Persephone couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She recalled Sybil’s comments about her relationship with Apollo. Everyone, even her close friends Xeres and Aro, had assumed they were lovers, but Sybil had told her and Lexa that she wasn’t interested in a relationship with the God of the Music.
“He wanted more from me than friendship and I refused. I’d heard about his previous relationships, all of them ended in disaster. Daphne, Cassandra, Hyakinthos…”
“Let me get this straight,” Persephone said. “This….god-child got a little pissy because you wouldn’t date him and took your power away?”
“Shh!” Sybil looked around, clearly afraid Apollo would appear and smite them. “You can’t say things like that, Persephone!”
She shrugged. “Let him try to take revenge.”
“You are fearless because you have Hades,” she said. “But you forget, gods have a habit of punishing those you care for most.”
Sybil’s words made her frown and she suddenly felt less confident.
“So you don’t have a job anymore?” Lexa asked.
Because of her gifts, Sybil had been enrolled the College of the Divine. There, she’d learned to hone her power and had been chosen by Apollo specifically to become his public relations manager. Without her gift, the job Sybil had spent the last four years training for was not attainable. Even if she had retained her powers, Persephone wasn’t sure anyone would hire a disgraced oracle, especially one Apollo had fired. Apollo was the golden god. He’d been named Delphi Divine’s God of the Year seven years in a row, only losing the title once after Zeus struck the magazine’s building with lightning in protest.
“He can’t do that!” Persephone exploded. She didn’t care how beloved the God of Music was, he didn’t deserve that respect if he punished people just because they didn’t want to date him.
“He can do anything,” Sybil said. “He’s a god.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” she argued.
“Right, wrong, fair, unfair—it’s not really the world we live in, Persephone. The gods punish.”
Those words made Persephone shudder, and the worst part was, she knew it was true. The gods used mortals as their playthings and cast them aside when they got angry or bored. Life was nothing to them because they had eternity.
“I wouldn’t even mind being fired, but who will hire me now?” Sybil said, her voice desolate. “I just don’t know what to do. I can’t go home. My mother and father disowned me when I applied for the College of the Divine.”
“You can work with me,” Lexa offered, looking at Persephone as if to say, can’t she?
“I’ll ask Hades,” Persephone promised. “I’m sure they can use more help at the foundation.”
“And you can stay with us,” Lexa added. “Until you are on your feet again.”
Sybil looked skeptical. “I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
Lexa scoffed. “You would not be an inconvenience. You can keep me company while Persephone’s in the Underworld. Hell, you can probably have her room. It’s not like she’s here most nights anyway.”
> Persephone gave Lexa a playful push and Sybil laughed. “I don’t want your room.”
“You might as well crash there. Lexa’s not wrong.”
“Of course, I’m not wrong. If I was sleeping with Hades, I wouldn’t be in my room, either.”
Persephone reached for a pillow and smacked Lexa.
It was the wrong thing to do.
Lexa shrieked like a banshee and reached for a cushion swinging wildly. Persephone dodged the blow, which left Sybil to take the brunt of it.
Lexa dropped the pillow.
“Oh, my gods, Sybil, I am so sorry—”
But Sybil took up a pillow, too, and smashed it into the side of Lexa’s face.
It wasn’t long before the three were locked in battle, chasing one another around the living room, delivering and taking hits until they collapsed in a heap on the couch, breathless and giggling.