Seventeen
“I could try Vanessa,” I say. “But there’s no way she can get in touch with Mercy that fast.”
“Can she get in touch with Athene?”
And there it is. A potential solution to this puzzle.
I let Connolly make that call while I eat. He’s known Vanessa longer than I have, and also, I’m suddenly starving. I eat all of my sandwich and half the fries, leaving Ellie glaring as I pick crab bits off the wrapper for her.
Connolly pulls a piece off his half-eaten sandwich and hands it to me. He’s on the phone with Marius, or so I presume by the shift of tone that suggests he’s talking to his many times great-grandfather. Marius may be the god of war, but he’s also very chill, laid back, open and honest in his dealings. Athene is goddess of battle strategy; Marius is the god of battle luck. The head versus the heart. All Marius wants is for Connolly and his brother to be happy and healthy. In short, exactly what their actual parents should want.
When he hangs up, he says, “Did you know they’re in Crete?”
“What?”
“Vanessa forgot that part when we spoke last night. They’re overseas for the week. Happy to help, and Marius offered to come back and mediate with his sisters, but I said no, not unless the situation gets worse.”
“Can they get in touch with Athene?”
“Marius is messaging her now. He apologized for not passing over her contact information directly, but she doesn’t like to have that shared, and she can be somewhat forceful in her opinions.”
“Understatement of the decade,” I mutter.
“I told him you’ve been threatened with a one-hour response window, after which there will be unspecified consequences. I get the impression that Athene may not take that threat as seriously as we’d like, so Marius is giving her thirty minutes to respond or he sends us her contact information.”
I laugh softly. “A little battle strategy of his own.”
“Precisely.”
While Ares might be the god of battle luck, in reality, the lines blur. Marius couldn’t have spent millennia in roles of war—general, mercenary, spy, and now head of a company that sells related technology—if he didn’t have a head for the art of war.
“So now we wait,” I say as I clean up my lunch. “Damn it.”
“I know. Let’s talk strategy of our own then.”
I separate my recycling and waste, each in the appropriate bin, and walk back as Connolly takes out his phone to make notes.
“I’ve untangled the timeline to get it straight in my head,” I say. “First, the paintings are created, which seems to have something to do with punishing Athene.”
Connolly’s fingers tap, taking notes.
“Then Athene and Mercy destroy them. Or they think they did. Which raises a huge question mark. There’s no way Athene destroys a painting if she isn’t absolutely certain it’s the right . . . Oh.”
I’m about to continue when the bell jingles. Two guys looking for a “formerly cursed” object for their apartment. Unlike the sorority girls from yesterday, these two are serious. They’re a setting up a new place together, and they’d love an antique with a story to tell. Exactly my kind of customers, so I don’t mind the interruption. After fifteen minutes of browsing, they pick a platter and I package it up for them.
“You had a thought before they arrived?” Connolly says after they’re gone.
“I did. The power Athene gives her descendants is past perception. The ability to see an object’s past. So it’d be impossible to trick her with a fake painting. She had to have destroyed the right ones.”
“Good point.” He taps more into his phone. “That seems to suggest the one you found is a fake with the same curse.”
“But not the fake Mercy commissioned for my test. That’s where it gets complicated. She gets a fake for my test and puts on a fart-joke jinx. She somehow nudges the listing onto my eBay searches. I see it, and you buy it. But someone swaps it for yet another fake, with the original curse. Whoever did that knew about her test.”
“Which could suggest that the person behind this is the one she commissioned to paint the fake. Whoever it is, they must be close to Mercy. Close enough to know what she was up to with you, which must be a very limited list. That’s the only answer.”
“Mmm, not exactly,” says a voice from the backroom.
The back door opens, and Mercy walks in. She’s taken out the pigtails and switched to a plait, as well as changing into a jeans and T-shirt. No longer the kid’s TV show host. Just a casually dressed woman of about forty. I hesitate, not completely certain it’s the same person.
She sighs. “Yes, it’s me. I’m blending. Teeny insists on it. Blend, blend, blend . . .”
“My back door was locked.”
Her grin sparks, the other Mercy peeking through. “Was. Wasn’t. Is again.”
“Where’s Athene?”
“I ditched her. I have a three-order minimum with my big sister.”
“Three-order minimum?” Connolly says.
“Let me guess,” I say. “You let her give you three orders, and then you ditch her.”
“Very good.” She hops onto the stool. “You must be Aiden.”
She puts out a hand. He doesn’t take it.
“Mmm,” she says. “You’re not happy with me either. Kennedy did tell you I’m not responsible for that curse, right? Or the police?”
“Yes, but you are responsible for her being targeted, solely as leverage over you.”
“Kind of like your parents, right? Threatening Kennedy to make you fall in line?”
He stiffens, and before I can assure him I said nothing, Mercy says, “I’m not needling you, nephew. I’m acknowledging that having me do that to Kennedy would be extra annoying. As for how I know about your parents, I do take care of my students. Which means I know where all the threats are coming from. I’m going to trust you can resolve that one.”
She turns to me. “Marius told me what’s going on. You can contact this person?”
I unlock my phone and show her the string of texts. As she reads them, her brows knit.
“I have no idea what this is about,” she says. “But I apologize anyway. I’ve never had something like this happen. Mortal lovers targeted, yes. Mortal friends targeted, yes. But not mortal mentees.” She lifts a hand to Connolly. “And because I can tell you’re bursting to say it, nephew, yes, if other mortals in my life have been targeted then it makes sense that Kennedy could be. But I only meant that people pester them for a cell-phone number.”
She taps the phone. “This is next level. For me, at least. I mean, I’m just Mercury. Athene, Paulo and Marius get most of the attention. Hector gets some, Artie, some. Denny and me?” She shrugs. “The advantage to being not taken seriously . . .”
“Is that no one takes you seriously?”
She grins my way. “Exactly. A pain in the ass when you want to be taken seriously, but it’s 95% to our advantage.” She lifts the phone. “I suspect this is a wrong number. Oh, they think they want me, but they really want Athene. Everyone wants Athene.”