accidentally messing up some of the sterile cleanliness of this place.
“What is she going to do with your blood?” I asked Cronus, who had not moved, still staring at the now closed door she’d shut. “She’s clearly willing to put up with a lot, so … it must be powerful.”
He shot me a disparaging stare. “Human, have you not been paying attention at all? I’m the strongest of the Titans. Their leader. My family feared me so much they locked me away for a thousand years because they couldn’t kill me. I’m probably the only god that Narida doesn’t have blood from. She’s a collector of powerful energy. I have no idea what she plans to do with all of her collections—so far she’s done nothing.”
I stared at him. Was he for real? “Did you not … uh … how do I put this? Maybe think that your blood was the last blood she needed to complete whatever dastardly plan she has in the works?”
Narida. He’d used that name already, but I’d forgotten until right now. Pulling out my phone, I decided to see if I could Google her.
Narida, the powerful crone, I typed into the search bar. As usual, about a million hits came up, and I clicked into the first few to find they were mostly cosplayers. “She won’t be on your Google,” Cronus said, taking a seat beside me. I hadn’t even realized how much the distance between us had been straining me, until he sat down.
Not wanting to, but needing more information, I pulled up her Instagram. Islandwitch201 was a very focused poster. She had a minimum of three posts a day, and they varied around the island life here. A few were her in a bikini, but only from the back. There was not a single face photo in her entire two-thousand-plus posts.
I took a quick chance to pop over to my Gram and grinned when I saw that I had gained two thousand more followers from the picture with Cronus, and I officially had 12K likes. It looked like the hashtag #INeedaGreekGod was trending.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
Maybe this would be my big break. Get me to 50k likes. I needed more pics of Cronus though. If he’d allow it. One of the comments was from Shauna asking where the hell I was. Oops. I’d have to shoot her an email when things slowed down.
“When you don’t age, it’s not smart to have your photo out there,” Cronus told me, pulling my concentration back to him. “Gods try to stay off the radar of humans, because if they knew about us, they would start panicking and all hell would break loose.”
Probably why he allowed one photo and one only.
“Is that why you hate humans and want to kill them all?” I asked him.
He shook his head, scowling at me. “We never wanted to kill all of them. We’ve been protecting your primitive species for eons. But now that my brothers and sisters are gone, the gods have been doing whatever they want under Zeus’s rule. That all ends for them now that I’m back.”
“You’re kinda scary,” I said, not joking.
He shrugged. “I am what I am. There is no changing that. The last of my kind … alone. The one who will destroy Zeus so that he cannot fuck with humanity anymore. It is my burden to bear.”
Shivers traced across my spine. “That’s my worst nightmare…”
The gold in his blue eyes deepened. “What is?”
Something told me I shouldn’t reveal such a private part of myself to him, but the words spilled out anyway: “To be alone.” I couldn’t imagine all of my siblings slaughtered. What happened to him was awful. Losing my mom had been enough of a loss to haunt me.
He stilled next to me, like for the first time I’d truly stunned him. The swirling depths of his eyes locked on to mine, and he tilted his head. “I understand so much more now. The reason you’re desperate for followers, likes, love. This is all to fill an empty void in your soul.”
Jesus. I suddenly felt like I was at a psychic reading or a shrink's office.
There was a new, heavy mood that hadn’t existed between us before this second. Until now I’d been joking and screaming and running to hide my panic. To not have to deal with the fact that there was a very real god-like creature attached to me. But I could not do that now. We had to stay