Page 2

2

Poseidon

Going home to shower is a waste of time, but I can’t fucking think with my damp clothes pressed to my skin, pulling with every movement, the salt starting to make everything crusty. It’s more than an irritant. It’s agony. My people—Olympus—need me at my best, and my best requires a shower and a clean set of clothes.

I move as fast as possible, but there are still half a dozen missed calls when I step out of the shower. Five of them are Zeus, who is very much alive despite the plans, weeks in the making, to change that. The sixth is from Hera.

It’s Hera that I call back even before I get dressed. She’s not a patient woman, and I highly doubt failing to make herself a widow has sweetened her temperament.

Sure enough, she answers almost before the phone actually rings. “Where are you?”

I prop the phone between my shoulder and ear and reach for a pair of pants. “Securing my prisoner. I take it Zeus is alive, judging from all the times he’s called me.”

“Yes.” Her voice is so cold, I’m surprised the phone doesn’t ice in my hand. “A small setback, but not a permanent one.”

Previously, I found her confidence inspiring. She plays the same games the rest of the Thirteen do, but she at least has the aim of protecting the people of Olympus. Well, she intends to protect her family, but it benefits the general population, which is the only reason I agreed to support her attempted coup. The enemy is literally at our gates; we can’t afford to have the Thirteen divided, and they will never be unified under this Zeus. He’s not charismatic enough, and the others see his attempts to bring the group together as weakness. He should have taken a note from his father’s playbook and ruled by fear, but it’s too late for that now.

“I assume there’s a reason you called. Unless you’re actually ready to discuss the navy currently laying siege to our bay.” Unlikely. Hera moves fast, but this is too much, even for her. We all feared the barrier would come down, but I hardly believed it was possible. It’s held for my entire life, my parents’ lives, my grandparents’, back more generations than I can count. The barrier was just a fact of life, and now it’s gone and Olympus is not prepared to deal with an outside threat.

“He’s called a meeting. I’m sure you’ll get a notification of it shortly. Afterward, I would prefer you linger here so we can discuss our next steps.”

Our next steps. She means to continue with her plans to murder her husband, and obviously she needs my help. Not that she ultimately asked me for much help when it came to putting together the plan to annihilate Dodona Tower. The only reason I agreed with that recklessness was because she promised to clear the tower of everyone except Zeus before bringing it down. The amount of destruction is hard to quantify, but the tower has served as an image for Zeus’s power for generations, ever since it was built so long ago. Bringing it down serves to undermine that title.

It all seems rather petty now. I thought we had more time. I was certain of it. But here we are; the barrier has come down. The barrier has come down. I can barely comprehend what that means. For so long my entire role in Olympus was to ensure our imports and exports came through the barrier smoothly. To ensure the people of Olympus wanted for nothing. To ensure we were safe.

Safety is going to be a foreign concept moving forward, I suspect.

I have no interest in making Hera my enemy. She’s much more useful as an ally, and we’ll need all the alliances we can get in order to protect the people who need it the most. So I swallow down my distaste and say, “I’ll be there.” I hang up before she can. It takes mere moments to finish dressing, but I still feel uneasy.

Everything is changing. And I can’t say it’s changing for the better.

It’s tempting to check on Icarus, but nothing I’ve learned about this man has given me any indication that he’s actually dangerous. Yes, he’s Minos’s son. Yes, he attacked Pan at the country party. Yes, he even took me captive and tackled me into the icy waves of the marina. But once we hit the water, the fight seemed to go out of him. I’m the one who had to drag him to safety. He hardly attempted to drown me.

No. There’s no reason to check on him. There is, however, every reason to ensure that the meeting of the Thirteen doesn’t progress without me present. There are people among that number who I trust to put the city’s safety first, but unfortunately they’re in the minority. I need to be there to act as a balancing force.

I run into Polyphemus near the front door. He looks just worried as I feel. “You’re off to the tower?”

“Yes. I need you and Orion to gather all the people we have and set up a network of sentries along the coastline to ensure that none of those ships land without our knowing about it. Use phones but have radios as backup in case something happens to the cell towers.” I don’t want to believe Circe would be able to dismantle our communication so quickly, but better to plan for the worst outcome. “I’ll be back as quickly as possible.”

“Everything with the Thirteen takes longer than it should. But yeah, I’ll see it done.” He shakes his head, his strong brows drawing together. “And the captive?”

Despite myself, I can’t help my gaze tracking to the door of the room Icarus is currently locked in. There isn’t a sound coming from behind the thick wood, which is just as well. He can’t escape. “He may have information we need. I’ll deal with him when I return.”

I don’t bother to call for a driver as I leave the house. My truck will serve my purposes fine, and I prefer to drive myself unless having a driver is absolutely necessary. I recognize that employing one is the normal way of doing things among the legacy families in Olympus, but it’s silly to employ someone just to drive me around on the rare occasions I need it. My people have better things to do with their time. Most of the rich and powerful in this city already think I’m odd, and this is just one additional piece of proof to support that belief. Having realized they couldn’t use me to further their goals, they mostly leave me alone.

At least until Hera recruited me for her coup.

It takes far too long and yet no time at all to drive into the center city. I hate to spend time in this part of the upper city. No one says what they mean, and everything is a lie. Even the buildings themselves participate in the illusion, each of them nearly identical despite their disparate purposes. A bar looks the same as a pharmacy, which looks the same as an office building. It’s a low-level irritation, but an irritation nonetheless. It’s also a perfect representation of what Olympus is. Of what the Thirteen are.

I’m one of the last to arrive. It makes sense, since I had the farthest to come, except for Hades…but Hades isn’t here. Neither is Hermes, now that I start counting heads. The latter makes sense; she’s been missing more often than she’s been present in the last few months. But Hades? He shows up for every meeting like clockwork. He’s the one other member of the Thirteen that I can depend on to have a cool head and to have his priorities in order.

At least until the attacks in the lower city had him raising the barrier that runs along the River Styx. I assumed it had fallen with the exterior wall and that he would be present, but maybe my assumptions are false.

I take my customary seat midway down the large rectangular table, between Demeter and Artemis. Artemis is about ten years younger than me with light-brown skin, dark curly hair, and a selfish streak a mile long. That trait hasn’t gotten better with the death of her cousin, the former Hephaestus. Demeter…is more complicated. She’s a soft-looking white woman who’s on her way out of middle age, not that you can tell by looking at her. She has deep laugh lines around her full mouth and crow’s-feet branching from her hazel eyes, but there’s something about her that continues to be ageless.

It’s what drew me to her initially, at least long enough to have a short, ill-fated affair. Ill-fated because I had no interest in becoming one of her ex-husbands and she had no interest in sharing power, even if it was only the perception of shared power. I wouldn’t say we’re friends now, but we have an uneasy truce.

Across the heavy wooden table, Athena watches me with unreadable dark eyes. She’s a beautiful Black woman about my age with her hair cut fading up the sides of her head and leaving her curls longer on top. She’s not happy I chose to spare Icarus, and while I can understand that, I’m not one to let my emotions get the best of me. Most of the time. Icarus is a tool to be used; I didn’t spare him out of the goodness of my heart. But Athena doesn’t like to leave loose ends, especially when that loose end sent her on a wild-goose chase through Olympus before the confrontation in the marina.

Zeus clears his throat, drawing everyone’s attention to the head of the table. He’s only a few years younger than me, but there’s something untried about his energy. I can appreciate his having no interest in playing the games the others do, but that lack of interest is a weakness all the same. The last Zeus may have been a monster, but we relied on his charm to keep the people happy and the streets relatively safe.

Not that I think he would have been better suited to handle the crisis before us now. Knowing him, he would’ve tried to make a deal with the enemy so he could come out on top, even if that meant sacrificing large numbers of people. That wouldn’t work now anyway, not when she is the head of the enemy forces. The monster threatening Olympus is of the former Zeus’s making. A reckoning that has been a long time coming.

“Circe is here.” I don’t mean to say it, but I hate this pregnant silence. We don’t have time for this. We need to move, to plan, to orchestrate some kind of defense. We squandered what little time we had to prepare for her with infighting. Now she’s here and all that’s left to do is scramble for our lives and those of every person in the city.

Or surrender.

Zeus plants his hands on the table and half rises. He’s an athletic white man with dark-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He’s handsome in the way of all Kasios family members, but where Ares and Eris—and even Hercules—are the beauty of warmth, Zeus is all ice. His cold doesn’t thaw now. If anything, the sensation of a freezing barrier closing around him only seems to grow. “The time for personal vendettas and bullshit is past. The enemy is at our gates, and if you think Circe will spare a single one of us, you’re a fool. She has more reason than most to hate the Thirteen and Olympus. She’ll show no mercy. She won’t be satisfied until the city is reduced to rubble and every person in this room is dead.” He takes a deep breath. “And that’s why I’m calling for the vote of war. We need to attack the ships before more arrive, to cut Circe down before she has a chance to do more damage.”

I accidentally catch Hera’s eye. I look away almost the moment I make contact, but even in that brief glimpse, I see satisfaction. The idea of the Thirteen ceasing to exist doesn’t seem to bother her. It’s strange. Her family has more connections to the various members of the Thirteen than most—her sister married to Hades, her mother occupying the title of Demeter.

Those connections should make her fight all the harder to protect the Thirteen. They don’t. Maybe she craves a simpler time, before her mother became Demeter and brought her and her sisters into the city proper. It’s those connections that resulted in her becoming Hera, a bargain to protect her family—not to seek power herself.

It’s a similar enough story to several of the past few Heras. Our current Zeus’s mother was a social climber, but Circe was just a beautiful woman with no connections. The Thirteen sure as fuck didn’t protect her when the last Zeus picked her up off the street and married her in a whirlwind ceremony. No one stepped in as he swept her off to a honeymoon that only one of them returned from. A swimming accident, he said. His fresh bride drowned in the ocean. Her body was never recovered.

Now we know why.

She’s back for revenge, and if her plan didn’t involve a navy laying siege to the city itself, I would step back and allow her to do it. Except the man who hurt her has been dead for nearly a year. Our current Zeus was a teenager when all of that happened, and while I was freshly named Poseidon at the time, I wasn’t much older. Perseus couldn’t be expected to do anything. Not when his father saved the worst of his torments for his eldest son. Or that’s what the rumors say.

But I should have done something. The guilt for the past Zeus’s actions have been a weight for the entirety of my tenure as Poseidon. I’m one of the three legacy positions. I should be able to use my power to protect people. Except nothing works like it should in Olympus.

The only people I can protect are my people, so I’ve spent the last decade focused on doing exactly that. Maybe it was a mistake not to fight for more power, not to try to expand my circle of protection past my territory… I don’t know. Even if I had tried to push back against Zeus’s abuse of power and people, I’m experienced enough to acknowledge that nothing would have changed.

Except there would be someone else of my bloodline occupying this seat right now, observing the same bitter rivalries play out, again and again.

While I’ve been musing, a heated discussion has started. Not that I need to be present to know the familiar routes this conversation takes. Zeus makes a declaration. Immediately, Artemis and the new Hephaestus begin listing all the reasons he’s wrong. It doesn’t matter what statement he begins with; it always progresses the same. Now Demeter will step in, making a big show of striving for peace while really riling up both sides. Hermes and Dionysus will whisper back and forth, lobbing a well-aimed insult from time to time to increase the chaos. All while Hades and Hera watch with unreadable expressions on their faces.

Except Hades and Hermes aren’t here.

I clear my throat. “We’re missing two key members.”

“A vote of war only needs a majority. They aren’t necessary.” Zeus meets each person’s gaze in turn. “As long as those of us here tonight are united.”

He might as well wish on a star for all that is going to happen. I shift, drawing his attention back to me. “That’s true, but I don’t know how we can formulate a defense for Olympus without taking the lower city into account.”

Ares is Zeus’s younger sister, her skin reflecting a rosier tint than his, which is mirrored in her auburn hair. I had my reservations when she won the tournament and took her title, but in the time she’s held it, she’s showed every evidence of being a fair leader. She certainly elevated what fighting troops we have. But is it enough?

“You’re right, but it’s one and the same. Hades said he will deal with the Thirteen once we are a whole and unified front. He’s not interested in wasting time bickering.” Ares makes a face. “Neither am I, honestly. Zeus called a vote and it’s time to actually vote. I’m in support of war against Circe.”

Artemis snorts. “You might as well lick his boots while you’re at it, Ares. Circe hasn’t attacked yet, so there’s no reason to think she will. I vote against.”

“On the contrary,” Apollo cuts in. “We have every reason to believe she’ll sack the entire city. She’s done a good job of it even before she actually arrived. I vote in support of war.”

Two in support. One against. We need seven in support to have the majority—and without a majority, we cannot act. I study the table, trying to anticipate which way the rest will go. Athena votes for war, which is expected. Obviously Zeus does. Hephaestus and Aphrodite, both being new and cautious, vote against it.

Four and four.

Dionysus looks sick to his stomach when he speaks. “I don’t think war serves anyone, but I’ve seen firsthand the damage done to this city and I’m not interested in letting Circe run rampant. I vote for war.”

Five and four.

“I vote for war,” I say softly. I don’t want it, but it’s the only option. That leaves us with six in favor of war, four against…and only two left. We just need Demeter or Hera to vote in favor and it will be done.

Demeter keeps her chin high, her hazel eyes steely. A pit forms in my stomach. I know this look. Sure enough, when she speaks, it’s firm and frank. “While I applaud your initiative, we don’t have troops in the traditional sense. We don’t have a navy. We are not prepared for a war, and throwing our people into combat will only end in them dead and Circe still victorious. There is another way. We just have to find it.” She takes a deep breath. “I vote no.”

“No,” I whisper.

All eyes in the room turn to Hera. I already know what she’s going to say. It’s there in the barely hidden satisfaction on her face and the way her lips curve ever so slightly. She shuts it down immediately, presenting a perfectly composed mask as she meets her husband’s eyes. “I agree with my mother. There must be another way. I vote no.”

And with that, Zeus’s plans die a terrible death. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t show even the slightest bit of disappointment. “So be it.” He rises. “This meeting is over.”

I watch the rest of the Thirteen file out of the room, my heart sinking at the implications. While Demeter isn’t wrong—we have no navy to speak of, and Ares’s troops are hardly trained in active combat—her vote spoke volumes. It undermined Zeus to a point where I don’t see how he recovers from this.

I heft myself to my feet and sigh. No matter how fractured the Thirteen, the fact remains that Circe is a threat. Our only chance to get ahead of her is to have the people in charge unified. Hades knows that; it’s why he’s refusing to waste his time until we can actually agree on something. Whether that happens at all, let alone before Circe attacks…it doesn’t seem likely at this point.

And my people will be the first harmed if she stages an attack with those ships.