It would only take seconds, and the screeching would stop. They would all be able to think again. And breathe. Cassandra’s hands clenched into fists, but she felt no heat.
“You do it!” she shouted, but he shook his head.
“I’ll do it.” Calypso dashed to the shelf and took up the knife. In two quick strides she positioned herself behind Megaera and drove the knife through the base of her skull, up into the brain. She twisted the blade and sawed her head off. It happened so quickly. Cassandra hadn’t even thought to look away.
“Worthless gods of death,” Calypso said, and tossed the Fury’s head into a corner.
* * *
The bowl of blood sat heavily between Cassandra and Thanatos on his kitchen island. Blood filled the lower third, still and thick as a dark red soup. Cassandra wasn’t sure, but she thought she could smell it, as if it had already started to rot.
Calypso remained down below, annoyed with both of them for not acting sooner. She’d volunteered to bury the body, and occasionally Cassandra thought she heard the strike of the spade, or the thumping of the corpse as Calypso rolled it into its shallow grave.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Cassandra asked.
Thanatos shrugged. “You know the old saying. ‘Find a Fury, drink its blood, all day long you’ll have good luck.’”
“That’s ‘find a penny, pick it up.’ And that blood better last more than a day, because I don’t want to summon another one of those things.”
Thanatos’ lips pressed together in a grim line. She got the feeling he was annoyed with her, too.
“Do we need to do anything to it? To prepare it?” she asked.
“Nope. Just drink it.”
“Am I going to have to watch?”
His dark eyes flashed.
“You’re the one who’s set on vengeance. You should have to be the one to do it,” he said. “You should want to do it.”
“What’s your problem? Are you seriously pissed that I didn’t kill the Fury in the basement? Because you’re the flipping god of death, so—”
“It’s not that you didn’t. It’s that you couldn’t.” He placed his hands on the counter on either side of the bowl. “You couldn’t.”
“Whatever this is”—she fluttered her fingers—“it doesn’t work the way I … It’s like my visions. It does what it wants.” But Cassandra could hear the lie in her own voice. The visions came from outside of her. From some other force that showed her what would be. When she killed gods, she drew their deaths right out of their centers. It was her will, like a sword.
Thanatos grabbed her hand.
“Whatever this is,” he said, “it comes from rage. From hate, and from pain.”
She waited for him to throw her hand back, but he didn’t. Instead his touch softened and he slid his cool fingers against her palm.
“And that makes it dangerous,” he said. “It makes it corrupt.”
“You’re the expert.” She curled her lip. “But this? It’s not about death. It’s about killing. And there’s a big goddamn difference.”
Thanatos’ eyes were sad. “Yes. There is.”
The door to the garage opened and closed. Calypso had finished the burial. Cassandra pulled her hand free before Calypso turned the corner into the kitchen.
“The blood is still in the bowl,” Calypso said, and flicked irritated beach-glass eyes in both their directions. She pushed sweaty strands of hair off her forehead. Her fingers left dark streaks of dirt and blood. “I’m going to use your shower,” she said, and left.
“We should probably have the blood out of the bowl by the time she gets out,” Cassandra said.
“She grows impatient,” said Thanatos. “She wants it over. She wants to be dead.” He went to his cupboards and pulled out a dark blue metallic sport cup. Roughly half the blood went into it, and then into the refrigerator. The other half he poured into a glass tumbler.
Cassandra swallowed. She fought the urge to look away or to ask for more sparkling water to calm her stomach.
“Bottoms up.” He swallowed the blood in one long gulp. It took forever to leave the glass. So much longer than it took to run out of the Fury’s wrist. When he finished, he looked even paler than when he started.
“Thanatos?”
He buckled, and Cassandra reached for him across the counter. But his weight was too much. It pulled her halfway up and over. Her elbow upended the mostly empty tumbler of blood and it leaked a large, dark dot onto the white countertop.