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Circe smirks. “They’d have to make it past the perimeter first.”
Hecate’s smile is nearly feline in its smugness. “Hmmm. That they would.”
I shake my head, giving up on hiding the confusion. “What protects the perimeter?”
“To a mortal’s naked eye?” Hecate replies. “Nothing. But to any creature or god from the otherworldly realms, it’s a multilayered security boundary.”
Circe settles onto a chair while twirling her finger, directing her mat to roll itself up. “Not just side-by-side stratums either. Each of us also cast horizontal spells. It’s like a chain link fence, only engineered from—and solely breached by—magic.”
“Magical chain link,” I mutter, slightly stunned but instantly wondering why. It makes oddly comforting sense. “So that’s why this place isn’t on any mortal maps?”
Hecate’s lips pull up. “The humans who need to know…know.”
“And here’s where we cue the eerie tunes, right?”
The quip is too confident to be mine and too rumbly to be Circe’s. But I don’t need half a second to connect it. My bloodstream already recognizes the person who’s reentered the building. The male I’ll always know—and crave—in an instant.
“Ah!” Hecate calls out. “There you are, Professor. I trust your morning walk was pleasant?”
“You can probably tell methat, Goddess.” Maximus’s tone is tinged with that same strange edge as his first comment. “Yes?”
He comes over with measured steps, taking hold of my upturned hand. His grasp is firm, but so is the stare he keeps riveted on Hecate. And just like that, my nerves are tossingcomfortablebehind.
“If you’re keeping tabs on the guest list around here, you must have been okay with clearing Zeus’s little stopover with me.”
My serenity evaporates. “Z? He was here? You saw him?”
“Just outside,” he says. “Not far from here.”
Circe snaps her fingers. “Thatwasthunder I heard a while ago.”
The usual All-father weather stir-up doesn’t explain how Z got past the magical chain link fence. But that’s not the most important point here. I drill Maximus with an extended stare, letting him see how my mind already drills to it.
Why did he feel the need to summon his father again?
Not a confession I’m going to get out of him this second. Not with Hecate gliding forward, the hem of her skirt rasping the floor as placid power flows from her demeanor.
“As for Zeus,” she says, “we allow him to come and go freely. We have an understanding.”
“An understanding?” I query.
“We probably don’t want to know more than that,” Maximus mumbles.
Hecate exhales, clearly happy to pivot the conversation. “How then, Professor,canwe assist you right now? You have but to ask.”
Her hypnotic tone communicates so much more than words. In strange but awesome ways, it humbles me. Even inspires me.
“You mean that, don’t you?” I already feel the rhetoric of the question. The uselessness of the words in the shadows of the brilliance I’m so sure of. “You’d really grant us anything we desire or need.”
“Anything within our powers, my sweet diamond.” She enfolds me in a hug that feels like so much of what I crave. Have yearned so long for. The fullness of a flannel blanket. The warmth of hot cocoa. The acceptance of family. “But even those aren’t infinite, so no mounting a unicorn for a ride across a rainbow.”
I pull back with a teary laugh. “How’d you know?”
“I promise we’ll take the standard route back to the cottage,” Maximus offers while sneaking his hand back into mine.
His not-so-subtle squeeze has me swinging my stare up and around to his once again. There’s a perturbing gleam in his arresting blues. If the concern emanating from him weren’t enough to sober me from Hecate’s embrace, his next statement does.
“We need to talk. Alone.”
