Ares moves toward us, angling his head in concern and making a gruff sound I remember from my childhood. The low hum hurtles me back to a time when I still had my sister, when I was sure I’d fight harder than anyone, save the people I love, and die on my feet. It was a time when Thanos was my only God, even though I thought he was human, just like me.
All of my earliest memories include him. Eleni and I hiding behind him, because he’s as big as a house. Thanos spending hours in the nursery, watching over us and scaring off our older brothers when they took their cruelty beyond the usual harassment. Crying in his arms before I understood how to control my tears—a skill I’ve obviously forgotten lately. This scarred, hardened, giant-of-a-man lifting me up off the blood-slicked floor after Mother beat me and then holding my hand through the hard bite of healing, Eleni always on my other side. I threw up on him more than once, usually when I was at the final threshold of pain. Thanos put my first knife in my hand, curled my small fingers around it with his enormous ones, and then showed me how to use it.
My eyes snap up to meet those of the God of War. Persephone is wrong about who raised me. Eleni was my best friend. But Thanos was everything else.
Ares and I stare at each other. He knows exactly what I’m thinking, and how my emotions are raging inside me right now. His wide-set eyes soften, but that just makes it worse.
“You could have stopped it!” I lunge forward and pound on Ares’s chest, anger, hurt, and bitterness making me rash. “You could have stopped it all!”
Griffin wraps his arms around me and drags me back. I shout, still striking out as he plants me on my feet and holds on to me.
Ares’s expression shows just enough of the temper he has boiling beneath the surface to make me straighten up and pause. But doesn’t he understand? I saved no one. Eleni died right next to me, and I was too weak to even get up. I’ve dragged Griffin through vats of blood—his own and mine—and put him through so much. And Little Bean… Mother was in her head! What lies did she feed my baby? What horrors did she expose her to? Will they stay with her, even though she’s so tiny right now?
Persephone spreads her hands in a calming gesture. “Zeus didn’t create humans so we could play with them like dolls, moving them here and there and filling their mouths with our own words. You’re not marionettes, and you don’t dance when we pull strings.”
“So what in the name of the Gods are you doing?” I ask, still too seething to let this go.
“Setting things into motion,” she answers. “Helping—when really necessary.”
“You mean when it suits you!” My heartbeat echoes in the hollow space beneath my ribs, the place that should have been filled with siblings and family and home, but they were ripped out, one by one, or else I never had them at all. Slowly, that empty space has been filling up with people I love, but what’s to stop them from being torn from me now? “Where were you when I needed you the most?”
A shadow flits through Persephone’s eyes. Ares’s expression tightens just before his seafoam gaze drops to the ground.
My voice lowers, trembling. “If anyone should have been chosen, protected, it was my sister.”
Persephone reaches out and gently grips my face with both hands. Magic thumps from her palms. It should sting my cheeks, but it just feels cool and gallingly numbing. “Stop, Cat. You need to move on. Eleni served her purpose.”
I gasp. If she’d struck me with a hundred whips, her words couldn’t have cut me deeper, or scathed me more. I jerk my face out of her hands and lurch back into Griffin. “So you killed her?”
“We did nothing of the sort.” Persephone’s hands fall slowly back to her sides. “Your mother and brother did that.”
That may be true, but… I turn accusing eyes on Ares. “You were there. You let it happen.”
Real sorrow clouds his rugged features, the kind that’s unmistakable and true. “Would you be where you are right now if Eleni had lived? Her death influenced the road you took on the Fates’ map. It brought you to Sinta. To Persephone. To him.” He nods toward Griffin. “It got you to Poseidon’s Oracle. It got you away from your mother. It brought you to where you needed to be.”
Unbelievable! “You can’t rationalize her death like that! My life’s not worth hers. And I could have gone to Sinta with her. We could have gone together!”
Persephone shakes her head. “Eleni had a destiny, just like you. She knew it, and she fulfilled it. She chose the road she needed to, and she took it without regret. Her life was worth a great deal, and she knew that, too. She knew how much it was worth to you.”
I gulp back more angry words. Persephone—my Selena—has always mixed empathy with hard truths in a way that makes them impossible to escape or ignore. She’s right. Eleni must have known what her death would do to me. Did she also know it would get me out of Fisa? To Selena? To Griffin?
Eleni had her secrets, just like we all do. I have oracular dreams. They’re infrequent, and usually apply only to the near future, but what if Eleni had visions, too? What if she saw much farther than I ever have?
I reel in shock, remembering. She once told me the entire world was mine.
My Gods. She knew.
“I felt her loss, too.” Ares’s simple words neither heal nor cut, but like Persephone’s, they make me listen again when I don’t want to hear. “I was with her for fifteen years, just like you.”
His truth hits me deep in my magic with the usual burn, and a sudden image of us all together invades my mind, both wonderful and heartbreaking. And utterly simple—as the best things are. We were outside in the springtime, away from the castle, and Eleni was practicing with her flaming birds since her Fire Magic had finally started to mature. They were still wobbly, half formed, and slow to react, but Thanos let her chase him around the field with them, running, dodging, and acting like he was scared. We knew he wasn’t, and it made us laugh. We never laughed much otherwise.
Persephone moves forward and takes my hand. Magic sparks, and I hate it because I know she’s using her healing power to calm me down. I want to stay angry. Devastated. Eleni deserves it. She deserves my loyalty.
“I don’t need your tricks.” I pull out of her reach again, refusing to lessen the fury in my heart. It’s been my companion for so long that I’m not sure how to function without it.
Persephone steps back, glancing briefly at Griffin. “No, I suppose you don’t.”
Is that hurt in her voice?
Feeling guilt now along with everything else, I reach up, take Ianthe’s circlet from my head, and then wrap it around the front of my belt, right over where I think Little Bean is. Mother won’t reach her again with compulsion. No one will.
“We thought she’d inherit her father’s immunity to harmful magic, but apparently she hasn’t,” Persephone says. “Or maybe it simply hasn’t matured yet.”