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As I lay on the stones of Troy, watching my blood roll along the crevices back toward the palace, I called out to the gods for a final time. “You took everything.”
Paris yanked himself away from me, falling backwards into a puddle. His bright blue eyes caught mine. They were wide, and hid nothing.
Truth.
He saw what I had, because he’d lived it. “Paris. Prince of Troy.” I was a logical woman, rational, and this wasn’t either of those things.
Everything fell into place. Pollux—he might be an equestrian coach now, but once, he’d had a twin brother. He’d made a deal with Zeus for his brother’s life, and Zeus had tricked him. Stolen his brother to Olympia and left Pollux on earth, alone.
Achilles. I glanced over Paris’s shoulder at the man who glared at me. General Achilles. Hero of Greece. Demigod. And somehowIhad bested him on the train.
Orestes.Jesus.Orestes—convinced by the god Apollo to murder the mother who had murdered his father. He’d been pursued all over the world by the Furies, who tormented him for a crime against nature.
Hector. Oh my god. I had quotedThe Iliadto him on the way to the train station. What the man had lived through…
“How?” I asked Paris, and then Achilles. “How are you alive? What is going on?”
Achilles ignored me. He pushed past me and Paris, and with one shove, knocked the top three rows of stones off the wall. His body was a blur of motion as he became a human wrecking ball. It took precious seconds for me to realize what he was doing.
“Wait!”
But he’d already reached the seal.
He lifted the stone, turning it, scraping the moss and growth off of it. I reached for it, but he ignored me.
“How long do you think this was sitting at the bottom of the ocean?” he asked. His voice was distant, like he was imagining it himself.
One huge finger trailed along the stone, stopping at the shell embedded in the stone, before continuing around the letters. “A thousand years?”
Or longer. It was on the tip of my tongue to answer, but I didn’t. All I could do was stare, stomach in knots as I watched him.
“Do you understand now?” he asked, the words as sharp as a whip. “Do you see why this had to remain lost?”
I shook my head. I understood why they were connected to it, but what did it matter if I found it?
“How could she?” Paris asked. He stood, holding out his hand. “She doesn’t know the whole story.”
* * *
Achilles held the seal under one arm, like a football. Our feet squelched in the mud, but I wasn’t watching where I was going. My gaze was on the seal, and sometimes, behind us, on the gaping hole in the ancient Abbey wall.
“There are no cameras, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Achilles grumbled. “Not that I would let that stop me anyway.”
From any other man, that would have sounded like a brag, but from Achilles, it was a mere statement of fact.
“Achilles,” I said his name quietly, not to call to him, or get his attention, but because I couldn’t believe it. Achilles—demigod—was real. And if he was real…
I glanced up at the sky. This meant the Olympians were real. How many things had they had a hand in? Wars? Genocide?
Did they walk among us? Hidden? Or were they as overt as they were in the myths, and somehow, we mortals just weren’t paying attention.
I wanted to know everything, but I had so many questions they bled one into the other.
We reached the parking lot and a truck not unlike Hector’s. Paris opened the back door, stood to the side, and I got in.
Moments later, all of us were inside, rain hammering the roof, and buffeted by the wind. But it was as if none of us noticed. I stared out the windshield toward the Abbey, not really seeing it.
All of the stories about Paris and Achilles raced through my mind, but I still didn’t speak. Paris started the truck, pulled out of the parking lot, and began to wind down the roads toward Whitby.
