From a tactical view, we have the upper hand.
I’m looking for the asshole with that kraken tattoo.
All the untidy thoughts clear from my head. Hades has already killed three men, and more are falling every time Zeus shoots. Between the two of them, they have me covered. I trust them to do it. And it frees up my attention to stalk that motherfucker.
Most of the shipyard is burned, but they won’t have burned the village. A whisper from the sea says they’re not over there—it’s only the people who live on Haven, the terrorized few who’ve stayed. Who are holding out hope someone will retake the island and restore it to peace.
They’re here. Around the shipyard. Dying every second.
I go through some scaffolding, into the shadows, and start climbing. That prick liked to be up high. He’ll do it again.
I’m right.
He appears on the third set of scaffolding, and it’s only now I see the size of the battle. It’s my crew against cannons and missiles and bullets. The new ship shrugs them off, but this guy—
He’s not going to stop until I stop him.
And so I run.
He’s not coordinated enough to keep the rifle in his hands; it falls with a clatter, and I kick it over the side of the scaffolding. Hand to hand will be better than guns, but slightly more difficult because he’s a mountain of a man who’s out of his mind.
I see it in his eyes.
And then my brain shuts off. My body takes over. I haven’t beaten a person like this since Cronos, but the man with the tattoo doesn’t die as easily. He keeps fighting back. Keeps aiming for my face. The pain is far away. I don’t care. End him, and I’ll end this. I have a gun holstered to my chest. Another at my ankle. I could kill this man in a second, but that won’t give me answers. I need answers first.
He’s starting to lose his balance when I get him by the shirt. Battle rages around us, gunfights and men screaming—that’s from Hades, I know, with his knives and his bargain with death. “Who paid you?” I roar into his face. “Who the fuck sent you here?”
A wild grin. Bloody teeth. He coughs up blood, and I look down between us to see that I’ve stabbed him at some point. Or he stabbed himself. I don’t know. I get in one final blow across the face. For Ashley. For the peace he destroyed here. For all of us.
His face turns into Cronos’s face, and I hit him again, my oldest fear surging like bile. But it’s not him. It’s not. It’s just some asshole with a kraken tattoo who burbles his own blood. “Demeter,” he says, and I wish it shocked me to hear her name. “Sent me. To tell you she’s going to take everything. And you deserve it.”
I shake him. “What do you deserve, motherfucker?”
“She’ll be happy. That’s all I want.” Obsession lights his eyes, and I finally understand what it means to allow Demeter any access to people. Pointless, awful death. She makes people love her. He chokes on a gush of blood and dies in my hands.
Around me, the battlefield—the shipyard—falls silent. Hades is down at the base of the scaffold, blood across his cheekbone. It’s not his. “Come down,” he says, and I realize I’m frozen here. Frozen in old memories and new responsibility and the weight of all of it.
I join him on the ground, and the two of us are walking back toward the ship when I see Zeus’s face change. The sea breeze reaches me a moment later. The footsteps a moment after that.
Hades and I both turn at the same time.
The shipyard’s not empty anymore. It’s filled with neat rows of Navy soldiers in uniforms, their guns pointed at us.
Ashley
I run for the stairs as soon as it’s quiet and find Zeus running too. He grabs me by the shoulders. “Go back down,” he says, and then he’s going for the steps. I don’t listen, so I’m at the railing when he opens the hatch and sprints for his brothers, Conor on his heels. Poseidon won’t let him stand in front of them, so they end up in a row in the center of the shipyard, facing an army.
Facing the Navy, I guess. Three men. One dog. Horribly outnumbered.
“I should have known,” Nicholas says, horror sharpening his voice. “I should have known. There weren’t enough men. It was a trap.”
My heart is outside my body. It’s the size of the sun. One of the Navy men is talking. My brain won’t let me understand. It picks out words like treason and kidnapping and orders to be taken alive or dead and all I know is that they’re going to shoot. All three of them. These men who are more like gods, these three men who have been brothers for years but who wouldn’t see it until now.
“Give me the phone.”
“Ashley, no—”
“Give it to me.”
He hands me the cell phone we had sent on one of the helicopters. It has the decrypted information from my mother’s USB thumb drive on it. It has an email ready to send. An email with the information my father gathered to blackmail the government. He did it for the worst reasons—for money. He courted danger in the world, instability and insurgency, so he could make more on military contracts. He used these documents to foment war, but I’m using it for a different purpose now. Because my mother gave me this, the ultimate gift. Safety. I’m using the document to guarantee peace.
I take it and run. For the stairs. For the hatch. Across the dock and into the sun. To where Poseidon stands with his brothers, Conor baring his teeth at too many sailors in the US Navy.
Their leader has a gun pointed at Poseidon, but I step in front of all of them and hold up the phone. “Put down your guns,” I say, as loud as I can without shouting. “Or you’re all fucked.”
The man in charge smirks. “You’re just one more body for the pile, little girl.”
I put my thumb over the screen, poised to press down. “Let me show you something first. What’s your number?”
Now he leers, and I hate him, I hate all of them. “You could just come home with me instead. Leave these criminals behind.”
I wait.
The men behind him are beginning to look uncomfortable with the idea of shooting an unarmed woman, so I ignore the pulse pounding in my ears and wait.
A roll of his eyes, and the leader rattles off his phone number.
I press send on the first message.
He digs his phone out of a pocket and peers at the screen. Scrolls. Looks harder.
Curses. “This is classified.”
“Not well enough, I’m afraid. I have it, and so do my friends. They’re ready to send this to the media if they don’t hear back from me. How would you like to see this on the news? War crimes would be the least of your worries if this got out. This is treason.”
“Ashley.” Poseidon puts a hand on my waist, his voice low and urgent, and I can hear how afraid he is for me. Not to die himself. Just for me. “Go back to the ship.”
I kiss his cheek. “I would have told you the plan, but you were resting.”
He doesn’t move away.
A whisper goes up from the man to the people next in command, and their formation shifts so that three men are huddled around the first one’s phone. One by one, they all back away. “I didn’t see that,” says one of the guys.
It causes a ripple of unease through the whole group.