Calypso blinked away the fire and turned her face to the shadows.
“I don’t want to give you false hope,” she said. “The way to the underworld has been closed for more than a thousand years. And I don’t know if your Aidan is there. But if he is, it doesn’t matter. Because we can’t reach him.”
“False hope,” Cassandra whispered. But if it was false, it didn’t stop her head from filling with possibilities.
*
Athena sat on Achilles’ lonely cot while Odysseus knelt on the floor, tending her crushed ankle. The shack was extremely well fortified. Shelves warped beneath the weight of canned food and bottles of water. He had plenty of first aid supplies, too. And, of course, weapons. Nothing so rudimentary as his hammer, either. He had blades of all kinds. He had a longsword, for Pete’s sake.
“The boot’s ruined,” Odysseus said. The steel trap had bitten all the way through the leather. It flopped sadly when he pulled it off her foot. “Might as well cut it down and make a bootie.”
“As if I’d ever wear a bootie.” Under the boot, Athena’s sock was all blood from lower leg to heel. When Odysseus plucked the fabric away and rolled it down, dark holes in her ankle and foot were plainly visible.
“Sheesh,” he said. “You should probably have stitches.”
“Do you know how to stitch?”
“Not really.”
“Then just bind it up. Either they’ll close, or feathers will pop out of them.”
Odysseus turned slightly pale at that.
“Hey.” She toed him. “No time to get queasy.” She glanced out the door at Achilles, who had put all the clothes he owned in a rucksack, along with a couple of his favorite books, and waited for them in the yard. “Are you sure about him?”
“As sure as I was the first twenty times I told you to leave him alone,” Odysseus snapped, and tugged the bandage just a bit too tight.
“If you’re waiting for me to say you were right—”
“I’d never wait for that.”
“I’m still not sure that you were right,” she snapped back. “What about Henry? How can we bring Achilles face-to-face with Hector?”
“Henry isn’t Hector,” Odysseus said. “But I’ll talk to him about it. Make sure he understands that Henry isn’t the enemy.”
Athena chewed her lip and watched the progress on her foot.
“Make sure you use enough bandage so the blood won’t show through at the airport.”
“You’re the boss.” Odysseus poured water into a bowl and sponged most of the blood off, but the wounds still bled, and in no time the water was thick and crimson. “I’m going to clean it a bit, all right? I know you don’t have to worry about infection, but—it’s nice to be tidy.”
He lifted and turned her foot with gentle fingers, dabbing the gaping holes with iodine. It stung like hell, but it was the kind of pain she could take. The kind she knew she’d heal from. Not like the feathers.
“Odysseus?”
“Yeah?”
“That thing you said—that you kept saying. Being a kid caught up in our shit,” she said. “I never believed you meant it. I didn’t see how you could. You were always my Odysseus.”
“I am your Odysseus.”
Only he wasn’t. Despite the same wavy dark hair and mischievous eyes, the same crooked smile, this Odysseus wasn’t that Odysseus. This Odysseus had a future and choices the other hadn’t had.
“I think oaths expire when you die,” she said softly.
“Then you don’t know much about oaths. There.” He set her ankle on the ground and reached for the padding and bandage. “Hold this.” She bent and pressed the white pad to her foot. Where her fingers touched, blood seeped through immediately. “I didn’t mean it, right?” He wrapped gauze round and round. “I mean, not for me. It was just something to say to keep you from killing Achilles. Not one of my most successful lies.”