Chapter Thirty-Three Hera
Chapter Thirty-Three
Hera
“I’m so glad you were able to join me,” Hera said brightly as she and Julia followed a uniformed spa attendant. They were at Trellis, her favorite day spa, tucked between Upper East Side apartment buildings like a forgotten gem.
Hera was growing increasingly frustrated with Hermes.
He hadn’t brought her anything on Julia since London, when he’d shared that he and Aphrodite had both failed to enchant Julia in recent months, though Aphrodite had successfully used magic on Julia at Olympus.
Hera’s mind had been whirling ever since, turning over various explanations.
Could Julia be under a protection spell cast by another god?
Perhaps she’d bathed in the blood of a dragon (never mind that dragons were long since extinct).
Or she might have eaten the berries from Demeter’s sacred rowan tree, which granted mortals protection from both physical and magical harm, at least for a time.
Was it possible that Hera had made a mistake when she activated the Eye of Argos? She thought back to when Julia had selected the engagement ring. Julia had slipped it onto her left hand, opposite that plain gold band on her right…
What had Hermes said back in London, that it felt like Julia carried some kind of shield? No, Hera thought with dawning horror, it couldn’t be.
Could it?
She would find out soon enough. That was why she’d brought Julia here, after all. It was time to take matters into her own hands.
Julia had clearly never visited a luxury spa, from the way she stared at everything: the chandeliers, the white marble counters, the bucket of ice where chilled cucumber slices were arranged in a circle.
In the hallway behind them, curls of steam advertised the thermal baths and cedar-planked sauna.
Once the attendant had opened their lockers and retreated, Hera gestured to the glass dish inside the locker. “You should put your rings in there. You know massage oil is impossible to clean from jewelry.”
Julia bit her lip. “Are you sure it’s safe?”
“No one is going to steal from you here.” To prove it, Hera untwisted all her own rings—which were worth a great deal more than Julia’s—and placed them in her own glass dish with a resounding clink.
To her relief, Julia followed suit, taking off her engagement ring and then the simple gold one on her other hand.
Hera tried not to sound too curious as she asked, “I don’t remember seeing that ring when we first met.”
“I know it’s plain, but it has sentimental value.” Julia sounded a touch defensive. “It’s the very last present my mother ever gave me.”
“What a lovely story,” Hera said soothingly. “Have you always worn it?”
“I started wearing it again in Greece, after Harry and I got engaged,” Julia explained. “I think a part of me wanted to feel close to my mother, with all the changes happening in my life.”
Or, if Hera was right, Julia might have known on some deep, subconscious level what the ring was for. She’d put it on to protect herself.
“I’m sure your mother would be very happy for you,” Hera said softly.
When they’d changed into the spa’s robes and jelly sandals, Hera led Julia to the courtyard at the center of Trellis, where women in fluffy robes usually sipped herbal tea and awaited their treatments.
Today, however, they had the garden to themselves.
Hera had specifically arranged for this, had rented out the entire spa for the day.
It would have been hard to hide a Well of Truth from other spa visitors, even the Xanaxed Upper East Side wives who came here.
Apollo had dug the well for Hera that very morning, after endless negotiations about what she would owe him.
In the end, she’d promised power and influence for a new musician he was obsessed with—typical Apollo, always getting worked up about some human or another.
Hera had felt the power surging around him as he’d struck the ground with his staff, a heavy bronze thing carved with intertwined laurel leaves.
Moments later, water had bubbled up from the earth.
Now, as they stepped into the courtyard, Hera saw Julia’s gaze cut straight to the Well. Perfect.
“Oh, you must come drink the natural spring water,” Hera exclaimed. “It’s said to have healed more people than the waters at Bath!”
“Really?” Julia asked skeptically. “Right here in New York?”
Hera approached a table where glass tea mugs were arranged next to dried fruits and gluten-free cookies.
“I always drink from the natural springs when I’m here.
It’s one of the secrets to looking eternally young.
” Before Julia could protest, Hera knelt and scooped a bit of water into one of the mugs. “Here, try!”
Julia hesitated, but then her eyes glazed over as she registered the beauty of the water. It was crystal clear and so very cold, as if it had come from a pristine mountain lake.
Water from the Well of Truth was intoxicating to humans.
Whether they looked into its surface—and caught glimpses of prophecy, as did the Oracle at Delphi—or whether they drank from it, they were inadvertently forced to tell the truth.
The water contained a colossal amount of power.
Apollo only dug a Well on rare occasions, which was why a god always had to supervise any human who imbibed from it.
Any more than a glass would be fatal to their mortal body.
Just look what had happened to that young man Narcissus.
He’d stumbled across an abandoned Well, one that Apollo had forgotten to fill in after he’d finished with it, and drank so much that he died.
Humans could only handle so much of the truth, couldn’t they?
Julia lifted the mug to her lips. Her first sip was slow, tentative, but the moment she tasted the Water of Truth, she began to tip back the glass like a frat boy chugging his first beer.
“Slow down, there.” Hera quickly reached for the glass.
The mortal’s face was relaxed into a dreamy smile, her eyes unfocused. She looked frighteningly high.
“Why did you get involved with my son?” Hera asked, cutting right to the chase. “What are you planning?”
“I’m planning to marry him.”
A maddeningly curt answer, but the Water couldn’t force mortals to elaborate, only to tell the truth. Hera tried a different tack. “Tell me, who are you, really?”
“Julia Dodds.”
“Your whole name.”
“I was Julia Alexandra Henningsen when I was a child.” Julia’s voice was flat, hypnotized. “After my mother died, my aunt Jess and uncle Daniel legally adopted me. I started using their last name.”
Henningsen. That sounded familiar.
“What was your mother’s name?” Hera asked, a chill tracing over her skin.
Julia’s gaze began to refocus. Hera hurried to hand her the Water of Truth, and the mortal took another greedy sip. She then sighed in delight and answered, “My mother was Claire Henningsen.”
Hera remembered that name now, even if she hadn’t heard it in eighteen years. “Was she married?”
“My father was never in the picture.”
“But your mother was seeing someone before she died,” Hera guessed. Julia nodded without answering, and Hera realized her mistake. She hadn’t asked a direct question.
“What do you know about that man?” Hera asked. “Can you remember his name?”
“I don’t think I ever knew it in the first place.” Julia frowned, her eyes focused eerily in the distance, as if she was casting her mind back.
Hera was terrified to hear the answer to this next question. “What happened to your mother?”
“Our house caught on fire. My mother didn’t make it, but I survived. No one knew how. The EMTs said it was a miracle.” The water still held her in its thrall; Julia was speaking matter-of-factly, without emotion.
Fear shot through Hera’s veins, finding form in little blue flames that crackled at each of her fingertips. It was supposed to be the fire of domesticity, of a woman contentedly cooking soup for her husband and children, of a candelabra presiding over a well-set dinner table.
She stared down at her fingers, watching the flames that licked there like blue fingernails. She hadn’t lost control like this in decades.
Since the night she’d killed Claire Henningsen. Julia’s mother.
· · ·
When she returned to the Upper East Side, Hera was surprised to find Zeus in the living room, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee as he scrolled through emails.
She resented how good he looked like this.
He had shrugged out of his jacket, a beautiful custom piece in a steel blue that would have looked ridiculous on another man but somehow emphasized Zeus’s casual, effortless sexiness.
At her arrival, he looked up. “You weren’t at the TWL luncheon this afternoon.”
Hera stood in the doorway. “I told your new assistant I wasn’t joining. No one wants the wife of the CEO at those things anyway. I always feel sorry for whoever gets seated near me, asking polite questions about the Hamptons when I know they would rather be next to you.”
“Really? Because I, for one, would like to be next to you. Or on top of you.” Zeus said it so mildly, the way he would announce a new hire in a company meeting. Only a flash in his blue eyes revealed his boyish sense of humor.
Hera chose not to acknowledge the innuendo. “Well, I’m sorry to have missed the luncheon. I was out.”
She didn’t mean to snap, but she was still rattled by what she’d discovered at the spa. Her mind kept turning back to that time of their lives, to what she had done.
Zeus had been having an affair, which was nothing unusual. Hera always learned of his indiscretions eventually. That was one of the curses of marriage: If you knew your spouse well enough, you could sense when they were hiding something from you. When they were hurting you.
At first she hadn’t worried overmuch. Claire was just another mortal woman, and it would end as soon as he grew bored or the woman showed signs of aging.
Except…this one didn’t end. Months passed, and Zeus seemed more infatuated with Claire than ever. So Hera intervened.