Chapter 12
I drew my katana and went for him before the sentence finished.
My babushka used to say that the wolf always announces himself three times before he eats you. First knock, second knock, third knock. Rhadamanthys had announced himself by existing in this courtyard, and I was done waiting.
He moved faster than a man in a Stetson with pearl-handled revolvers had any right to move. The hat was ridiculous. The guns were ridiculous. The speed was not. He cleared my swing by inches and stumbled back with one hand on his hat like that mattered more than his throat.
"Now, wait just a second."
I swung at his neck. The angle was Prague, Istanbul, the cargo hold outside Gdansk where I'd opened a man because he'd reached for a phone.
The muscle memory ran clean and fast, and the relief of it buckled through me.
This I knew. This was simple. Ten minutes ago I'd been on my knees in the wet grass with my daughter's fists in my jacket, and the raw place she'd torn open in my chest still throbbed with every heartbeat.
The blade fixed that. The blade always fixed that.
He drew both revolvers and caught my blade between the barrels.
The impact shot up through my wrists into my elbows.
The guns were decorative, but the steel was functional, and he handled the weight like he'd done this before.
The shriek of steel on steel split the courtyard.
He turned my blade, redirected me past his shoulder, and put three steps between us before I could come around.
"Hephaestus." He kept both guns wide, barrels down. "I am not your enemy tonight."
I came at him again because I knew what a Judge was and I knew what a Judge did. Standing in a courtyard with my daughter behind me while one of Zeus's dogs explained himself was not going to happen.
He blocked with the left revolver. The jolt ran harder this time, and I lost feeling in my thumbs for half a second. I adjusted my grip and kept swinging.
He could have shot me. I'd given him four clear angles, and he'd taken none of them. I kept moving anyway because seeing it and trusting it were different things.
Eight came from my left, fast and low.
She buried her knife in his thigh before either of us could stop her.
Rhadamanthys buckled. He caught himself on one knee and stared down at the blade in his leg, then looked up at the girl who'd put it there.
"Brava, piccola," he said. The pain tightened every word. "You earned that one. Only one, though."
She backed toward me with her chin down and her hands open for the next weapon.
She'd stabbed a man three times her size, and not one adult in this courtyard had stopped her.
I was going to have a conversation with her about engaging armed targets alone.
I was going to lose that conversation. She was her mother's daughter and also mine, and neither of those bloodlines had ever listened to reason.
The thought landed differently now. An hour ago mine had been a word I kept behind my teeth. Now she'd written Я ЗНАЮ in the dirt and hit me until she ran out of anger, and mine sat in my chest like a bruise I kept pressing.
I put her behind me and went at him with everything left.
I drove him back across the courtyard. The stones were uneven under my boots, and I compensated without thinking, weight forward, blade high. He blocked and gave ground. He fought the way old professionals fight: nothing wasted, every movement a negotiation instead of a commitment.
A door slammed behind me. Romani voices cut through, then boots on stone from every direction.
I swung, and he blocked. I came around for another and someone grabbed my arm from behind.
I yanked free and drove my elbow back into whoever had grabbed me.
Two men caught my shoulders. A third caught the katana at the hilt, and my grip was good, but three men pulling in different directions was better.
They hauled me back by my arms, my jacket, my sword hand, until my boots scraped across the stones. Just as many people held Rhadamanthys six feet away. The shouting cut off. The grip on my arms stopped pulling and just held.
My pulse kept swinging. The adrenaline had nowhere to go, and it banged through my chest and my wrists and the backs of my knees, all that momentum slamming into stillness. I held my breath until the courtyard stopped tilting.
Rhadamanthys knelt with blood running down his leg. His Stetson sat crooked on his head. Two men pinned his arms behind his back. His revolvers lay on the stones where someone had kicked them.
He spoke before I could decide what came next. He pitched it past me, at every person holding him.
"You need to listen to me. Because if you don't, everyone here will be dead by dawn."
The men holding my arms squeezed tighter. A woman near the kitchen door crossed herself and grabbed the doorframe.
The word dochka still sat behind my teeth from the olive tree.
His sentence cut through it. I'd spent enough years inside the Pantheon to know what it cost a Judge to walk away from his post. Rhadamanthys knelt in his own blood and offered his death as a credential, and that kind of currency only spent one way.
I jerked my arms free, and they let me go.
"Explain," I said.
Rhadamanthys lifted his chin. Blood soaked through his pant leg where Eight had opened him up, and he knelt in it without looking down. He'd blocked my blade with his guns instead of shooting me in the chest when he had four clear shots. I wanted to dismiss that. I couldn't.
"Achilles and his Myrmidons are at every exit out of this valley." He said it to the yard, not to me. "They move at dawn. Every man, woman, and child under this roof will be dead before the sun clears the hills."
A man to my right spat on the ground. "And why should we believe a Pantheon dog?"
Rhadamanthys turned to him. He clenched his jaw against whatever the leg wound was doing to him.
"Because I walked through that blockade to get here." He held the man's stare until the man shifted back. "I walked straight through it. Achilles knows my face. He knows my name. He let me walk past his men because he knew I would never walk back out."
"Let him talk."
Diego's voice cut across the yard, and the crowd split for him.
The bruise along his jaw had darkened since the basement, and my ribs tightened at the sight of it.
He'd bled for me twice today. Three times if I counted the fight he was about to walk into tomorrow, which I did, because my body had already started tallying the cost.
He came through the gap with his jaw set and his lip still split from Danior.
"Let him talk," he said again. "And then we decide."
He pressed his arm against mine. The heat came through my jacket sleeve, and my whole side leaned into it before I could stop myself.
I'd had his hands on me hours ago. I'd had his mouth on my throat and his nails on my skin, and the sound of him calling me perfect still vibrated through me like a blade struck against steel, the hum that stayed after the impact faded.
The soldier in me needed the contact filed away and locked down.
The rest of me wanted to turn into him and put my face in his neck and stay there.
I kept my weight forward because that was all I knew how to do.
The wind shifted off the hills, carrying the diesel stink of idling SUVs from the roadblock below. Rhadamanthys looked at Diego like he'd been waiting for exactly this.
"I burned my position, my authority, and every protection my title afforded me to deliver a warning I could have kept to myself." He kept his voice level. "If that is not enough for you, kill me and find out at dawn whether I lied."
The man who had spat studied the ground. The rest of the yard studied Rhadamanthys.
Then he played the card I had not known he held.
"Luka Aleksandar is alive," he said. "Rafael Oliviera is alive. There is a resistance building against Zeus, and I am part of it."
The yard split open. Romani and Spanish crashed together, voices climbing over each other, and the noise hit my skull like a pressure change. My vision tunneled. The courtyard, the crowd, all of it shrank to the size of a single name, and the blood in my ears roared louder than the shouting.
Luka was alive.
Luka Aleksandar, who'd challenged Prometheus and lived.
He'd stood up to one of Zeus's dogs and disappeared, and I'd written him off because that's what disappeared meant in our world.
I'd written him off the way I'd written off everyone, the way I'd tried to write off Diego and Eight, because grief was easier when you skipped straight to the end.
My knees tried to buckle. Diego caught my elbow and leaned his weight into my side. He held me up in front of forty people and made it look like he was just standing close.
A door banged open behind me.
Lorenzo came off the porch and across the yard. The crowd split for him because he moved like a man who would go through anything that did not step aside. His shirt hung half-unbuttoned, his feet bare, and none of that slowed him down.
He dropped to his knees in the dirt in front of Rhadamanthys and grabbed the front of his jacket with both fists.
"Say that again." His voice broke on the second word. "Say his name again."
"Rafael is alive, piccolo." Rhadamanthys said it quietly, just for him. "He's alive, and he's fighting."
Lorenzo tightened his grip on the jacket. He shook once, hard. Then he pressed his forehead against Rhadamanthys's chest and stayed there. On his knees in the dirt in front of forty strangers, he made no sound.
I knew that sound. The one he was swallowing. I'd made it in the basement with my face pressed into Diego's hip, and I'd made it at the olive tree with my daughter's fists against my chest. The sound a man makes when the thing he'd already buried comes back breathing.
Diego pressed his thumb against the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse point, and I let him because nobody looked at us. Everyone looked at Lorenzo.
An older man spoke from the edge of the crowd, one of the clan leaders I'd marked at the funeral. He said something in Romani, and the yard shifted around it.
Diego translated without turning his head. "He's calling for a kris. A tribunal. The elders decide what to do with him."
"A trial?" I said.
"More or less. The good news is, they'll wait until after the kris to kill him."
Two men pulled Lorenzo off Rhadamanthys. He let them. His face was wet, and he wiped it with his sleeve and stood with his fists at his sides.
Valentina's nephews hauled Rhadamanthys to his feet.
He put his weight on the good leg and let them take his arms. At the edge of the courtyard, he turned his head back and looked at me.
His Stetson was gone, knocked off during the fight.
Without it, he looked younger, less ridiculous, more like what he actually was: a man who had bet everything on a room full of strangers and waited to find out if it would kill him.
The kitchen door closed behind them.
The yard went quiet. Diego let go of my wrist. The skin where his thumb had been went cold.
Eight slipped her hand into mine.
Her fingers were cold and small, and she gripped tight. I closed my hand around hers and squeezed once. She'd stabbed a Judge for me tonight. She'd written I know in the dirt and then held on. I was still learning what that meant, and the learning hurt in a way I had no training for.
The SUVs at the end of the road sat where they'd been all night, headlights burning inward. I counted the ones I could see from here and came up short of comfortable.
I squeezed Eight's hand once more and let go.
"Come on," I said to Diego. "We need to hear what the Judge has to say."
I walked toward the house with my daughter on my left and Diego on my right, and for the first time in a decade, the weight on both sides was something I wanted to carry.