She was, oh she was.“You should not have come.”
Stone hovered behind them, watching.“Get to work!”
“I can’t with you watching so closely,” Apollo snapped.“Go swing a hammer elsewhere.I never did like voyeurs.”
Stone growled but backed off a few steps.
Apollo flicked his hand at him.“Go get the lead.It has to prepared.It’s an important step, and you should practice it.”
“How?”
“Soak five grams of lead in a gallon of water for a quarter of an hour.And five prayers to Vulcan as the lead soaks.Go.”Another hand wave.
And Stone scurried off to gather materials.
“Five prayers to Vulcan?”Sybil whispered.
“I could have told him to stand on his head, too.Should I?”
“No!”
He looked at the table, but the smile that softened his face was for her.
“What are you doing here?”she asked.“I told you I would take care of this.Do you not trust me?”
“Of course I do.That doesn’t mean you have to do this alone.Listen, Sybil.I might never have another moment to say this.I love you.And if I don’t ever leave this forge, I’ll die happy knowing you’re safe.”
His heat flashed through her, gentle and loving and… familiar.As if he’d been loving her all this time, but she’d not been able to recognize it.
A flash near her other hand, where it rested against the device.
Stone cursed across the room.
And Apollo breathed her name, squeezed her hand.
But she could not look away from the prototype.
It had turned to gold.
She yanked her hand away from it, and as soon as her skin lost contact with the device, it flashed back into the highly polished steel.Had she just turned steel into gold?
She put her hands on the device again, thought of the kind of gold that was Apollo—brilliant from the inside out, the kind of valuable brightness that comes only after a lifetime in the dark.
There—
Steel giving way to gold.
Her heart thumped loud enough to bring the ceiling down around them.
“Sybil…” Apollo’s hand crept to her wrist, manacled it.“How did you…?”
“You did it.”Stone stared at them from across the room.“Gold.”The one word like an obsession.Slowly he came toward her, and she backed into the strength of Apollo’s side.
“Bloody hell, you’ve done it,” Stone breathed.
She put a hand on the device again, intending to turn it back, to somehow convince him he’d seen wrong because what she’d done was not what he’d asked her to do.The device hadn’t turned anything to gold.
She had.
