Henry scoffed and threw a shot up into the backboard. It bounced off and Cassandra chased it down the driveway. She took her own shot, missed, and blew into her frozen hands. Touching the cold ball was starting to hurt.
“So what do you think he is, if not a god?”
Henry shrugged and dribbled absently. “A government experiment maybe. And now he’s got amnesia about it, or paranoid fantasies or whatever. It happens all the time.”
“Where?”
“TV.” Henry smirked. “To be honest, Cassie, I’m trying not to think about this too much.”
That was well and good for him. But she had to think about it. Because big sister was coming, whoever that was, and she was coming for her. “Henry?”
“Yeah?”
“You know how I won’t be psychic for much longer?”
Henry bounced the basketball, nodded. “Sure. Eighteen or whereabouts you always said. It’d just go up like a puff of smoke.” He drew up and took a shot; the ball dropped through the net and bounced off the driveway into the dead grass. “What about it?”
“Well, what if I was wrong? What if that dark spot in the future isn’t me not being psychic anymore? What if it’s me not being around anymore? What if I just—” She held her hands up and let them fall. “Die?”
Henry took a breath and let his shoulders slump. He still had traces of pirate eyeliner under his eyes and it gave him the look of a cartoon villain.
No. A dark, reluctant hero, maybe. But never a villain. Henry doesn’t have a villainous bone in his body.
It didn’t surprise her that he was the one having the hardest time accepting Aidan being what he was. He was always so grounded, solid, and practical. A six-foot-tall rock people leaned on. Sometimes Cassandra wondered if he believed in her psychic stuff at all, or if he just said he did because he loved her.
After a second, Henry retrieved the ball from the grass. He shook his head.
“Nope.”
She smiled. “Nope, what?”
“Nope, that’s not going to happen.” He dribbled and passed her the ball. The impact stung her fingers.
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” he said, and took a defensive position, trying to get her to drive past him. “Maybe I’m psychic too.”
* * *
Aidan stood in the backyard of his parents’ house, leaned against one of their pine trees and listening for movement. The only thing he heard was a gentle wind and the soft squeak of his mother’s porch swing swaying slightly back and forth.
His adopted mother. The mother who was thousands of years too late to be his real mother. He’d never thought of her that way before. She’d always been Gloria, the woman who loved him enough to call him her son. And Ernie was always just his dad. But everything was coming unraveled. The way that Cassandra had looked at them through the window that day; he couldn’t get it out of his mind.
There wasn’t much time left. He’d fought against believing it ever since Cassandra’s visions had started. But denial didn’t do anyone any good. Not even a god. Especially not a god, when Athena was on her way. A fight was coming to him, and he had no idea whether he could win, no matter what he said to the contrary.
He looked down at his clenched fists. For the first time, they seemed pathetically weak. Maybe he’d been hiding for too long, passing as a human when he was anything but. He used to be one of the strongest gods to walk on Olympus: the god of the sun, the god of prophecy and the arts. But he was out of practice. Not so long ago, he would have had that little rat Hermes skewered and roasting over a pit with a snap of his fingers. He flexed his fists again. Maybe he really was growing weaker. Maybe he hadn’t escaped the curse that was killing the others after all.
“You’re not thinking of taking her away from here, are you?”
Aidan turned, ready to rip Hermes in half, but his anger dissipated as quickly as it came. It wouldn’t have been possible anyway. Hermes peeked out from behind another pine, his legs loaded on springs. If Aidan so much as pulled his fist back Hermes would run, too fast and too far to ever be caught.
“It would be a waste of time,” Hermes warned. “And she wouldn’t be safe.”
Aidan smiled ruefully. “Is she safe here?”
“She’s not safe anywhere.”
He looked at Hermes. The god of thieves had changed over the centuries, but not much. He wore his hair shorter, and he dressed like he’d fallen out of a Hilfiger catalog. And he was thin, so painfully thin. The kind of thin that eventually killed you. But the mischievous light in his eyes was familiar and so was the curve of his mouth. The stance too, edgy and tense, was so much the same that he might as well have had wings on his feet.