"Why were you sitting up there?"
He pulled away, uncomfortable.
That only worried me more. "Acheron? What is it?"
He swallowed and dropped his gaze to the floor. "You will think me mad if I tell you."
"No, I won't. I would never think such a thing as that."
He looked even more uncomfortable before he spoke in a thin tone. "I hear voices sometimes, Ryssa. When I'm near the sea, they're louder."
"What voices?"
He closed his eyes and tried to withdraw.
I gently took his arm and kept him by my chair. "Acheron, tell me."
When he met my gaze, I saw the fear and anguish inside him. It was obvious this was something else that had caused him to be beaten in the past. "They're the voices of the Atlantean gods."
Shocked by his unexpected answer, I stared at him.
"They call to me. I can hear them even now like whispers in my head."
"What do they say?"
"They tell me to come home to the hall of the gods so that they can welcome me. All but one. Hers is stronger than the others and it tells me to stay away. She tells me that the others want me dead and that I shouldn't listen to their lies. That she'll come for me one day and take me home where I belong."
I frowned at his words. By his eyes, everyone knew Acheron was the son of some god. But to my knowledge no demigod had ever heard voices of the other gods. At least not like this.
"Mother says that you must be a son of Zeus," I told him. "She says that he must have visited her one night, disguised as Father, and that she didn't know he'd been in her bed until you were born. So why would you hear the voices of the Atlantean gods when we're Greek and your father is either Zeus or a Greek king?"
"I don't know. Idikos drugs me whenever I hear them until I'm too dizzy and numb to notice anymore. He says it's a figment of my mind. He says . . ." His face stricken, he looked away.
"He says what?"
"That the gods have all cursed me. It's their will that I serve as I do. It's why I was born so unnaturally and why everyone wants to sleep with me. The gods all hate me and they want to punish me for my birth."
"The gods don't hate you, Acheron. How could they?"
He wrenched his arm from my grasp and gave me a look so insolent that I was shocked by it. Never had he shown this much spirit. "If they don't hate me, then why am I like this? Why has my father denied me? Why would my mother never even look at me? Why have I been kept as an animal whose only role in life is to serve as my master bids me? Why can't people look at me without attacking me?"
I cupped his face in my hands, grateful that he no longer tensed when I touched him. "That has nothing to do with the gods. Only other people's stupidity. Has it never occurred to you that the gods sent me to free you because they didn't want to see you suffer anymore?"
His gaze fell. "I can't hope for that, Ryssa."
"Why not?"
"Because hope scares me. What if this is all I am? A whore to be bartered and sold. The gods make kings and they make whores. It's obvious which role they chose for me."
I winced at his words. Honestly, I preferred the weeks when he refused to mention being a whore. I hated the reminders of what had been done to him against his will, especially those wretched balls in his tongue that flashed every time he spoke.
"You are not cursed!"
"Then why when I tried to gouge out my eyes would they not stay out?"
Paralyzed by those words, I couldn't breathe for several seconds. "What?"
"I've tried three times to gouge out my eyes so that they couldn't offend others, and each time they returned to my skull by themselves. If I'm not cursed, why would they do that?" He lifted his hand to show me that cut that had already started to mend. "Injuries that take weeks for others to heal, heal in days if not hours on me."