Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters by Emily Roberson

Author:Emily Roberson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

* * *

We take the golf cart back to the stadium entrance, then ride in my SUV back to the palace.

A production assistant is waiting inside the doors with sandwiches for both of us. We eat while Icarus leads me to the area on the first level where my mother’s dance party will be hosted. It is an enormous U-shaped room, surrounding an outdoor plaza with a giant lighted stage and a swimming pool. Inside, there are bars along every wall, banquette seating, dance floors, an elevated DJ booth. Disco balls hang from the ceiling, ironically. Maybe.

The party is only an hour or so away, so right now, the room is a blur of activity as everyone makes sure that the setting is exactly right.

“You’ll be starting here,” Icarus says.

“At the party?” I say. “Do I have to?”

“Yes, yes, you do,” he says. “This is the path you will need to take. That way we won’t have to make a camera crew follow you.”

“Okay,” I say.

We go to the ninetieth floor. Not a floor I’ve spent any time on.

Our feet are silent on the thick pile carpet.

“Here we are,” Icarus says as we come into a three-story-high atrium with a wall of windows. Unlike most of the palace, this space is not cream and gold. Instead, the walls are black, only the accents are in gold. A flight of floating black Lucite stairs climbs along the back wall of the atrium. We take the stairs to a black door, and when I open it, we are in another room I’ve never seen.

I can tell it’s new from the smell of fresh paint. They probably took the tags off the furniture this morning. Which isn’t surprising. I swear sometimes my mother’s decorating gets more hits on the Internet than Xenodice’s behind.

The room is strange. My mother really let some architect show off in here. The walls are sloped, twice as tall on the outside as at the entrance, and the large, eight-paned windows are set at the same cockeyed angle as the walls. They are covered in mosaic tile in an abstract design of swirls and whorls, done in black and dove gray. The only furniture is a very long, ultra-streamlined red chaise longue; a black midcentury-modern cube end table with a planter full of wheatgrass on top; and a black onyx obelisk on a pedestal in the middle of the room. The chaise longue looks like a comic-book drawing of a sofa—the place where the villain’s girlfriend would be lazing in evening wear, drinking cocktails and watching him hatch his evil plans.

Icarus stands behind me and puts his hands on my shoulders. “I was thinking you wouldn’t feel comfortable with a cameraman in here with you and Theseus yet—”

“Yet?” I say, glancing back at him. “Icarus, this isn’t going to be a regular thing.”

He squeezes my shoulders. “I’m trying to make it better for you.” He lets go of me and moves to the wall. “Since I didn’t want to send in a cameraman, you’re going to have to watch your position in the room.

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