Chapter 9
Hermes
I’m getting really fucking tired of being drugged.
My head feels too large on my shoulders and my body isn’t obeying my commands to move.
Circe closes the door softly behind her and walks toward me, every inch a goddess taken human form.
I’m so angry at her, I shouldn’t be fighting not to whimper at the sight of her beauty. I contain multitudes.
She sinks down on the couch next to my reclined body, making the cushions dent and sliding me toward her. I try to fight it, but I might as well be a human doll for all I’m successful.
“I must have gotten the measurements wrong,” she murmurs. I can’t feel the fingers she brushes down my cheek, but heat blooms in their path all the same. “It’s for the best. We’re running out of time.”
I want to blame the new tension in her body on guilt that she just gunned down two people in cold blood, but I know better. She wasn’t shaky after she shot Eros—gods, he’s really dead—so something else must have happened.
She keeps stroking my face almost absently, her mind clearly focused on other things.
“I meant my offer to Hera, you know. I’ll kill her if I have to, but it brings me no pleasure to remove a Hera from this world.
I can’t let her keep the baby, Hecate. We both know too well how the desire for vengeance can taint a life.
I have no desire to turn around in twenty years and find some fresh-faced young thing with my murder in their eyes. ”
There’s no reasoning with her, even if I could talk, but I’m a damned fool for this woman because I want to try. My lips work, the effort to press out one word leaving me exhausted. “Ex. Ile.”
“How well did that work for me?” She smiles sadly. “I realize it’s not the same. Zeus truly thought I was dead, otherwise he wouldn’t have rested until he ensured the rumor was truth.”
All these years, and I still don’t know the details of what happened.
Zeus returned from their honeymoon claiming she was swept out in a riptide, only to drown trapped against the barrier.
Her body was never found, but there are plenty of sea predators who could have done away with her.
It didn’t matter, though. The most powerful man in Olympus wasn’t interested in recovering her remains, and so there was no search conducted.
“I can see from your eyes that you want the story.” She sighs and glances at the door. “We have a little time, so I suppose it doesn’t hurt to share it now.”
Once I realized she was alive, it was simple enough to take a trip to Aeaea and find out everything I could about her time there.
How she came to the island with little but managed to draw in and manipulate all the rich and powerful who wanted more than their island home offered.
How she spun her plan for vengeance expertly, a spider in the center of her web until it was time to strike.
What I couldn’t find out was where she spent the year between her “death” and her arrival to Aeaea.
She picks up one of my limp hands and traces a finger over my palm as if she can truly tell my future from the lines fracturing there.
“It’s more or less what you’d expect. He wanted me for my beauty, and the fact I didn’t return his desire only made me more attractive prey.
If I had been smart, I could have used that to my advantage, but I was young and scared, and you know how I was back then when I got scared. ”
She got angry. The Circe I knew never allowed herself to sit in fear. Not when she could act out instead.
“He started beating me the night he took me.” She says it flatly, simply reciting the facts, as if she’s not tearing my heart out of my chest with her words. “Aphrodite had an awful time finding a wedding dress to cover up the bruises.”
“Circe,” I rasp.
“Shhh.” She keeps up her methodical stroking of my palm, over and over again.
“I couldn’t stop fighting him. I didn’t know better.
All I wanted was to escape and get back to you.
” She smiles almost fondly. “I tried to kill him the first night we were on the coast. I dosed him with rat poison I found in one of the outbuildings. I was too hasty, though, and didn’t get the dosage right.
He was violently ill, but not enough to call in outside help, and certainly not enough to kill him. ”
Now that she mentions it, I remember Zeus looking haggard when he returned from his honeymoon. The city chalked it up to grief. I blamed it on guilt; I really should have known better.
“He was more patient than I was.” She shakes her head. “He waited until most of his strength came back and suggested we go swimming. ‘Suggested’ being a deceptive word because I didn’t have a choice. When we were in the water, he did his best to drown me.”
I close my hand around hers. “He’s dead now. Peitho, too. Your vengeance has been served.”
She jumps a little and gives me a resigned look. “You really are recovering too quickly. It’s inconvenient.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“No, you aren’t.” She doesn’t take her hand from mine. “I had the presence of mind to play dead when he tried to drown me, though I’ll admit I panicked at first. Floating there as he swam away was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.” She shudders delicately. “From there, the rest is history.”
It is most assuredly not history. Not when she somehow managed to take a part of the barrier with her, ensuring that it was only a matter of time before it fell and made the entire city vulnerable. Not when she came back to the city all these years later to kill all those responsible.
“I’m sure you suspected the truth,” she continues, still watching me with those intense green eyes as if she’s measuring my every breath. “Everyone did. Zeus the wife-killer, as if it’s some kind of joke instead of the lives of three women cut short too early.” And no one did anything.
The unsaid words stand between us, the reason we’re in this place, occupying these roles.
With his violent acts, Zeus set us on our respective paths, and then had the audacity to die before either of us had a chance to finish him off ourselves.
I hope those final seconds while he fell to his death were filled with terror and hopelessness.
Not enough, but nothing would be enough.
“Hades killed him.” It was an accident, at least partially, but it’s still true enough.
“Demeter told me.” Circe looks away. “It changes nothing. He held the position while Zeus rampaged, all while he sat in the lower city and did nothing to challenge it.”
She’s not wrong…at least not entirely. “The system was designed that way. Hades was practically groomed by Zeus from the time he was a child to be helpless in the lower city. He couldn’t—”
“Hecate.” She sets my hand on my stomach.
“I don’t care. He could have done something.
Poseidon could have done something. Any of them could have acted at any time to stop Zeus.
How many people had he killed, directly or not?
How many had he harmed because he was too powerful to fight?
” She narrows her eyes. “How many of those instances occurred while you held the title of Hermes?”
“Too many,” I whisper. Only the knowledge that killing Zeus would be a bandage—and not even a good one at that—stayed my hand.
He had to die, but not until the right time.
I’m still not certain it was the right time when the fight with Hades resulted in his death, but if Hades hadn’t done it, then Demeter would have the moment he laid hands on Persephone.
There was no way they’d have made it to their first anniversary.
For the first time since seeing her again, Circe actually seems troubled.
The calm mask flickers, revealing the fiery woman I fell in love with a lifetime ago.
“How could you stand it, Hecate? I’ve seen the pictures, the many articles in that farce you call a gossip column.
You were near enough to slip a knife between his ribs countless times over the years. Why didn’t you?”
My mouth is far too dry. I wish I could blame it on the drugs, but shame is the true source.
She’s right; I had plenty of opportunity to kill the last Zeus.
The others, too. There isn’t a locked door in Olympus that can keep me out.
I could have murdered my way through the Thirteen and kept doing it until the legacy families stopped trying to put people into those positions…
or I died. The only reason I didn’t do that was because Atalanta.
She pulled me back from the brink, ensured I had a slip of a soul left to save.
I tell Circe the same thing Atalanta told me all those years ago, when vengeance was the only thing I could see. “He’s a symptom of the problem, not the source. Killing him wouldn’t have brought you back.” My voice cracks. “I had to make sure there’d never be another you in the future of Olympus.”
Her sympathy falls away as if it’d never been. “But there were others like me. Lamia. Leda. Persephone herself would have numbered among them, and not a single person stepped forward to stop it.”
“Hades did.”
“Hades had an opportunity dropped in his lap and took advantage of it.” She scoffs. “If she hadn’t fled to the lower city, he wouldn’t have lifted a hand to save her.”
I hate that she’s right. The concept of acceptable losses has become far too familiar to me. “That doesn’t make your way better.”
“Yes, it does.” She rises, taking her warmth with her. I can actually see her slipping her mask back into place. “Because, unlike you, the only losses I find acceptable are those of my enemies.”
“Circe—”
“No.” She slashes a hand through the air, still graceful in her anger.
“You don’t get to tell me about the high road you’re taking.
You’ve stood by while the Thirteen committed untold amounts of harm to those who couldn’t defend themselves.
To people like you were before you became that.
People like I was. Zeus is the worst offender but hardly the only one.
Peitho had plenty of indirect blood on her hands, which she’s now paid for.
The last Apollo went after teenagers. Athena tried to have a woman killed simply because Odysseus found his mistress inconvenient—and that’s not the first time it happened. The list goes on!”
“That doesn’t make your way better!” I’ve done what I can to ensure justice finds its way to the predators in this city, but I’ve had to move cautiously because I couldn’t risk losing the Hermes title.
The secrets of the barrier were hidden too well.
It took me years to sift through the spotty information about what really kept the barrier up all these generations.
Years of searching Olympus’s secrets, of honing my skills to break into more and more complicated locks.
Imagine my surprise when it all led to a bunker on the outskirts of the upper city.
Somewhere I’d walked past hundreds of times over the years.
“At least my way isn’t going to be wholesale slaughter. ”
“Which is why your way isn’t making any progress at all.” She carefully drags her fingers through her short hair, refreshing the style. “I know how good you are, but you won’t make it out of this room. I’m too close, Hecate. I can’t have anyone interfering—even you.”
She’s not lying. I’m trapped. Panic flutters in the base of my throat.
I always have a way out. It doesn’t matter where I’ve wandered over the years; I always have an exit strategy.
Until today. Until I let my emotions get the best of me.
For nothing. Eros is still dead, and now Atalanta is on her own.
I suspect Circe’s plan for the lower city’s barrier is the same as mine for the upper city.
She’ll find the location of the main hub and blow it up, bringing down the barrier. She has a small number of soldiers, yes, but clearly her plan hinges on the civilian population doing her dirty work.
Which is a fucking problem. I glare up at her. “If you send that mob to the lower city, it will be a bloodbath. There have been tensions between the upper city and the lower city since the founding of Olympus, and the events of the last year haven’t helped.”
“Especially because Hades brought up the secondary barrier, choosing to protect his own people and leave the rest of Olympus to rot,” Circe counters coolly. “Whatever is coming for the lower city, he put it into motion when he made that choice.”
I grit my teeth. “Whatever is coming. Interesting use of passive voice there, Circe. You’re setting this up. You don’t get to wash your hands of the blood that will inevitably follow.”
She walks slowly to the door, pauses, and looks over her shoulder. “That’s the difference between us, Hecate. You always assume I’m trying to keep my hands clean because that’s what you do. When the barrier falls, I’ll be the first across the river.”