Sea Green Eyes

Chapter 81

He recognized her dress – a flowery green-andred wraparound, like the skirt of a Christmas tree. He recognized the colourful plastic bangles on her wrists that had dug into his back when she hugged him goodbye at the Wolf House. He recognized her hair, an overteased corona of dyed blonde curls and her scent of lemons and aerosol. Her eyes were blue like Jason's, but they gleamed with fractured light, like she'd just come out of a bunker after a nuclear war – hungrily searching for familiar details in a changed world. "Dearest." She held out her arms. Jason's vision tunnelled. The ghosts and ghouls no longer mattered. His Mist disguise burned off. His posture straightened. His joints stopped aching. His walking stick turned back into an Imperial gold gladius.

"Mom?" he managed. 

"Yes, dearest." Her image flickered. "Come, embrace me." 

"You're – you're not real." 

"Of course she is real." Michael Varus's voice sounded far away. "Did you think Gaia would let such an important spirit languish in the Underworld? She is your mother, Beryl Grace, star of television, sweetheart to the king of Olympus, who rejected her not once but twice, in both his Greek and Roman aspects. She deserves justice as much as any of us." 

Jason's heart felt wobbly. The suitors crowded around him, watching. I'm their entertainment, Jason realized. The ghosts probably found this even more amusing than two beggars fighting to the death.

Piper's voice cut through the buzzing in his head. "Jason, look at me." She stood twenty feet away, holding her ceramic amphora. Her smile was gone. Her gaze was fierce and commanding – as impossible to ignore as the blue harpy feather in her hair. "That isn't your mother. Her voice is working some kind of magic on you – like charmspeak, but more dangerous. Can't you sense it?"

"She's right." Annabeth climbed onto the nearest table. She kicked aside a platter, startling a dozen suitors. "Jason, that's only a remnant of your mother, like an arai, maybe, or –"

And he watched Cressida's blue eyes burn away to reveal the startling indigo shade they usually were as she pinned him with her eyes. "She is not real," her voice thundered. "We are. She abandoned you and she betrayed Thalia. See the truth, Jason."

"A remnant!" His mother's ghost sobbed. "Yes, look what I have been reduced to. It's Jupiter's fault. He abandoned us. He wouldn't help me! I didn't want to leave you in Sonoma, my dear, but Juno and Jupiter gave me no choice. They wouldn't allow us to stay together. Why fight for them now? Join these suitors. Lead them. We can be a family again!"

Jason felt hundreds of eyes on him, just like the rest of his life, there had always been eyes on him.

"You left me," he told his mother. "That wasn't Jupiter or Juno. That was you."

"Dearest, I told you I would come back. Those were my last words to you. Don't you remember?"

Jason shivered. In the ruins of the Wolf House, his mother had hugged him one last time. She had smiled, but her eyes were full of tears. It's all right, she had promised. But even as a little kid Jason had known it wasn't all right. Wait here. I will be back for you, dearest. I will see you soon.

She hadn't come back.

Instead, Jason had wandered the ruins, crying and alone, calling for his mother and for Thalia – until the wolves came for him. His mother's unkept promise was at the core of who he was. He'd built his whole life around the irritation of her words, like the grain of sand at the centre of a pearl.

People lie. Promises are broken.

That was why, as much as it chafed him, Jason followed rules. He kept his promises. He never wanted to abandon anyone the way he'd been abandoned and lied to. He realised how similar he and Cressida were and how she'd never break a promise and took people breaking promises to her and lying to her so harshly. They shared the fatal flaw of being abandoned and despite their loving partners, that fear would always be there.