but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill me first. That would bring him great satisfaction.
I bowed my head, gritting my teeth against the inevitable.
Fine, I thought. I deserve it. Just spare my friends. Please.
The pressure eased.
I glanced up through a haze of pain.
In front of me, Reyna and Meg stood shoulder to shoulder, facing down the god.
They sent him their own flurry of images. Reyna pictured me singing “The Fall of Jason Grace” to the legion, officiating at Jason’s funeral pyre with tears in my eyes, then looking goofy and awkward and clueless as I offered to be her boyfriend, giving her the best, most cleansing laugh she’d had in years. (Thanks, Reyna.)
Meg pictured the way I’d saved her in the myrmekes’ lair at Camp Half-Blood, singing about my romantic failures with such honesty it rendered giant ants catatonic with depression. She envisioned my kindness to Livia the elephant, to Crest, and especially to her, when I’d given her a hug in our room at the café and told her I would never give up trying.
In all their memories, I looked so human…but in the best possible ways. Without words, my friends asked Harpocrates if I was still the person he hated so much.
The god scowled, considering the two young women.
Then a small voice spoke—actually spoke—from inside the sealed glass jar. “Enough.”
As faint and muffled as her voice was, I should not have been able to hear it. Only the utter silence of the shipping container made her audible, though how she cut through Harpocrates’s dampening field, I had no idea. It was definitely the Sibyl. I recognized her defiant tone, the same way she’d sounded centuries before, when she vowed never to love me until every grain of sand ran out: Come back to me at the end of that time. Then, if you still want me, I’m yours.
Now, here we were, at the wrong end of forever, neither of us in the right form to choose the other.
Harpocrates regarded the jar, his expression turning sad and plaintive. He seemed to ask, Are you sure?
“This is what I have foreseen,” whispered the Sibyl. “At last, we will rest.”
A new image appeared in my mind—verses from the Sibylline Books, purple letters against white skin, so bright it made me squint. The words smoked as if fresh from a harpy tattoo-artist’s needle: Add the last breath of the god who speaks not, once his soul is cut free, together with the shattered glass.
Harpocrates must have seen the words, too, judging from the way he winced. I waited for him to process their meaning, to get angry again, to decide that if anyone’s soul should be cut free, it should be mine.
When I was a god, I rarely thought about the passage of time. A few centuries here or there, what did it matter? Now I considered just how long ago the Sibyl had written those lines. They had been scribbled into the original Sibylline Books back when Rome was still a puny kingdom. Had the Sibyl known even then what they meant? Had she realized she would end up as nothing but a voice in a jar, stuck in this dark metal box with her boyfriend who smelled like roses and looked like a withered ten-year-old in a toga and a bowling-pin crown? If so, how could she not want to kill me even more than Harpocrates did?
The god peered into the container, maybe having a private telepathic conversation with his beloved Sibyl.
Reyna and Meg shifted, doing their best to block me from the god’s line of sight. Perhaps they thought if he couldn’t see me, he might forget I was there. I felt awkward peeking around their legs, but I was so drained and light-headed I doubted I could stand.
No matter what images Harpocrates had shown me, or how weary he was of life, I couldn’t imagine he would just roll over and surrender. Oh, you need to kill me for your prophecy thingie? Okay, sure! Stab me right here!
I definitely couldn’t imagine him letting us take the Sibyl’s jar and shattering it for our summoning ritual. They had found love. Why would they want to die?
Finally, Harpocrates nodded, as if they’d come to an agreement. His face tightening with concentration, he pulled his index finger from his mouth, lifted the jar to his lips, and gave it a gentle kiss. Normally, I would not have been moved by a man caressing a jar, but the gesture was so sad