“Well, somebody had to do it after you snuffed it out.” He smirks.
“What do you mean? It was already out before I ever set foot in the amphitheater.” I remember, because I was standing right next to it for a while.
“I’m not talking about the cauldron fire,” he answers, his eyes sparking with glee.
“Then what—” I freeze as I think back to the first morning I met him. The first morning at Anaximander’s. “You mean your lantern? That was—”
“The eternal flame of humanity?” He shrugs. “Kind of.”
“Oh my gods.Oh my gods. OH MY GODS! I blew out the…”
He grins. “Yep.”
“The same one you…”
“That’s the one.” He nods.
“And you didn’t say anything? All this time, you just let me go on like it was no big deal?”
“What was I supposed to say?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe,You shouldn’t have done that!OrWe need to figure out how to fix this now.” I throw my hands up in exasperation. “You should have said something.”
“And miss out on you figuring all this out on your own?” He throws his head back and laughs. “Now where’s the fun in that?”
I don’t even know what to say to that, so I just sit here running things through in my mind again and again. As I do, a million questions come to me. But the most burning one is, “Well, why haven’t you been able to fix it then? Surely this isn’t the first time in the history of humanity this has happened.”
“Oh, no. It’s definitely the first time it’s happened,” he counters.
I can literally feel my face drain of color. “Ever?”
“Yes, ever.”
“But how? Why? I mean, it wasn’t even hard to do,”I tell him. “I just”—I purse my lips and blow air through them in a demonstration of what I did that day—“blew it out.”
He laughs again. “Yeah, I noticed.”
“So what does it mean that I could do that?” I whisper. “Does it mean I’m a bad person or…”
“You’re not a bad person, Penelope. Not at all.”
“Then what? I mean, I blew out humanity’s fire. That can’t be a good thing.” I swallow. “No wonder I didn’t make it into Athena Hall.”
“No. You didn’t make it into Athena Hall because it’s obviously not where you’re meant to be. And as for being a terrible person? I actually think it’s the opposite.” His blue eyes meet mine and a weird sense of calmness fills me despite all the thoughts ping-ponging around in my head.
“The opposite?” I whisper.
He shrugs. “It’s like I tried to tell you the last time we talked. You’re a very special person, Penelope.”
“No, I’m not. I’m just me.”
“And who are you?” He lifts a brow. “Besides the girl who blew out the eternal fire? And the girl who waltzed into the Underworld and came right back out? While bringing Hades’sBook of Deathwith her? I don’t know about you, but all that seems pretty special to me.”
His words send me reeling all over again. My heart pounds. My chest aches. And suddenly it’s really hard to take a breath. “But what does all that mean?”
“I think it’s up to you to find that out, don’t you?”
I give him my most winning smile. “I mean, it’d be cool if you’d just tell me.”
