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“What?” Megaera asks as Zagreus gets dressed. “What’s eating you this time?”
He hates her. It’s obvious in the short, choppy movements he uses to pin his chiton but it was obvious before, too, in the guttural sounds he made and the way his fingers bent desperate scratching at the wall. She sees this all the time, the self-pity and offloading of blame. He and the wretches of Tartarus choose to loathe her, as if none of them made their own decisions.
And now he’s angry that she cut it short, that she has no interest in playing along tonight. He doesn’t answer her or even look her way, instead focusing his burning glare on the mirror as he straightens his hair, his armbands.
“I’ll leave,” Megaera threatens, and that makes him turn.
“No.” Something dark and arrogant in his voice. “I have something to say.”
“Say it, then.”
“I’m not going to marry you, Megaera. This is over.”
Something turns over in her gut as the words hit her, as sudden and painful as her surface transformations, but above it she feels a cold nothing. She sneers. “Oh, is that up to you now?” she asks, because it isn’t.
But Zagreus answers her with a wide grimace, lips pulled back from his teeth in an ugly imitation of a smile. “What, isn’t that what you wanted, Meg?” he says, voice richly airy. “For me to claim a little of the authority of my birthright? To step up and assert myself in the Underworld? Well, here I go. Thanks ever so much for your instruction, but I won’t need it anymore.”
“Ha, ha, ha.” Three deliberate syllables, pitched like real laughter but unfelt. She isn’t feeling anything. She’s shaking. That’s not relevant. “You’re kidding. You think you’ve matured, little man? Think you’re good now?”
“Maybe I do.”
“Well, you aren’t.” And that’s never been more obvious than it is when he tries to hold himself like his father, draping authority over himself like too-large clothing. “Listen to me, Zagreus,” she says, and hears cruelty in her voice, but that doesn’t mean that what she’s about to say isn’t true. “You’re never going to be any good until you get the hell over yourself. Not for your father, not for anyone else whose esteem you so obviously crave. Until you figure out how to get your head out of your own ass and grow up, you’re never going to amount to anything more than a spoiled brat.”
She watches the blow land, watches Zag reel behind his eyes. Everything he’s feared, coming out of her mouth rather than whirling like a cyclone in his own heart. She’s bitten it back so many times. But apparently sparing his feelings has given him a pathetically inflated sense of his improvement, let him think that no one can see the truth. No longer.
He opens his mouth once; no sound comes out. His hand comes up to his face, nails raking at his forehead, and he breathes. As his hand drags downward, his expression rearranges itself. She watches him decide not to care.
“Well!” he says, dropping his arm to his side, and he might as well be speaking to a stranger. A pampered prince talking down to a subject. “If that’s how you feel, Megaera, then I cordially invite you to consider all of that none of your business any longer.”
“Gladly,” she tosses back, her eyes cold, because she knows how to wear all the scorn and pride he’ll never be able to mimic.
“Wonderful! Then we’re in accord.” He smiles, facetiously gracious. Bastard. Bastard. Megaera wants to shred his bones with her fingernails. “Get the hell out of my room,” he says, “and don’t come back.”
Without a word, Megaera turns and strides away, into his courtyard, and from there she takes to wing and Tartarus’s dusty air hits her all at once. A suffocating familiarity. The grit stings in her eyes and her throat. And with that, the First of the Furies throws herself into her work.