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Oh no.
Did that mean what I think it meant?
Was the floral scent I detected her perfume, and she had been using it to seduce Hadrian or maybe it could even be some kind of love potion—-
"I'm sorry, Hades."
I knew it! Oh my God, I knew it!
"One of the SR-41 vials was stolen. I've been wracking my brain, trying to think of how the thief got in, and now..."
"Echo's spell," Hadrian said grimly.
"Exactly."
Don't you hate it when the guy you love and the girl you hate started speaking in a language you didn't understand? And don't you hate it more when they did it in English?
LOTUS, I reminded myself even as I had this childish urge to stick my tongue out at both of them. I mustn't act without dignity, ever. And so I forced myself to smile as I said, "ELI5, please."
Hadrian and Mira both looked puzzled, and it kinda made me feel smug. Finally. Now they knew how I felt.
"What does ELI5 mean?" Hadrian asked finally.
I grinned at him. "Explain like I'm five, duh."
Hadrian laughed, and Mira stared at him incredulously. "You're only being polite and considerate to your consort, yes? That truly could not have been funny for you."
"It was, actually," Hadrian said without a qualm, and oh God, but he just gave me another reason right there to fall in love with him.
"But it's beneath you to even laugh at such a thing." Mira sounded bewildered and offended, and a tiny gasp involuntarily escaped me as I finally realized what kind of stick she had up in her butt all this time.
Mira didn't dislike me because she was hoping to fill my shoes as Hadrian's new wife. Rather, she disliked me because she didn't think I had the right pedigree as LOTUS.
"Saoirse?" Hadrian's sharp tone startled me out of my rather blissful state of enlightenment. "Are you alright?"
"Totes." I meant it. Mira as a distant cousin whose approval I needed to win was so much better than Mira the distant cousin who had the hots for my boyfriend, and so when I saw her lip start to curl up again—-
"I beg your pardon," I said in my best Queen Elizabeth voice and gave Hadrian a regal nod. "What I intended to say was yes, I'm alright."
The Lord of the Underworld was now staring at me like I had started growing eyes all over my face in hopes of being the next Cyclops. "Seriously," he said finally. "Are you okay? Is it your—-"
I glared at him. If he dared, oh if he dared breathe a single word about my big M in front of Mira...
But thankfully, my boyfriend was anything but dense, and he said right away, "On second thought, you do look fine, love. And as for what you were asking about earlier..."
Knew it. I was grudgingly impressed at his nice segue, and just the tiniest bit suspicious. Maybe he really was Eros—-
"The floral scent you identified is narcissus."
It wasn't so much as the words than the way Hadrian's jaw had hardened that caught my attention.
"It's the key ingredient in Echo's spell," he said said flatly, "which is used to remember certain words and play it back...using the same exact voice."
I knew I wasn't as brainy as either of these two, but even I didn't need to have the consequence of that spelled out. Someone had obviously used Echo's spell to unlock the door to Mira's laboratory, and as for SR-41...
Oh, this cousin of his...
I had a feeling 41 was supposed to symbolized my age, which normally I didn't give a whit about, but now that I was suffering from the most exaggerated symptoms of menopause...
She obviously wanted to annoy me, and she got what she wanted. I was annoyed, never mind if we both knew I was the equivalent of a three-month-old fetus when compared to her ancientness.
"Let me guess," I said darkly. "SR stands for Saoirse Repellent, doesn't it?"
"I only had the word 'remedy' in mind," Mira answered, "but seeing that milady's quite obsessed with repellents..."
Cousin, I reminded myself. She was Hadrian's cousin, which made her my cousin by marriage.
Hadrian walked towards the table where the vials were, and I followed behind him. There was a set of vials placed in a cooling tray, with one spot conspicuously empty.
"The formula still needs a couple of tweaks," Mira told us, "but I've tested it on a couple of basilisks—-"
I took mental note of this so I could Google it later on. Why a basilisk and not the usual rat or guinea pig?
"And it worked," Hadrian ended for her. "Didn't it?"
"We have enough samples of Zeus' thunderbolts here, so it was quite simple to create miniature carbon copies and bespell them in a similar way. I then placed them inside the basilisks' cage, and not a single one of the thunderbolt was activated. They didn't recognize the basilisks as targets at all!"
