OLYMPUS REBORN — BOOK ONE: ZEUS REINCARNATED AS A TEENAGER
Volume: One — The Awakening
I should explain how the visions work. Or how I've come to understand them through the rearview mirror.
The thirty-second ones are manageable. Demi goes still, she sees, she comes back. It's disorienting but quick—like a spiritual sneeze. Then there are the "Deep Dives." I'd seen two of those so far: the Bridge and the one in Indiana she'd had to navigate alone. She describes those as being pulled under—not looking at a movie, but being inside the storm, having to swim back to the surface before she forgets how to breathe.
I'd filed those under: Monitor. High-risk. Potential breaking point.
It became a breaking point at 7:00 AM in a gas station parking lot just past the Colorado border.
We'd made good time through Nebraska. It was flat, fast, and mercifully uneventful. The sky had behaved, the car hadn't broken down, and even the pull in my chest—the golden compass needle that pointed West—felt steadier.
But Colorado was a different beast.
The second the Rockies jagged across the horizon, something in my marrow woke up. It was the elevation. The ancient, unyielding stone. The way the sky opened up, getting bigger and closer at the same time. The divine current runs closer to the surface here; it's less buried under two centuries of concrete and Wi-Fi signals.
I felt more like myself than I had since the fall. I was careful not to enjoy it. Getting comfortable is how you get caught with your guard down.
I was swiping Gary's card at the pump—another ghost-debt for the list—when I heard her make a sound.
It wasn't a word. It wasn't even a scream. It was a sharp, strangled intake of breath that signaled wrongness before my brain could categorize it.
I spun around.
Demi was leaning against the passenger door, one hand white-knuckled on the roof of the Civic. She wasn't rigid. She was vibrating. Her whole body was shaking with a frequency that looked like it was trying to shake her apart.
Her eyes were silver—not just a flicker, but a full, luminescent chrome that seemed to cast its own light. Her other hand was pressed flat against the car's window as if she were trying to push herself through the glass.
I was across the concrete in three steps. "Demi."
No response. Her gaze was fixed on something five thousand miles away.
"Demi!" I grabbed her shoulders. Her skin felt like it was humming. I could feel the static discharge jumping to my fingertips. "Hey. Come back. Right now. That's an order."
Nothing. She was slipping.
I looked around. Early morning. One other car was at the far end of the pumps. The attendant inside was buried in a tabloid. Nobody was watching.
I did the only thing I could. I reached for that thin, needle-eye thread of power I still held—the spark that remained of the King—and I pushed it toward her. It wasn't a lightning bolt. It was a tether. I wrapped the feeling of here and now around her like a shroud.
Stay with me, I thought, projecting it with every ounce of divine will I had left. Come back to the surface.
The shaking slowed.
Her eyes flickered, shifting through a dozen shades of gray before finally settling back into the dark, familiar brown. She gasped, her knees buckling, and she grabbed the front of my hoodie with both hands just to stay upright.
I stood there and let her hold on. I didn't breathe until she did.
It took a full minute for her heart rate to level out. She didn't let go immediately, and for once, I didn't make a sarcastic comment about personal space.
"That was a bad one," I said softly.
"Yeah." Her voice sounded like it had been dragged over broken glass. "Yeah, that was... that was deep."
"What did you see?"
She didn't answer right away. She was doing her mental inventory—sorting the images, locking the scary ones in boxes.
"The sky," she said finally, looking up at the clear, crisp Colorado blue. "But it was... wrong. Like there was something underneath it that shouldn't be there. Something wearing the atmosphere like a stolen coat." She shivered. "It's not here yet. But it's practicing."
"Practicing what?"
"Breaking through."
The gas pump clicked off with a metallic thud.
"There's more," I said. It wasn't a question.
"There's always more." She finally released my hoodie, smoothing out the wrinkled fabric with trembling fingers. She took a real breath, her posture returning to that sharp, Demi-standard. "I saw your brothers. I don't know their faces—not yet—but I felt them. Like two radio stations I almost recognized."
She paused, her brow furrowing. "One of them is... standing at the edge of something. On purpose. Like he's been waiting for the world to catch up to him."
"Which one?"
"The loud one," she said. "The one that tastes like salt."
Poseidon. Standing at the edge of a disaster on purpose. That was the most Poseidon sentence I'd heard in sixteen years. A reluctant smirk touched my face.
"And the other?" I asked.
"Far," she said. "Very far. But... calm. Completely calm. Like whatever is coming, he already knows how the story ends."
I felt something loosen in my chest—a knot of anxiety I hadn't even realized I was carrying.
Hades. Calm. Unbothered by the apocalypse.
Of course he was. He always was the only one of us who understood that the end is just another type of beginning.
"Okay," I said, opening her door. "Get in the car."
"Zeus—"
"You're back. You're okay. Get in the car and tell me if the 'Sky-Coat' starts getting closer."
She looked at me for a second, her expression unreadable—searching for something in my face that I wasn't sure I was ready to show her. Then she nodded and slid into the seat.
I stood by the pump for a moment longer, looking up at the sky. It was beautiful. It was blue. It was silent.
Not yet, I thought at the thing practicing underneath the blue. Not while I'm still breathing.
I got in the car and drove.