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“You should be,” answers Demeter.
She comes to the side of the bed and helps us off. My mom comes to my other side, but it’s Hercules who has wobbly knees now. Light from the bedroom windows is starting to filter into the hall.
Hercules and I are the last ones out, my mom waiting for us.
I’m at the door when my dad takes a deep breath. “I saw Rosie.” He’s almost too quiet to hear, and breaks into rough, audible sobs.
“Oh, Hades,” Eleanor says, and I reach back and pull the door shut behind me, my chest aching for him. Hewouldbe embarrassed about crying in a way that other people could hear, which he’s never done, not once in my life.
Poseidon clatters down the stairs behind Demeter. “When you saylight Hades’s house on fire—”
“The young man was going to shoot a flaming arrow at the house.”
“What?” shrieks Artemis from the bottom of the stairs. She’s in pajamas, constant Apollo at her side, the rest of my cousins gathered in a clutch of bedhead and bewildered looks. “Can I shoot him with an arrow, then? Hi, Demmy.”
Demeter dispenses gracious kisses to all the cousins. “Do you have your bow?”
“They took it away last time I shot someone with it, but they didn’t hide it very well.”
“Demeter, for Christ’s sake,” Zeus says. “No one is murdering the—young man? Are we talking about a teenager?”
“No, he is simply a fool.” Demeter finishes ruffling Pollux’s hair and goes through the living room, the rest of us following. “Gio?” she calls. “Where did you go?”
“In here,” he calls back. There’s a small library off the living room, and Demeter’s husband is standing in it. His light hair looks shiny and gorgeous in the glow from a lamp on the corner table. It’s having to compete with the sunrise.
A sallow-skinned man sits at his feet, his hands tied behind his back and a bruise darkening under his eye. He glowers at us as we get closer, his lip curling to reveal the telltale lines of a heavy smoker around it.
“Nofuckingway.” Hercules doesn’t seem tired anymore. He doesn’t feel tired. I wrap my hand above his elbow, because I’m almost certain he’s going to kill this man. “You piece of shit.”
“Shut the fuck up,” spits the man. “I have nothing to discuss with you.”
Hercules laughs. “Wasn’t enough for you last time? Kick him over here, Gio, and I’ll give him what this asshole is so desperate for.”
I tug at Hercules’s arm. “What are you talking about?”
He pulls away from me too fast to stop him. Hercules is at Gio in a few long steps, and he digs his hand into the man’s dark hair and pulls his head up so I can see his face in the lamplight.
“You’ve met before,” Hercules says. “Remember?”
One blink, and I see their faces as they were the night of the charity gala. Hercules’s hair was much shorter, but his eyes are still the same. The bloodlust there sends a shiver down my spine.
The man, whose name is Kenneth Coleman, hasn’t aged well.
Dark smudges underneath his eyes make them look wilder. There’s a pallor about him, a strange color to his cheeks. The man lookshaunted.
Not by me. He’s the one who pushed me into that alcove and put his mouth on mine when I didn’t want him to touch me. He’s the one who called me a bitch after I bit him, trying to get him to stop.
I take a few steps closer.
“Kenneth.” He pulls against whatever Gio used to tie his wrists. “You…don’t look great.”
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You should be thrilled.”
“What?”
“You killed my parents. You killed mysister.”
A general murmur rises from my family. Artemis’s voice rises at the last second. “Okay,nowI’m putting an arrow through his eye.”
