“Yes, I wanted to kill him! I want to kill all of them. Athena, Hermes, Odysseus. All of them. I hate them.” She paced in front of Aidan’s grave. The letters on his headstone curved down in pity. She ran at it and shoved it hard. Two hundred pounds of marble fell over in the grass. It seemed to Cassandra that it flew.
“I hate you,” she said, and then she screamed until she thought her vocal cords would rip, would snap like weak twine. “I hate you!”
What else she said in the next several minutes, what expletives, what names, what elaborate curses, she didn’t know. Maybe it was none of those and she stood screaming nothing in an empty, sunlit cemetery.
Thanatos stood to the side and ignored her until she was through.
Wrung out and guilty, she felt sort of ridiculous, and her broken fingernails throbbed. But when she glanced at Thanatos, his expression was neutral. Her lip curled to say something like, What was that? Death therapy? Should we hug it out now? but her voice was too tired for it. Instead she asked, “Am I crazy?”
“If you are, people have gone crazy for less.” He looked at Aidan’s headstone, helpless on its back. It reminded Cassandra of a lobster she’d seen in a tank once, hopelessly flipped over, no longer trying to right itself. Why bother? It was headed for a pot of hot water anyway.
“Thanatos?”
“Yeah?”
“Am I evil?”
He looked at her with calm eyes. This was what he’d been trying to puzzle out this whole time. What she was.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said.
Cassandra smiled shakily. “Me neither.” She flexed her hands. They didn’t feel like her hands. So much power in little bones and skin. It was strange to have that power and still feel so powerless.
“I’m angry about everything,” she said softly. “Angry that Aidan’s dead. Angry that he deserved it. Angry that these people, these gods, showed up one day and made everything hard. Athena stuffed a bad life into my head. Made me fight when I didn’t want to fight. Hurt my friends. Became my friends.
“And I feel guilty for being so angry.” She sighed. “And I can’t control it. And I killed Calypso.”
“It doesn’t make it any easier that she wanted to be dead,” Thanatos said.
“No. And she wouldn’t have wanted to die, if she knew that Odysseus was alive. She hoped, at the end. I saw it in her eyes. Maybe that’s why I did it. Maybe I killed her on purpose because I hated her hope. I wanted him to be dead because Aidan was dead. So I wouldn’t be alone.”
“You’re adding to your own memories,” Thanatos said gently. “You weren’t really thinking that. It happened too fast.” He said those things to comfort her. But he didn’t say it was an accident, or that she hadn’t meant to do it. He didn’t lie.
“I have to learn to control this,” she said. “I have to learn to swallow it.”
Thanatos bent to retrieve Aidan’s headstone. He lifted it one-handed and set it carefully back into its place.
“You can’t swallow it, Cassandra. You have to let it go.”
22
THE WAR UNSEEN
Thanatos dropped Cassandra in the Applebee’s parking lot to meet her dad for an early dinner and a movie. Her idea. Making up for time lost being a jackass, she told herself. Not a tactic to avoid Andie and Henry, though that was a bonus. She didn’t know what to tell them about Calypso, or about almost murdering everyone in her path.
She remembered testing her touch on Andie, when they’d visited Henry in the hospital after the wolf attack, and her stomach twinged with shame.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Thanatos asked. “We can go somewhere else. Talk.”
“I’m fine. And thanks. But what about you? Where are you going? Think Athena will let you back in the house?” Or perhaps he was leaving. Back to California. It surprised her how much she wanted him to stay.
He can’t go. He’s my only witness. The only one who knows what we did.
He ran his hand through his hair and ruffled it like he was tired.
“You won’t leave?” she asked. “Town, I mean.”