“Back in time?” I asked. “Like … really back in time, turning back the clock?”
She laughed lightly. “Figuratively. I want to show you something, something that will help to explain things better than I could without the visual aid. Will you come with me?”
I hesitated. It’s not like I wasn’t squarely in the middle of her safehouse right now. It wasn’t as though she didn’t already have the ability to persuade me, to push me along. Still, she could have tried to force the issue but she was going for the delicate approach. It was the opposite of manipulation and yet carried the fingerprints of it still. “Sure,” I said, overcoming that hesitancy. “Where are we going?”
“To show you where you came from,” she said, stepping over to the door that Reed had just gone through a moment before, “to show you where your family originated.” She smiled. “And to hopefully answer for you, finally, just one of the reasons you’re so damned important to everybody on the planet.”
Chapter 27
The luxury sedan cruised the rain-slicked streets of London. The weather had turned in the last day while I was unconscious, and the chill had been palpable as we had gotten in the car. Hera sat in the back with me, her platinum hair short-cropped around the top of her head as she leaned it back against the leather seat rest. Breandan was quietly nervous up front, and part of me thought about asking him why he was here with me. I didn’t bother, though, because a second after I thought of the question, the answer came to me—he was still worried some Century sweep team was going to jump out of the shadows and kill him the moment he wasn’t around me. Somehow, I’d become a good luck charm to a man who could control luck. Go figure.
Reed was up front with him, driving, and we rode along in silence until we crossed Tower Bridge heading north. I saw the Tower of London across the water. I had meant to check it out but that obviously hadn’t panned out. As my eyes followed it while we passed, they came back to Reed in surprise. “Hey, aren’t you used to driving on the other side of the road?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “So?”
“So,” I said, “isn’t it kind of confusing, trying to remember you’re not going the right way? I mean, I’ve only been in the passenger seat so far for a couple of drives and it messed with my head.”
He shrugged. “It’s no big deal. Just takes some thought.”
I raised an eyebrow at him and thought about giving him a glare as he stared back at me in the rearview mirror. “What are you trying to say?”
He stared back while we sat at the traffic light, waiting for it to go green. “That it takes some thought.” I saw his grin flash in the mirror. “Don’t go looking for an insult where there isn’t one.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “You’re just saying that so I won’t be expecting one later and—BAM!”
He looked back to the road. “You know me too well.”
“Oh, yes,” Hera said, her eyes closed and her head back. “I haven’t seen a brother and sister this sweet on each other since Artemis and Apollo.”
I frowned. “Janus’s parents? Wait, are you saying they were like … Cersei and Jaime Lannister? Cuz, if so … eww.”
She raised a drooped eyelid enough to stare back at me with a commanding green eye. “That’s exactly what I was saying. It sounds more incestuous than it was in most cases, though, because you have to keep in mind that myth isn’t fact. What looks like family was more like an organization. What appeared like a father figure was more like a … Director, I suppose.” She gave me an elusive smile. “His children were actually his lieutenants. Brothers—well, Hades and Poseidon actually were his brothers. But none of the kids were related.”
That shut us up for a while. An uncomfortable silence persisted even as we slid through the downtown area, the tall buildings towering above us as I stared out the window and tried to crane my neck to look straight up. The rain dotted the glass like little diamonds, refracting as the sunlight peered out from behind a cloud and hit them. Prisms of rainbow light were as small as little beads within the drops, and I watched them refract as we drove on.
It took us what felt like an hour to arrive at our destination. My internal map was totally screwed up, and we passed a hundred parks along the way. It seemed like every few blocks there was a square that was empty save for greenery, with a fence wrapped around it so it could be closed at night, I presumed. “Looks like Russell Square,” I murmured as we passed another. I wasn’t really thinking about it as I spoke; all these squares looked alike to me, surrounded as they were by fairly similar buildings to my untrained (and uninterested) eye.