"You're a what now?" Surely I hadn't heard that right.

"A god."

"You're a - what -" I was dumbstruck for a second, then burst out in laughter. I couldn't help myself. Any inclination I'd had to believe him was gone. "A god? Are you sure about that?"

"Yes, I'm sure," he said, patiently waiting for me to finish laughing.

"You're… god? The God? The almighty one?"

Now he was the one to start laughing. "No, Emma, monotheism is a myth. I'm one of many."

"Well, if you're a god, aren't you a myth?"

"I'm standing right in front of you. I'm pretty real, aren't I?" he smiled.

"I'm… I have to sit down," I said and leaned against the windowsill, still laughing but looking at him a little more cautiously now. If he honestly thought he was a god, or anything other than human, and he'd collected all those weird passports and paintings and other things just to convince himself of that… then at the very least he was delusional, but probably psychotic and maybe dangerous, too.

"What makes you think you are… a god, Noah?" I tried to sound patient and understanding. I needed to figure out what he was thinking, what was going on, and most of all whether I had to get myself out of here as fast as I could.

"I don't think that, it's the truth. You see that spear?" He pointed at the spear on the wall. "That's mine, as in, that used to be my weapon of choice. I'm the god of war."

I looked at the huge, ancient-looking spear. I hadn't really thought about it, nor had I thought about the antique shotgun in the living room, but was it possible he'd… stolen them? Because he believed they were rightfully his? "The god. Of war."

"Yes. I know it's hard to believe." He sat back on the desk, acting laid back, but I could see his fingers twitching again.

"You're damn right it's hard to believe. Are you an overly excited LARPer?" I asked. "There's no way this is real."

He was getting impatient. I heard it in his voice - a hint of irritation had seeped in. "I'm telling you the truth, Emma. What do I have to do to make you believe?"

"Easy! Do some magic godly tricks!" I exclaimed. "Show, don't tell, Noah!"

"Fine," he grumbled.

I saw a flash of golden light and Noah was gone - I looked around and called out for him tentatively, when a soft gust of air pulled my glance upwards. A woodpecker was sitting on the bookcase - then, just as quickly as a second and a half earlier, the woodpecker disappeared into another flash of light and a large dog stood in front of me. Ace, who had been resting in the corridor, raised his head, but went back to sleep as soon as he recognized this other dog. It looked up at me, then - flash - was replaced by an old man, leaning on his cane and his back bent.

All of them had Noah's brown eyes.

The old man stared at me for a second, gauging my reaction maybe, and then turned back into Noah.

"What the f-" I sputtered when I finally found my voice. This was too much. In less than twenty minutes I'd gone from complete bewilderment at the passports to thinking my boyfriend was batshit crazy, to… whatever the hell this was. To him actually being a god, or at least something that could turn into animals. And all that only two days after I'd been assaulted and seen Noah go completely berserk and… oh. I supposed that made sense, then, if he was a god of war.

Noah noticed my legs buckling before I did. He caught me by the arms and lifted me onto the desk. "Do you need a minute?"

I took a few seconds to control my breathing, then shook my head. "No. I'm okay."

"Are you sure?" He looked me in the eyes inquisitively, as if he was expecting me perhaps to faint or start crying.

"Yes." I sighed to help my muscles relax. If I could keep my head straight, think rational thoughts, then maybe I could get through this conversation. "So if your name isn't Noah, or James or Adriano… then what is it?"

"My real name is Ares," he said, and as he spoke it was as if his skin slowly became more brilliant, as if there was a golden light that shone out of him, but it was more a sensation he radiated than something I could actually see. It had been that before when I'd caught glimpses of it too, I realized now.

"Ares... the... Greek god?"

"Well, Greece didn't exist as such at the time, and I wasn't actually born there, oh, and I'd consider myself a god of the entire world rather than just the one country, but yes, I suppose you would put it like that."

I looked down at my feet that were dangling above the ground. "Right."

He reached for my hand, but I pulled it back. His adam's apple moved. "What else do you want to know?"

I didn't know - I had so many questions that I probably wouldn't be able to ask all of them in a lifetime. I didn't know which question was important to ask first. I hadn't even yet been able to process what had happened on Friday night, let alone everything that I'd seen and heard in the past half hour.

"What's with the shirt?" I asked eventually - possibly the most mundane question I could've asked.

"What about the shirt?" He raised an eyebrow, challenging me.

"The one in your closet. With the rips and the stains."

"That was blood."

"No, there was gold. What's the gold?"

"I'm telling you, it was blood. My blood."

I shook my head. "I saw the blood, but I'm talking about the gold."

He sighed. "The gold is my blood."

I frowned. "Wait, what?"

"Do I need to show you?" he asked reluctantly.

Somehow, even after having seen him change into a bird and a dog, this seemed impossible. "Yes."

"Really?" He raised an eyebrow, but when I nodded, sighed again in resignation - and then he was suddenly holding a knife. "Aw, man, I really don't want to do this…" But he rolled up his shirt sleeve and pressed the sharp point of the knife into the skin of his arm. A drop of gold welled up, then another. His upper lip was raised in pain until he lifted the knife and his skin healed instantly. He wiped the drops away and licked them from his thumb. "Any more questions?"

I stared at the spot where the knife had disappeared from his hand into thin air. I probably shouldn't be surprised that he could do that. I looked up at his face. His expression was friendly, affectionate, but there was an intensity to it that I couldn't quite place. "You don't look like the art I've seen of you. Of Ares, I mean."

"Well, it's hardly photorealistic," he shrugged. "Especially the pottery doesn't really do any of us justice." His tone was so lighthearted, as if he could just drop this bomb on me and then we'd carry on as we had, but he looked different to me. I hadn't found him intimidating in a long time, probably not since our third or fourth date, but that was back. Now that I knew he was a god, the god of war, of brutality, of bloodlust, and now that I'd seen that bloodlust in action, I realized that his usual composure and nonchalance wasn't who he really was. I moved the tiniest bit away from him on the desk. I wasn't scared of him, I trusted that he wouldn't hurt me, but I couldn't be that close to him.

"So that's that," he said, businesslike almost and not having noticed my subtle distancing, and turned to me. "Now what?"

I frowned. "What do you mean, now what?"

"We could sit here all night playing twenty thousand questions and I'd tell you whatever you want to know, but I'm getting hungry, to be honest."

"You're getting hungry." I looked at him incredulously.

"Yeah. Aren't you?" He stood up and closed the desk drawer, then took a step towards the door but halted when he saw I wasn't moving.

"I'm really not." What was I supposed to do? I didn't want to go home just to be alone and ruminate over what I had learned. I couldn't go to Gabrielle's or Rachel's - I wouldn't be able to act like nothing had happened, but I also had no idea how to explain this. I didn't really want to stay either. I hopped off the desk and left the room without saying another word.

"Emma, wait," Noah said, following me. "Emma!"

I ignored him. I just crossed the landing, dashed down the stairs, and yanked my phone off its charger.

"Emma!" He took two steps at a time on his way down.

I grabbed my jacket and tried frantically to find my keys that were no longer in its pocket. Where were they? Could they have fallen inbetween the seat cushions? I got on my knees and looked underneath the leather couch - anything not to meet his gaze.

"Emma!" Noah - Ares - no, Noah - whoever roared from where he stood in the doorway.

I froze, my head still angled towards the ground. He'd never, not even once, raised his voice at me. He didn't sound angry, distraught rather, but I'd only witnessed that level of emotion in his voice once and that was two days ago when he'd been threatening Daniel.

I slowly sat back, rolled my feet to the side, and stood up. "What?" I shouted back. "What do you want? From me?"

He stared at me, astonished and perhaps a little hurt. "You seemed okay with it." His voice was restrained, as if he'd regretted that roar the moment it had exited his mouth.

"Of course I'm not okay with it. How could I be okay with you telling me you're not fucking human? That you've literally lived thousands of years? I can't even grasp the idea of what you are. How do you expect me to process all of that and be okay with it already?" Already? Had I just said that? There was no already. I couldn't imagine a future in which I would just accept this.

"I'm not expecting you to be okay with it. I was actually amazed how well you took it. I'm just... surprised by this sudden change." He moved closer, eyeing me carefully. I didn't stop him.

Had I taken it well? I really thought I hadn't. I was still not taking it well. I sat down, rubbing my forehead. "You said you wanted me to figure it out for myself."

"Right." He lowered himself onto the couch next to me, but left some space between our bodies. He'd picked up on that hint, at least.

"So you left all those things out there for me to find?"

"What, you think you would've found out if I hadn't wanted you to? That I'd just carelessly strewn evidence of my former lives around?" he grinned.

I looked up. "I thought maybe you were just really sloppy. Or that you thought you hid it well enough."

He started laughing. "Emma, I'm as old as humanity. I like to think I've picked up a trick or two."

"So you wanted me to know."

"I did."

I frowned. "Why? Do you regularly tell people you're a Greek god?"

He shook his head. "No. Actually…" He bit his lip. "The last time I told someone was in the late eighteenth century."

My mouth fell open. The whole concept of him being fifty thousand years old had so far only felt abstract - but now that he mentioned this concrete point in time, I realized that he had actually lived through all of history. Those paintings in the study had been real scenes. He had seen the French Revolution. The Renaissance. The Middle Ages. Rome. The pyramids - not just those in Egypt, but all of them, probably. Shakespeare. Major scientific discoveries. I wondered what his life had been like throughout all of that. Whether he'd had friends, jobs (but then he probably wasn't really a soldier now, was he?) - whether he had put down roots the way he had here.

"That's over two hundred years ago."

"Eh, just a blip," he shrugged, but his casual dismissal wasn't very convincing.

"Why haven't you told anyone since then?"

He looked away, pondering it for a moment. "That last time didn't go so well. In all honesty… you're the first person since Rome I'm telling of my own volition."

Wow. I felt my anger at his lying and at his mind-blowing revelation fade a little and be replaced by surprise and… and pity. As far as I knew, no one practiced ancient Greek or Roman religion these days. I couldn't even fathom how it must feel if no one had believed in your existence for almost two millennia, and if you had had to hide your true self all that time. It had to be so lonely.

I felt an urge to reach for his hand, his knee, just to touch him - but I didn't want him to interpret that as a sign all was forgiven and all was good. Instead, I grabbed a cushion and held it tight in front of my stomach. "Why tell me? If it's such a secret?"

He turned his gaze to me, a gaze full of hope and yet also of anguish. "Because I trust you."

"With this? I don't even know if I trust me with this." What was I supposed to do with all this knowledge? With knowing or at least having an inkling of how the world had been created, who ruled over our existence, maybe even of what happened after death? I couldn't tell anyone, but I also couldn't keep this to myself. It was too much, too big, to keep to myself.

"But I do, I do trust you. It's just that I wanted you to know me for me first, not as a god… because that last time, her finding out changed everything." He looked resentful, but also a bit guilty saying that.

Her. Of course. Of course he had a past - his past was literally tens of thousands of years. He'd had plenty of time to be with thousands, no, millions of women. What did that mean for us? How significant could I be?

"But who says that I'm gonna be any different? That this time it's not going to change everything?"

He smiled bittersweetly. "You're already different, Emma. You're not relishing in it."

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Claudine, she…" His fingers twitched again. "It was mostly lust between us. Physicality. She got addicted once she found out. She went overboard and that should have bothered me, but I bathed in it. I ate it all up… No mortal had known so fully who I was in over a thousand years and no one had accepted it in much longer than that. I gulped down every bit of self esteem she gave me. She made me accept myself, even it was more about what I was than who. But who I was was… not a good person."

The period at the end of that sentence sounded out loud enough for me to know he wasn't going to elaborate on that, at least not now. In the silence that followed I thought about those words - 'not a good person' - and I realized that they could mean something different to him than they did to me. Wouldn't a god of war's sense of morality be completely warped, anyway?

He continued speaking before I had the chance to ask a question, if I'd even wanted to. "But you know what, Emma?" He looked up at me and smiled. "You make me a better person. Not a better god - hell, you should see me in my battles now, all I can do is think of you… but you make me a better man. And you make me happy. I haven't felt truly happy since London, or maybe not even since Florence, and you pulled me out of the hellhole. Don't you see how much you mean to me?"

I swallowed. I took a deep breath in and looked away, stalling. He wasn't saying those three little words, but it sounded suspiciously like a declaration of love. I didn't know what to do with that - I barely even knew how I felt about him now. Yes, I had fallen for him… but I'd fallen for Noah. Even though he was behaving much like his usual self - if a little more sensitive, a little more direct, a little less detached - I felt like I had to get to know him all over again. I could hardly even comprehend I was talking to a god, let alone that I'd been in a relationship with a god. What if everything had been an act? What if none of 'Noah' was real? What if, as a god, he was apathetic or even disdainful towards humans? I didn't know him at all.

Aside from all of that, I had no idea what London and Florence meant to him, but they were clearly important. There were stories there.

I was saved from having to answer by a sarcastic voice that would've been sneering, had that been possible for one that was as melodic as Luca's.

"Look at you two little lovebirds."

We both looked up, startled. Noah (or Ares - really, what was I supposed to call him?) groaned. "What are you doing here, Apollo?"

I stared from Noah to Luca. "Wait, you're Apollo? As in the sun god?" I could've known. He looked like the actual sun.

"And god of music, arts, poetry, healing, archery, prophecy and truth, patron deity of Delphi, averter of evil, protector of fugitives and ref-"

"Yeah, yeah, we get it, Daenerys," Noah said, waving his hand dismissively.

Luca - no, Apollo - took an indignant step forward. "How dare you call me -"

"Why are you here?" Noah got up, moving to stand protectively right in front of me.

Apollo smirked. "You and I have got to talk, Ares. I hear you're confessing all your dirty little secrets."