She was stronger. In control. She could hold her power between her fingers as if it were a candle.
“Isn’t this what you wanted me to find, when we met?” Cassandra asked. “Control? Balance? To bring death from someplace other than a place of hate?”
“I didn’t want you to find it right before you disappear,” Thanatos whispered. He touched her cheek, knuckles cool against her skin.
Cassandra looked into his black eyes. He was different from Aidan in every way. Perhaps that made it easier to like him. He would never be a replacement.
“I used to think I was angry at the gods,” she said. “But I was just angry. Angry at Apollo for painting a target on my back. Angry at Aidan for being gone.”
“You still love Apollo,” Thanatos said.
Aidan. Apollo. He couldn’t undo the past, but he’d tried to make up for it.
“I guess I do,” Cassandra replied. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Thanatos said. “I find that I’m jealous. Maybe it’s leftovers from Calypso’s spell.”
He stood before her, a god dressed like a boy. She saw through it now. If Aidan were alive, and came knocking on her door, she’d know him for what he was in an instant.
“If I let you kiss me,” she said, “would you try to kill me?”
“No,” he said, and pushed his fingers into her hair. “If I kissed you now, I wouldn’t. But I would someday.”
Someday. But they would never have a “someday.” Their time would end when she did.
She pressed her hands to his chest.
Birds chirped loud in her ears. A hundred. A thousand. Too many to populate the elm trees on the sides of the road. It was the vision.
“Birds,” she said, and pushed away from Thanatos. “What are you trying to tell me? That you’re staying in an aviary?” But the chirping wasn’t birds. The wings coming toward her face flapped too fast, and dipped up and down. Birds didn’t have fur, or pinched little rat faces.
Bats. They screeched their way past calcite formations and subterranean waterfalls. Cassandra felt the breeze from their wings, felt the warm skin of them pass against her cheeks. If any of their claws caught in her hair, she was going to scream, vision or not.
“What is it?” Thanatos asked.
“Cave system. Adirondacks. There’s a newly opened entrance.” She could see them, too. The Moirae. Or more accurately, she could feel them, beating like a heart in the center.
28
WALKING STRAIGHT INTO AN AXE
“How’s Hermes?” Odysseus asked. He’d come out on the widow’s walk to stand with Athena in the dark.
“Sleeping. Ares is with him now.”
Odysseus squeezed the wood railing and it groaned. It was a wonder the balcony still stood, after all her pacing and pushing.
“How much longer does he have?” he asked, and her throat tightened.
“Not long.” Hermes’ breathing had been strained for the last few hours, and the fever was back. He was still conscious, but so weak he could hardly keep his eyes open.
“I’m sorry,” Odysseus said. “I know it’s hard.”
“It shouldn’t be,” she said bitterly.
“Letting go of anyone is hard.”
“No, I mean it shouldn’t be,” she said. “Aidan fell in battle. That was bad enough. But Hermes is just lying there. Wasting away while I stand here with my hands tied, waiting to serve the thing that’s killing him.” Her fingers gripped the wood and rattled it. “Why haven’t they told us where to go yet? Why couldn’t they have shown up a day earlier? And why do I wish he was already gone, so I wouldn’t have to do this knowing that my brother is dead and that wherever I am, I wasn’t with him when it happened.”
“However he’d die … it wouldn’t make it easier.”
“Stop saying stupid things!” she shouted.