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He looked from me to Rhea to the girls spread out on the cots, some clutching pillows and, in a few cases, stuffed animals for comfort. And staring at Jonas with wide eyes. He met them unflinchingly.
“I would have saved you had I known ahead of time,” he told them. “Would have sent an entire battalion to your aid had I had any inkling. But once you were dead, I would have left you so. For I could not have saved you then without risking that which I valued more.”
It was an unbelievable speech. Even more so, several of the older girls were nodding, as if they agreed with him. What kind of brainwashing bullshit had Agnes been teaching them?
“My life is not worth more than theirs!” I snapped. “I am not—”
“You are Pythia!” he shouted, rounding on me with blue eyes blazing. “You are the only one we have left! And we are facing a possibly world-ending war! So, yes, I would have left them to their fate. I would leave ten thousand more lying dead on the ground before I would risk you. For if we lose you, we lose the war. We lose everything.”
He wasn’t pink anymore; he was white, almost as much as his hair. I’d never seen him like this. Never seen him remotely close.
But I finally understood what all this was about.
I finally understood that Jonas was afraid.
It seemed incredible. He’d been a daredevil in his youth, racing insane flying cars through the ley line system, the massive rivers of metaphysical power that flowed over and around our world and which the more lunatic mages used for transport. It was a game that left competitors dead even more often than NASCAR, but Jonas had seemed to revel in it. And then in old age, he’d engineered a dangerous coup that had ousted his much younger counterpart and returned him to preeminent power in the Circle. To say that he was not a man who rattled easily was the understatement of the century.
But he was sure looking like it now.
And that I didn’t understand.
Yes, we were facing a possible invasion. Yes, it was by creatures out of legend, creatures who should have stayed there, because they were far too much for humanity to handle. And yes, it was scary as hell, because our main defense, a wall of energy once erected around our world by one of the gods themselves, had recently been proven to be less than the perfect barrier we’d always thought it was.
Which was even more of a problem than it normally would have been, because the being battering at the gates right now was the worst possible scenario for a world already torn by war: the god who personified it.
I got that.
I got all of that.
What I didn’t get was what Jonas thought I could do about it.
“Do you expect me to fight Ares for you?” I asked, bewildered. It sounded incredible just saying it.
But Jonas apparently didn’t think so. “You defeated a god once before—”
“I helped defeat Apollo. And he was mostly dead already.”
He’d been the first one to breach the barrier, and had ended up the godly version of crispy fried for his trouble. He might still have been okay, if he’d taken time to heal, but of course he hadn’t. Godly pride had made him assume that he was still more than a match for us pathetic humans. And that plus some really amazing good luck on our part had left us alive and him . . . well, we all hoped he was dead.
Nobody had heard from him since, anyway.
But that was Apollo. Known for lyre strumming and nymph chasing, if the old legends were to be believed. This was Ares. I’d recently
fought his half-human kids and barely survived, and that was with help I wouldn’t have again. But the god of war himself?
“You are a demigod,” Jonas pointed out, causing several of the war mages to flick me quick glances, as if they didn’t believe it.
Of course, sometimes neither did I. And with my hair hanging limp and dripping around my face, my body wrapped in an old gray bathrobe, and my feet in fuzzy pink slippers, I didn’t look like someone whose mother had been a goddess. But then, I didn’t look like it all dressed up, either. I was a five-foot-four blonde with skinny legs, out-of-control curls, and freckles.
Imposing I was not.
Mom had been more so, and had been the one, in fact, to erect the wall that was still keeping out her kind, thousands of years later. But Mom was dead, and I was what we were stuck with. And I was not going to be enough.
“You have abilities even the gods do not possess,” Jonas argued, as if he was trying to convince himself.
I hoped he was succeeding, because he wasn’t doing a damned thing for me.
“Like what?”
