This was going to be one long-ass trip.
Three hours in and it was already feeling like a long-ass trip. We’d spent too much time this morning dicking around and now there was no way we’d reach Osborn by nightfall. We’d have to stop somewhere along Interstate 64 for the night, because driving straight through was stupid when the potential for facing anything was high.
Josie had been playing the quiet game, glued to her Nook from the moment I’d climbed behind the wheel and started the SUV, which had been fine with me, but I did wonder what she was reading. Probably romance. Or Harry Potter. She seemed like the kind of chick that would dig boy wizards. But it was around the time we crossed out of West Virginia and hit Kentucky that she powered the thing off and started staring out the window.
My fingers tapped on the steering wheel. A lot of stuff had been dumped on her in such a short period of time, but she was holding it together like a champ, like…
Like Alex.
Fuck.
If I could carve out all those memories and every shitty thing I’d caused and everything attached to Alex, I could look at this objectively. I could see that Josie had some of Alex’s strength. Obviously not the physical kind, but strength… It went beyond muscles and the ability to fight. Josie had the important kind— mental strength. The girl had…grit. Most mortals, after finding out they weren’t exactly mortal, that spirits and Titans were after them, and that their father was a legendary god of dickdom, would’ve flipped their shit by this point.
But she was just staring out the window, her profile thoughtful, a little distant. Maybe I should have said something, like point out how well she was doing—positive reinforcement and all that good stuff. But the words weren’t there, and every time I glanced over at her, her expression hadn’t changed.
As the tires smoothly ate away the miles, my mind wandered to those moments outside of the SUV, to how her body had felt pressed against mine. There was no denying that I was physically attracted to her, and while she was a different type of girl than I normally went for, I wasn’t surprised by wanting to get in her pants and between her legs.
It just wasn’t something I should act on. But not acting on it wasn’t looking too good. It had only been a handful of days since I’d first seen her and not nearly as many hours that we’d been together, and I was already feeling my tenuous grip on restraint slip. I wasn’t known for my self-control, especially when it came to something I wanted.
And yeah, I wanted her. Wanted her in a way that was purely physical and inherent to who I was. And it was official. Apollo was a bigger idiot than I realized for putting his daughter under my guardianship, knowing everything he knew about me.
I laughed out loud at that.
“What?” Josie asked, looking at me.
Grinning, I shook my head. “Nothing.”
She was quiet for a moment, then she blurted out. “I forgave Erin.”
The statement caught me off-guard and I glanced at her again. She was staring at me, the hollows of her cheeks pink. “Okay.”
“Do you think that makes me, like, too forgiving?”
As I coasted around a slow-moving van in the passing lane, I smirked. “I’m probably not the best person to ask, Joe.”
“Why, Sethie?”
My smirked turn into a grin. “I hold onto grudges. I feed and water them, growing them into happy little pools of bitterness.”
“Well, that sounds fun and lovely.” She shifted in the seat, stretching out her legs. “I don’t see the point in holding onto grudges, because that happy pool of bitterness will turn on you and start eating away at you.”
Already was.
“It sucked that she lied to me, but she’s still my friend. She was still there for me,” she said. “And that’s what matters. Anyway, I guess some of this is kind of cool,” she went on, “I mean, there’s this whole world existing right alongside ours, interacting with ours, and we’ve had no idea. It’s like something in a movie or a book. Like Hogwarts coming alive.”
Yep. I called it. Totally into boy wizards.
“You’ve read Harry Potter, right?”
I snorted. “No.”
“Seen the movies?”
“Nope.”
“Been to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter?”
I laughed. “That would also be a no.”
“I’ve never been there either, but still.” She twisted toward me so fast, it was a surprise she didn’t choke herself on the seatbelt. “Have you been living in a cave?”
“I’ve been busy,” I replied as I checked the rearview mirror. “You know, fighting automatons and saving the world.”
“What’s an automaton?”
“Something you do not want to see,” I said, and when she huffed, I sighed. “They are one of Hephaestus’s creations. He’s like the ultimate blacksmith. He can create just about anything. Automatons were basically half-robot and half-bull. They breathed fireballs.”
She turned back to the windshield. “That doesn’t sound like any fun. How do you even pronounce his name? Can I just call him Hippo?”
I laughed under my breath. “We call him Hep. He hates it, as much as he hated Ares for sleeping with Aphrodite while they were married. Ever hear of unbreakable chain and net? It’s real. He used it to catch the two of them getting it on.”
“Oh. I…I thought Aphrodite was with Adonis or something?”
“Aphrodite has pretty much been with everyone. She even hooked up with one of the Sentinels I know, and he ended up with a nice scar as a reminder of the no-touchie-touch policy.”
“The Sentinels… You’ve mentioned them before.” She tapped the Nook on her knee. “You said they were mostly the halfs, right?”
“Yeah. Now the Sentinels are more of a mix of pures and halfs.”
The Nook continued to bounce. “And the Sentinels are like the godly version of the army?”
“Something like that. All halfs go before the Council—well, used to. A lot of this has been abolished for about a year, but back in the day, at the age of eight, we went before the Council—twelve pures who oversaw each of the Covenants, which are schools near the largest communities, and it was determined if we were to train to become Sentinels or to go into servitude. I obviously went into training. We got basic education, but it was more focused on different styles of fighting and defense, ranging from hand-to-hand combat like grappling and krav maga, to basic martial arts, to gun and dagger play. There’s thousands of Sentinels. Used to be more…” Before I helped kill a whole truckload of them.