“If you weren’t looking for me,” she asked Hermes, “what are you doing down here?”
“The Moirae,” he said. “They’re up there with Achilles. In Hephaestus’ house. They’ve got him. We were after the shield and we got it. But we had to run. Athena.” He grabbed her arm. “I stood against them. They’re weakening. Hephaestus told me to come back, if I found help.”
Athena thought quickly, remembering how it felt to have the Moirae in her head on Olympus. How easily they’d forced her to her knee. But Hermes had faced them down.
And I stood, too, when I had to. When Odysseus fell.
“We have to go back up.” Hermes tugged her gently. “Hephaestus was trying to help us.”
“Then we won’t lose him.” She nodded to Ares, and he sprinted ahead at once. Athena choked down the urge to tell him not to do anything stupid. Wasted words.
Odysseus flipped his sword in his hand, but Athena pressed it to his side.
“Don’t face him,” she said.
“Not going to face him. I’m just going to give back this sword, and we’ll call it quits.”
“I mean it. You’d lose.”
“Yes,” he said. “But it’d be closer than you think.”
*
Athena knew long before she got inside Hephaestus’ house that it was over. Ares hadn’t even bothered to battle cry.
The sight when she reached the top of the stairs was sad and strangely empty. The fireplaces still burned. Hermes pressed a hand to a motorized chair and declared it still warm. No doubt the blood was warm, too, where it lay in streaks and puddles. Everything about the scene felt immediate, as though if they’d gotten there a blink sooner they’d have seen it all. But Hephaestus was gone. Vanished. Not even a twisted body remained for them to mourn.
“I can’t tell if he left alive.” Ares studied the tracks of blood covering most of the floor. If Hephaestus left alive, he’d done so in pieces. “There’s too much corruption to the trail. The Moirae dragged themselves through it. Maybe they dragged him along behind. Or maybe he dragged himself, and got away.” He leaned in and sniffed a spray of red. “Not all of it’s his. Good on him.”
“Will you cut the CSI,” Hermes snapped. “Goddamn it.”
“I’m saying he might be alive,” Ares snapped back. “Look here, at the palm print. There was weight behind that.”
“Do you want me to get you a black light and those little flags with numbers on them? And get your damned wolves out of it!” Hermes darted to the desk and threw a paperweight at Panic and Oblivion. It landed among their paws and shattered. They whined and trotted away licking red muzzles.
Ares set his jaw and squeezed fresh blood from his mangled hand.
“Hermes,” Athena said. “Someone should try to track him, if he can be tracked.” She nodded reluctantly at Ares, as if to say, Let him do it. She didn’t want to leave the others, in case the Moirae or Achilles decided to double back.
“Where are we?” she asked, and hoped no one gave the obvious answer of Hephaestus’ house. That much she could tell. From the welded girders decorating the ceiling to the double fireplaces burning hot, the whole place felt like him. Blacksmith of the gods. It even smelled faintly of iron, though that might have been the blood.
“Buffalo,” Henry supplied.
Buffalo. So close to home. So close to her own bed she could practically feel the pillows rising up to meet the backs of her shoulders. She wouldn’t even make them hitchhike. They’d spring for a car. Hell, they’d spring for a driver.