Page 16 of Patron of Mercy

Thanatos hadn’t known going into the situation that Prometheus was already romantically involved with someone, but he couldn’t say it surprised him. His friend had always been singularly magnetic among titans and gods alike. Just another thing that had made it stranger he’d chosen to associate himself with a loner like Thanatos.

Prometheus nodded at Julian’s question, but his gaze didn’t leave Thanatos. “Zeus’s father. But I have no idea why anyone would want anything to do with him.”

Julian, who’d been in the middle of picking up a cronut, stopped and stared at Prometheus, then Thanatos. “Big, blonde, and sneering has a father? That doesn’t sound like a guy I want to meet.”

Lach snorted. “They’re all dicks when it comes to you and me, vampy. But he might listen to Prometheus—”

“I told you we’re not going to see Cronus,” Thanatos told him with a quelling glare. “Much less asking Prometheus to—” He broke off, realizing how insensitive it would be to mention Tartarus to a man who had recently escaped it after millennia. “To have anything to do with Cronus. No one is talking to him. It’s not an option.”

“That’s for the best,” Prometheus agreed. “There was a reason I sided against Cronus during the war. I don’t know what you could possibly need with him, but he was never helpful to anyone if he could avoid it. Better by far to deal with Zeus.”

Julian almost choked on his pastry, so Thanatos assumed he was more familiar than he’d have liked with the king of Olympus. At the same time, Lach held a bottle of water out to Julian and Prometheus patted him on the back soothingly.

“Watch out for those donut bones, friend,” Lach said with a twinkle in his eye.

Thanatos glared at Lach. He couldn’t be respectful to Prometheus, but he could flirt with his lover? Of course he could. Lach had always appreciated a handsome man, and Julian was that. But the last thing Thanatos needed to add to the scenario was misplaced jealousy.

“We need his scythe,” Thanatos announced, cutting to the chase. He couldn’t imagine that Julian was interested in Lach, but he wasn’t going to stand there and watch the man flirt with someone who was spoken for. Damn Lach and his flirting.

“Planning to travel in time?” Prometheus asked, eyes narrowed in a confused squint. “That’s never a good idea. And not like you.”

“No,” Lach interrupted, waving away the specter of time travel. Once, Lach had dragged him directly into a dragon’s nest—Thanatos didn’t want to see the “adventure” dangerous enough to give Lach pause. “That’s a terrible idea. Gaia says we can use it to make the plants grow again.”

Julian perked up. “Do you think it’ll work? It’s looking bad. We’re already trying to build up stores. We have people working in greenhouses, but the plants aren’t doing much better than plants in fields.”

“Vampires are worried about humans starving?” Lach asked.

With one stark look, Julian questioned Lach’s wisdom, and maybe his parentage. “If the humans starve, we die too. It takes a certain population of humans to support one vampire. Hunt history says that more than one vampire to a thousand humans is downright dangerous to us.”

Lach blinked, shocked. “Huh.”

“Right,” Thanatos agreed. “We’re trying to stave off a worldwide famine, which would hurt everyone.”

Prometheus gave Thanatos a look that said he knew there was one person present who wouldn’t be too badly hurt, but he decided to let it pass without explanation. There were reasons he was helping. Sure, he thought Elysium was a better existence than life, but humans didn’t.

Damn him, Glaucus didn’t.

Thanatos would never forget the fire in his eyes when he’d demanded that Thanatos not take his baby brother away when the sickly boy was taken with fever.

It had been one of the first times Thanatos had truly been able to empathize with why humans feared him. Maybe he didn’t take their loved ones away forever, since all good people were reunited in Elysium, but to humans, whose lives were so short, even a few decades of separation seemed exceedingly long. And that was assuming the humans were aware of Elysium, and believed they were going there.

Humans clung to their mortal lives, found value and comfort in them, and Thanatos wasn’t going to ignore what they wanted. He didn’t know what was best for everyone, and he wasn’t arrogant or selfish enough to force his will on them.

For a moment, Prometheus watched him. Then his eyes darted to Lach, with his salt-curled hair and sun-brown skin, and he seemed to come to a realization. Thanatos scowled at that, ready to open his mouth and explain that his inclination to help had nothing to do with the damned human pirate. Something stilled his tongue. Maybe it was the strange way Lach had been acting, or maybe it was Prometheus’s ready acceptance that Thanatos was doing something good, but he simply waited for Prometheus to go on.

“I can’t tell you for sure where the scythe is.” He glanced at Thanatos, and then away, focusing on Lach. “It’s been a long time, so it’s possible it’s been moved. I’d be inclined to say not, though, since if someone had it, the whole world would probably know.”

Thanatos shuddered. He’d mostly stayed out of the war, but he remembered what Cronus had been capable of doing with the scythe. He hadn’t considered its power over harvests, since he had mostly seen it used for violence. Or the manipulation of time. He didn’t want to imagine what the wrong people would do with such a powerful artifact. He almost didn’t want to find it, humanity be damned.

Julian was looking back and forth between the two titans, expression pensive. “Is it that bad? Should we be looking for a different way to fix this?”

“No.” Lach had always been decisive, but Thanatos had rarely heard him quite so certain. “Gaia says it needs to be the scythe. In thousands of years, she’s never steered me wrong. Whenever I think I’m being smart and I can do it a better way, it always turns out she’s right.”

While Thanatos couldn’t question Gaia’s bigger-picture perspective, it irked him that Lach trusted her without question. Also, she didn’t know everything. Thanatos had a twin brother people thought the same of. Like Gaia, he slept most of his life away. But Hypnos always had a skewed view of the world when he woke, having only experienced the passage of time through people’s dreams, and Thanatos didn’t imagine Gaia was any different.

Unlike Thanatos, Prometheus seemed to trust Lach and Gaia. He bit his lip and nodded. “There’s an island. I don’t know what it might be called now, but it’s shaped like the scythe. That’s where Cronus left it, and Zeus declared it off limits to the gods. At the time, they were all loyal enough to him to follow the order. Maybe they’ve since forgotten where it is?”

As unruly as the gods were, they occasionally had short memories. Or more loyalty than anyone, including they, would admit. “I would ask Athena if she’s hoarded it away somewhere, but Zeus made her account for all the magical artifacts in her possession last year. It’s possible that it’s still where Zeus left it.”

---