24. Eurydice

24

EURYDICE

Minthe must have called ahead, because they’re ready for us when we arrive. The apartment Medusa and Calypso share is a charming little space tucked into the neighborhood on the other side of the winter market. It’s close enough to walk, which we do despite the cold weather. Winter is more than just a promise; it’s here.

The situation seems relaxed enough as Calypso lets us through the front door and guides us into the living room. I’m pretty sure this space came furnished when they initially rented it, but evidence of the way that they’ve made it home is everywhere. On the kitchen counter, there’s a wide array of tea in neatly labeled canisters. The corner of the living room has been converted into an office space for Calypso. There’s a small desk scattered with papers covered in various stages of design. Curiosity flares, but that’s not what I’m here for, so I focus on Ariadne.

She looks muted. I can’t tell if it’s in relief or despair. She does manage to give me a small smile as I sink into the chair across from her. I lean forward. “How are you feeling?”

“Complicated.” She tugs on the throw blanket wrapped around her shoulders until it covers her more completely. “Mostly relieved, though I’m playing the part of betrayer to my father, even if he is an unmitigated ass. Conflicted, because I didn’t tell…” She shrugs. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

I can’t imagine the courage she must’ve had to reach out and ask for help, let alone trust us enough to actually follow through on that offer of help. It’s hard not to feel like a monster for pressing her when she’s so obviously feeling fragile, but I have my orders. I want this role that Hades gave me, and that means doing what’s necessary. “I know that you just went through an ordeal, but—”

“I have my bargain to fulfill,” she finishes for me.

“Yes.”

She looks down at her hands, and although impatience pricks at me, I keep my silence. It doesn’t take long for her to work through whatever thorny past she’s seeing. She’s certainly not looking at anything in this room, or even this day. When she finally speaks, her voice is soft and steady. “I don’t know if my father was always so ambitious that it poisoned everything about him, or if something happened to make him this way, but I do know he wasn’t always a bad father. I have many happy memories from my childhood in Aeaea.”

“What changed?” I should probably be silent and let her talk her way through this, but I’m supposed to be gathering information, and every little detail is important.

“She came to the island.”

I don’t move. I’m pretty sure I don’t even breathe. According to Eris, Cassandra heard Hermes and Minos talking at the party right before everything went off the rails. In that conversation, they talked about his benefactor, a mysterious woman Hermes seems to have some connection to. Is this the same woman?

“You have to understand. Our island is almost as isolated as Olympus is, but we don’t have a magical barrier enforcing it. People just have no reason to come; we work very hard not to give them a reason. Aeaea watched tourism take the communities around us and turn them into mockeries of themselves. The council—not the current council, but the one from a couple generations ago—put laws into place ensuring that we couldn’t follow in the path of our neighbors.” The sadness in her voice tells me just as much as her words do.

“The community started to die,” I guess.

Her smile wobbles around the edges. “You’ve heard the story before.”

“Not this one, but there’s historical precedent. It’s horrible to watch a community wilt, but I don’t see what that has to do with our current situation.”

“That’s what I’m trying to say—fifteen years ago, this woman appeared on our island, walked right into the council meeting, and promised that if they put her in charge, it would pave the way to a glorious and prosperous future for our island.”

What she’s saying sounds like something out of a storybook. I narrow my eyes. “From everything you’ve just said, you have a community that is wary of outsiders, if not downright hostile. What conceivable reason would they have to listen to the stranger?”

“Because she promised them Olympus.” She must see the pure disbelief on my face because she shakes her head slowly. “Yeah, that was my initial reaction when I started digging through my father’s computer to find out why he suddenly started acting so strangely. It’s true. Ever since that day, Aeaea dances to her tune.”

This is a fascinating, but I don’t see how it helps the situation we’re in now. We already knew that Minos had a benefactor. This is just a little history lesson explaining that. “Okay,” I say slowly.

“It’s okay; I didn’t get it at first either. It wasn’t until she and my father started planning his entrance into Olympus so that Theseus and Aster—the Minotaur—could compete for the title of Ares that I was able to hack into her systems. Then I realized the scope of what they’re planning.”

I blink. “You did what?”

She won’t quite meet my eyes. “Like I said, my father wasn’t always neglectful and too busy with his master plan to worry about being an actual father. But ten years is plenty of time to learn any skill, including hacking. It’s not like it’s hard.”

I would beg to differ, but it’s not really my place to argue with her on the subject. “Are you going to keep me in suspense or tell me what you found?”

Her smile steadies a little. “The trouble was that I thought she gave us a fake name, so I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out who she really was. It’s a rookie mistake. Usually the simplest answer is the correct one.” She pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them. “She didn’t have all this information about Olympus because she was like my father, someone on the outside desperately looking in. She had it because she’s from Olympus.”

I jolt. “What?” Even living in the country before my mother became Demeter, we should’ve heard about an exile. They are exceedingly rare, with the last Aphrodite being the only one in the last twenty years…or so I thought.

The thing is, once you exile someone, they stop being under your purview. Apollo might have technology to ensure that the former Aphrodite can’t be a danger to us, but was that technology in place fifteen years ago?

Maybe they killed the people they exiled…

The thought makes me shudder. I could ask my mother about this, except no, I can’t, because I agreed that I am working for Hades, which means all my reports will go to him. My mother can no longer be the main authority in my life.

“Does the name Circe ring any bells?”

___________

I feel strange as I head back to the house with Minthe at my side. She hasn’t said anything since we arrived at Calypso and Medusa’s apartment. She played the part of the silent guard, but I know that she’s Charon’s second-in-command, which means she must have thoughts about what we just heard. I open my mouth to ask her but stop before a single word escapes. I’m not sure what the protocol is surrounding something like this. She heard everything I did, but are we allowed to talk about it? I don’t know.

Better to report directly to Hades and sidestep any potential errors.

We find him still in his office with a stack of untouched paperwork in front of him. There’s a strange look on my brother-in-law’s face that I’ve never seen before. It’s frightening. I don’t know what happened in the time since I saw him last and now, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to ask.

He looks up as I knock on the doorframe. “Did you get the information we need?”

“I think so.”

“Come in and shut the door. Minthe, report to Charon.”

Minthe squeezes my shoulder and then heads down the hall. I may have known Hades for over a year, but it still takes more courage than I’ll ever admit to step into the office and close the door behind me. I follow his silent command to take the chair across the desk from him.

The silence gets to me immediately. Maybe I’m supposed to start? “Her name is Circe. I think she was exiled from Olympus fifteen years ago, and she apparently went straight to Aeaea and offered them Olympus on a platter. Ariadne was kept out of the actual nitty-gritty plans, so most of the information she has is what she could glean from her father’s emails and conversations she overheard.”

Hades steeples his fingers in front of his face and leans forward. “Go on.”

“The gist of it is that Minos was intended to soften up the city and sow chaos, as well as undermine the power of the Thirteen. He was to destroy public confidence in them. Then, after an undisclosed amount of time had passed, they would bring the barrier down.”

“How? Not even Apollo is entirely certain of how it works—or why it’s failing.”

I feel absolutely sick over what I have to say next, and I would do anything not to be the messenger that delivers this information. But he has to know. They all have to know. “It started failing fifteen years ago. It may have taken us longer to realize it, but that’s when the process began.”

“You can’t know that.” He leans back. “Circe may have claimed that she’s behind that, but it’s impossible.”

I wish he was right, because it’d mean Apollo has a way to fix the barrier. “Unfortunately, it’s not. She took a piece with her when she left. Ariadne couldn’t tell me what it looks like, or how it functions, but it was the proof the council on Aeaea needed in order to go along with Circe’s plan.” I shiver. “The barrier will fall, and when it does, she will be waiting there with an army.”

“We have scouts monitoring the perimeter. There hasn’t been any movement on that front.” The words sound like he doesn’t believe me, but his tone isn’t dismissive. More like he’s musing to himself, mulling over the information I brought him. “That doesn’t mean Ariadne’s lying though. Just that Circe is smart enough not to show her hand before she’s ready to strike.”

“What do we do?”

He gives himself a shake and finally focuses on me. “Leave that up to us, Eurydice. You did a fine job getting that information. We’ll hold up our end of the bargain with Ariadne, but for now it’s time for you to go home.”

It’s not until I’m walking out the front door that I realize he didn’t tell me to go to the room that I usually keep in this house. He told me to go home, and there’s no way he meant the upper city.

He meant Charon’s town house.

I’m not even surprised when Minthe pulls up in one of Hades’s nondescript black sedans. I climb into the passenger seat and sit back with a sigh. I don’t mean to speak, but I have too many emotions tangled up inside me, and Minthe will understand. I hope. “I thought the information would fix things, but it only made them worse. We are in a lot of trouble.”

“Welcome to the lower city.” She laughs a little. “But seriously, you did good work today. You handled her perfectly and got every bit of information that she had. It was well done.”

Warmth takes up residence in my chest. It’s one thing to think that I might have something to offer, but it’s entirely another to have it confirmed by someone who has no reason to lie to me. Minthe isn’t related to me, even by marriage. She’s not interested in getting in my pants. She’s essentially a coworker who’s giving me a pat on the back for a job well done, and that feels so damn valuable. “Thanks.”

“Now that we have that out of the way, I have something you need to hear.”

The warmth in my chest dims. “Okay.”

“We didn’t get a chance to talk about it this morning, but I’d like to make one thing clear.” She weaves through the light traffic with an ease I envy. “Medusa is still adjusting to how we do things in the lower city. She sees things in a very black-and-white way, which means your previous role as honored guest who isn’t technically a citizen of the lower city created a gray area you were able to manipulate her through. Don’t think that I will allow you to do the same to me.”

I jerk back. “I never manipulated her.” That sounds insidious. Evil, even.

“How many times have you slipped her security detail? No, you don’t have to answer, because I already know. Seven times in the last year. That shit won’t fly with me.”

“I had my reasons.”

“I literally do not care.” She glances at me. Considering her words, I expect to see anger on her face, but there’s just a calm resolve. “You’re on the staff now, and you’re officially a citizen of the lower city. If you try to slip my security detail, I will track you down and drag you back to Hades and Charon by your hair. No hard feelings; it’s just business. You want to go somewhere, you talk to me about it, and we figure out a way to do it safely. If we can’t do it safely, then we go to Charon and see if he has extra resources to lend. There’s a proper way to do things, Eurydice, and I expect you to hold the line.”

I swallow my instinctive angry response and force myself to really think about the words she saying. She’s not treating me like a child. She’s laying out clear boundaries and expecting me to hold them. I can do that. “I understand. You have my word that I’ll talk to you before doing anything that might be dangerous.”

It’s not until she stops at the curb in front of the town house that the events of the afternoon catch up to me. Events of the last couple days, really. I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in days. The stress feels like it’s wearing me down to a single thread that might snap at any moment. Ariadne’s words keep circling around in my head. They all add up to one conclusion. War. The one thing that we thought we were all safe from, and it’s coming knocking on our door, sooner rather than later.

I don’t know how we’re going to survive it.