He stared at the words, still unable to see her point. “You’ve lost me. What does this prove and why is it important?”
“It proves you’re not hunting Sirens.” When he glanced up at her, still completely confused about where she was going with this, she shook her head. “It means what happened to you isn’t related to the soul mate curse. If it truly were the soul mate curse making you hunt down Sirens in revenge for your mate’s death, you’d have gone crazy as soon as Penelopei died. But you didn’t. Silas told me that you didn’t start having these episodes until long after you’d faked your death and were living in the human realm alone.”
Ari looked down at the page. That was true. His episodes hadn’t started for several months after Penelopei’s death.
“These blackout moments don’t happen when you’re around regular Sirens,” Daphne added. “I think they happen only when you sense the Sirenum Scorpoli. And if that’s the case, then I think it’s highly possible Hera took advantage of your pain and depression after you lost your mate and cursed you a second time.”
“You just said a person can’t be cursed more than once by any one god. Hera is the one who established the soul mate curse.”
“Right. But once an Argonaut’s soul mate is dead, there is no more curse, now is there?”
Ari studied her smooth face in the firelight. Her eyes were filled with hope and promise, but he was wary. For fifty years he’d been fighting the soul mate curse. Hadn’t he?
“I hear what you’re saying,” he said cautiously. “But there’s no way to prove it. Just because I didn’t flip out on the Siren upstairs doesn’t mean anything. It could just be that the soul mate curse is changing, adapting, I don’t know, fucking with me so I go even more nuts.”
“I might have believed that myself until I saw the marking on your calf.”
“What marking?” He reached for the edge of his sweats and pulled them up to his knee. “I don’t have a marking on my leg.”
“It’s faint. I didn’t notice it until I helped you out of your wet clothes and put you into bed. Here.” She placed her hand on his leg and twisted so he could see the back of his calf. And the very faint mark, two inches long, so light and in a place he never thought to look, he’d never noticed it.
A feather. A peacock feather.
“The peacock is a symbol for Hera,” Daphne said. “I looked it up. No other Argonauts have that marking. Which means this mark, this curse? It’s unique to you.”
Ari stared at the marking, his mind tripping back over every encounter he’d ever had with Sirens. He couldn’t remember them. Couldn’t see their faces or the markings on their arms. But even if Daphne’s theory was true, it didn’t change anything.
He set the book down, what little hope he’d foolishly built up crumbling at his feet. “Whether they’re Sirens or this Sirenum Scorpoli, it makes no difference. I still hunt and I still kill and I still can’t remember why.”
“It makes all the difference.” She grasped another book from the floor and set it in his lap. “According to this—this ancient text from Olympus that I found in your own library—the Sirenum Scorpoli are responsible for instigating most of the wars in the human realm. They stir up religious zealots. They prey on differences between cultures and emphasize those differences until people want nothing more than to kill each other. These pages are filled with accounts of the Sirenum Scorpoli stimulating one natural disaster after another with Zeus’s magic, for causing diseases like the black plague and AIDS. Think about it, Ari. Zeus thrives on chaos. Chaos creates instability and instability leads people to pray. To pray to the gods. And that, more than anything else, is what he uses the Sirenum Scorpoli to do. To make people turn back to praying to the gods. Because the more humans who worship Zeus, the stronger his powers grow.
“Ari,” she said softly, “You’re not hunting unsuspecting good guys. You’re hunting the bad guys. The Sirenum Scorpoli cause more bloodshed and death than any daemons. They’re daemons trussed up like models.”
Ari’s chest vibrated with both hope and doubt. He looked down at the book she’d set in his hand. Didn’t remember bringing it here. Didn’t know where it had come from. Closing the book, he looked at the cover. The same double-S marking Daphne had seen on those females’ arms in the woods was stamped into the leather.
A memory flashed. Bits and pieces of a battle he couldn’t piece together. “I took this from them,” he muttered. “After a fight. When they were dead.”
“That’s what I assumed. There’s no other way you could have gotten your hands on something from Olympus.” She glanced up and around the library. “It’s been here a while. You had the knowledge the entire time. You just didn’t know it.”