Page 49 of Wildfire

Without even flinching—fuck, was Hebe actually a secret knife-twirling badass?—she dragged the blade over her own arm. There was a flash of gold, the trickle of ichor toward her elbow, and within seconds, her skin stitched back together and only the glimmer of gold remained.

With a pinched frown, Hermes held his forearm up, peering at the thin slice she’d made. It wasn’t healing like hers. Gods, he’d really fucked himself up.

“What did you do to yourself?” Hebe asked, exasperated, as sure as he was that this was his own godsdamned fault.

“Weeeeell—” Hermes shrugged. “I got all up close and personal with Typhon?”

Hebe’s lips thinned. “And you know that his skin is poisonous?”

“Uh huh.”

“So he’s not the kind of being you want to go rubbing up against?” she continued.

Hermes forced a grin. “Couldn’t help it. Youknowhow much I like the bad boys—all big and tatted up. Totally my jam, sis.”

Hebe’s eyes flicked to Wilder briefly. She cocked a brow. “Yes. Clearly. Typhon is simply your type.”

With another sigh, she traced her thumb over his cut. Slowly, it was beginning to heal, but the ichor she smeared across his skin was a dusky copper color.

She dug in her purse, pulled out a mason jar with gleaming golden fruit inside, a fork tied under the lid with jute, and pushed it into his hands. “I don’t know why your powers aren’t working, but I have to assume it’s like when Dad killed Menoetius—not so much about the actual injury as burning off the immortality from the inside out. Your body worked the poison out, but not fast enough, and you took in a lot. This should help. Probably.”

Hermes’s forehead wrinkled as his brows shot high. “Probably?”

Hebe shrugged, sitting back on her heels. “Probably. I mean, we’ve turned mortals immortal before, but it’s not like, after he ate ambrosia, Theo Ward was all the sudden powerful—like he could zip around at the speed of light or grow daisies in his hands or whatever. I mean, maybe one day something’ll manifest, and maybe it’ll be easier for you because you’ve alwayshadyour powers. But I don’t know.”

“Brilliant.” So Hermes was going to be even more useless than he already was. At least Zeus wouldn’t have to worry about Hermes murdering him anymore.

With a huff, he sat up, shifting to the end of the couch. He bent his legs in front of him and opened the mason jar of ambrosia. “You find this on Pinterest?” he asked Hebe, giving the jute tie a little flick.

Hebe shrugged. “You’d rather I carry ambrosia around in Tupperware?”

“I was thinking maybe Pyrex would be appropriate—”

He hadn’t paid any attention to the hard, shocked expression on Wilder’s face as he surveyed the jar, but right then, the professor cut in. “You’re telling me that Theodore Ward ate that, and now he’s immortal?”

For a second, Hermes sucked on his tongue. He looked up at Hebe, at Lysandros, but neither one of them seemed keen on illuminating the secrets of the world for his hot-headed professor. “Okay,” Hermes said, when it became clear he was the last option here. “Yeah. Lysandros fell for your stuffy professor and offered him the big ‘I’—life eternal or whatever.”

Hermes speared a piece of ambrosia and held it out in the air, dangling it on the fork between them. “You want a piece?”

Answered Prayers

Wilder narrowed his eyes at the god before him.

Maybe he should have realized before about Ward. In retrospect, all the clues had been there, but Wilder wasn’t a fucking investigator. He was a teacher. If people wanted him to know things, they told him. If he needed to learn things, he looked them up online.

If it had been any of his business, Ward would have told him.

And frankly, even if Ward did think of him as a friend, which was clearly in question at this point, he wasn’t sure he should have told him. It wasn’t the kind of information one shared around with anyone they didn’t trust completely.

Wilder didn’t have anyone he could tell such a thing.

And there was Hermes, jokingly dangling what was ostensibly immortality in front of him. Was everything a joke to the god, including his own possible mortality?

Or, what seemed more likely, did he joke about things at inappropriate times because he was secretly terrified?

The same way Wilder acted like an ass when he was frightened.

Weren’t they the most pitiful pair known to humanity?

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