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He was watching me with such meticulous calm because he wasn’t sure how I’d react to him.
It’s one thing to know your dad and his brothers as powerful, nearly superhuman men who scared other people sometimes. It’s another thing to learn that other people might have a real reason to be scared. And my Uncle Hades—who had made bowls of popcorn the size of our pillows for movie night and who had sung weird songs to distract me from the sting of the antiseptic when I had a scraped knee and who had carried me in his arms into dark rooms and said nothing is different just because it’s dark, listen, it sounds the same as it did when it was light—thought that he might have revealed, in that moment, that the scary thing in the dark was him, and had been for a long time.
But he hadn’t. He’d only proved, yet again, that sometimes what you needed wasn’t a person who would cover your eyes. Sometimes, you need a person who won’t hesitate to finish what you started. And he never did.
He was the one who taught me how to hunt, and field dress an animal, and bring it out of the woods to be processed and given to people who needed it more than I did. Those trips we took, skirting the edges of the law on private land, are how I know that hunting is as much a part of me as anything else.
So it’s second nature to follow Apollo’s energy through the forest, even as the mountain gets steeper.
It’s second nature to know, well before I reach the clearing, that there are three men with Apollo.
And it’s second nature to know I’ll kill them all.
Because they’re not the scary thing in the dark.
I am.
16
APOLLO
I’m not having the day I planned.
Ha, ha. Understatement is such good humor.
“Shut the fuck up,” says one of the men who’s escorting me to the Rathbek border. I can’t tell if he sounds like a cartoon villain because he is a cartoon villain or because my hearing is going. Could be both.
Somehow, Guard Number One has mistaken my wheezing as a laugh. Who knows? Maybe it was a laugh. Maybe this is all very, very funny. Being in the woods in the dark—how is it still dark, by the way?—is a downright laugh. I don’t have a single weapon on me. No bow. No arrows. No knife. I didn’t even wear my woodland clothes.
It is funny, if you think about it, because I go to lengths to be prepared in other aspects of my life. I glow at people all day long at my think tank to fund policy research so that we can preemptively not have wars over water and food. I am so good at phone calls. I hired Delphi, who everyone loves without her even having to glow at them, and she does world peace all the time.
I would never walk into the woods without my archery accoutrements. And I would never never walk into the woods without Artemis. Without at least knowing that she was there, waiting to hunt me down.
Yet here I am, in these woods, on a mountain, without my archery outfit. I’m wearing a suit. Well, most of a suit. Slacks, anyway. I have a belt, and an undershirt, and nice shoes that are most certainly not fit for mountain hiking.
The other thing that’s not fit for hiking is my body. And these are not carefully maintained trails, no. They are mountain trails. Woodland mountain trails over a mountain that sits between Mociar and Rathbek. My two worst nightmares.
That’s not fair. Mociar hasn’t done anything to me, really. It’s Rathbek who’s doing a Rathbek on me right now.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Guard Number Two says.
“But I?—”
“Do you know English?” snaps Guard Number Two. “Do you know what it means to shut the fuck up?”
“Do you know English?” I ask.
The third guard, Guard Number Three, says something that’s not in English but sounds like it means I hate this guy.
“We have English in common,” I mention.
Then my knee goes out. I fall sideways into Guard Number One, who hoists me upright with an irritated grunt.
“Sorry!” I say.
The three of them have a terse conversation around me. It doesn’t sound promising for my immediate future, but who am I to judge? Maybe they’re discussing how much I’m worth to the Rathbek government, such as it is.
