Chapter 5 Circe
Circe
I have the crowd right where I want them, frothing at the mouth and slavering for violence. Peitho kneels before me, her face pale and terrified, none of the cold calculation she showed earlier in evidence. Good.
I hold up a hand, silence falling immediately at the simple gesture.
“I won’t have it said I’m without mercy.
” I sweep my gaze over the crowd in a way designed to ensure every person feels like I’m looking at them specifically.
I expected to feel more victorious to be here, enacting the final stages of my plans.
My chest is an empty, echoing space just like it has been since Antigone pulled me from the water all those years ago.
“You have heard the list of her crimes, have witnessed many of them yourselves. Will you speak on her behalf and beg for mercy?”
The silence thickens, gaining weight and intensity. No one moves. No one seems to breathe. I fight down a shiver. A mob is a terrifying beast, unable to be controlled, even by those who set it into motion. We’re not quite past the tipping point, but we’re getting close.
I can’t afford to rein them in. Not without them turning on me.
Eros sits in the front row, so tense he’s practically vibrating, his gaze jumping from his mother to Demeter to me.
Only Psyche’s hand on his arm seems to keep him leashed, and it’s unlikely to do so for long.
Even if she manages to keep him in his seat, she’ll lose him in the end for asking him to sit by and watch his mother be executed.
No one makes it out of Olympus unscathed.
I let the silence stand for several more beats. “No?” I smile. “Very well.” I pull my gun from the holster tucked into the small of my back and point it between those weeping blue eyes.
“No!”
I flick a glance to Eros a bare moment before a weight hits me from above.
Above? I slam into the floor hard enough it snatches the breath from my lungs.
The impact threatens to daze me, but I’ve trained too damned hard to be laid low by a surprise attack.
I start to shove the attacker off me but stop short when I catch sight of familiar dark eyes lined with thick black lashes.
There was a time in my life when I swore those eyes contained all the mysteries of the universe and whatever future awaited me—because it would be with her.
“Hecate,” I hiss.
“In the flesh.” She goes for the gun.
I had my people prepare for the eventuality that someone may try to do something foolish and heroic.
I didn’t expect Hecate, but it makes no difference.
Antigone and Nerissa are there in a heartbeat, grabbing Hecate—because I refuse to call her Hermes—under the arms and hauling her off me.
Too easy. She never would have let herself be taken so easily.
Something metallic flashes in her hand. “Knife!” I cry out, forgetting to keep my tone modulated to my public persona.
Antigone dodges a split second before Hecate makes contact. It’s enough for her to break free, though. She dances back, twirling her knife in a careless way. “You know, there’s a reason public executions went out of style ages ago. Murder is deeply distasteful and all that.”
It takes effort to rise gracefully to my feet instead of scrambling, but I force myself to do it. To tilt a smile to the audience who are roaring their displeasure and confusion. “Since when has Olympus frowned upon murder…Hermes?”
She sidles to the side, not moving toward Peitho but getting between me and…Eros and Psyche?
Demeter finally rouses herself from whatever disassociation she’s indulged in. “Circe, you’re about to lose the crowd.” She doesn’t speak loudly, but she’s close enough for me to pick up the words all the same.
She’s right. Hermes is beloved by the people of Olympus.
I have no intention of killing her, but they don’t know that.
If they think she’s threatened, the tide may turn against me.
I can’t allow that to happen. The moment requires decisive action.
I resolutely turn away from Hecate and focus on my current intention.
Peitho. I lift my voice, my microphone ensuring my words will cut through the chaos.
“Peitho, for your crimes during your reign as Aphrodite, you are sentenced to death.”
“Damn it, Circe!”
Movement as Hecate tries to throw herself at me again. Too late. She’s too damned late. It’s the simplest thing in the world to pull the trigger three times, taking the bitch twice in the chest and once in the forehead. Peitho slumps to the ground, blue eyes blank and unseeing.
A roar goes through the crowd, but I can’t begin to tell if it’s in support or denial.
Calm settles in my bones. This may not have gone off as seamlessly as I initially planned, but it did go off.
The Aphrodite who presided over my kidnapping and forced wedding, who I begged for freedom only to be denied, is dead.
One down.
There are a few dozen trials to hold once I get my hands on the rest of the Thirteen and the legacy families, but only a handful of them are ones I personally care about. Poseidon. Hades. Athena. Zeus, even if he’s not the same man who hurt me. Sins of the father, as the saying goes.
I’m so focused on Hecate, staring at me with those pretty, wide brown eyes as if I’ve shocked her by doing exactly what I said I intended to do, that I don’t see Eros coming. He launches himself over the edge of the stage with a smooth move I’d admire in other circumstances and sprints toward me.
I take one measured step back and raise my gun. “Not another step.”
“Circe, don’t.” Hecate’s voice cracks on the last word. She sounds so much like her old self that my head whips around to look at her when I should be focusing on the incoming threat.
Her beauty breaks the shards of heart left in my chest even further. Gone is her splashy fashion, bright and shiny like a two-bit magician. She’s wearing black pants and a black hoodie, her boots laced up tight. She looks a lot like the girl I used to love. Enough to give me pause.
The distraction costs me.
Eros grabs for the gun, and he’s much more effective than Hecate was. His blue eyes, so like his mother’s, are murderous. “I’m putting an end to this now.”
He’s stronger than me, but that matters little. I release the gun, using his confusion to pull my second one. Every plan must have contingencies, and that includes personal defense. “No, you’re really not.” I shoot him twice in the chest.
The shock on his face, the condemnation, stings as he stumbles back and presses his hands to his wound.
He goes to his knees and slumps over, going paler yet as his blood paints the stage around his body.
This man has as much blood on his hands as I do, and yet he looks at me as if I’m the monster in the room.
Demeter shoves me aside, reaching his fallen body the same moment Psyche does. The women sink to their knees, their dark heads bowed almost identically as they frantically try to stop the bleeding.
Antigone starts to move forward, but I shake my head. “Leave him.” I turn the gun on Hecate, but she’s standing with her arms down, shock written all over her pretty features as she stares as Eros. At least that will be simple. “Take her.”
Antigone snatches the knife from Hecate’s nerveless fingers and roughly wrestles her arms behind her back, driving her to her knees.
Psyche’s head jerks up, tear tracks marking her round cheeks. She opens her mouth, but Demeter puts a hand on her arm, no doubt worried what I’ll do to her precious daughter if she challenges me publicly. Demeter’s hazel eyes go hard. “You killed him.”
I shrug. There was a time in my life when killing a person, let alone two, would have given me nightmares for years. Now, I feel nothing at all. “He would have done the same to me.” I lift my hands, all too aware of the crowd. “Was it poorly done?”
They roar in response, the spectators of a public execution who showed up for violence and got more than they were promised.
They’re pleased. They’ll remember this and show up for the next and the next, until I’m finished.
It will be tricky to navigate them back to their normal lives once we’ve accomplished a full transition to power, but I have a plan for that.
I have a plan for everything.
I motion to my people, signaling for them to open the doors around the auditorium.
Then I give my full attention to the crowd.
“You’ve seen what we can accomplish together.
The Thirteen are terrified of your power—and they should be.
They’ve fled to the lower city, taking refuge behind a barrier identical to the very one that kept you trapped at the whims of their power. Will we stand for it?”
“No.” The word is more felt than heard, vibrating my body down to my very cells.
“Show them,” I say simply and point to the doors. “This is your city, not theirs.”
They manage to file out of the room in a mostly orderly fashion, helped along by my people at the exits.
Within a handful of minutes, the final stragglers have dispersed.
I can hear them chanting something out in the quad.
Good. Things are coming along nicely. Now it’s time to button up this small mess.
I turn back to find Hecate on her knees, still being held by Antigone, her skin waxy and her chest heaving with each breath. “What have you done?” she whispers.
“What I had to.” More words press against my tongue.
It didn’t have to be like this. I never wanted to be your enemy.
You drew your line in the sand, and the only option I have is to step over it.
I swallow them all down. I don’t owe her an explanation, and beyond that, it would weaken my position among everyone gathered.
I motion to Nerissa. “Get this mess cleaned up.” There’s much to do and little time to accomplish it. I walk out of the room, Antigone dragging Hecate behind me, leaving the bodies of the last remaining members of the Ambrosia family on the ground where they fell.