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I wanted details.
The front door opened, bringing in a waft of cold, loamy air. Hector and Paris were equally red-cheeked and windblown. They took in our expressions, came inside, and shut the door.
“What happened?” Hector asked.
“Leo was just asking what would happen if we were to put the seal together,” Achilles informed him. “I was going to enlighten her. With our best guess anyway.”
“How bad is it?” I asked. “Given that you want to drop it into a trench?” It was a weak joke.
“You’ve seen the Furies.” It surprised me that Orestes was the one to answer. “And felt them. They’re powerful, but they aren’t full gods. That’s because there are no gods. Every Olympian is sealed away where they can’t interfere in the lives of mortals, or anywhere in this realm.”
So, here was the thing. I had accepted that Pollux was a demigod—mortal mother, and son of Zeus. But I hadn’t really focused on the details of that fact.The son of Zeus.
Of Zeus.
Mother, fucking Zeus.Lightning bolt hands, shape-shifting Zeus.
My knees went a little weak and my head spun. With one hand, I grasped the wall and slid down until my butt hit the floor. “Right, Gods. Because they’re real. They have to be, because you are.”
This made Achilles chuckle, and I was glad I could be amusing. “She finally gets it. I wondered when it would hit. This reaction makes a lot more sense.”
I didn’t bother to reply, because I was currently considering how muchworsethe world would be if the gods got their hands in the messes we made. Truly—humans weren’t doing a very good job here. We were destroying the planet and each other. And with no divine help.
Seal.Keeps things in. Keeps things out. The gods were sealed somewhere, and I had found pieces of that seal. “Like a djinn?” I didn’t say the next part out loud, but I pictured a tiny pantheon of figures in the bottom of the seal. Like Aladdin and Genie.
“The gods brought us back from the dead, because they weren’t done playing with us,” Paris said. “To them, the Trojan War was ten years of entertainment. They didn’t care about the lives lost. They wanted us—the central figures—”
“And Pollux,” Achilles interrupted. “Though gods know why…”
Gritting his teeth, Paris ignored the other man. “They brought us back, and made us—those of us who were mortal—more—and they made those of us who were more, something closer to them.”
“Demigod plus one, if I was a math equation,” Achilles added.
Dropping my hands from where I rubbed my temples, I studied the guy who could joke about this stuff, but he wasn’t smiling.
“We took that power and pain, and somehow, we collected and held it,” Hector explained. “The seal was created out of our power. It wasn’t just a vessel that held our strength and cunning and immortality. It was like a—” Glancing out the window, he searched for what to say. “A magnet for power. If there was a source of power near it, it drew on it, sucking it slowly away.”
“So the seal took the gods’ power from them? How? The second you took the power from one god, didn’t the others realize what was happening?” I asked.
“If we tried it again, I don’t think we could pull it off,” Pollux answered. “I tricked Zeus, asked him to follow me into a cave deep in the ocean. I pretended I wanted to make a deal with him. The gods had had so muchfun,” he spat the word, “they all came together to see just what I might offer them. I suppose things were boring after a decades long war.” He stared hard at Hector and then down at me. “Zeus—my father—brought the entire pantheon. And the moment they were together, the seal began to seep their power away.”
“Why didn’t they notice?”
“Pain.” Paris’s hair was wet from the moors, and it dripped onto his shoulders. The fabric of his shirt clung to him as he raked his hands through his hair and laced his fingers behind his head. “I have always suspected that was what we had on our side. I think our pain amused them, and distracted them. And I can’t answer how any of it works because I don’t know. I just know we managed it. Our power made the seal and stole the power of the gods.”
Achilles snorted. “Zeus was too busy deciding if he should take Pollux’s offer of—”
Oh, god. I knew exactly what Pollux had offered. “You offered him half your immortality for your twin brother’s life?” I faced the big man. I’d asked him to explain what half of immortality was as an academic exercise. I had no idea what I’d been asking. “I’m sorry.”
Pollux shrugged one strong shoulder. “How could you know?”
“Zeus got what was coming to him,” Achilles said, tone too bland for a man who made a joke of everything. I suspected he used it to hide just how hard this conversation was. “We were pathetic and broken heroes. But our presence distracted the gods long enough for the seal to even the playing field. Then—like thieves with stolen treasure—we ran.”
I lifted my eyebrows. I couldn’t picture Achilles running from anyone.
“A good general knows when to retreat, Leo,” he said seriously.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen.” The blonde-haired prince leaned against the wall next to Orestes. While they were different, one dark, one light, one golden eyed, one blue, they had the same world-weariness. Both appeared younger than Hector, Achilles, and Pollux, but one look at how they held themselves and the soul shining out of their eyes, and you could see lifetime upon lifetime lived. “We’re lucky they were too weak to follow.” Paris’s lips lifted in a sudden grin. “And that they had no idea what had happened until it was too late.”
