temporary inconvenience. I didn’t like Cyrus’s chances of surviving the regime change when Konstantin took back the reins.
“You keep playing with fire and you’re going to get burned,” I said, and Cyrus laughed like I’d made a particularly funny joke. I thought back on my words, but they were nothing more than a perfectly ordinary cliché, not funny at all. Whatever the joke was, I didn’t get it.
Cyrus realized I didn’t get it and raised his eyebrows at me. “Playing with fire?” he prompted. “Getting burned?”
Nope, that didn’t clear things up a bit.
“You are aware that my father and I are descendants of Helios, the sun god, aren’t you?”
Actually, I’d never bothered to ask. For some reason, I’d kind of assumed they were descendants of Zeus because he was king of the gods. I wouldn’t have thought Konstantin, who puffed himself up with so much pomp and circumstance, would be the descendant of a god many people had never even heard of.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Cyrus said. He turned in his chair and tugged down the collar of his shirt so I could see the glyph that marked his skin, right where his neck joined his shoulders. It was an iridescent sun with long, spidery rays. If he wore a shirt with no collar, some of those rays would be visible, though only to other Liberi. I myself had a glyph in the middle of my forehead, and no mortal had ever shown any sign that they could see it.
“I’m still kind of new at this game,” I reminded Cyrus. “I tend not to think about who a person’s descended from unless I can see their glyph. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Understandable,” he said, turning back toward me. “I’ve known what my father was, what I was, for all my life. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have all this thrust upon you all of a sudden.”
There was real sympathy in his words, and I had to give myself another mental slap in the face to remind myself he was one of the bad guys. He was just more subtle and deceptive about it than the rest of the Olympians.
The waitress returned to our table, bringing our food. I tried not to stare at his croque monsieur with naked envy, but it was hard when the bread was a perfect toasty brown and glistened with butter. My soup and salad would make a perfectly nice lunch, but Cyrus’s looked positively decadent.
To my surprise, Cyrus didn’t even bother to glance at his food. Instead, he opened his wallet and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.
“Lunch is my treat, since I barged in on you so rudely,” he said, laying the money on the table and pushing back his chair.
“You’re not going to eat?”
He shook his head. “I’ve said what I needed to say. There’s no reason for me to disturb you any further.”
Then why did you order food? I wondered, but declined to ask.
“I’m sure they’d be willing to give you a to-go bag. Throwing away a croque monsieur is a crime against nature.”
Cyrus grinned at me as he stood up. “I saw the way you looked at my food when the waitress brought it. I have a strong suspicion it won’t go to waste. It’s been a pleasure.”
I watched him leave with what I was sure was a puzzled frown on my face. I’d been properly warned off, but I had the nagging suspicion that there’d been more going on during our conversation than met the eye. However, I couldn’t figure out what it was. And the croque monsieur was getting cold.
Cyrus was right; his food didn’t go to waste. It wasn’t until I was almost halfway through the sandwich that I realized Cyrus had specifically come to talk to me here, nowhere near where I lived or worked. No one knew where I was. So how had he found me?
The only explanation I could come up with was that he had tracked me by my cell phone somehow. Not something a private citizen would ordinarily be able to do, but the Olympians had so much money to throw around they could buy just about any service known to mankind.
I resisted the urge to dig my phone out of my purse and remove the battery. Cyrus already knew where I was right this moment, so there was no point. But I added a new task to my to-do list: buy a disposable cell phone.
There are