“When this war is over,” she said, spreading cheese on crusty bread, domestic as he’d ever seen her, “Olympus will return in gold. No more caves. It’ll be a palace again. And we’ll come out from underground. Except for Hades, I suppose. But he likes it that way.” She turned her cheek, and for a second only her beautiful side showed. Ageless. Light blond hair and cream skin. Second only to Aphrodite. Then she turned back, a monster cobbled together out of drying clay.
“Will they heal you more now?” he asked. “Since we’ve tried to do as they asked? Will they heal me?”
“The Moirae do as they will. Don’t presume to guess. You know better.” She thumped her stone fist against the tabletop. “But perhaps they will. Tell me about your wayward half sister. About the damage you did. Tell me where Achilles is.”
Ares hesitated. When the Moirae realized he had failed, would they crumble his mother to dust before his eyes?
“I stabbed Athena,” he said. “A few times. Nearly cut her leg off. She’s still—” A force, he almost said. Still the goddess of battle. Still more than a match for me. But Hera looked as eager as Aphrodite’s puppy, and he didn’t have the heart to disappoint her. “She’s just as much of a bitch as I remember.”
Hera laughed. “Some things are hard to forget. And what of Achilles?” She ground her teeth again and moved her heavy stone hip to rest more comfortably.
“Let me tell them myself,” he said. “I want to see them.”
Hera blinked, like his words made no sense. “But they haven’t asked for you.”
“I’m asking for them.”
“You can’t … do…” she trailed off and looked everywhere but into his eyes. She stood, with effort, dragging her stone parts. She had to be in constant pain, and the Moirae didn’t fix it. Why? As punishment? Or was the job too much for them? Ares had to know for sure. What they were. What they could do. He would see it for himself before he bent his head to their whims.
“I’ll settle for one of them,” he said. “Take me to Clotho. I want to see if her hair is really as red as they say. I want to know if the Moirae of life and birth remembers mine.”
“One of them,” Hera said, and made a mad sound. “One of them. Of course they remember your birth. As I do. The god of war. You bit through your own umbilical cord. I was so proud of you.”
“Don’t try to charm me,” he said. “And don’t change the subject.”
She made a fist and her nails dug into her palm until they drew blood. When she spoke, her voice was hesitant, and careful.
“Ares. I want you to listen. I want you to try and understand. Can you do that?”
“I should think so,” he said.
“I wasn’t…” she started, and stopped. “I was never truly a mother. I was your mother, but you were a god.” She rubbed her fingers over her stone fist. “What did I know about fear? Or about worry? I never had to watch you bleed and wonder if it would heal. I never had to understand that you could die.” She pressed her hand to his cheek. “But I know that now.”
“Mother—”
“So don’t ask me to take you before them. Don’t ask to look upon them before you are forced to. Just trust me when I tell you that they are terrible.”
*
Cassandra walked into her house quietly. If she was lucky, no one would see her and she could sneak up to the shower before her dirty hair and the strangely identifiable odor of jungle raised questions. All she had to do was clean up, stash her bag, guzzle a pot of coffee, and she’d be good to go.
Her luck held. The house was silent.
“Lux?” she whispered, and waited for his cover-blowing woof, or the click-clack scramble of his toenails on the floor. Nothing. Henry must’ve taken him out. But the lack of clamoring dog wasn’t the only thing missing. “Mom?” she called. “Dad?”
The clock on the kitchen wall read six thirty. On a Wednesday. They should have been sitting around the table eating dinner. Maybe they had gone to a movie, she supposed, but then where was the dog? She pulled her phone out of her bag, but it was dead. No outlets in the rain forest. “Dammit.” She fished her charger out of the front pocket and plugged in her phone, then called her mom.