Chapter 101
Right Time, Right Place
LYRA
“What first?” I ask Cronos.
He purses his lips, considering. “You’ve already managed to come to me.
So you can get where and when you want. Next, something small but impactful.
A moment in your own past. The first time you go there, don’t interact, just watch.
The second time, your goal is to manipulate something there. Understood?”
I nod. “How?”
He smiles. “That’s the easy part. The same way you came here.” Then he talks me through it anyway. “Ready?” he asks.
No. I nod.
“Then close your eyes. I’ll talk you through it again.”
I’m reluctant to do the first part, not wanting to shut out his face, knowing I won’t have much longer seeing it, even if this takes a thousand years to learn.
But I close my eyes, and Cronos starts talking.
Listening to his steady instructions, I picture the place I want to go.
I imagine the moment and what it looked like, where everyone was standing.
“Now,” I whisper.
Did that work? I peek and sigh.
Because I’m still in Tartarus. Cronos squeezes my shoulder. “That’s okay. We have time.”
So I try again.
And again.
Until I lose count.
Until finally, I feel the air against my skin change. Is it working?
I crack one eye open, probably making a ridiculous face, and then gasp and open the other wide. I did it. I time traveled. I’m in my past.
I’m standing inside Zeus’ temple in San Francisco, in all its modern-day, white-marbled, gold-gilded, lightning-topped glory. The sizzle in the air tells me I’m right.
“Holy shit.”
I think.
I frown and look around for the one person I’m here for.
My gaze lands on a man in a ridiculously expensive bespoke suit topped with a shock of white-blond hair.
There he is.
Zeus.
The man-size, tantrum-throwing god baby. Hades killed him. My heart aches a little, even for Zeus.
He is standing just outside his inner sanctum in the temple in San Francisco.
Through two sets of columns, I can see the glitter of the famous bridge with its Corinthian columns spanning over a night-blackened bay. Then I move my focus to where Zeus is looking.
To a couple in the outer temple, the woman’s belly swollen with child.
I guess I timed it right, because she abruptly stops walking. Her eyes go wide as a small puddle forms around her feet, unimpeded, since she’s wearing a loose dress. My mother.
This is the moment.
Only…Zeus doesn’t move. He clearly sees what happens, but all he does is wrinkle his nose in visible distaste.
I look between them and him, and still the god doesn’t so much as move in their direction. No anger. No cursing. What the—
Oh. My. Gods.
The universe has got to be shitting me. Am I the reason I was cursed?
Cronos said I was supposed to watch the first time, manipulate the second time. But I already know what I’m supposed to do here. Now. The rightness of it settles in the center of my chest. The same feeling I get when I’m with Hades.
So instead of returning to the Titan, I move silently behind Zeus.
From the side, I can see the mesh of the glamoured veil still in place.
As I lean closer, Zeus doesn’t even twitch, not even a hint that he realizes I’m right beside him.
I frown. Then reach out and wave a hand in front of his face.
Nothing. Not a blink. Not a frown. Not a sneeze. He does nothing.
Wait a minute.
“Can you see me?” I ask, my voice feeling overloud in the space.
No reaction. From him or anyone else in here.
Am I invisible when I time travel now? That would have been handy before.
“Shit,” I mutter. That better not mean that I’m wrong about this.
I step closer to the god of thunder, and using the technique Cronos tried to teach me about glamouring, I go to whisper in Zeus’ ear and send my will into his mind, only to jerk back before I say a single word.
Because his mind is already…shredded.
The dark hallways are lit by the race of neurons firing, and they are…twisted and knotted. A labyrinth of memories cut off, buried, burned, destroyed. Of pathways reformed, burrowed inside his head like the tunnels of Tartarus.
Someone else has been controlling Zeus. Glamouring him.
Controlling him a lot and for a very long time, it seems.
Why?
Fuck. That is a problem for another time. First…
I reach back into his mind with my power and whisper in his ear. “You will heed my command, Zeus.”
The previous King of the Gods’ face goes slack, eyes focused on some distance only he can see.
That was easy.
Too easy.
Whoever has been messing around in his head, they’ve done a bang-up job.
I point at the couple as my mother moans around a contraction and my father is on the phone to get help. “You are offended. They dared to desecrate your temple. Curse the child in her womb to be unlovable.”
I pause, thinking of Hades. Of how he fell in love with me. I think maybe he’s loved me since before I was cursed, or after the curse was broken, depending on how you look at it. Regardless, that explains how my curse didn’t affect him.
But the others…Aphrodite, Zai, Meike, even Boone, since I brought him to Olympus during the games—my friends who love me—and it suddenly seems so simple.
I whisper an extra instruction. “The curse will only work in the Overworld. In Olympus or the Underworld, it loses its power. And once someone starts to care even the tiniest bit for that child, no matter when that starts, the curse will no longer work, even in the Overworld.”
I think that covers most of the scenarios. The only possible exception is Boone.
I know that Boone once told me, just before he died in Hephaestus’ Labor, that he’d always wanted to partner with me, that he admired me, that I put him and all the thieves at a distance, making friendship impossible.
He brought me tools and my vest to compete in the Crucible.
I’m not sure when friendship for him started, or how, but I know it did.
I just will have to have faith that either the exception to the rule I created now or something else in our futures or our pasts will make it possible.
“Go,” I whisper to Zeus. “Do my bidding.”
I silently apologize to baby me as the god storms over to my mother and seals my fate, then disappears in a swirl of clouds and lightning bolts, leaving my parents stunned.
My life, even the worst of it, really has been in my control all along.
And this is the way I ended up where I am now. The only way the Titans get out.
I’m the bitch who made my own life hell.
Awesome.
I’m about to close my eyes and return to Rhea when glittering red light catches my attention. My mouth parts around shock as a familiar crack of time appears in the room and a man steps out just before it disappears again.
Boone looks around, confused, and then his gaze lands on something off to the left that I can’t see. I ease forward until I clear one of the columns and catch sight of…him.
Of Boone, only younger. Maybe seventeen or eighteen.
He’s not alone, leaning over a girl, caging her in with his hands on the column on either side of her. At first glance, I don’t recognize her—a petite brunette who gazes at him with wide eyes—but then the glamour I can see over her shimmers and shifts, and I suck in a strangled gasp.
Persephone.
He recognized her in Tartarus, though. Immediately. Was he in love with her then? Is that how he knew?
Time-travelling Boone watching the couple jerks his gaze away, turning his back on them, bitterness twisting his features into something unrecognizable.
Which is when he sees my parents.
I can see his recognition of them cross his features and stiffen his shoulders.
Hestia’s Lock. He’s seen my parents’ faces. He knows who they are.
Then he’s leaning forward, eyes narrowed on them, and a new emotion flashes.
Decision.
He approaches them, kneeling in front of my mother, who is now bent over. He talks to her in hushed tones, and I don’t know what he asks or what she answers, but he startles.
“Fuck.” His lips form the word. And then I think he says my name.
Just like I did moments ago with Zeus, he leans in and whispers something in my mother’s ear. With my ability to perceive glamours, I see the veil fall into place over her face. Not iridescent but green. Like the color of his power.
He rises and gives my father a hard stare, and I start hurrying toward him.
What is he doing to them?
I get to his side in time to hear his words. “When she is three years old, you will deliver your daughter to the Order of Thieves.”
A sound of shock tears from my throat.
But Boone doesn’t hear. Doesn’t even know I’m watching.
He steps back, giving them both a glare. “You don’t deserve her,” he tells them. “She’ll be better off with us thieves than she ever would have been with you.”
He’s saving me from them? Because he knows they aren’t good people. Damn. I should have thought of that myself.
But Boone…
I know I wasn’t the only one broken time in Tartarus was taking to the past. Boone disappeared several times, going other places. What I didn’t know was that I’m not the only one whose been affecting my past. Although, unlike me, Boone has been trying to make my life better.
I stare at his face—the familiar lines of it, the scruff, the crooked mouth that, when he smiles, reminds me of a pirate. “You’re a good man, Boone Runar.”
A sparkling, jagged rip in time appears behind him, and he turns his head, then, with one last glance at my mother, steps inside and disappears.
I stare at where he just was for a long beat, even as my father helps my mother hobble away. “We’re going to have a chat later,” I promise future Boone.
I still have a world to fix.
So I close my eyes and return to Cronos.
To continue my learning. For as long as it takes, because time is finally on my side. I seriously need to meet the goddess of irony someday. Maybe if we become friends, she’ll stop fucking with me.