Furious

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Maybe it hadn't all been for nothing. Hades' reaction gave me hope that we weren't in the wrong. We hadn't lead hundreds if not thousands of souls to their slaughter on a whim or for love and we hadn't been participating in a futile war among entities who should have remained forgotten.

No matter how we got to that point, reinstating Hades had to be worth it.

He touched my face, drawing me out of my own head. The touch of his skin on mine sparked the dormant Fury inside me. She growled inside me, fighting to be free, to pilot my body back into battle.

"Now is not the time to lose yourself, Autumn, we have not yet won. Zeus is waiting for answers. I think it is time to share a drink with my brother." Hades sounded like I remembered him. He smiled like I remembered.

"We don't have all of the answers to give him and I seriously doubt that a drink is going to bridge the gap between the two of you." I said. I'd almost forgotten the very scary god who had demanded the Nectar still waited on the surface. "Your issues are beyond a peace-offering, even if it is the Nectar he wants so badly."

"What little answers you might have are not the ones Zeus wants," Poseidon proclaimed haughtily. The shadow he cast in the dim room flowed over Alex's still form as he approached. Here I was getting all doe-eyed over Hades, thinking we were alone in the dungeon. It was foolish to assume Poseidon had left when he knew Hades would be coming. He once again held his trident. Blood flaked on the staff where Gregory had touched it.

His trident was the mantle of Poseidon just as the charm pressed against my chest was the mantle of Hades. The mantle given to me by the Fates. The Fates who ordered me not to reveal it until the right moment.

It was the Fates who continually created hoops for Hector to jump through, the flaming kind that were suspended above your head. They first threw him into unknown territory and told him to rule it; they brought war down on his doorstep with no allies among his brethren; they hid the Nectar, hid the mantle of Hades, spoke cryptically of prophecies that no one else had ever heard in completion.

"Actually, I think we have exactly the answers that Zeus will want. The Fates work for him after all; he's going to want to know about their mutinous plan against him." If both my legs were working, I have jumped up to click my heels. For once, I was the one with the answers.

I couldn't tell the Fate's motives but I knew that it was the sisters, not Alector or Jasper or Hector or even Zeus, behind all of this bloodshed. What they were trying to accomplish I did not know—why give me the mantle? What kind of pawns were we, Hector and I?

"There are two options as far as I see it." Gregory approached, calm and stoic as ever. "Either the Fates were working alone for a devious end or they had orders from Zeus."

I wanted to pout that Gregory has stolen my thunder but there were more important issues at hand. Pushing away the petty thoughts left plenty of room for solutions. If only I had any.

"You saw him up there; Zeus is terrified of dying. He didn't want this any more than we did. And," I was going out on a limb but I had a good feeling that it was a solid branch, "Zeus would never have allowed them to remove the Nectar from Olympus. They, using Tantalus as a mule, snuck it out under his nose."

Poseidon nodded, for the first time not hateful in his reaction towards me. "For all of his centuries and all of his temper, Zeus would never endanger so many of his Olympian's lives. Not now that we are irrelevant in the world of man."

In my extensive studying of the history of Greek myths, I read only once—as if they didn't really want you to know—that while the Fates could weave the lives of humans with their thread they could not weave for the myths themselves.

Before this war I had been too mortal; the Fates were able to manipulate my lives, my parents' lives. They brought me here by weaving the threads of our lives but maybe they couldn't write my fate anymore.

As we discussed our next steps as unlikely allies, I hoped I was Fury enough to contest what Fate had in store for me.