The last thought slams me back into my abused body. I clamp my jaw shut and force my limbs into motion, struggling through the racing water toward the faint light overhead.
I surface to the roaring of the river. I’m near the middle, and I’m so damned cold I can barely tread water as the river whisks me toward the sea. My lungs feel like blocks in my chest, my dress tangling around my frantically kicking feet. The river is moving too quickly. I’m going to drown. There’s no way out of this, no path forward.
I catch a glimpse of figures downstream on the bank to the right of me, but the current spins me around and slams me into a rock before I can see more.
This time, when I go under, I stay under. The dress is too damned heavy, the water too cold, my body too tired. My thoughts become sluggish.Swim. Fight. Swim. Air.My limbs aren’t obeying, though. Instead of climbing back to the surface, I sink down into the darkness, the light diminishing above me in a way that has little to do with depth and everything to do with the spots blooming behind my eyes. I need air. If I could move past the horrific cold permeating every bit of me, I would have drowned by now.
Movement in the shadows, a figure cutting toward me withpowerful strokes. A dream. A nightmare. A hallucination of my oxygen-deprived brain. It’s the only explanation for seeing Hecatehere, drowning right beside me. Except she’s not drowning. She wraps her arms around me, and then we’re rising, rising, rising.
The first slap of air against my face feels like a blade. Even as what’s left of the logical part of me demands I hold perfectly still and concentrate on keeping my face above water, my hind brain is screaming I’ll lose access to the air if I don’t fight. I tense, hands finding the arm banded across my chest, fingers digging in.
“Don’t you fuckingdare,” Hecate gasps. “We’re probably going to fucking die even without you struggling, but probably isn’t a guarantee.”
My frozen lips can’t form words. I don’t know how she can. It’s everything I’m capable of in this moment to kick my feet in an attempt to keep us moving, to be a help instead of the stone dragging us both down.
It takes forever. It takes a single second.
I can barely feel my hands and feet as Hecate suddenly releases me and I sink again. My ass hits rocks; we’re in the shallows. All I have to do is sit up and I can keep breathing. I just need to…
Different arms, both familiar and not, gather me up and up and up. I see Atalanta’s face twisted into a fearsome scowl, and then everything goes dark.
***
Hecate
“We have to move.” My teeth won’t stop chattering as I grab myboots and the case that contains my rifle. The moment we realized what way the wind was blowing, we booked it off the roof in an attempt to intervene. Too slow and too fucking late. I reached the outer edge of the crowd just as Demeter was killed, watched in horror as Antigone shoved Circe off the fucking bridge before the crowd surged and she went down in a tangle of violence.
I’ve never run so fast in my life. Sheer luck put us close enough to the shore to intercept her, that she chose a yellow dress this morning, which we could see at a distance even when she was underwater.
That same dress is a beacon for the mob I can hear howling in the distance. “Atalanta.”
“Hecate, are you sure?” She looks at me, dark-brown eyes sober. “This could end here and now if we just leave her.”
It’s nearly impossible to think with the cold burrowing down to my bones. “It’s too late. Circe made sure of that. Demeter, Zeus, Minos, Hades. They’veallmade sure of that. Us, too.” I look down at Circe’s unconscious form. Her lips have gone blue. “I can’t let her die if there’s a chance to save her. Can you?”
“I guess not.” She awkwardly gathers up the skirt of Circe’s dress. It’s drenched and weighs an absolute ton, which can’t be good for her shoulder, but one harsh look tells me I had better not offer to carry the unconscious woman. “If we don’t get both of you out of your wet clothes, saving her from drowning won’t matter because hypothermia will take you out.”
“You say the sweetest things.” Can someone chip their teeth from shivering too hard? Distantly, I’m aware it’s agoodthing to be shivering violently. It’s when the shivering stops that you’re in serious trouble. Circe isn’t moving at all. “Hurry.”
“Yeah, I know.”
We scramble up the steep incline to the street. I can’t tell what direction the mob is moving—if it’s moving at all. It will, though. It’s only a matter of time. Once a crowd turns into a riot, it will swallow everyone in its path until it dies down. Which can last days if the anger burns hot enough.
After seeing Demeter gunned down, I’d say their rage is blistering.
I force myself to take lead as we stagger down the street. I have safe places scattered all across the upper city, but damned if I can think straight to figure out where we are and which is the closest one.
It’s Atalanta who picks up her pace and turns down the second street. By the time we move three blocks, my shivering isn’t nearly as violent as it was when I hauled myself out of the river. In fact, I don’t feel much cold at all. Uh-oh. That’s really bad. “Not much time.”
“I know,” she bites out. Atalanta checks the block number and takes another left.
I catch sight of a familiar door and nearly sob with relief. “How do you know about this place?”
“I know about a lot of your places.” She shifts Circe easily to her left arm and punches in my code without hesitation. And then we’re inside and dragging ourselves up a set of narrow stairs to an equally narrow hallway. Another code in the door at the end and we’re inside an apartment I bought under a false name a few years back.
I get to work yanking my soaking clothes off. Or trying. My shirt and bra are easy enough, but the button on my pants defies my fumbling attempts to conquer it. “Fuck.”
And then Atalanta is there, nudging my numb hands out of the way and wrestling me out of my pants. The awfulness of the momentmakes me laugh. “This isn’t how I wanted to get naked with you.”
