The Return (Titan 1)

He arched a blond brow. “I’m not surprised that she reminds you of Alexandria.”

For a moment, I couldn’t move or say anything. My lips pulled back into a sneer as I stumbled a step back. I waited for him to say something else, anything else. Apprehension ran its bony fingers over my neck.

“What is she?” I rasped, tensing up. The need to destroy something rippled over me like a shockwave.

Apollo dipped his chin and the seconds ticked away before he spoke. “She is a demigod.”

Chapter 4

THAT HAD to be the last thing I was expecting Apollo to say.

“A demigod?” I repeated like I’d just learned to speak a few seconds ago. “A real, live demigod?”

“Opposed to a fake, dead one?” He chuckled, proud of himself, and then sighed when my eyes narrowed on him. “You used to have a sense of humor, Seth.”

“I used to have a lot of things,” I retorted. His features sharpened and his mouth opened like he wished to expand on that, but that wasn’t what was important here. “There hasn’t been a true demigod in thousands of years—not since mortals worshipped the gods.”

“That’s true. We agreed not to create anymore when we retreated to Olympus, but what is also true is that she’s not the only one.”

I stared at him, and then I barked out a short laugh. “There are demigods roaming the Earth? You know, this might have been good to know a year or so ago, when we all were getting our asses kicked.” Demigods were like the Apollyon, their powers second only to the gods’. They were major ass-kickers. And they were also like Pegasus. Supposedly it existed, but since it did so in Olympus, I’d never seen it. “Wait. This doesn’t make sense. I felt nothing around that girl. She sure as hell didn’t act like a demigod, and that doesn’t explain why she reminds me of…her.”

“Is it so hard to say her name?” Apollo asked. “I think a few minutes ago was the first time you’ve said her name since after you two fought Ares.”

My jaw ached from how hard I was grinding my molars.

“Whatever,” Apollo said, his attention returning to the godsforsaken ceiling fan chain. “Don’t talk about it. Be the best issues-boy you can be.”

I took a deep breath. It didn’t help. “I don’t have issues.”

He tipped his head back and roared with laughter. Paintings of the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains rattled. “You have more baggage than United Airlines. Cross that out. You have more issues than Medusa, and that woman makes the inside of a cat lady’s thoughts seem like a calming place.”

“I hate you.”

“You wound me straight to the heart, bud.”

My patience was just about the same as that of Cerberus after someone tried to take a squeaky toy away from him. “What about the girl, Apollo?”

He dropped down into the leather chair, his large form nearly swallowing it. “It’s a long story.”

“Go figure.”

That comment went largely ignored. “It all started with your birth, so there’s something else you can add to your mountain of suck.”

I wondered if there was an anti-god repellent and where I could find it.

“We knew the moment you were born that there would be the possibility of a God Killer, since Alexandria was on schedule to make an appearance a few years later. We didn’t know who among us was responsible for your birth, but we knew they’d want to use you for their own gain.”

“This walk down history lane is boring me.” I crossed my arms.

Unaffected, he eased himself closer to the bed, kicked his booted feet up on it, and stretched out leather-clad legs. “The risk of you two joining forced us to come up with a contingency plan in case the proverbial poo hit the fan.”

My brows knitted. There was something wrong with hearing Apollo use the word “poo” in a sentence.

“The Twelve agreed we had to do something,” he continued. The Twelve were the core of the Olympians, the most powerful. There were more gods, so many that no one could keep track of them, since they populated like rabbits, but the Twelve called the shots. “So we decided to do something none of us had done in thousands of years. We created twelve demigods.”

Twelve? Holy roasted Hades’s balls. “So, let me guess. You and Zeus, Hephaestus, Dionysus, Poseidon, Hermes, and Ares,” I spat that bastard’s name out, and then moved on, “got human women knocked up, and then Hera, Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, and Demeter got pregnant?”

“That’s usually how making babies works,” he replied dryly. “Once our lovely ladies conceived, they transferred their offspring into mortal women. And before the twelve demigods were born, their abilities were bound so that they, until needed, would be nothing more than mortal. We couldn’t have demigods running amuck in the mortal world.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Demigods are more powerful than pures. You know that, Seth. The aether we pass onto them has not been diluted. They can control all the elements, including akasha. We could not allow them free reign.”

“Of course,” I muttered.

“Two of them were killed off immediately. Zeus got jealous and took out Hera’s child, and in retaliation, she snuffed out his. You know how those two can be.”

Gods.

“That left ten. Of course, as we know, Ares had a stick up his ass and was planning to turn the mortal world into his personal playground of carnage. He knew of our plan. He went right along with it. He knocked off four more during his little reign of terror, leaving six remaining. Of course, his own kid wasn’t one of the ones he killed.”

A muscle began to thrum along my jaw. During my time with Ares, he’d mentioned none of this. Not that I was surprised. There was a lot he hadn’t told me, and even more I simply hadn’t questioned, because I hadn’t cared. Not at first, at least. Tension crept into my shoulders. “If you had at least six demigods, why weren’t they used to help defeat Ares?”

He wiggled his booted feet. “Everything we do has a cosmic checks and balances system. The demigods’ powers can only be unbound two ways. At least six of them have to be in the same location at one time, and then it’s like a universal remote. All of their abilities are released naturally, like a system hitting critical mass. The second way is for us to release their powers, but that’s… that is messy, and we can only unbind the demigod who belongs to us. If we make that decision, it weakens us considerably and it would take time for us to recover. Another cosmic check and balance.”