“Hurt?” His demeanor now completely changed, Gideon swore and demanded a report.
As we walked back to the Guard, and down to the underside, Silver ran through the events step by step, only glossing over my fingers inside her.
I would have summed up the events in three to five sentences, but her narration was certainly more dramatic.
I was surprised to see she also glossed over her discovery of my identity. Thankfully the many things she shared were enough for Gideon to not bother wondering how I’d portalled us out to Apollo, or where we’d been.
We parted ways at the Hall of Truce, as he had to report to his mother, and Silver knew she had to see Kleos after worrying her friends for the last day.
Back at the Regis manor, we’d barely crossed the threshold before Silver was tackled by a mountain of fur. I almost reacted before recognizing the scent of the creature.
I stared at the beast as Silver wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “Amavi!”
They were about the same size.
“Are you certain that’s the same bloody dog?” I wondered. “We were gone for three days.”
I knew hellhounds grew fast, but if she continued at this rate, she was going to be the size of a truck in a couple of weeks. Now it made a lot more sense that Apollo called her a guardian.
“She’s a menace,” Kleos said fondly. “Destroyed a dozen pairs of shoes so far.”
“Only your cheap ones, darling. She has excellent taste—wants to see you wear the best. I rather like her.” Lucian winked at his wife. “Congrats on blowing up half of the pavement in Paris, by the way.”
So they’d received some news.
I rolled my eyes. “A third at most. And at least I didn’t damage the Eiffel Tower.”
“Plus there are two hundred crystals we don’t have to worry about anymore,” Silver said.
Kleos groaned as we walked up to the red wing. “About that. Isla came to scan my memories yesterday. I genuinely didn’t know how many I’d made. Draining myself was part of my routine. I locked them out of the way and never thought of them beyond that.”
I cut to the chase, seeing that she was about to drone on as much as Silver would have. “What’s the damage?”
“Two thousand or so. That’s how many she saw me lock away since I started about five years ago. It was just once a week at first, then eventually one every other day, but by last year, I drained daily—sometimes twice daily.”
“Fuck,” I swore.
“If every crystal is modified to turn those who survive them into berserkers, Zeus can have two thousand supercharged minions doing his dirty work for him.”
“Tell us what happened, exactly. We got police reports, videos, testimonies while we were waiting for you guys to come back, but regular humans didn’t really understand things.”
I let Silver repeat the entire story.
“By Hades’s bloodiest pants, why didn’t you call us!” Lucian demanded.
“No phone—I dropped it on the road.”
Grunting, he summoned a bag of runes and handed one to Silver, then another to me. I looked at it curiously. The black flat rune stone was marked withlaguz. While familiar with the rune of water, intuition, subconscious, I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to help.
Silver gasped. “My own emergency button? Thanks, Daddy!”
He rolled his eyes. “You press it and think my name three times. I’ll be alerted.”
“Handy,” I admitted. “You’ll have to show me the spell.”
Silver concluded her story, once again simply leaving it at the fact that I took her to her brother.
Lucian was more astute than Gideon. “You knew where Apollo was.”
