Page 40 of Bonds of Hercules
Helen and I backed away into her bedroom and closed the door. We crawled into her pink bed and turned onto our sides, facing away from each other.
Fraught silence stretched.
“You don’t want to mess with Zeus.”
It took me a second to process Helen’s quiet voice.
“There’s a reason,” she said, “that the Great War was so fatal for OlympiansandChthonics. Have you ever wondered why no one talks about it?”
I dug my nails into the “C+A” tattooed on my forearm.
Everything about Sparta was convoluted.
“Three words,” Helen whispered.
I squinted, confused what—
“Mutually assured destruction.”
Paralysis stiffened my limbs.Rigor mortis.
Helen fell asleep first, whimpering and kicking under thecovers. When I finally joined her, I dreamed of a cloaked grim reaper watching me.
“Be careful, darling,” Death whispered darkly into my ear, twirling one of my curls.
It’s just a nightmare.
A mouth brushed softly against my forehead, lips warm and disturbingly real. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
The grim reaper stared down at me.
All night, he didn’t move.
Death stood hunched over my side of the bed, staring without blinking, hovering inches from my face, his breath hot against my cheek.
Watching.
Mutually assured destructionplayed on a loop inside my head.
6
GUNS AND OTHER FOREPLAY
ALEXIS: SIXDAYSUNTIL THEFIRSTTITANASSIGNMENT
Nyx was a heavy, snoring scarf around my neck.
“Holy Kronos, Ican’tdo this,” Helen said as she sat on her bed, waving one of her bedazzled “emotional support” guns in the air.
Dragging my hands over my face, I closed my eyes and imagined Carl Gauss praising me for my work on the Riemann Hypothesis. Emmy Noether smiled as she looked over my calculations. Tension melted out of my shoulders at my heroes’ approval.
“What in Kronos’s land am I going to do with Ceres?” Helen wailed despondently. “What have we done?”
My eyes shot open—Carl and Emmy were dead.
Welcome to Hell.
“I did it, technically,” I said. “Not you.”
