It wasn’t hard to find Theo in the Rome airport. Selene went straight to the bookshop closest to the gate for his Athens flight. He wasn’t in the history section—she suspected he was tired of dwelling on the past. Instead, she found him tucked in the corner beside the single shelf dedicated to English-language science fiction novels.
She stood silently for a moment, watching him read. His glasses slipped down his nose; he pushed them back up. She’d seen that gesture a hundred times. Never before had it made her want to cry.
This is a terrible idea, she thought, taking a wary step back. I should never have come. But she thought of her father, so close to death, and cleared her throat. “Looking for a little escapism?”
Theo jumped.
“Christ, Selene! You scared the crap out of me.” He slammed his book closed, wincing at the movement. The arrow wound in his arm, she remembered guiltily. That’s not going to help my case.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded. Then his anger swiftly dissolved into desperate misery. “Please don’t tell me you’re on my flight.”
“No,” she said, pretending his expression hadn’t felt like a stab from Mars’s spear. “I’m not meeting Scooter at the base of Olympus for another two days. No point in getting there earlier—it’ll take him that long to help Father assemble the other gods. So I’m not going to Athens yet. It’s the only place I know I don’t need to search.”
He glared at her suspiciously. “Search for what?”
“More like for whom.” She didn’t elaborate. This was a bear better lured with bait than trapped with force.
She watched the conflict play out over Theo’s face. Finally, he shoved his book back onto the shelf and crossed his arms. “All right. For whom?”
“The Gray-Eyed Goddess.”
“I thought Athena couldn’t be found.”
“Has that ever stopped us before?” she asked calmly.
“Us? You’re kidding, right? Why would I possibly help you?”
“Because my father’s life hangs in the balance.” She described Zeus’s worsening health. When she’d left the apartment that morning, his heart had slowed even further, and his skin was icy cold.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” he said, and from the softening of his gaze, she knew he spoke the truth. “I’m trying to help—I’m going to Olympus so a mortal can witness the Gathering, remember? But I don’t see how Athena can do more than the rest of us.”
“I know she can. Because the Delphic Oracle told me so.”
“What? When?”
“After we defeated Aion and the Torchbearers, Apollo and I passed through classical Delphi.”
Theo’s eyes grew huge. “You time traveled to classical Delphi and you didn’t tell me?” He threw up his hands. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to bury the lede, Selene?”
“I thought you didn’t want to talk to me,” she said a bit sullenly.
“I didn’t. But …” He groaned loudly, his customary loquacity finally surrendering to wordless frustration.
“Come on, Theo,” Selene urged. “Help me find Athena. Don’t you want to meet her? I thought she was your favorite goddess.”
“I’ve learned that even favorite goddesses can disappoint you,” he snapped.
I deserved that, Selene knew, biting back a retort. “At least help me figure out where to look. The Pythia said, ‘Seek the Wise Virgin. Not in Athens is her seat, but where the Virgin is tall. There the cure is the spear that can conquer the greatest foe.’ But if she’s not in Athens, then where? Where else would Athena be tall?”
Theo’s lips pressed together, and she could sense his resistance. He still didn’t want to get dragged back into her problems. But some combination of his sympathy for Zeus and his usual insatiable curiosity got the better of him. “You received the prophecy in Delphi, so it was in Ancient Greek, right, not English? Tell me the Greek version.”
“Um …” She took a second to retranslate. “Zetete ten Parthenona Sophen. Ou de en Athenais to hedos, alla Hagne pou eukteanos, ekei to akos to akontion hoi ho megistos enantios nikethesetai.”
“To akos to akontion,” Theo mused. “The cure is the spear.”
“Yes. When we find the Virgin, her cure will be the spear we use to conquer death—the greatest foe.”
“So you’re taking ‘spear’ and ‘foe’ metaphorically.”
“Of course. The Delphic oracle should never be taken literally—you know that.”
Theo raised a skeptical brow. “More like you should never trust your first interpretation. Apollo spoke the prophecy in ancient Delphi, after all his immortality had been restored—why would death be his greatest foe? The Olympians’ traditional enemy wasn’t dying; it was the giants.”
“The ones we locked away in Tartarus after the Gigantomachy.” Selene sucked in a breath as she imagined what could happen on the summit of Olympus when the gods gathered to reopen the ancient prison.
Theo echoed her thought. “I’ve been standing here for the last hour, waiting for my plane, trying to distract myself from what we’re about to do in Greece. Because the more I think about opening Tartarus, the more I think Zeus might not have thought carefully enough about what comes out.”
“Father thinks a whisper of pneuma will escape from the chasm, but along with it—”
“Comes a whole army of hundred-armed giants.” He looked grim. “I think your prophecy is telling us all how to survive. Athena was called the Giant Killer. That’s why we need her. And her spear, too. Because there’s not much point if the pneuma comes whooshing out and Zeus is miraculously healed, but then we all die at the hands of your ancient enemies anyway.”
“True. But whether the spear is metaphorical or literal—whether she defends us with her weapon or heals Father with a cure—we still need to find her hiding place. Think.”
Theo raised a brow at her impatience. “I’m working on it.” He rubbed the dimple on his chin. “The Parthenona in the prophecy definitely refers to the virgin Athena—that much we agree on. She’s the one with the Parthenon and the spear, after all. But I’m not so sure about ‘alla Hagne pou eukteanos.’ You translated that as ‘where the Virgin is tall.’”
“Because that’s what it means,” Selene said quickly, annoyed that he might accuse her of messing up her mother tongue.
“Sort of. But Hagne is more like ‘Chaste One.’ Pure, holy, inviolable. Any woman who hasn’t had sex—even just a young woman—can be a parthenona. Only one actively resisting sex is a hagne. That’s why Hagne is more commonly used as an epithet for—”
“Me,” Selene finished for him. She could almost see the scene playing across his memory—all those nights he spent in her bed, abiding by her strict rules, until she finally tossed them away one frozen, moonlit night by the banks of the Hudson. Before the thought could derail him—or her—she pushed on. “So Athena can be found where the Chaste One—Artemis—is tall? Where the hell would that be?”
“Eukteanos… Tall like a tree,” Theo began, his eyes roaming the shelves of the bookstore. “Something tells me I’m not going to find an Ancient Greek lexicon hiding amid the Italian paperback thrillers, but I want to look up the definition. I feel like Aeschylus uses the same word to mean—”
“Wealthy,” Selene interrupted with a groan. “Styx. Not ‘where Artemis is tall,’ but ‘where Artemis is wealthy.’ When we were in Delphi, I wasn’t thinking about dual translations,” she admitted. “It felt perfectly natural to me to just assume I understood the prophecy in English, too. But Ancient Greek is full of words with multiple meanings.”
The corner of Theo’s mouth quirked. “Like I said, never assume you understand the Delphic oracle.”
“True,” she agreed. “Like when King Croesus asked whether to invade—” She stopped in mid-thought. “King Croesus,” she repeated slowly.
Theo’s eyes lit up. “You mean ‘rich as Croesus’? That King Croesus?”
She nodded, finally slotting the pieces together. “The legendarily wealthy king who built one of the biggest temples in the history of the world to honor the Chaste One.”
“The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Turkey.” Theo’s broad grin brought out the dimples on both cheeks and sent Selene’s heart skittering. She never thought he’d smile at her again. “You weren’t wrong, Selene. The prophecy just holds multiple meanings at once. The Wise Virgin’s seat is the place where the Chaste One is wealthy—”
“And also where Athena is tall—”
“Because that’s where your sister is living today.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, the thrill of discovery coursing between them like an electric current.
“Aegean Air flight fifty-four to Athens, now boarding through gate fifteen.”
Theo started visibly. He glanced down at his watch, then at Selene, then back at his watch.
Selene looked at the departure board. For once, she felt as if the Fates were on her side. “There’s a flight in forty-five minutes to Izmir, Turkey. That’s the closest city to ancient Ephesus. We have a day to find her and a day to get back. I’m going. Now.”
“Athens passengers, please have your boarding passes and passports out.”
Theo pulled out his boarding pass and stared at it for a moment before he blew out a loud breath. “I’m going to come with you, aren’t I? I’m going to help you find Athena and convince her to come to Olympus.”
Selene just smiled.
Theo crumpled the boarding pass in his fist. “But that doesn’t mean we’re partners in any other sense, okay? If we need a hotel, you get your own room, and we don’t talk about us. I’m coming as a scholar—is that clear?”
Her smile drained away, but she nodded. She’d never begged a lover, a worshiper, or any other man to want her.
She wasn’t about to start now.