snake Protection works. It actually works. 

They ate breakfast at their desk, although they disliked eating food anywhere besides the kitchen table, so that they could draw another Snake Protection charm and leave it somewhere inconspicuous at work, maybe taped under one of the shelves of the walk-in. If the PGM, whoever they were, thought they were going to mess with the only place Ari got to beat things with rolling pins whenever they got too stressed, they would just have to think again.

Ari did, indeed, get to beat cold butter with a rolling pin that morning. Everyone at Full English was quieter than usual, and peevish when they spoke, because of the stress of hiring someone to replace Virgil – who was smiling as politely and making tea as coolly as ever – and because Ari’s day off had left them behind in their preparation for the weekend rush. Greg, at least, shot Ari a few warm, hidden smiles whenever Teddy wasn’t looking, like a good night’s sleep had transformed the awkwardness of his affections into a fun secret they were both in on. To their great surprise, Ari appreciated this new layer to their co-working relationship, and when their hands were beginning to crack from the hot dishwater, they relished Greg bumping them with his shoulder and smiling.

Maybe I should have said yes, Ari thought.

The pocket of their shorts felt heavy with the ring, and Ari shook their head, a couple of quick jerks like a horse flicking flies away with its tail.

No way. I made the right decision.

With the Snake Protection charm stowed safely in the freezer, Ari felt more at ease than they had in – maybe forever, if they thought hard about it, but at least in the past few months. Their arms were loose and quick as they diced several pounds of onions, and they dashed back and forth to the walk-in to retrieve chilled dough or heavy cream whenever Teddy asked, and sometimes before he was able to get the whole request out. Even through the haze of discontent that surrounded the kitchen staff at Full English, Teddy noticed Ari’s sudden focus and calm.

“What the hell’s going on with you, Reasonable Effort? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you haven’t been this good at your job in ages.”

Ari shrugged. “Making up for being gone yesterday.”

“Well, keep making up for it, I guess. You’re doing great. Your break’s in ten.”

Instead of working on their applications or staring into space feeling guilty for not working on their applications, Ari traded a quick “those things’ll kill you” with Greg and spent their entire lunch break texting with Damian. There were multiple misspellings in each of his messages, and over the course of the conversation he revealed that he had already begun drinking for the day. Evidently Nico and Penny enjoyed imagining themselves both as foodies and as wine connoisseurs, and despite their limited budget, the pantry was well-stocked with dozens of bottles. Damian communicated all this with the loving but dismissive attitude of someone who has just downed an entire bottle of their dear brother’s best red without so much as appreciating the vintage.

‘Should you be going this hard before noon?’ Ari replied to this deluge of wine information.

‘waht else could i be doing… it’s been a rouhg months.’

Ari grimaced at their phone. ‘I’m not your dad,’ they replied. ‘Do whatever you want. It just seems like this might interfere with the quality of our research. And also your reaction time, if you get attacked by invisible magicians.’

Several minutes passed. Ari ate their peanut butter and jelly sandwich – thrown together this morning when they remembered, once again, that they were nearly out of leftovers – and waited. They scrolled through the Wikipedia page for ibises to pass the time. Finally, Damian replied: ‘i’ll sboer up be4 you come over kid. dont evenworry about it.’

***

To his credit, Damian actually had sobered up – or at least if he was drunk, he was hiding it well – by the time Ari showed up on his doorstep, carrying their dictionary and notebook under one arm and a reusable shopping bag on the other.

“What’s that?” he asked, jerking his chin at the bag.

“Sustenance. I had to make a grocery run after work, and I picked up a few snacks while I was there.” Ari crossed the living room and placed the bag on the kitchen table, where they pulled out a family-sized package of pretzel sticks, a tub of hummus, and a bag of frozen lobster chunks, which had begun to sweat in the heat outside.

“Lobster?” Damian asked, leaning over their shoulder. “Fancy.”

“It was really discounted – it expires tomorrow. I guess lobster doesn’t last that long even when it’s frozen. Anyway, it’s not for us.” Ari gestured to the flock of ibises which, as usual, were clustered solemnly around the kitchen table. “I looked it up. Apparently their diet involves a lot of crayfish and crabs and stuff like that.”

“They don’t eat, kid, I told you that. I’ve never seen them eat anything.”

“Have you ever tried feeding them?”

Before Damian could answer, Ari tore open the bag of lobster and offered one to a glossy ibis. It clamped its beak shut and bowed its head. Ari tried another bird, but it did the same routine as the first.

Damian let out a sharp laugh. “Told you so!”

Ari kept offering lobster, but all of the glossy ibises refused. After a few more tries, Ari noticed their heads were bowed towards the white ibis at the center of the flock.

“Are you in charge?” Ari asked it. “Do you eat first?”

The white ibis didn’t respond, but it took the chunk of lobster from their hand, using their beak with the delicacy and precision of a surgeon’s forceps, and swallowed it. It moved forward then and pulled the entire bag of lobster off the kitchen table, where it spilled onto the floor. Ari winced. It wasn’t their house, it wasn’t their place to jump in and start cleaning, they didn’t even know where the mop was, but seeing that much weird, half-melted lobster juice pooling on the floor made their skin crawl. But the ibises started scooping up and eating the lobster; it was a feeding frenzy. The white ibis watched the chaos but did not partake in it, with what might have been a smile on an animal that didn’t have a beak.

“See?” Ari said triumphantly, ignoring the turning in the pit of their stomach as the lobster juice crept closer to the soles of their boots. They backed up as unobtrusively as they could manage. “Maybe they were starving this whole time.”

“If they were,” Damian grumbled, “they could’ve just left.”

“They must be here for a reason, then.”

Damian glanced down at the spreading puddle, then at Ari, who had shifted their weight onto their heels in anticipation of another step backwards. “Do you want me to clean that shit up?” he asked.

“What? No, don’t worry about –”

“It’s obviously bugging the hell out of you. Here, let me just…”

Damian rummaged around beneath the sink until he emerged with a container of lemon-scented disinfecting wipes, the same kind Ari used at home. Nico and Penny have good taste, they thought. Damian wiped up the remains of the feeding frenzy, shooing the birds out of the way to clean up every spot the lobster had touched.

“There,” he said as he threw away the wipes. “Better?”

“Much. You didn’t have to do that.”

He snorted. “I did. Nico was the same way growing up. Wouldn’t let any of his food touch, wouldn’t let me on his side of the room unless I promised not to rearrange his shit, the whole enchilada. It never bugged me – or not never, but it was just how Nico was, so it wasn’t a big problem or anything. And it made him so happy when I’d clean shit up his way without being asked that sometimes I’d do it just to surprise him. It annoyed the hell out of my dad, though – but I guess anything Nico did would have.”

Ari had hoped to jump right into going over their research, but this glimpse of Damian’s former life was too tantalizing to pass up. “Yeah?” they asked.

“Yeah.” Damian sat down at the kitchen table. “I still feel bad about that. I mean, not my fault, but still. Mom was great – she was a real flower child type of person, loved us both equally in kind of an ‘all God’s creatures’ way, but my dad was always on my side and not on Nico’s. Even though Nico and I were mostly on the same side. Nico was fussy, I guess. Didn’t like getting dirty, didn’t like playing with other kids except me. God only knows why he tolerated me at all, other than being his brother. I was a real pain in the ass as a kid, y’know.”

“I think I could have guessed that.”

“Getting into trouble for roughhousing during Cub Scouts, chasing the cat around the house. That kind of thing. I was never trying to make him happy, and Nico always was. But Dad loved all my bullshit, and he was always pissed at Nico. I think he had this fuckin’, like, fantasy of having a couple rough-and-tumble boys running around the house, grilling and hiking and tossing a football around, or whatever the hell people born in the fifties thought their lives were supposed to be like.” He shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe it was just because Nico’s adopted.”

“He is? I didn’t know that.”

“Why would you?”

“Internet stalking?”

“Guess so. But yeah, my folks got told they’d never be able to have a baby of their own. The adoption paperwork took ages to come through, and I guess they kept fucking in the meantime, because the day after they brought baby Nico home Mom found out she was pregnant.”

“Oh, wow.”

Damian leaned back, tilting his chair onto two of its legs. A couple of the ibises let out nervous twitters. “Anyway,” he said, gesturing at the floor where there had once been melted lobster juice, “it’s no big deal. We’ve all got our weird things.”

“Thanks.” A brief silence hung in the air along with the lingering smell of artificial lemon. “So, do you want to hear about that magic paper?”

Damian let his chair fall back down with a clatter that startled the ibises into more disgruntled noises. “You know I do. I tore the whole fuckin’ house apart trying to find others, but no dice. If he had anything else, he hid it pretty damn well.”

“He probably just had the one, then. All of the obvious magic stuff in this house comes from this one paper, and I’m sure if he had more information, he would’ve used it. It’s magic, but you already knew that, and I’m pretty sure it works even if it’s not Nico doing the magic, but you already knew that, too.”

“You tried it?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept having –”

“Bat visions!” Damian crowed. “Yes! That’s how they get you!”

“Well, I made one of these Snake Protection things and stuck it up over my bed and poof, no more bat visions. The paper is – it’s like an instruction manual, as far as I can tell, anyway. Or a recipe book. But, like, one of the old ones where they didn’t list ingredients and they just told you to bake things in a slow oven or fry your vegetables for the time it took to say ten Paternosters or stuff like that.”

“So a shitty recipe book.”

“Yeah, kind of.” Ari opened their notebook and explained their translation point by point to Damian. When they mentioned the missing information in Hermes Lamp and their suspicion that the page had been torn – maybe stolen – from a larger book, Damian’s face lit up. He pulled off his sunglasses and leaned toward Ari with a wild smile.

“Of course there’s more,” he said, slapping his open palm on the table. The ibises flapped and grunted irritably at him, but Damian continued, ignoring them. “How else would they be keeping us awake? How else would they know how to make those rings? Or be invisible? Or pop my fucking eye? How long did it take you to translate that?”

“Uh, like three or four hours? It was tough because I’ve never had to work with a text that looked like this before, with the handwriting and the mirrored words and stuff. I imagine if I had more practice I’d be faster at it, but it took a long time and a lot of hard work to deal with this page.”

“But you would get faster.”

“Yeah, I think so. I mean, that’s just how practice works, so I’d hope –”

“Then all we have to do,” Damian said, his eye shining, “is figure out where the rest of that book is.”

“I guess so. You’re not wrong, but that’s easier said than done. Do you know how many completely irrelevant results you get if you look up ‘Hermes lamp spell’ or ‘snake protection tin’ online? It’s, like, seventy percent people who are really into crystal healing and twenty percent people who are really into white supremacy.”

“What’s the other ten percent?”

Ari grimaced. “The overlap between the two.”

“Yikes.” Damian reached for the back pocket of his jeans – Ari suspected they were the same as yesterday’s – and pulled out a crumpled piece of notebook paper. “If it helps, though, I might have a starting point. I figured out where Gilbert works.”

“The piece of ass?” Ari teased.

“Shut up, kid, you try drunk-researching the career of a guy you don’t give a shit about.”

“I’d rather try sober-researching, frankly.”

Damian rolled his eye. “Look, it’s been a hard couple months, and as much as I need you for this fuckin’ rescue mission, I’m not really up for a teenager moralizing about –”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Seriously?” He squinted at them. “You look young.”

“I get that a lot. But yeah, no, I graduated two years ago.”

“Huh, okay. Should I stop calling you ‘kid?’”

“I don’t mind it. Should I stop bugging you about the drinking?”

Damian sighed. “No, you probably shouldn’t. I think if I had a therapist they’d tell me the fact that it pisses me off so much when you bring it up means I have some kind of deep-seated fuckin’ issue or something.”

“I really don’t care what you do with your free time. It just seems –”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, kid, I know. I’ll try to lay off when we’re in active research mode. D’you want to hear about Gilbert or not?”

“Of course I do.”

Damian un-crumpled the piece of paper from his pocket and spread it out on the table. He had taken notes in extravagantly wide, looping handwriting, the perfect opposite of his brother’s jagged, cramped hand. At the top of the page, Ari noted something that looked like a street address.

“Dang, did you find his house?”

“Not quite. That’s the building where he works. He teaches Latin and Greek at Saint Julian’s College, up near Burlington. His photo on the faculty website is so fucking smarmy. He’s wearing a tie bar in it, for fuck’s sake. Hang on, do you have your phone? Gimme.”

Damian looked up Gilbert Applewhite’s faculty photo and presented it for judgment. Ari did not admit that they would have loved to reach a point in their gender presentation where a tie bar would make them look like a smarmy academic rather than a nervous little boy borrowing his dad’s clothes for his first communion. They also did not admit that, were it not for the thinning blond hair, Gilbert Applewhite wouldn’t be bad-looking, in a clever, nerdy kind of way.

They did, however, admit that they’d seen him before.

“He was in one of my Asclepius dreams,” Ari said. “When I had the ring on. The dream about how they made the rings. He was the guy who killed the lizard. Asclepius told me that was Gilbert Applewhite.”

“Of course he’d be the guy who killed the lizard,” Damian grumbled.

“You really hate him, huh?”

“I don’t know the guy, I guess, but I haven’t found anything to make me like him. He lived in Cambridge his whole life. Went to Harvard as a full-on legacy kid. His whole fuckin’ family was built around this founding myth of being smarter and better than everyone else because they all went to Harvard. He gave interviews about it for the admissions people once he was there and how it was so cool to go to Harvard because you could study your passion and still come out knowing your degree was valuable.” Damian mimed a gagging motion.

“I’m guessing he’s not from a family of classicists, then?”

“Nope. Mom’s a biomedical engineer, Dad’s the chair of the chemistry department at MIT. He’s an only child, because of course he is.”

“So am I.”

Damian raised an eyebrow at them. “And would you look at that. You, too, live in the same town where you went to college, and you know Greek. My point stands.”

“Fair enough.”

Damian ran through the highlights of Gilbert Applewhite’s career: graduated with honors from Harvard in 2003, attended the same exclusive PhD program as Nico – “Nico never mentioned him, but I don’t actually remember him mentioning anyone but Penny, and he never talks about grad school anymore, so maybe that’s not as weird as it sounds” – didn’t drop out of the program, unlike Nico, and went on to achieve a lucrative tenure-track position teaching dead languages and ancient religions at Saint Julian’s. His dissertation was roundly praised and quoted in publications much more prestigious than Ari’s senior thesis, and he’d won all sorts of teaching awards and presented at all sorts of conferences in his five short years at Saint Julian’s College. There was a profile on him in the school’s conservative student paper praising his commitment to upholding ‘traditional western values’ and another in the liberal student paper applauding him for handing out painstaking handwritten evaluations in lieu of grades, which he referred to as ‘a barbaric system, unnecessary past the age of twelve, which stifles students’ development in favor of cruel, mechanical standardization.’

Gilbert was, in short, the academic world’s equivalent of a rising superstar.

“No wonder you hate him,” Ari said.

“Everyone loves him!” Damian agreed. “Somebody’s got to take the opposition stance.”

“And you’re good at that.”

“How’d you know that, kid?” Damian grinned toothily. “So, here’s what I’m thinking. You’ve still got this asshole’s ring. Why don’t we take a little day trip and return it to him? See what we can get out of him while we’re there.”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

Damian flinched, looking genuinely affronted. But Ari shook their head and continued, “His ring ended up in my apartment by accident. I’m almost certain of that. It’s not the kind of thing you leave behind if you don’t want people to know that magic exists, and I doubt these guys do, seeing as they might have kidnapped Nico for figuring out one single page. Obviously these magicians, whoever they are, know exactly who you are, and they’ve been messing with me, too, but that doesn’t mean they know who I am or that I’m helping you.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know, but they might not. I mean, we’ve only been seen together outside this house, what, once? If they think giving me bat dreams and moving my coatrack scared me off you, maybe they’ll stop messing with me. And if that happens, and they don’t know we’re in this together, it seems stupid to blow that by marching into his office and proving that we’re both on this rescue mission. And what would we even ask him? We don’t have the first clue who the PGM are or what it stands for or why they took Penny and Nico or if they’re even responsible for that. Just because Nico didn’t trust them doesn’t mean he was right.”

“Yes it does,” Damian insisted. “Nico must have had a damn good reason to leave that note or else he wouldn’t have done it. If he says it’s their fault Penny left, I believe him.”

“He’s your brother. Of course you do.”

“And you said you believed me.”

Ari sighed and cracked their neck with a satisfying pop. “I believe you about magic. I don’t know if I believe – whatever. I just… I have so little sense of what we’re up against here, and between us we know two spells and one of them requires you to be completely incapacitated while Hermes pilots you like a mech. Doesn’t it strike you as a bad idea to go charging up to Saint Julian’s demanding answers?”

“Of course it does!” Damian burst out, exasperated. His eyebrows were raised in the middle and turned down at the edges, forming an arch over his scarred face and his one pleading eye. His big square hands gripped the edge of the table, and the gentle open corkscrews of his hair, which he wore loose, bounced around his face. Ari found themself thinking once again that he ought to grow the bleach out because his natural dark brown was such a good look on him. Ari found themself fighting the urge to lay one of their own hands – delicate and nimble, but small, so small that they’d had to give up on piano lessons at a young age – over his, to comfort him, or at least to calm him down.

“Of course it’s a bad idea,” he said, gathering himself somewhat. “I’m not that stupid, kid. But I’ve been hanging around here for months. Mowing through Nico and Penny’s good wine, trying not to get my ass kicked by invisible magicians, worrying like hell about what happened to the two of them, and there’s been fuck-all I could do about it. You wouldn’t believe how thrilled I was when I figured out all the shit on the walls was in Greek. Even though I couldn’t read it. Just because it was something. This Gilbert guy is the best lead I’ve ever had. He left his fucking magic ring in your apartment, kid, he broke into your goddamn apartment! Doesn’t that make you want to do something? Anything? Now imagine if he’d taken your brother with him on the way out!”

Ari nodded, slowly, wondering why they were doing it. “Alright.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We’ll go to Saint Julian’s. But we need more of a plan than storming in and threatening him ‘til he talks.”

“Can we at least call that Plan B?”

“Plan C at the very most.”

“So what’s your Plan A, then?”

Ari glanced over at the ibises. They had retreated somewhat from Damian, presumably because he had displeased them by continuing to make sudden loud noises, but they were still watching the conversation intently. Ari made eye contact with the white ibis.

“You know,” they said, “I might be remembering this wrong, but I’m pretty sure Thoth was an ibis.”

“Egyptian god of knowledge, wisdom, scribes, and all that shit? That Thoth?”

“You know that but you don’t know any of the Greek stuff?”

Damian shrugged. “Not my fault that I went through an Egypt phase instead of a Greece phase as a kid.”

“And the Thoth thing didn’t occur to you?”

“Not really. I mean, I guess now we’ve pretty much proven that you can summon gods, but like…” He cast a derisive glance over the ibises. “They’re birds. If the white one is a god, shouldn’t it have done something cool and badass by now instead of just squawking at me all the goddamn time?”

“I don’t know. It was just a thought. Anyway, here’s what I’m thinking for Plan A.”

***

They waited until Monday morning, when Full English was closed for its version of the weekend and Ari wouldn’t have to make another excuse to slip away from work. The two of them drove separately, with Ari setting out first thing in the morning and Damian waiting for Ari’s text that they were at a gas station near Barre before he left. They had debated whether or not the separation would matter but decided it was probably better if they had two different getaway vehicles. Just in case.

It was August now, and the heat had mellowed, but it hadn’t gone away. Going outside was less like being blasted with a laser gun and more like being gently, deliciously roasted alive. You were still dead, but you didn’t feel quite so annoyed about it. Like boiling a frog.

Despite the temperature, Ari was dressed up in an outfit that almost reached parody levels, so obviously did it worship the idea of academia. Embarrassingly, the outfit had not been hard to construct from items already in Ari’s closet. They’d swapped their contact lenses for a pair of round tortoiseshell frames they kept on hand only for emergencies and thrown an old brown messenger bag over their shoulder. Long-toed brown dress shoes they’d last worn when they were eighteen and defiantly chose a suit over a dress for their baby cousin Reyna’s baptism. A pair of deep green cotton twill trousers with pale brown pinstripes. A cream-colored button-down from the thrift store with miniature purple flowers embroidered around the shoulders. And, as a finishing touch, a pearl earring stuck through each point of the shirt’s collar. The earrings were a gift from Ari’s mother, presented to them on the occasion of their high school graduation in what Ari suspected was a last-ditch effort to convince them to act like a girl again. They’d never been able to wear the earrings without feeling things in the pit of their stomach that they preferred not to feel.

At least they’re getting some use now, Ari thought as they slackened their grip on the steering wheel and waited for the traffic to inch forward. Every few miles another construction site sprouted up along I-89 and forced the already congested flow of morning commuters into one lane or the other. Ari was making whatever the opposite of record time was. They turned the air conditioning up another notch in their car and fidgeted with one of the earrings they’d poked through their collar, rolling it this way and that. They hadn’t been sure about the outfit, but they’d sent Damian a picture and he had responded enthusiastically. ‘i just had to use almost all my data for the month to download that. worth it. u look really good. u also look like u worship neetcha. 10/10.’

‘Nietzche?’ Ari had responded, barely containing a laugh as they gave themself another once-over in the mirror.

‘yeah him. i was an economics major, we don’t care about how to spell dead guys names. see u in burlington, kid.’

They inched their way past the final neon orange cone and merged into the left lane, flying forward ahead of the people making their way into Montpelier for the day. They fiddled with the radio, tuning it away from the pop-country station that had been wheedling at their ears without them realizing and toward talk radio. The sounds of level-voiced Vermonters with studied mid-Atlantic accents discussing the upcoming state Senate primary and the record low price of gas kept them company all the way to Burlington.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.