“We think this is all a distraction aimed at you two. The paintings aren’t modern copies. They seem to be contemporary with the originals, and then also over-painted.”
“Yes, we are aware of that. I have analyzed the Eldest Daughter. May I presume you’ve seen another?”
“Vengeful Boy. It was sent to Aiden’s parents, supposedly courtesy of me. I believe there were two sets of paintings. The woman who commissioned them really wanted her revenge. If you got hold of one set, another still exists. Anyway, that’s not the point because the paintings aren’t the point. They’re a smokescreen. Someone has targeted me with the paintings, forcing you two to run around trying to save my ass—and the asses of everyone who comes into contact with them.”
When I pause, Athene says again, “Continue.”
“I wasn’t targeted because I’m Mercy’s new mentee. I was targeted because I’m a convenient mortal whose well-being Mercy might care about. Convenient because I’m in the area. You guys were here, in this region, handling another problem. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess. That problem involves your father. Zeus.”
Silence. Then Mercy starts swearing. Athene cuts her off with, “I see where you’re going with this, Kennedy. You believe Zeus is distracting us via these paintings.”
“Yep, and we know it’s Zeus because we met him last night. Big guy. Looks like Hector, but a helluva lot more charming?”
“You met Zeus himself?”
“Well, that’s our guess. We ran out of gas—very unexpectedly. We ended up at a motel where the night clerk tricked us into taking the honeymoon suite—nudge-nudge, wink-wink. We woke this morning to discover the entire motel has been closed for months. Same with the road . . . which is also way off our route. I can’t even quite conceive of that level of illusion magic, so maybe we’re hallucinating—”
“No,” she says crisply. “That would be him.”
“Definitely him,” Mercy says. “Ridiculously over-the-top, and coming from me, that’s something.”
“He was amusing himself,” I say. “Having fun with us before getting back to whatever business you two were trying to interrupt.”
“Yes,” Athene says dryly. “There is no matter so urgent that it cannot be set aside for a bit of amusement, particularly at the expense of hapless mortals.”
“Well, these two hapless mortals will leave you to it. We have another problem to deal with. The case of the disappearing debutante.”
Mercy chuckles. “Dare I ask?”
“Aiden’s arranged-marriage partner has vanished, along with her parents, and her grandmother thinks she’s being forced to the altar . . . only not with Aiden, apparently.”
Silence. Then Mercy says, “What?”
Connolly cuts in. “By arranged-marriage partner, Kennedy only means that the young woman was the primary prospect on my parents’ candidate list, and I was on her parents’ list. There was no marriage forthcoming.”
“That isn’t—” Athene clips off the rest. “Would this young woman be Eleanor O’Brien?”
“Nope,” I say.
“She’s Eleanor’s cousin,” Connolly says. “Theodora O’Toole.”
“What’s going on?” I say.
A beat of silence. Then Athene says, “We may know who Theodora is about to marry.”
“Uh . . .” I say.
“Zeus,” Mercy says. “They’re marrying her to Zeus.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Thirty-seven
I spend the next sixty seconds deciding I very clearly am still asleep, and I’ll wake to discover I’m in that motel room with Connolly, and the motel is most certainly not closed down. We never met Zeus. We just ran out of gas and ended up at a regular roadside motel.
My first reaction to that? A pang of sharp disappointment, not for what happened in the motel but for what happened twenty minutes ago, those moments when Marion Connolly seemed to understand what she’d done to her sons and want to make amends. The rest can be a dream, but I desperately want that to be true.
Why do I think I’m dreaming? Because there is no way the paintings problem can be connected to Theodora and the arranged-marriage world of the luck workers.
It can’t, can it?
Turns out, it can, and that’s fifty-percent coincidence and fifty percent a collision of magical worlds.
Zeus is the market for a wife. Hera died decades ago, and I suspect he’d cut loose and had himself a blast after that, his only reining influence gone. But there’s a reason he hadn’t left Hera millennia ago. He needed her. Oh, he’d rather have looser reins, but she’d also kept him from getting himself into anything he couldn’t get out of again.
Hera was balance and restraint. She was his goddess of hearth and home. Who would keep the home fires burning for him? Who would keep his finances in order? His home in order? Give him a place to lay his head when he wanted a bit of peace? That is, according to Athene and Mercy, what Zeus had with Hera and what he wanted again. Which meant he needed a wife.
Zeus had been in the area wife-shopping, and his daughters had been trying to figure out who he was targeting so they could run interference before some mortal girl made a horrible mistake.
If an immortal wants an arranged marriage, where better to look than the luck workers of Boston, New York and Philly? That’s where the Irish branches of Marius’s offspring ended up, and they practice arranged marriage.
Except that isn’t quite what Zeus wanted. Or it’s not the direction Athene and Mercy were looking. He wanted a reminder of his Hera, a descendant of her line. That’s where the O’Tooles came in. Eleanor is Theodora’s cousin on her maternal side, which is descended from Hera. When Athene and Mercy started closing in on Zeus, he fed them false clues pointing at Eleanor. The truth is that the ideal mate was descended from Hera and from luck workers.
Oh, and there’s one more thing Zeus needs. A little extra that Theodora won’t even realize she possesses: semi-immortality. Yep, the young woman I’d envied in my shop really does have it all—money, beauty, brains, two types of magical powers and a genetic aberration that means she’s going to live one hell of a long time.
That’s the theory anyway. Mercy and Athene know Zeus wants a semi-immortal wife. They know he’ll be able to recognize semi-immortals, using a power the others don’t possess. And since Theodora is a descendant of Hera—and cousin to their initial suspect—they’re certain she’s Zeus’s new bride-to be. Her parents had used Connolly as a bait-and-switch.
Oh, we’d love it if you married Aiden Connolly. What? You don’t want to? Hmm, well here’s a second option . . .
They let everyone—even Theodora—think Connolly was the one. Theodora expected that, and so she wouldn’t be surprised by a flurry of preparations. She also wouldn’t be overly alarmed if they tried to force her hand. Connolly was a decent guy—he’d never force her into marriage, whatever her parents might want.
Only Connolly isn’t the bridegroom. And the guy who is? Well, he’s never taken no for an answer, not from a woman, and he’s sure as hell not going to start now.