Sybil cleared her throat and took a deep breath, but even as she spoke, her voice broke. “I told myself I wouldn’t cry over this anymore.”

“Sybil,” Persephone reached for her hand.

“Apollo fired me and took my gift of prophecy away,” she explained. She laughed humorlessly, wiping her eyes as more tears slide down her cheeks. “Turns out you can’t continue to reject a god without consequences.”

Persephone couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She recalled Sybil’s comments about her relationship with Apollo. Everyone, even her close friends Xeres and Aro, had assumed they were lovers, but Sybil had told her and Lexa that she wasn’t interested in a relationship with the God of the Music.

“He wanted more from me than friendship and I refused. I’d heard about his previous relationships, all of them ended in disaster. Daphne, Cassandra, Hyakinthos…”

“Let me get this straight,” Persephone said. “This….god-child got a little pissy because you wouldn’t date him and took your power away?”

“Shh!” Sybil looked around, clearly afraid Apollo would appear and smite them. “You can’t say things like that, Persephone!”

She shrugged. “Let him try to take revenge.”

“You are fearless because you have Hades,” she said. “But you forget, gods have a habit of punishing those you care for most.”

Sybil’s words made her frown and she suddenly felt less confident.

“So you don’t have a job anymore?” Lexa asked.

Because of her gifts, Sybil had been enrolled the College of the Divine. There, she’d learned to hone her power and had been chosen by Apollo specifically to become his public relations manager. Without her gift, the job Sybil had spent the last four years training for was not attainable. Even if she had retained her powers, Persephone wasn’t sure anyone would hire a disgraced oracle, especially one Apollo had fired. Apollo was the golden god. He’d been named Delphi Divine’s God of the Year seven years in a row, only losing the title once after Zeus struck the magazine’s building with lightning in protest.

“He can’t do that!” Persephone exploded. She didn’t care how beloved the God of Music was, he didn’t deserve that respect if he punished people just because they didn’t want to date him.

“He can do anything,” Sybil said. “He’s a god.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” she argued.

“Right, wrong, fair, unfair—it’s not really the world we live in, Persephone. The gods punish.”

Those words made Persephone shudder, and the worst part was, she knew it was true. The gods used mortals as their playthings and cast them aside when they got angry or bored. Life was nothing to them because they had eternity.