Chapter 26 Cas
CAS
The return trip was considerably easier, given that there were several portals to Midgard on Bilskirnir.
“Why can’t Zeus just come here and travel to Earth this way?” Silver wondered.
I smirked. “He can’t access my keep without invitation, and he has no clue I have a portal to the mortal worlds.”
She frowned. “But you managed to get to Highvale. I don’t get why he can’t.”
She had so many questions. Finally able to answer them without risking a kick to the balls, I explained, “I—Thor, that is—always was welcome on Midgard. That’s why I was chosen for surveillance here.
No other Olympian can reach it without a direct invitation.
Even so, the trip was fucking painful. I don’t want to repeat it. ”
We took the portal to Paris again, riding the RER B in silence until we reached the private airport where the Guard’s jet still awaited us.
Silver was silent the whole time, processing the events of the last day. I didn’t doubt she’d have a plethora of questions soon.
Gideon met us at the airfield, south of the vale, shouting threats and demanding to know why we hadn’t been in touch.
“Twelve hours off schedule without any contact, Silver!” he yelled in her face.
I moved instinctively, only meaning to block him, but I ended up pushing him back several yards. “Sorry,” I managed between clenched teeth. “She’s hurt. Give her space.”
Silver’s eyebrows rose a little as she stared at me questioningly.
Maybe I was a little too protective, but sue me. I saw her with a pole through the gut, bleeding out on the pavement.
“Hurt?” His demeanor now completely changed, Gideon swore and demanded a report.
As we walked back to the Guard, and down to the underside, Silver ran through the events step by step, only glossing over my fingers inside her.
I would have summed up the events in three to five sentences, but her narration was certainly more dramatic.
I was surprised to see she also glossed over her discovery of my identity. Thankfully the many things she shared were enough for Gideon to not bother wondering how I’d portalled us out to Apollo, or where we’d been.
We parted ways at the Hall of Truce, as he had to report to his mother, and Silver knew she had to see Kleos after worrying her friends for the last day.
Back at the Regis manor, we’d barely crossed the threshold before Silver was tackled by a mountain of fur. I almost reacted before recognizing the scent of the creature.
I stared at the beast as Silver wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “Amavi!”
They were about the same size.
“Are you certain that’s the same bloody dog?” I wondered. “We were gone for three days.”
I knew hellhounds grew fast, but if she continued at this rate, she was going to be the size of a truck in a couple of weeks. Now it made a lot more sense that Apollo called her a guardian.
“She’s a menace,” Kleos said fondly. “Destroyed a dozen pairs of shoes so far.”
“Only your cheap ones, darling. She has excellent taste—wants to see you wear the best. I rather like her.” Lucian winked at his wife. “Congrats on blowing up half of the pavement in Paris, by the way.”
So they’d received some news.
I rolled my eyes. “A third at most. And at least I didn’t damage the Eiffel Tower.”
“Plus there are two hundred crystals we don’t have to worry about anymore,” Silver said.
Kleos groaned as we walked up to the red wing. “About that. Isla came to scan my memories yesterday. I genuinely didn’t know how many I’d made. Draining myself was part of my routine. I locked them out of the way and never thought of them beyond that.”
I cut to the chase, seeing that she was about to drone on as much as Silver would have. “What’s the damage?”
“Two thousand or so. That’s how many she saw me lock away since I started about five years ago. It was just once a week at first, then eventually one every other day, but by last year, I drained daily—sometimes twice daily.”
“Fuck,” I swore.
“If every crystal is modified to turn those who survive them into berserkers, Zeus can have two thousand supercharged minions doing his dirty work for him.”
“Tell us what happened, exactly. We got police reports, videos, testimonies while we were waiting for you guys to come back, but regular humans didn’t really understand things.”
I let Silver repeat the entire story.
“By Hades’s bloodiest pants, why didn’t you call us!” Lucian demanded.
“No phone—I dropped it on the road.”
Grunting, he summoned a bag of runes and handed one to Silver, then another to me. I looked at it curiously. The black flat rune stone was marked with laguz. While familiar with the rune of water, intuition, subconscious, I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to help.
Silver gasped. “My own emergency button? Thanks, Daddy!”
He rolled his eyes. “You press it and think my name three times. I’ll be alerted.”
“Handy,” I admitted. “You’ll have to show me the spell.”
Silver concluded her story, once again simply leaving it at the fact that I took her to her brother.
Lucian was more astute than Gideon. “You knew where Apollo was.”
He wasn’t asking.
I considered my options. I was in the Regis manor, with Kleos, Lucian, Silver, and perhaps Cassius lurking somewhere. I doubted unfriendly eyes could easily see through the shields around this place.
“He’s Ares,” Kleos told Lucian casually.
I turned to her, one eyebrow raised.
“As I said, Isla ran through my memories. I felt a light charm on me and dismantled it.”
“He fucked with your memory?”
I waited for Kleos’s condemnation, but unlike Silver and Lucian, she didn’t even seem mad.
“A little. But he first asked if I could keep a secret. I said I wouldn’t. I would likely have done the same in his shoes.” She smiled at me.
“Sorry,” I told her honestly. “I need to be here, and I need to be seen attempting the mission I’ve been given by my father. If I don’t, people I care about will suffer. Given the general mistrust around me, I figured announcing my name wasn’t the best strategy.”
“All forgiven,” Kleos assured him. “It wasn’t malicious. Besides, what’s a little memory spell between friends?”
I nodded, not missing the two others glaring at me.
“Be that as it may, use any harmful magic on my wife again, and I’ll personally escort your soul on a one-way trip to the depths of Tartarus,” Lucian drawled, ever so casually.
I couldn’t exactly blame him.
Clearly, Lucian and Silver weren’t going to forgive and forget as fast as Kleos, so I opted to bow out. “Well, I’d better get going. I need to get the snake from my neighbor.”
The excuse was flimsy at best.
“Wait one moment,” Kleos said with a graceful wave.
A few seconds later, a plate floated into the room, with half a dozen frosted cupcakes on top.
“Can’t let you leave without those,” she said, taking my hand. “Thank you for taking care of my best friend, Cas.”
I blinked at her, baffled by her warmth.
They were night and day in both looks and demeanor, but in a way, she made me think of Hestia. They were just as warm.
That wasn’t good. I was starting to care about some of these people.
I couldn’t afford to.
I wasn’t their enemy, but the reason I was here had nothing to do with them, or this stupid town.
Zeus was planning to raze it, burn it from the map, and there was nothing any of us could do about it.
“Right.” I cleared my throat. “Thanks, Freya.”
Freya had never been friends with the first version of Thor in the old days, just like Ares was completely indifferent to Artemis.
I’d believed I knew what I was walking into: a doomed city full of people who would not matter to me. I could focus on protecting the one person prophesized to end Zeus, and let the rest of them handle themselves or burn.
Today I had a plate of cupcakes with little butterflies flying around them, and a bratty doll with silver eyes glaring at me.
Things were getting far too complicated.