And if Prometheus could take that, then she could take this.

Sophie pulled her shoulders back, finding courage from the myth her father used to tell her at bedtime. She’d take her current weirdness over Prometheus’s fate any day, along with a bowl of soup, a hotel room that didn’t have cockroaches, and a plan. Assuming she didn’t need to check herself into a psychiatric unit, she had to figure out how to contact Athena, and she was pretty sure the internet didn’t have a workable answer to: How do you call a Greek god.

CHAPTER 3

More sorcery. This time, it was called a shower.

Piers stood under the hot stream of water, groaning. Sophronia probably thought he was dying in here, but he couldn’t help himself. It was incredible. The whole room was. Human waste flushed away at the press of a button. Water turned on and off with a flick of the wrist. Bright lights that required neither oil nor wick. Soap that smelled just like something you could eat. He wanted to lick it off his arm and see what it tasted like. He didn’t, but he was tempted. The bubbles were hard to resist.

The only thing intruding on Piers’s bathroom bliss was wishing he could tell his family about the wonders of this place. His sisters, especially, would love it. Egeria would explore every nook and cranny, discovering how things worked. Jocasta would quietly observe until she produced a pearl of insight that would transform everyone’s vision of things. And Kaia. His heart pinched. Her boundless excitement would be contagious.

Piers squeezed his eyes shut. Would he ever see his family again? Not only his three sisters, but Griffin and Carver, too? His parents? He’d always lived in the middle of a constant throng of people, activity, and projects, and suddenly finding himself lost and alone—well, not quite alone—made it hard to breathe sometimes. The truth was, he didn’t know how to get back to them—if he even could get back to them. And it was hard to make a plan when he didn’t know where he was or why he’d ended up here.

The one thing he did know was that humans didn’t travel between the gods’ worlds. Gods could. Magical creatures could. But not regular people. Which meant something had gone colossally wrong.