It took me ages to fall asleep, and when I did, I dreamed of Henry whispering words I didn’t understand. Dozens of questions swirled through my restless mind, but that voice offered no answers. Why had he gone through with this, knowing what it might mean? Had he done it purely to protect Milo? I’d had it handled, more or less—I hadn’t anticipated Calliope interrupting, but Henry couldn’t have possibly known she would either.
He should’ve stayed behind. He would’ve been much more useful as a weapon Cronus and Calliope didn’t know about. He might’ve been the weight that tipped the balance away from them and toward the council instead, and he’d given that up to turn himself over to Calliope.
I wanted to be mad. I wanted to be furious, to rip the room apart until there was nothing left. It wouldn’t accomplish anything though, and the best I could do was exactly what James had asked of me: to focus my efforts on thinking of something that the council hadn’t.
Right. Wasn’t pride the very thing that had nearly lost me Henry and my mother and immortality in the first place?
But the members of the council weren’t exactly angels either. They could do whatever they damn well pleased, and if they could cheat, so could I. Pride it was then, along with a side of wrath for good measure. If there was a way out of this, I would find it.
After a restless night and an even more fitful day, the sun set on Greece, and at last it was time. As the council disappeared from the throne room to battle against an enemy they no longer had a prayer of defeating, I closed my eyes and slid into my vision.
Ava was waiting for me in the nursery, exactly where she’d said she would be. Milo wasn’t in his crib, though. Ava’s arms were empty, and Cronus wasn’t standing in the shadows rocking him either. Henry must have had him then.
Peering anxiously out the door, Ava pressed her lips together, oblivious that I was waiting. I glanced over her shoulder and followed her gaze to a window in the hallway. Through it I saw half a dozen small shapes attacking an opaque fog. The evening’s battle had begun.
“Kate?” said Ava, turning so suddenly that I didn’t have time to move out of her way. She walked right through me. “Are you here?”
I didn’t bother to reply. She wouldn’t be able to hear me, so it was useless.
She stared into the empty nursery, and her shoulders sagged. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s true. I swear to you I didn’t know what Calliope was planning.”
This was it? Another round of apologies? I huffed and closed my eyes, ready to return to Olympus. I’d come. I’d listened. I wasn’t going to waste my time with this any longer.
“I know the last thing you want to do is trust me,” echoed Ava as I slipped back to Olympus. “But I need to show you something.”
I snapped back into the nursery, hungry with hope. Glancing around as if she wasn’t sure I was there, Ava exited the room, and I followed on her heels. She led me down the hallway and the narrow staircase I’d used the day before. We stopped on the same level that held my prison, and my stomach exploded with butterflies. Where was Ava taking me? Calliope couldn’t possibly be holding Henry down here, could she?
Ava paused at a door. Nicholas’s room. The clang of metal against metal ripped through the silence, mingling with his screams. I flinched, but Ava pushed the door open and stormed inside. I hurried after her.
“You swore you’d stop,” she said, and it took me a moment to realize she wasn’t talking to me. “I did what you told me to. Now you hold up your end of the bargain.”
Calliope stood in the middle of a dank room with shelves and worktables along the edge. Discarded scraps of metal and dozens of weapons—some glowing weakly and others nothing more than lumps of steel—littered every surface.
Nicholas’s forge. This was where he’d made that damn dagger.
Right beside the dying fire in the center of the room, someone had welded a metal chair to the floor with opaque fog. Nicholas slumped against it, bloody and broken in ways gods should’ve never been. He was half-conscious, his face slashed and purple and his body a mess of cuts and bruises.
“Your side of our deal hasn’t been finished yet,” said Calliope. “Kate is still alive.”
Ava scowled. “That has nothing to do with—”
“I don’t care.” Calliope’s voice sliced through the air like a scythe. “You will do what I say, or I will kill Nicholas. That is all there is to it.”
He groaned, his eyeballs moving underneath his swollen lids, and Ava reached for him. Calliope stepped between them.
“I don’t think so,” she said with girlish delight. “You know what happens if you touch him.”
“I don’t care anymore.” Ava darted around Calliope and knelt beside the chair. “Nicholas? I’m here. I’m so sorry, baby.”
Nicholas tried to mumble something through his cracked lips and broken jaw, but it was unintelligible. To me, at least; Ava’s eyes filled with tears, and she gently took his hand. When her skin touched his, a hissing sound filled the tiny prison, and Ava winced. But it wasn’t until Nicholas grunted that she let go. Where she’d touched him, her palm turned scarlet, as if she’d handled hot embers.
“I will release him once I have won the war,” said Calliope. “No sooner.”
Ava’s face twisted with barely contained rage, and she shifted her stance as if she were about to throttle her. Calliope must’ve noticed, too, because in the blink of an eye, the dagger appeared in her hand, and she held it delicately to Nicholas’s throat.