“And now?” Ian asked.
I sighed. “And now I just miss them. More than anything else, I wish I could talk to my parents one final time and ask them why. Why they were Reapers. Why they did the horrible things they did. Why they didn’t tell me what they really were.”
“Maybe they were trying to protect you,” he suggested. “Maybe they didn’t want you to become a Reaper. I read the Protectorate reports. According to what Gwen Frost saw with her psychometry magic, your parents were trying to get out. They were trying to leave the Reapers for good.”
“And Covington killed them for it.” I spat out the words.
Covington had been the head librarian and the person in charge of giving my parents all their Reaper assignments. He was the one who’d told them where to go, what to steal, and whom to kill. When my parents tried to leave the Reapers, Covington stabbed them both in the back and then made it look like my parents had attacked him, killed several students, and tried to steal artifacts from the Library of Antiquities.
Thanks to Gwen, the truth had eventually come out, and she and her friends had helped me capture Covington here at the Eir Ruins. The librarian was in prison now, locked away where he couldn’t hurt anybody else. At least, not physically. But Covington was still hurting me every single day, whether he realized it or not. He had taken my parents away from me, and nothing would ever change that.
“Maybe you’re right about them wanting me to take a different path, to be a good person, a good warrior, a good Spartan.” My voice rasped with emotion. “But I’ll never know for sure, will I? That hurts more than anything else. That I’ll never know what they really wanted for me.”
Ian nodded, and once again, we lapsed into silence for a long time. Another breeze gusted over the rocks, making us both shiver, but we stayed still. Neither one of us wanted to move and break the fragile truce, the tenuous peace, between us.
“At least your parents tried to get out.” Ian’s voice was as rough and raspy as mine had been. “Drake never did that. He never wanted out. He likes being a Reaper. He likes stealing and betraying and killing anyone who stands in his way. He proved that again tonight at Lance’s mansion. He’s the same as he always was.”
“And how was that?”
Ian sighed. “He was the older brother, and he was always so much cooler and stronger and smarter than me. I looked up to him, you know? He was my bloody hero, right up until the moment I found out that he was a Reaper.”
“What about your parents? Where are they? Zoe told me they travel a lot, working for the Protectorate.”
Ian sighed again. “Yeah, they’re always gone, collecting artifacts and fighting Reapers in different parts of the world. They were on a mission when everything happened with Drake. They didn’t even come home for his funeral. They said they couldn’t leave before their mission was finished, but I think they were embarrassed and didn’t want to hear all their Protectorate friends gossiping about how their son had turned out to be a Reaper. How Drake had ruined the Hunter family name and legacy.”
He picked up a jagged rock and started turning it over and over in his hand.
I winced. It sounded like Ian’s parents didn’t care much about him or Drake, if they had stayed away to avoid hearing people gossip about them. My parents might have been Reapers, but at least they had always been there for me, and I knew they had loved me.
“After Drake supposedly died, I was a mess,” Ian confessed. “But Zoe and Mateo helped me through it. The three of us have always been best friends, ever since we were little. Zoe’s parents pretty much took me in, and Zoe was always there, making sure I was eating and sleeping and not wearing myself out training too hard. Mateo too. He was always trying to cheer me up by letting me beat him at soccer or tennis or video games.”
“And what about Takeda? It seems like the two of you are also pretty close.”
Ian nodded. “We are. Takeda was the one who kept Drake and me updated about where our parents were and what they were doing, and he always checked in on us while they were gone. Takeda trained both of us, and he was always there whenever I had a problem or needed to talk to an adult. He’s been more like a father to me than my own dad ever has been.”
“So Takeda’s probably hurting too,” I pointed out. “Over Drake’s betrayal and everything else that’s happened.”
“Yeah,” Ian admitted. “But that didn’t give him the right to lie about Drake still being alive. And it doesn’t change what Drake is now, what he’s always been. Or the fact that I was too blind to see it.”
His hand tightened around the rock, and he reared back his arm and threw it as hard as he could. The rock disappeared into the canyon below, and several seconds passed before I heard it hit bottom. Even then, it was a soft sound, little more than a whisper, but Ian still flinched, as if it were as loud as a clap of thunder roaring out all of his mistakes.
He looked at me, regret filling his face. “I’m sorry that I’ve been such a jackass to you, Rory. It’s just…when Takeda told me that your parents were Reapers, I thought that you might be like Drake. That you might fool me the same way he had. And I couldn’t stand that. Not again. Especially not from you.”
“What’s so special about me? I’m just a Spartan girl, going to Mythos Academy like all the other warrior kids.”
He shook his head. “No, you’re not just another warrior. You’re so much more, so much better than that. I saw how all the other kids treated you when you stepped onto the quad the first day of school. But you walked right through the gauntlet of them anyway. You were—are—so strong, so brave. I was jealous of you.”
“Why?”
“Because I couldn’t have done that. I couldn’t have walked past all those kids. Not without screaming, going crazy, and punching everyone in sight. That’s another reason I joined the Midgard. So I wouldn’t have to go back to school in New York right now and deal with the fact that everyone knows my brother is a Reaper.”
“What are you going to do now that you know Drake is alive?” I asked in a soft voice. “That he’s here in Colorado and working with Sisyphus.”
Ian’s face hardened, and determination blazed in his eyes. “I’m going to stop him—no matter what.” He hesitated. “I’ll even…kill him, if I have to. I don’t want to. But if it comes down to him or me or one of you guys on the team, then I will take him out.”
I gave him a sad smile. “Then that makes you stronger than me. If my parents were still alive, I don’t think I could do the same to them.”