I glanced at her sharply. She was staring straight ahead. I didn’t respond.

“You know I fought Ares, right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She wet her lip and then stopped walking, facing me. “Ares didn’t just kick my ass and he didn’t do it quietly. He . . . he broke me for a long time, in a way that I wasn’t sure I’d ever really recover from.” Each word she spoke was painfully blunt and obviously wasn’t easy for her to speak. “I don’t know what happened when you were with him. No one has said anything, but I know how . . . I know how evil works.”

Closing my eyes, I looked away and swallowed. There’d been no nightmares the last couple of days. I was hoping they’d stay away. Total textbook avoidance, but I really didn’t have the time for a mental breakdown.

“Anyway,” she said. “I’m just putting this out there. If you want to talk about any of that stuff with Hyperion, I’m here.”

“Okay.” I cleared my throat as I flipped my ponytail over my shoulder.

Alex smiled a little, a small one that kind of made me feel bad for being upset earlier about her and Apollo.

As we stared at each other, realizing that we had yet another thing in common, a very tenuous bond formed between us. It was frail, brand spanking new, but we’d both looked into the eyes of . . . evil and were standing here despite it.

“Sooooo,” she drew the word out as we started walking again. “You and Seth . . . ?”

Oh my, that was going from one awkward conversation to another.

“Looks like things have changed since the last time we talked.” Alex laughed then, and the earlier somberness washed away, as if she had practice moving on quickly from terrible, horrific things. “Which was what, just a day ago?”

“Yeah.” I laughed along with her. “Feels like weeks, right?”

“That’s how it always is when stuff is going on.” She hopped up on a low wall and walked on the edge. All right, I was back to not liking her, because I would’ve fallen right off that like a three-legged llama. “So, it seems like you guys have worked things out.”

Part of me didn’t want to talk about this, but my tongue started moving as always. “I think so. Yes,” I corrected myself. “We’ve worked things out.”

At least I thought we had. We hadn’t had a chance to really talk. We were together, but sitting down and actually having a conversation about the state of things was probably a good idea.

When she didn’t respond, I looked over at her. Her expression was blank as she walked the wall.