“Yes,” I said. “It’s fine. You should go.”
He looked disappointed. Shaking his head, he turned away from me, jogged toward the palace wall, and vanished around the corner. He didn’t look back, not once.
I tried not to read too much into it. He had beasts to fight. Besides, Ares was the least of my worries right now. Hector cawed, demanding my attention. Orpheus was out there somewhere, and he likely needed me.
With my heart in my throat, I took off through the trees. The flaming palace soon vanished behind me.
45
SELENE
Hector led me deep into the forest. I raced through the night, mud spraying onto my trousers. The trees blurred past me in dizzyingly shades of green and brown. We’d gone too far, and it worried me. I’d expected to find Orpheus somewhere near, hiding out with the mortals in some bushes. But I’d been chasing Hector for at least an hour. If Orpheus was all the way out here…
As the path narrowed, I suddenly recognized where we were. The squat House of Masks hunkered in the shadows, and Hector dashed straight for it. With a sigh, I followed after him. Why had he brought me back here? Surely this wasn’t where Orpheus was hiding.
Hector led me past the headless statues and into the depths of the house. Up ahead, a dim light filled the cavernous space where we’d found Hestia. Cawing, Hector suddenly darted down and settled on my shoulder. His talons gripped my arm.
I cut my eyes toward him, whispering. “Are you sure this is where you want me to go?”
He pecked my cheek.
“Ouch. All right.”
With a sigh, I crept forward. I had no idea what to expect. Hector would never knowingly lead me to danger, but my heart pounded my ribs all the same. Something didn’t feel right. There was a prickling on the back of my neck, as if the magic of this place was warning me.
When I reached the end of the corridor, I inched inside the vaulted room. A flickering torch hung along the wall that hadn’t been there before. Orange light spilled across the floor, illuminating a hunched, pale figure chained to the wall.
Blearily, Orpheus cracked his eyes and peered at me.
“Selene,” he choked out.
“Oh my god, Orpheus.” I rushed to his side and fell to my knees. My hands fluttered across the bloodied cuts and puckered red patches that covered his bare chest. Swollen purple bags hung below his eyes, and he trembled, even when I barely touched him.
“What happened to you?” My heart twisted as I looked at the chains that trapped him to the wall. Those hadn’t been there before. Ares had ripped the old ones out of the stone.
“The lycanthropes,” he said.
I stood, my hands fisting. “The lycanthropes did this to you? How?”
“They came for me during the day when they were in their human forms. And then they brought me here. Because I planned on telling you everything I know.” He hung his head, his chin his brushing his blood-soaked chest. “I am so sorry, Selene.”
A rushing filled my ears. “What do you mean, tell me everything you know?”
I hated to demand answers from him when he was like this, but he’d already started talking, his words scraping from his raw throat.
“It was your mother’s plan,” he said, looking up at me with pained eyes. “High Queen Theia, she’d been plotting this for months. Years, even. Medea discovered a way to manipulate humans and transform them into animals, with the magic Circe brought from here. From Aiaia. You knew that part, though. About the lycanthropes. What you didn’t know was that your mother encouraged it. She planned to use them against Zeus.”
Stunned, I lowered myself to the floor and sat on the hard stone. Nothing he said made sense. It was incomprehensible. My mother would never do something like this.
But then a little voice whispered in the back of my head.Wouldn’t she?
My mother had hated Zeus, despised him. When she spoke of him, I often caught her staring off in the distance with a hard look in her eye. And then she would suddenly stop, refusing to discuss him any longer. I always thought it was because she felt hopeless, but perhaps it had been far more than that.
Orpheus continued. “The power of transformation for the lycans, it comes from a full moon. No matter what Medea tried, she couldn’t find a way for the humans to turn into their beastly forms without it. So…your mother, she came up with a way to get you to the island, so that it would be a full moon when the beasts attacked.” He lifted his eyes to meet mine, and the meaning I saw in them speared me. “You know why. As long as you’re on this island, the full moon will rise.”
I sat back, my heart pounding. “You can’t mean all this.”
But it explained so much. It explainedeverything. I’d always wondered why my mother had insisted we split up when she’d taken me to see Olympia. Now I knew why. She’d always planned to sacrifice herself…forthis. And she hid it from me. All this plotting, all this scheming. All touseme without my permission.
