Chapter Fifty-Four

Sophie visited Adrian in the makeshift guest room, the study on the first floor with a sofa where he was going to sleep. Kiri and Rosie and Pumpkin all dozed on the floor. It was after midnight and the rest of the house had gone to bed. But rather than engaging in steamy undressed activities with an ear cocked for the footstep of her parents, they were arguing. Quietly and sympathetically, but still an argument.

Adrian was trying to convince her it might be best if he didn’t stay inside the house. “If they find out I’m in here, they could just blow the whole place up to get me—taking the lot of you out too.”

“How would they do that with all the magic and spying you guys are doing?” she said.

“I’m telling you, our magic and spying are not that awesome. They could sneak straight past all of it if they chose their moment right. We can’t protect everyone, always.”

“Well, I feel safer if you’re here,” she insisted.

“And I’m saying maybe you shouldn’t.”

They went over and over those same pieces of ground. It was, in a grim way, a relief when Zoe’s text interrupted them.

It came to them both, cc’ing Nikolaos, and they stopped arguing to check their phones.

Attack on Tab. We’re all ok for now. Need to regroup and plan.

Sophie’s stomach clenched in queasiness. She gazed at Adrian. After a few seconds, he advanced and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll keep watch round here. You call Zoe and get the details.”

She nodded, though her tongue had turned so dry she doubted she’d be able to speak. Adrian and Kiri departed to the front room, where, in the dark, he moved from one window to another and peered out.

She called Zoe. Zoe gave her the story, and said they’d be finding a different place to sleep tonight, other than either the dorm or the hotel room in Seattle. “You two might think about doing the same,” she said.

“But my parents and brother are here. They’re asleep. I don’t want to wake everyone up and move them, but I also don’t want to leave them…”

“Listen, I’ll come over,” Zoe said. “I’ll feel round, same way I did with Tab’s car. If there’s anything like that bomb planted near, I ought to be able to sense it. Then maybe you can stay for now, but think about a new place to go tomorrow, yeah?”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Sophie went out to the living room and caught Adrian up on the conversation, though he’d been hearing details from Freya, who had called him.

He peeked past the curtain to squint out into the night. “We don’t know if they’ll even target this house anytime soon,” he whispered. “They might be concentrating this attack on Tab. We need to figure out if they know she’s immortal for sure, or if they were just trying to do damage to your friends. I’d bet on the former, if they went as far as a car bomb, and a high-powered rifle as backup.”

Sophie leaned against the wall, shaking. “So what else do they know?”

“That’s what we have to find out.”

Zoe arrived soon. After giving each of them a reassuring hug, she walked the perimeter of the house and the property, trailing her fingertips on the concrete foundation, the cars, the fence, the planter boxes, every potential hiding place for explosives she could think of.

“Nothing,” she reported when she came back in. “Which isn’t to say they won’t try some other way, sometime. But nothing for now, tonight, as far as I can sense.”

“I wonder if Quentin even knows her assassin failed yet.” Adrian’s jaw clenched as he scowled out at the empty road. “If I knew where she was, I’d bring her his body myself and dump it at her feet. Then I’d drag her into the spirit realm and leave her for the animals like I told her I would.”

Sophie sank onto the sofa, wishing she could find some realm free of all this viciousness. Did any such place exist, besides the fields of the Underworld? Maybe she should just move there. With her whole family. Her father might like it, growing magical produce, but Liam would surely get bored and go above ground and get himself eaten by one of those spirit-world beasts…

Her dazed thoughts tumbled with her into her dreams as she fell asleep on the sofa, with Zoe and Adrian keeping watch in the house.

The immortals stood or sat about in the fields, some gazing across the glowing expanses in distress, some studying the souls of their fallen companions with stormy expressions, some clustered around Hekate.

Persephone, Hades, Demeter, Zeus, Hera, Epimetheus, Euterpe, Benna. The fallen had all converged to meet their grieving friends and family. Hermes had spread the word, dispatching others to fetch everyone, until all the immortals had come down here to judge what should be done.

Ares had come with the rest, though he looked as uneasy as ever. “Why have you not attacked?” he asked the others. “How can you let a savage insult like this stand?”

For once, no one talked him down, Persephone noted with concern. She tried to do so herself. “Ares, once you reach the state we’re in, you’ll see it doesn’t help, answering violence with violence…”

He rounded on her. “I never want to be in the state you’re in! I don’t want it to happen to any of us! We need to wipe out these ungrateful swine, and we need to do it now.”

“I agree.” Artemis’ voice trembled, and her eyes glistened as she took in the row of her translucent companions. “They have gone too far.”

Dionysos had found Agria’s soul—the only leopard-like animal in the fields—and was kneeling beside her, watching her circle curiously around the soul of a house cat. “They have gone too far,” he said softly. “We need to take a stand.”

“I agree.” It was Hekate’s voice. Everyone turned to her in surprise. She kept her eyes lowered, staring at the pale grass. “I’m willing to incur black marks against my soul if it means destroying these murderers. The Fates long to get their hands upon them. I can feel it.”

“My dear,” Rhea said gently, “isn’t it possible it’s you who long to get your hands on them?”

“Either way,” Hekate said, without even a blink. “Who’s with me?”

“Truly, I don’t think we should initiate bloodshed,” Hephaestus said, with some timidity.

Hekate turned a passive glance upon him. “We didn’t initiate it. And what if it wasn’t us who shed the blood? What if it was nature?”

Dionysos looked from Agria’s soul to Hekate, and rose with a nod. “I stand with you.”

Hermes waited at Hekate’s back, as if guarding her. He squeezed her shoulder. “And I.”

“And I,” Ares muttered.

“And I,” Artemis said.

Apollo joined. Poseidon joined. Aphrodite joined. Rhea joined. Two of the Muses joined.

And in the end, those who declined to join agreed not to stand in the way of the rest.

Sophie awoke to the clink of breakfast plates and the white light of morning. She entered the kitchen to find everything was still surreal: her parents were having breakfast with Adrian and Zoe, and her dad looked up at her and said, “Hey. I’m thinking we have Christmas in some other house this year. Like one in Baja maybe.”

Sophie glanced at Adrian, who capitulated in a half shrug. “Works for me,” she said. “Kind of like the Witness Protection Program. As long as you don’t tell people where you’re going.”

“We’ll work out the details today,” her mom said. “Find a good place, get organized, and go this afternoon or tonight. So none of us has to worry so much. Sound good?”

Sophie nodded, the kinks in her neck relaxing in sweet relief. “Very good.” She glanced up the stairs. “Liam still asleep?”

“Yeah,” her mom said. “We’ll tell him when he gets up.”

“Tell him everything?” Sophie looked to Zoe and Adrian, who both clearly wore doubt on their faces.

Her dad spread jam on his toast. “I’m thinking at first we’ll just tell him it’s meant to be a big secret and we can’t tell anyone. Course, when he sees how we’re getting there, he’s going to need more of an explanation.”

“He’s going to love that bus,” her mom said.

Terry shook his head. “Tell you what, your grandma is not going to be pleased with us for bailing on her Christmas visit.”

“I’ll bring her to see you if you like,” Zoe said, smiling at him. Hekate smiling at her grandmother Demeter, Sophie thought. Not that her dad knew he was Demeter yet.

She blinked her bleary eyes and turned toward the bathroom to get ready for the day.

Krystal’s disappointed sigh cut through the quiet of the cabin. “Here it is.” She glared at her phone’s screen, reading aloud. “’A man was accidentally killed by a bus on Capitol Hill last night when he pulled a gun on a crowd after a Luigis concert, and was chased into the street by onlookers. Police also found a car bomb beneath one of the audience members’ vehicles parked on the street, and suspect the two incidents are linked.’ God damn it. Idiot. We shouldn’t have trusted him.”

“It’s hard to get people to do that kind of work,” Landon sympathized, leaning over her chair to look at the phone.

Betty prodded the embers in the fireplace. “So we still aren’t sure Tabitha’s one of them?”

“No,” Landon said. “But then, we wouldn’t have been sure if we’d killed her, either.”

“I say she’s one of them.” Krystal thumped her phone down on her lap. “Ugh. Incompetents.”

“Sounds like it was mostly bad luck,” Betty said. “No plan is perfect. We’ll try her again before long. Adrian is still the known enemy, and we still go after him today. You ready?”

Krystal’s frown lifted to a calculating smile. She twirled the end of her red ponytail in her fingers. “Ready.” She beamed across the room at the case containing her newest purchase, which Betty had helped finance: a grenade launcher to attach to a rifle Krystal already owned, and a few high-explosive rounds. They had all been purchased under the table to avoid legal registration, and had set Betty back a couple of thousand dollars. But that was a small price to pay for stopping a threat to the safety of the human race.

Law enforcement would thank Betty Quentin someday, if they ever found out the whole story.