(Get up, Cassandra.)
Their voices wove together as one, so loud and encompassing that Cassandra mistook it for her own thought. She’d hooked her elbow onto the vanity table and dragged herself halfway onto her knees before she realized it wasn’t.
“Get out of my head.”
(Not just now. Now we need your legs. Ours have become … unreliable.)
A flash then, of skin twisted and melted together, bones joining to other bones as tributaries into a larger river. The image couldn’t be hers. She’d never seen that part of the Moirae. The legs uncovered. And even in her darkest thoughts, she couldn’t have conjured something so painfully wrong.
“What do you want my legs for?” Cassandra looked at her reflection. A single dot of blood hung on her upper lip. She touched her ear and her fingers came away dry.
(To ferry a message.)
“Forget it.” She wiped the blood away on her sleeve. “Get out.” Except she didn’t mean it. Not really. The longer Clotho and Lachesis sat inside her mind, the more at home they seemed. It wasn’t crowded, or an invasion. It was company. When one or the other or both of them took control of her legs and stood, Cassandra went pleasantly slack inside.
Sort of lovely, to not have to do things on my own.
(Yes. Very lovely. You are very lovely, Cassandra.)
Cassandra smiled into the mirror. One half of each eye had turned green.
“Should we go to Athena’s, then?”
*
Hermes’ fever held steady. He didn’t wake. Aside from swallowing and shivering when Athena spoon-fed him bowl after bowl of hot broth that evening, he hadn’t moved at all.
“Hermes,” Athena whispered. “Can you hear me?”
She listened so intently for a response that she jumped at the sound of Odysseus’ shoes on the floor.
“Come on,” he said, and squeezed her shoulder. “Let’s get you some air.”
He led her upstairs into her bedroom and straight through to the widow’s walk. The cool night hit her square in the chest. Odysseus moved to the railing beside her.
It had been tense in the house with Hermes ill, and tense between Athena and Odysseus. The ghost of Calypso was around every corner. Sometimes, Athena passed Odysseus in the kitchen and felt the pressure of a hundred things keeping them apart. Other times, such as there on the walk with him, they felt closer than skin to skin.
“We shouldn’t stay up here long,” she said. “Ares is out running the wolves, and I don’t want Hermes to wake up alone.”
Odysseus said nothing. But it hung in the air anyway. Hermes might not wake up. She might never hear his annoying, wiseass voice ever again. The fever was high and mean. A mortal would have been dead hours ago.
Odysseus bent his head and kissed Athena’s shoulder. He turned her toward him and kissed her cheeks, her closed eyes, and finally her lips. He slipped his arms around her and held her tight, kissing her deeper until her mind was a blank, until she was nothing but body.
“It’s not wrong,” he said. “I was just afraid.”
“It is wrong,” she said, but she kissed him again.
A branch snapping underfoot made them draw apart. It was Cassandra, walking slowly across the grass.
“Good thing Ares is in the woods,” Odysseus said, and waved, but Cassandra didn’t look up. She didn’t look at much of anything.
Athena’s hackles raised with every step the girl took. Just before Cassandra disappeared from view, her eyes flickered to the widow’s walk.
Brown eyes gone half green.
She grabbed Odysseus’ arm.
“That’s not Cassandra.”
*
They dashed down the stairs. Odysseus grabbed a sword off the wall and made a good show of being ready to use it.
“What do you mean it’s not Cassandra?” he asked. “Who the bloody hell is it, then?”
Athena leaned down and, as gently as she could, shoved the couch and Hermes away from the door as far as it would go.