It filled me with a protectiveness that bordered on rage. Her anxiety made me want to kill things, specifically Athena and Poseidon.
For the first time ever, I wanted a god to escape our prison. I wanted him to escape, just so I'd have a chance to kill him. Over Leo's head, I met Pollux's gaze and saw the same thing reflected on his face.
“How long do we wait?” Leo asked, jarring me out of my homicidal fantasy. “To sink the piece of the seal?”
“We should get out of the harbor first,” Paris joked, and Leo laughed.
Her laugh loosened that knot in my chest. Didn't make me want to kill the gods any less, but I could take a deep breath.
Paris
Leo's laugh filled me with pride. I could read the worry on my friends' and brother's faces, but it eased a little with the sound. This was the first time in memory that I had done something to take away my brother's stress, instead of adding to it.
I wondered what was different about Leo and why she affected me this way. With Helen, she was all I could think about. Hunger, sleep—none of that mattered.
With Leo, though, everything was clearer. Maybe years had changed me. I had only been alive a quarter of a century when I met Helen, and here I was with millennia behind me. But I thought it was more than that. My love for Helen was so all-encompassing, it made me selfish. It had been a drug. An addiction.
It hadn't been good for me. It hadn't been healthy. It had only led to ruin and death.
And that wasn't Helen's fault. It was mine. She didn't make me act the way I did. She didn't make me steal her away in the night to sail away from her husband and into Troy. She didn't make me sacrifice everything for her.
But she hadn't argued against it either—not until the end when it became clear that our futures only held loss.
“The deepest part of the channel is around five-hundred feet,” Leo mused, holding tight to my brother's hands. “But the more I think about it, it doesn't really matter how deep it is where we drop the seal. The gods can get it. The laws of physics don't apply to them. The most we can do is make it hard to find.”
As one, we all stared at the container holding the pieces of the seal. I couldn't feel anything, no waves of power or pulse of awareness, coming from it. Leo had a different reaction, though, and she shivered as if the sight of it chilled her from the inside out.
“I wonder...” she began and trailed off.
I waited. Her brown eyes, so warm and expressive, were impossible to see in the darkness. Shadows played across her pale skin, leaving some parts of her face visible, like her lush pink lips.
“I wonder if we should wait,” she whispered.
“To destroy it?” Orestes asked. “No. The best thing to do is hide it again.”
She licked her lower lip before raking her teeth across it. “Is it?”
Hector withdrew his hands from her, and I saw it then—the shuttering. He was hiding his reaction, expecting the worst. The move left Leo even more alone, and it took all my self-control not to punch him in the chest.Idiot.Couldn't he see she needed him right now? Whatever she was going to say was taking courage.
“You pushed your powers into that vessel,” she said. “Not all of them, but as much as you could, right?”
No one said anything. Orestes and Hector weren't making eye contact, and Achilles and Pollux barely blinked. So, I replied, “Yes. I don't know how we did it, but we did. We put everything we could into that seal to keep the gods trapped.”
Reaching one hand to her head, she pushed her fingers through her hair, then patted the strands in a strange way I noticed she'd started.
“I wonder if we should wait, because you might need more power than you have right now. Athena got free. It makes sense the rest of the gods will too. You'll need to trap them again.”
“It doesn't work like that,” Hector argued, his tone sharp.
Though her rosy cheeks paled, she didn't reply to him angrily. Instead, she asked calmly and precisely, “How does it work, then?”
And that was the question, right there. We didn't know. The emotions boiling in us had given us a strength we hadn't known we possessed. All my hurt, anger, loss, and love had coalesced and spewed out of me like lava from a volcano. But instead of shooting into the sky and raining fire everywhere, I managed to hone it and send it into the vessel.
“There's no way to measure your power, but I can't fathom what it was if what you were left with was immortality, youth, strength, and I don't even know what else.” She pulled on a curl, then folded her hands in her lap.
Reaching over the seat, I took her hands and pulled her into my lap. Fuck Hector. She needed something. Her body relaxed immediately, and a breath left her lips as she leaned into me. Feeling like a fucking hero, I tucked her against me, urging her to lean on my chest. She smelled like the moors—earth and rain and that indefinable scent that was unique to her. I closed my eyes and inhaled, trying to place it. Bergamot, maybe, from the tea she drank.
“I don't know if we'll be able to do that,” Pollux said. When Achilles shot him a look, he quickly added, “We had luck on our side, and I don't know what the hell else.”