DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

with Dionysus. It was Dion. If this had been anyone else, she wouldn’t be so confused. She wouldn’t feel so… conflicted.

He kissed her gently on the top of the head. “I love you,” he said.

She blinked away the tears. “I love you too,” she admitted.

He turned his head. “I’m sorry!” he called to Kevin.

She looked over and saw that Kevin that been thrown into the water of the lake and was furiously paddling between two dead bodies, trying to reach the shore.

They’d gotten a break. Anger, fear, love—something had allowed Dion to maintain control of the god’s form for a lot longer than ever before.

She knew it could disappear at any second, so she quickly took his huge face in her hands and said, “I have to kill you.”

“I know.” He looked into her eyes, and she saw an echo of his old self.

She recognized the way he blinked his eyes, the way his eyebrows moved.

She started to cry again, and he used a finger to wipe her tears. “I was going to ask you to kill me. I won’t fight.”

There was so much she wanted to ask, so much she wanted to say, but there was no time. His tentative hold could slip at any second, and then they’d be dead.

“Your mother loves you too,” she said.

And she tore him apart.

As promised, he did not put up a fight. She let loose, and even she was shocked by the power within her, by the extent of the wildness, by the violence of which she was capable. Like a cartoon character, like a whirlwind, she burrowed into him, through him, rending flesh, breaking bone, slashing organs. She kept moving—kicking, clawing, grabbing, digging—and she was screaming and crying at the same time, the saltiness of his blood mingling with the saltiness of her own tears, and she continued on, unable to stop, tearing apart not Dion but the thing that had stolen Dion, the thing that had taken him from her.

She collapsed, exhausted. Her vocal cords were hurt from screaming, but the tears were still streaming down her blood-soaked face. There was nothing left of Dionysus. There was no head, no hand, no foot, no finger. Nothing even remotely recognizable. There were only bits of bone and flesh, scattered over an amazingly long section of shore. And blood.

A lot of blood.

Kevin stood staring at her, still in the water. There was fear on his face, fear of her, and though she wanted to reassure him that everything was okay, everything was all right, she did not.

She had killed Dion.

She had loved him.

And she had killed him.

Already she felt different. Tired. She wondered what was happening down in the valley. Were the people still drinking, still partying, still celebrating? Or with the god’s influence gone, were they shaking their heads and coming to, as if awakening from a bad dream, wondering where they were and what had happened? She looked up. The trees and bushes had not changed back. The ones he had transformed were still in the shapes he had made them.

What had happened to the satyrs and the centaurs and the nymphs?

God, she felt tired. She leaned back, her head resting on soft, cooling flesh.

Kevin walked over, stood next to her. He looked down at her form, but there was nothing sexual in his gaze, only worry. She realized that she did not feel anything sexual either.

Not even when she thought of Dion.

“What’s to stop him from coming back?” Kevin asked finally.

“There are no maenads left. Only me.”

“But he’s a cyclical god, right? He dies each year and is reborn?”

“He never brought the others back. There’s no one to bring him back. He was a god of flesh, and his flesh is no more.”

“That’s all then? That’s it?”

She nodded tiredly. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess it is.”

She lay there for a while, Kevin still standing next to her. She closed her eyes for a few seconds—she thought. But when she opened them, it was dark, it was night. Kevin was still standing above her, watching her with concern.

She sat up, her head thumping.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said, and surprisingly, she did feel better. “I guess I am.” She stood, walked slowly over to the edge of the lake, where she stripped off her pants. She looked at Kevin, smiled, then jumped into the cold, refreshing water to wash off the blood.

EPILOGUE

Both the state and federal government stuck by their radioactive-waste story, sending in hundreds of troops and agents dressed in white contamination suits, quarantining the area and debriefing the residents with an elaborate series of physical tests and psychological examinations that Penelope assumed were supposed to brainwash the muddled, hungover citizens into thinking that what had happened had not happened.

She and Kevin knew better.

They were close after that, nearly inseparable. Kevin’s parents survived and he went back to live with them. Since her mothers were all dead and she was too old to be adopted or become a ward of the state, she had herself declared an emancipated teenager by the court and moved into a small apartment near school. She received an allowance from her mothers’ estate, although the amount of the estate and its assets were still being determined by lawyers and accountants and she would probably not inherit what was left of the winery or its proceeds for several years.

Somewhere toward the end of the school year, she and Kevin officially became a couple. He moved in with her after graduation, but that did not last the summer, and she went off alone to Berkeley in the fall.

They’d shared a lot, but perhaps they’d shared too much. Seeing each other, they were constantly reminded of what had happened, and the wounds that should have healed into scars seemed to be perpetually kept open.

And Dion was always between them.

But if the experience they’d gone through had torn them apart, it also permanently linked them together. No one else had gone through