He held her gaze and replied, “I know. I would never claim to. You’ve been through things no one should ever have gone through. It’s unforgivable. It’s a dark cross that’s going to sit over all of us for as long as life goes on. But it’s not the only one.”

He rubbed the kitten’s chin, her head tilting up, her warm purr filling Molly’s silence.

“What’s the end game here?” he asked. “Go through the world smashing things up until there’s nothing left? Until either the anger burns you out or someone finally finds a way to destroy you once and for all? Because Joe and I aren’t going to stop. We won’t back down. And now you’ve seen what he can do.” Percy only caught the smallest flash of Joe’s becoming blush before he was drawn away by Molly’s cry of frustration.

“I want revenge!” She threw her hands up into the air, a rain of blood dripping across the grass. “I don’t know. Some kind of…Something! Something to make up for it. Something to make up for four hundred years?—”

“Nothing can,” he said bluntly. “And that’s brutal, and it’s life. Nothing can ever atone for a past wrong like that.”

“Yet you expected me to give up and walk away in exchange for a cat?”

“I’m not asking you to give up. And you’re not having my cat either.” She scowled, he scowled, and he continued, as patiently and succinctly as possible, “People want to tell you that anger is dark and that it’s bad. It’s not. It’s energy, and it’s power. When you let go of your anger, that’s when you become complacent. That’s when you become a victim. I would never ask you to do that.”

Percy reached for her hand, which surprised her enough to look up at him, large and frightened eyes meeting those that had known the fathoms of deepest love, and deepest pain. “If I couldchange it, I would. I’ve wanted to burn this world more times than I can tell you. But I’m glad I couldn’t. Because if I wasn’t here to fight, if Joe wasn’t, what then? Should we just hand this world over to people like that? We can’t choose our pasts or our families or the people we’re surrounded by, any of us. But you can choose the people you love. You can choose to fight for them. They’re worth every bit of it.”

Molly gave a breath of a laugh, so much as to say she felt only the crippling fury, and none of whatever else Percy hinted at.

Without a trace of malice in his tone, Percy said, “Your anger is valid and justified. But you can’t just blindly take your fury out on anything and everything. You need to target it, and I can help you. You’ll get your revenge. And it won’t be through ‘living your best life’ or any of that trite, pacifist horseshit. It will be real, and cold, and viable. Precise. But you can’t give in and throw it all away by making a mistake like this. You can’t do them the favour of taking yourself out of the battle before you take some ground. Even though the odds are stacked against you, you fight, and you never stop. Because unless you fight, nothing changes. Just being here is a fight. Just existing. You stay and you be a thorn in their side until you split them wide open. There’s too much beauty in this world, too much love, to sacrifice it like that. That’s what they want. Don’t, after all this time, don’t let them take that from you.”

Her eyes fluttered closed, and the first tears she’d cried for four hundred years slipped free, down onto Percy’s fingers that still held her hand. She cried, long and piteously, and Percy’s kitten sank her little claws into him over and over, and Percy stayed right where he was, holding onto both of them. Molly yielded to his touch, moving her arms around his neck, pressing herself against his chest, and he ran a hand around her, stroking her hair, much like he would have stroked Cleo’s hair.

He could never have said how he might have reacted, what he might have done, had she looked any other way—had she taken the body of someone who meant nothing to him—but as it stood, Molly had chosen that one step on her path to near-world-destruction wisely. Just as she had when she’d chosen Percy and Joe to be the people to stop her.

Percy pulled back to look at her and said, “I really do believe that sometimes violence is the answer. Often. More often than not, in fact?—”

“Percy!” Joe interrupted.

“But sometimes, the softer way works even better.” Percy raised his eyes to Joe and offered a loving wink in return for his smile. “I never would have gotten here if I didn’t have someone to take my hand and show me the way. And I would have been broken. Hurting. And I didn’t think I was ever going to find my way out of that. I didn’t even know there was a way out.” Taking Molly’s hand again, he said, “That’s why I’m offering it to you.”

Molly tightened her fingers around his, and Percy enclosed hers with his other hand, and she said, “I’m sorry I killed you.”

Percy responded with a grin. “It’s okay. A lot of people want to do that.”

She laughed softly, then found Joe. “Sorry. For everything.”

“Fuck you,” Joe retorted.

Percy stifled a laugh, settling into how much fun Dark Joe already was.

“She’s a murderer,” Althea threw in, having been waiting for the appropriate time to remind them all of that small fact.

Percy gave a harried nod of understanding. “To be fair, a lot of us are murderers.” Her understandably outraged response was cut off when he focused his attention back on Molly and said, “I need to know. Can you bring those girls back? Not bones and ashes—can you bring them all back, full and alive again?”

“I can,” she said. “And Cleo too. Get me to the skull, and I’ll do it.”

Just then, a low and morbid groan echoed up a long avenue. All eyes snapped down to a shady path, where one final skeleton ambled their way along. More than a skeleton. A corpse in remarkably good condition for a body that had lain in its coffin for so very long.

“Oh, shit,” Percy muttered under his breath. He freed himself from Molly with a squeeze of her fingers, jumped to his feet, grasped Joe’s hand and pulled him some small way from the others. “Please don’t be mad.”

“What?” Joe did a double take of both the skeleton and Percy, not sure which one was worrying him more. “What did you do?”

Percy vomited out, “You know we were discussing art and morality, and, and, the philosophy of?—”

Twice as loud, twice as urgent, “What did you do?”

Molly’s head turned, and she cried out, “Puss?”

“Urrrrrrrh!” came the groan in return.