“She doesn’t mean that literally!” I yelped for the dogs’ benefit.
“And you thought…” Reyna didn’t seem to know where to point—at me, herself, the sky. “Seriously? Wait. My dogs would have attacked if you were lying. Oh. Wow. HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!”
“So that’s a no, then,” I huffed. “Fine. I get it. You can stop—”
Her laughter turned to asthmatic squeaking as she wiped her eyes. “Apollo. When you were a god…” She struggled for breath. “Like, with your powers and good looks and whatever—”
“Say no more. Naturally, you would have—”
“That would have been a solid, absolute, hard-pass NO.”
I gaped. “I am astonished!”
“And as Lester…I mean, you’re sweet and kind of adorkable at times.”
“Adorkable? At times?”
“But wow. Still a big-time NO. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
A lesser mortal would have crumbled to dust on the spot, their self-esteem imploding.
In that moment, as she rejected me utterly, Reyna had never seemed more beautiful and desirable. Funny how that works.
Meg emerged from the hackberry bushes. “Guys, there’s nobody up there, but—” She froze, taking in the scene, then glanced at the greyhounds for explanation.
Don’t ask us, their metal faces seemed to say. Mom is never like this.
“What’s so funny?” Meg asked. A smile tugged at her mouth, as if she wanted to join in the joke. Which was, of course, me.
“Nothing.” Reyna held her breath for a moment, then lost it again in a fit of giggles. Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano, daughter of Bellona, feared praetor of the Twelfth Legion, giggling.
At last she seemed to regain some of her self-control. Her eyes danced with humor. Her cheeks glowed beet-red. Her smile made her seem like a different person—a happy different person.
“Thanks, Lester,” she said. “I needed that. Now let’s go find the soundless god, shall we?”
She led the way up the hill, holding her ribs as if her chest still hurt from too much hilarity.
Then and there, I decided that if I ever became a god again, I would rearrange the order of my vengeance list. Venus had just moved up to the top spot.
Frozen in terror
Like a god in the headlights
Why U speeding up?
MORTAL SECURITY WAS NOT a problem.
There wasn’t any.
Across a flat expanse of rocks and weeds, the relay station sat nestled at the base of Sutro Tower. The blocky brown building had clusters of white satellite dishes dotting its roof like toadstools after a rain shower. The door stood wide open. The windows were dark. The parking area out front was empty.
“This isn’t right,” Reyna murmured. “Didn’t Tarquin say they were doubling security?”
“Doubling the flock,” Meg corrected. “But I don’t see any sheep or anything.”
That idea made me shudder. Over the millennia, I’d seen quite a few flocks of guardian sheep. They tended to be poisonous and/or carnivorous, and they smelled like mildewed sweaters.
“Apollo, any thoughts?” Reyna asked.
At least she could look at me now without bursting into laughter, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just shook my head helplessly. I was good at that.
“Maybe we’re in the wrong place?” Meg asked.
Reyna bit her lower lip. “Something’s definitely off here. Let me check inside the station. Aurum and Argentum can make a quick search. If we encounter any mortals, I’ll just say I was hiking and got lost. You guys wait here. Guard my exit. If you hear barking, that means trouble.”
She jogged across the field, Aurum and Argentum at her heels, and disappeared inside the building.
Meg peered at me over the top of her cat-eye glasses. “How come you made her laugh?”
“That wasn’t my intention. Besides, it isn’t illegal to make someone laugh.”
“You asked her to be your girlfriend, didn’t you?”
“I—What? No. Sort of. Yes.”
“That was stupid.”
I found it humiliating to have my love life criticized by a little girl wearing a unicorn-and-crossbones button. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Meg snorted.
I seemed to be everyone’s source of amusement today.
I studied the tower that loomed above us. Up the side of the nearest support column, a steel-ribbed chute enclosed a row of rungs, forming a tunnel that one could climb through—if one were crazy enough—to reach the first set of crossbeams, which bristled with more satellite dishes and cellular-antenna fungi. From there, the rungs continued upward into a low-lying blanket of fog that swallowed the tower’s top half. In the white mist, a hazy black V floated in and out of sight—a bird of some sort.