I could still see it, that vague impression of a face, screaming silently from underneath the skin of Jonathan’s side. The eyeballs pushing against their fleshly covering and constantly working, as if trying to see out; the nose grotesquely distending the flesh, not that Jonathan had seemed to care; the wide-open mouth. I hadn’t been able to tell what she was saying, if anything.

I hadn’t wanted to know.

She hadn’t deserved that fate; nobody did. But the Circle wouldn’t have been much kinder. She’d been a Pythian acolyte who was seduced by the gods to betray her vows, although they hadn’t had to work too hard in her case. She’d been mad at the world for years and looking for a way to get even.

She’d found one.

But helping Ares to return hadn’t panned out. And the party had ended with Jonathan slicing and dicing her soul and grafting a piece of it onto his own, to give him the ability to access the Pythian power. She and Jonathan were both dead now, so they wouldn’t be joyriding around the timeline anymore.

It should have been a relief, but I was finding that a hard emotion to summon at the moment.

“I take it Jonathan learned to graft souls from you?” I said, also calmly. I was pretty sure that I was numb at this point. “I heard the gods were into that.”

“Some, not me.”

“No, you just eat them whole,” I said, before I thought. But I didn’t flinch at the warning flash in those baby blues. Because it was true, and because I was dying anyway.

I found it weirdly liberating.

“Fearless,” Zeus mused, after a moment. “But then, I don’t know what else I expected.” He took a puff and let it out, watching it drift slowly skyward. “In any case, they were right to kill him—filthy beasts, necromancers, playing with the dead—”

“As opposed to feasting off their souls? Tell me, did Metis scream when you ate her alive?”

Again, the words were out before I could stop them, making me wonder what was wrong with me. Was I trying to provoke him? Had I actually gone crazy?

But Zeus learned fast, and there was no reaction this time.

“No.” Blue eyes met mine coolly through a haze of smoke. “I caught her by surprise.”

I didn’t have anything cute to say to that. The rush of adrenaline fueling my bravado gave out abruptly in the face of true evil. There was no emotion on his face, no happiness at the thought of her death, but no remorse, either. Just cold calculation.

He smiled at me. “In any case, we followed you into your shift, where I could talk to you—”