𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐒, ᴘᴇʀᴄʏ ᴊᴀᴄᴋꜱᴏɴ

014 ── on my hands.

        Theia cracked the rigour from beneath her jaw. Languidly, her eyes crossed the room, intentive.

        The guards had haltingly strayed from the room, leaving only three within their orbit, idling across the perimeter. Her lighter was gone; latent in Kinzie's pocket, no doubt. Hylla towered before her, hands clasped at her front, contemplating her and Hazel as they lingered in her eyeline.

        The redhead's teeth sunk to her lip, running and overturning opportunity like a weave of thread. They had no weapons graved to their hands; that induced complication. Hylla was armed with just a dagger, gleaming on her hip. Theia's eyes clouded — if she could get her arms around her neck, press her skull's dead weight to her spine, she could have her dead quicker than the woman could have that blade seared between her ribs.

        "I wouldn't try." Hylla spoke, eyeing the two before her; one eying the door, trembling and mute, and the other unfaltering to her eye, her only tell the sudden luminescence in her iris. It was as if her blood thirst was kindling in their depths. "While we'd respect the attempt, we would have to kill you."

        Theia's teeth gritted. Amicable. Amicable lived like roadkill somewhere near her spleen. She could be amicable, and she would have to be. She would.

        "Thanks for the warning." Hazel grumbled.

        Her face ached with a blinding sting that entailed a numbness across her flesh. The redhead's neck pulsed as the steady flow of cardinal slowed, crusting on her lips like damnation. Her hands cupped the arc of her nose; she breathed slowly, before jolting abruptly to the side with a hiss melded to the back of her teeth, setting the bone.

        Hylla shrugged. "The least I can do. I believe you come in peace. I believe Reyna sent you."

        "But you won't help?"

        The queen studied the necklace she'd taken from Percy. Her fingers recollected over the beads.

"It's complicated," she said. "Amazons have always had a rocky relationship with other demigods—especially male demigods. We fought for King Priam in the Trojan War, but Achilles killed our queen, Penthesilea. Years before that, Hercules stole Queen Hippolyta's belt—this belt I'm wearing. It took us centuries to recover it. Long before that, at the very beginning of the Amazon nation, a hero named Bellerophon killed our first queen, Otrera."

        "You mean the lady—"

        "—who just left, yes. Otrera, our first queen, daughter of Ares." Hylla's eyes cast to Theia briefly, as if deriving them both from the same blood. Theia said nothing at all, lifting her chin. The weight of her headache pressing on her cranium.

"Wait, Ares — don't you mean Mars?"

        Hylla made a sour face. "No, definitely Ares. Otrera lived long before Rome, in a time when all demigods were Greek. Unfortunately, some of our warriors still prefer the old ways. Children of Ares...they are always the worst."

        "Greek demigods?" Theia contemplated aloud. The word was sour on her tongue, gritty and dusted with the remnants empire before her own. Her eyes flashed with memory; how Percy Jackson had been labelled a graecus. How he had been heralded by Juno Moneta. A boy, a stupid boy, created by the sea that the Roman's avoided and bearing no mark of belonging.

        A boy locked in a cell, now, that she would have to break. He had stung her and warmed her, an aching strike their melding. What was she to do now, that his life was in her hands, waiting to be put out?