PART I
THREE QUESTS
1
AT LARGE
The California coast. Soft, hot sand beneath her feet and an expanse of blue before her eyes. Cassandra pulled a deep breath in through her nose: dry heat, and oil from the fryer in the café behind her. A hint of engine exhaust, too, from somewhere, and underneath all the rest, barely detectable on the edges of the air, the smell of salt and deep, dark cold.
Deep, and dark. And blue. But I know what moves farther out underneath the currents. Behind the waves. I’ve seen their fins, and their lidless eyes. I’ve tasted their blood.
Her eyes tracked the water for ripples and shadows, but saw nothing. None of Poseidon’s Nereids, or Leviathans. Not even a shark. Nothing to wade into the shallows and meet, to fill her nose with fish and rot. Nothing for her to pop like a blister.
“It’s been months since your Aidan killed Poseidon. Maybe they’re gone. Dead, like him.”
Cassandra turned. Calypso bent over a wooden table, arms laden with red plastic baskets of French fries and turkey club sandwiches. Dead like him, she’d said. She meant dead like Poseidon, not dead like Aidan. But that’s what Cassandra heard. Her mouth opened, ready to spit out something bitter, to say Aidan wasn’t her Aidan. That he never had been. But he had belonged to her as much as any god could belong to anyone.
“If they were dead, they’d wash up on the beaches,” Cassandra said. “They’d be lined up for me to see. Black, bloated bodies to crack under the sun and be torn apart by seagulls.”
Calypso pushed a sandwich toward her.
“Their deaths on display for you. Their corpses for your approval. You think they owe you that, do you?”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re not dead.” Cassandra pulled a toothpick from the turkey club and pointed at a tomato. Calypso took it and added it to her own. They’d been on the road for a month, since Cassandra had dragged them both out of flooding Olympus. Only she’d taken a wrong turn. When they emerged on dry, cold dirt in the back of an anonymous cave, they had been hundreds of miles from Kincade, New York, and when they turned back, the cave wall was just a cave wall no matter how she’d tried to pry her way back inside. Olympus was gone. So she’d had to let Aphrodite and Ares go, while she growled and gritted her teeth and screamed loud enough to drown out Calypso’s wails for Odysseus. Odysseus, who lay ruined on rocks somewhere outside of time with Achilles’ sword through his chest.
And Athena is lying just as ruined right beside him.
She clenched her jaw. She hated that Odysseus’ death should be twisted through with a god’s, that hate spread thick and covered everything. Even him. Her friend. She tried to smile at Calypso.
“Thanks for the sandwich.”
“You’re welcome.” Calypso smiled back, and small wrinkles appeared beside her eyes. The skin of her face was softer, and drawn thinner. The price of Cassandra’s touch when she’d dragged her to safety. A streak of gray had appeared in her hair in the space of a blink inside the cave, just behind her ear, bright white against the brown waves. Now she kept it gathered together in one piece, and twisted it through a new braid. In the sun it looked shiny and separate, pretty as pulled taffy.
Calypso nodded toward Cassandra’s basket.
“You should eat more. You’re getting thin. And you need to sleep. You need to do something to sleep better.”
“We’re not going back,” Cassandra said. “And we’re not calling them. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” Calypso repeated. “They think you’re dead.”
“Not everyone. Not my parents.” When they left that cave in Texas, she decided she wasn’t going back to Kincade. Not to a mess and grief and confusion. Not to watch Hermes panic and try to regroup. She had work to do, the work of killing gods, and she wanted to do it alone. Or so she told herself. But the first time she had Internet access, she scoured the web for news from Kincade. Andie and Henry’s Twitter feeds were both jammed with speculation about why she’d run away. There was nothing else. The papers didn’t write up runaways. Only Andie and Henry thought she was dead. And so far they hadn’t let anyone else in on the suspicion.
“But your brother,” Calypso frowned. “And poor Andie.”
“They’ll understand. When it’s over.” When all the gods are dead, and we have our lives back.
As if we could ever have our lives back.
Calypso raised her brows.
“You’d feel better if you called them.”
“No I wouldn’t. I’d feel heavy, and guilty, and I would miss them.”