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9

Reunion

All of my sisters were so excited to see Zane again that they all tried to hug him at the same time.

“Come on in,” Calli said from the kitchen doorway. She was wearing her favorite cooking apron, one with a bright flower-and-bee motif. “I’ve made all of your favorite dishes. Dinner will be served shortly.”

“So I didn’t miss dinner?” I said as Nero and I sat down in the living room next to Harker. “Awesome. I’m famished.”

Zane’s eyes twinkled. “Didn’t you just eat?”

“No, that was ages ago,” I told him.

He snorted. “Yeah, about ten minutes ago.”

The dinner bell rang. I glanced across the room to find Tessa standing there, the bell in her hand.

“Dinner is served,” she said.

“That was quick.” I stood up eagerly. “You could even say the timing of our arrival here was divine.”

Tessa rolled her eyes at my lame joke, then we all followed her into the dining room.

“I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately,” I said after we’d all sat down to dinner. “Those memories that led me back to the Lost City mean something. It all means something. We need to decipher the past in order to understand the present—and maybe have a chance to predict the future.” I glanced at Nero, who was seated beside me.

He was very quiet.

“What is it?” Calli asked. “You know what’s going to happen?”

“Something of it,” I said. “Maybe.”

“I have had visions of Leda,” Nero told my family. “And of our daughter.”

“You can tell the future?” Tessa’s eyes went wide. She looked impressed—and a little scared.

“No.” Nero shook his head. “I cannot.”

“Grace sent him the visions,” I said. “The night before Nero and I met.”

“Be careful, Leda.”

I knew Calli wasn’t just warning me about the hot basket of rolls she’d just passed to me.

“I know,” I said. “Grace is a demon and demons cannot be trusted. Nor can the gods, for that matter.”

“Grace sent me those visions so that I would take notice of Leda when she stepped into my territory two years ago,” Nero said.

“She wanted to bring us together,” I added.

“Yes,” Nero agreed. “But that doesn’t mean the visions are false.”

I sighed. We’d been over this again and again, so many times before. We’d gone in circles, trying to figure out the truth, but we just couldn’t. Since facing Faith, since gaining new magic, I had tried to see into the future myself, but to no avail. I didn’t seem to have the power to look into the future like my mother did. Maybe my daughter possessed that power, between Grace’s rituals on me and her ensuring my unborn daughter absorbed Faith’s powers. Though we wouldn’t know that for sure until she was born.

“I’m definitely being cautious where Grace is concerned,” I told Calli.

“What do the visions of your daughter show?” Calli asked.

Nero’s eyes were as hard as granite. “The universe at war over her.”