“Stay? At your place? Your parents won’t care?”
“You’ve been staying over at our house since you were seven.” They reached the car and he maneuvered her toward the passenger side. It took some doing, but he got her in and managed to drive them both home.
When they got to his house, it was dark. His parents hadn’t even left the outside lights on. They were home, though, inside sleeping—or at least pretending to. He did his best to be quiet going in, but Lux was ecstatic to find not one but two family members to greet, and his snuffling nose in the entryway made it a special chore to get Andie out of her shoes and jacket.
“Wait,” she said when they stood before the open door of Cassandra’s bedroom. “I don’t think I want to go in there.”
“Andie. It’s late.” But he couldn’t say he blamed her. The room looked darker than dark, and deserted. The air inside didn’t feel like it belonged to the rest of the house anymore.
“Can I sleep in your room?” she asked, then wrinkled her nose. “Your bed’s not super dirty, is it?”
“It won’t be unless you barf in it.”
He brought her into his room and closed the door behind the dog, who looked perplexed by their extra company. Andie wasted no time getting under his blankets. He was just about to go to his closet for a sleeping bag to put on the floor when she moved toward the wall and turned the covers down.
“Okay,” he said, and shut the lights off. His bed had never creaked as loud and gracelessly as it did when he got in beside her. But they lay back and listened to Lux turn in a circle before he sacked out on the floor.
“Henry?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want you to fight Achilles.”
He was about to say me neither when she threw her arm over his chest and pulled him close.
“I’m scared of it,” she whispered, and he wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.
“It’s okay,” he said.
Sure it was. He’d have some magic shield and he’d stare down that blond, god-obsessed monster just like he did before. Just like it happened before. Only this time he wouldn’t let Andie be there to see it. He didn’t know how Hector could have done it back then, how he could have let her see it and carry the sight with her forever afterward.
* * *
“How do you find a magical shield that’s two thousand years missing?” Hermes paced back and forth across the balcony outside Athena’s bedroom. “How do you find a magical shield that’s two thousand years missing?” He’d gone to Athena’s room after an hour of asking the same question in the living room, in the hopes that a little of her wisdom remained. Just enough to float the answer into his brain. But the only answer that came was:
You don’t. You don’t find a magical shield that’s two thousand years missing, any more than you find Excalibur, or the Holy Grail, or the last living unicorn. There was no trail to follow, no leads, no sightings. Maybe if Athena were there, she’d have a plan.
“But she isn’t. I am.” He felt the balcony rattle under his feet and slowed his pace. Without noticing it, he’d started to use his speed. To any passersby, he would’ve looked like a human-colored set of lines streaking back and forth. Oops.
He gripped the railing. This little game of What Would Athena Do? wasn’t getting him anywhere. So what would Hermes do?
“That’s easy. Hermes would run.” Except that after their trip to the desert, he’d been exhausted and slept for twenty hours. He wouldn’t be able to run for much longer. And Henry and Andie would be unlikely to run with him willingly and leave their families defenseless in the blast radius.
“So we can’t run. What else? Play to my strengths. What do I do if I can’t run?” He thought back. The last time he couldn’t run or steal his way out of a problem had been when he noticed he was losing weight. And then he’d still run. Straight to Athena. Straight to—
“Someone else who can take care of the problem.” He stood, careful not to move too much and disrupt the thought that had started to form between his ears. The problem wasn’t finding the shield, which seemed fairly damned impossible, it was having a shield. Having the advantage given to Achilles by the gods. Given by Hephaestus, god of fire, craftsmen, and metalwork.
A spark of hope started in Hermes’ chest and worked its way outward, making his whole body vibrate. Hephaestus. A god. A god he’d just seen, less than two hundred years ago.