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Orestes paled, then nodded. Each of us had been reborn, and none of us wanted to be reminded of the pain and fear of those moments.
He swallowed hard, then said, “You know, I haven’t heard them. Not for days.”
Them.The Furies.
“Since when?” Pollux asked, eyes narrowing. He brought his hand to his mouth, then dropped them between his legs. “The night at her apartment?”
“That morning,” he replied. “When I stopped her from walking into traffic.”
Achilles shook his head. “I had to go to all the trouble of pushing her off a train, and you could have let her have an accident.”
“Do you really want me to have let that happen?” Orestes snapped. “Are you that fucked in the head?”
Slicing my hand through the air, I stopped them. “Enough. We’re not going at each other’s throats. I think Paris is right, as much as I hate to admit it. Leo wants the seals because she wants to know. From what she told me about Diana Regan, we would have been in much more trouble.”
“What did she tell you?” Pollux asked. “When?” He seemed to be racking his brain for the time I would have had alone with her. “The drive to the station.”
I nodded. It was the first time in memory that I had been given a window into someone else’s life. Someone not standing in this room right now, that was.
“What did she tell you?” Paris asked.
Flicking on one of the lamps near the couch, I thought about refusing to answer. After all, she’d told me, not them. Maybe she didn’t want me to share the details of her past.
Then I remembered her grasping my hand, and shoving her way into my memories without my permission.
So I told them. About being kicked out of Harvard. About her advisor. About Oxford, and her suspicions. All of it.
By the end of it, all of them agreed with Paris’s assessment, though Achilles put it bluntly, “It’s the devil you know.”
Leo cleared her throat just as Achilles finished speaking. The other man froze, caught with his foot in his mouth.
“I, uh, wanted to know if you wanted to see it, so far.” Gazing at him she went on, “If you’re brave enough to join me in hell, that is.”
He pushed to his feet, a tight smile on his lips. “Let’s go, Cerberus.”
I choked at the name, but Leo only smiled, a matching one that was just as tight as Achilles’. “Well, this hellhound may just let you past the gates into the underworld.”
“Fuck,” he said under his breath as he passed by me, and now I smiled. It wasn’t often I saw Achilles get as good as he gave.
Leo
Cerberus. That asshole had called me the same name as the three-headed dog who guarded the underworld.
I led them upstairs, my enthusiasm dampened by Achilles’ insult.
“He didn’t mean anything by it.” Paris was directly behind me, and spoke quietly. “He was trying to joke.”
“Was he?” I infused a lightness I didn’t feel into my voice. Achilles made it difficult to be around him. In the stories I’d read about him, he was confident and brave, and definitely tended toward the boastful and… assholeishness. I just made the word up, but it fit him.
“You’re going to stomp right through the staircase,” Achilles called, and he really was getting on my last nerve. Unfortunately, or fortunately for him, I was focused on what I’d found so far.
The stone was easily picked apart, and then brushed away. My fear of scraping the shard embedded in the stone was unfounded. The obsidian was dull, but the tools Hector let me borrow hadn’t damaged it at all.
In the time I’d been working, it had become fully dark outside. Moving about the room, I’d found every lamp available, a couple of surge protectors, and set them up around the desk to give me enough light. It left the rest of the room dark, but that didn’t matter.
We gathered around the desk, close together, but not close enough to touch. When I pointed to the image, each one of them took a step back and away from me so we wouldn’t accidentally touch. I tried not to take it personally, though it was. I supposed they’d learned the lesson of being within arm’s reach.
So far, I’d revealed what appeared to be the base of a vessel, like a vase or an amphora, the stoneware the Greeks used to transport wine, and perhaps half of its rounded belly. The ochre image emblazoned on the obsidian was obvious—to me at least. My students would probably have said it showed a chariot race, but they’d miss the body dragged behind the chariot.
