“And if you win, you’ll regain your immortality?”
“Even if we don’t, at least we’ll be the last to die.”
“You’re so sure,” said Demeter.
“I am, Aunt,” said Athena. She looked up at Aidan’s sun, blazing high and hot in the sky. “I well and truly believe the Fates favor us.”
“The Fates favor you,” Demeter said quietly. “And so. What is your first step?”
“The first step,” Athena said. She’d begun pacing back and forth across her aunt without realizing it. “Try to find Artemis. Save her from the beasts in the jungle and gain another soldier.”
“That’s not the true first step,” said Demeter. “When Hera came after you, she sought two things. Two weapons. You only control one.”
“The other can’t be controlled.”
“Then he must be eliminated.”
“Yes,” Athena said. “I need Achilles kept out of the other side’s hands permanently. The trick will be convincing Odysseus to give him up. And once Achilles is gone … there’ll be nothing they can do against me.”
The eye blinked slowly. For something so sickly and close to death, it was clear as a mirror.
“Go, then, and try your tricks,” Demeter said. “None of this will really be over, anyway. Not until you are dead.”
2
SUN AND STONE
Snow never gathered on Aidan’s headstone. Other grave markers stood half-buried, with ridges of ice packed across the tops even after family members brushed them off. But Aidan’s sat bare. Snow and ice shrank from it. Out of respect? Or out of horror, maybe, at something buried beneath the ground that had no business there.
A god. A god lay dead at the feet of that granite slab. Apollo. Aidan Baxter. God of the sun.
Cassandra Weaver stood off to the side, as she had on every Tuesday and Friday afternoon since they’d buried him. Sundays were too crowded, and she hated the sound of other mourners, the ones who knew how to mourn and what to say. How to cry softly into a handkerchief instead of screaming until their noses bled.
Her fingers reached out and traced the air in front of his name. Aidan Baxter, Beloved Son and Friend. Every day in the cemetery she thought she’d say something that needed to be said, but she never spoke.
High on Aidan’s grave marker, above his name, was a carving of an enflamed sun. No one had told his parents to put it there. They just had. One more strange thing, working its will on the world, placing symbols for dead gods and keeping the snow at bay.
Odysseus stepped up beside Cassandra and laced his fingers through her hair, drawing it over her shoulder like a brown curtain.
“It’s been an hour. Should we go?” His neck was tucked into his shoulders. Londoner. Unused to the cold.
She’d asked him to be her alarm clock. Time in the cemetery tended to stretch out, and she didn’t have hours to lose. Normally, the job fell to Athena. The goddess accompanied Cassandra practically everywhere she went. A faithful, and hated, hound dog. Looking past Odysseus, Cassandra could almost see her, standing quietly near the edge of the cemetery in the copse of bare winter trees. She’d used to lean against a monument of a weeping angel, looking bored, until Cassandra snapped at her and said she was being disrespectful. But Athena was hundreds of miles away, somewhere between New York and Utah, seeking another dying goddess, stretched out across the desert. Seeking word of Aphrodite.
Cassandra’s hands tingled and burned even at the thought of Aphrodite’s name. They’d spent two months looking, Athena and Hermes both. They threw lines out in all directions, and still Aphrodite was nowhere to be found.
Andie said it didn’t matter. That Aphrodite would die eventually anyway. But it wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t be enough, if it wasn’t at Cassandra’s own hands.
Odysseus sank deeper into his coat. His shaggy brown hair made for poor earmuffs. Cassandra flexed her fingers to drive the burn away, and to drive Aphrodite from her thoughts.
“Cold?” she asked.
“Of course I am. It’s beastly cold.” He stuffed his hands under his armpits. “But take your time. We’ve got a while before we need to nab Andie from practice.”
“We can go. Thanks for coming with me.”
“Anytime. But if we don’t go soon, I’m going to warm my feet on his gravestone. Think he’d mind?”
Cassandra looked at the marker. Aidan Baxter. She’d loved him from the minute she saw him, without ever knowing what he really was. Who was she to say what he’d do, or what he’d feel?