A Shrine to an Unknown God

STITCH

I SLIDE THE KNIFE beneath his skin. It races up his palm, slicing open the flesh. The wound forms a clean line of red and then splits.

Ezra yelps, wrenching his hand away from me. His blood spills onto the white tile floor, forming a small river in the space between them.

Marisol screams. Dahlia's eyes roll back in her head. She slips out of her chair, her body slamming into the floor. I did not anticipate either of them reacting so dramatically—Ezra, sure, I was half-expecting him to black out himself, but Marisol and Dahlia are women. They should be tougher than this.

"You'd think Dahlia was a man the way she fainted at the sight of blood," I joke to Marisol.

"Don't say that to her." Marisol looks at me, hard and cold. Her eyes shift to Ezra's bloody arm and Dahlia blacked out on the floor, deciding which she'd rather do—see if he has self-healing powers or help her friend. After a moment she sighs and kneels at Dahlia's side, pressing two fingers against her throat, then moving her feet and lifting them up above her body.

"Are you trying to lift her?" I ask. "Do you need help?"

"No, you're supposed to lift their legs like this when someone passes out," she explains. "To help get the blood flowing or whatever. I learned it when I got CPR-certified for extra credit in health class."

"YOU GUYS!" Ezra yells, flailing his bloody hand about. "It's working!"

I grab hold of his hand and inspect it. Sure enough, his wound has already started to heal itself. The blood-flow has stopped, and the skin has started to stitch itself together again.

"Holy shit," Marisol says. "Hoooooooly shit."

By the time she's said those four words, the wound has completely closed itself off, leaving nothing to show it was there other than the drops of blood on his palm, and the river of the stuff on the floor.

"I'm gonna go viral," Ezra says, with tears in his eyes. "I'm gonna be rich."

"I know your mom had to have told you something about your dad," I tell him. "Tell me everything she told you, even the littlest details."

"Who gives a shit about my daddy issues? I'm gonna be rich!"

"Your dad was a god, Ezra. Don't you want to know which one?"

And if it could have been Apollo. And if his mom could have been Evadne. And if he might be the one I have to kill.

"Fine." He sinks into his chair, grinning from ear-to-ear and marveling at his hand. "She told me I have his eyes, and his smile. And that she met him on vacation—in Greece, God, it should have been obvious. But, Antigone, riddle me this: how did a devout Texan Catholic end up banging a Greek god? I mean, props to my mamma for that."

Ezra's eyes, green as so many things—green as the ocean, green as wine-grapes, green as the sky before a thunderstorm, green as the plague. And his smile, always so mischievous, always a step ahead, the smile of a thief and a trickster, the smile of a lover, the smile of a battle-drunk soldier, the smile of someone who knows too much. He could be the son of so many gods.

His appearance—and the appearance of his father, if we had more of a description than having Ezra's eyes and smile—would give little concrete away about his parentage. I took mostly after my father's go-to appearance, so I'm a bad example, but most demigods look little-to-nothing like their godly parent. Gods can change their appearance so often, it's difficult to nail down what one looks like. They can even change their gender at will—for all we know, Ezra could be the son of a typically-female goddess that decided to present as a male in order to seduce his mother.