Alex glanced at me and then agreed. “He left here without harming anyone.”
“He did hit me,” Luke added dryly. “But he didn’t kill me and he could’ve easily done so.”
“I know what he did,” Apollo growled, and I felt heat creep into my face. Did he really know what Seth had done before he’d left? Because, ew. “Seth cannot be trusted. Not now.”
Closing my eyes, I tried counting to ten. I only made it to three. “He has given you no reason not to trust him. He has done—”
“You do not know him as well as you think you do,” Apollo responded, his back to me. “You do not know him at all.”
Tears of anger and frustration filled my eyes. “I know him better than any of you.”
Apollo’s back stiffened. “You need to find the other demigods now. The Titans need to be entombed—” He held up a hand. “—and not killed. We will deal with the God Killer.”
Aiden and Alex exchanged looks.
Ice drenched my veins. “What do you mean, deal with him?”
“Once you locate the other demigods, bring them to the Covenant,” Apollo ordered.
I stepped forward. Pieces of tile fell into the gaping crevice.
“Careful,” Luke murmured as he stopped a few feet behind me. “I so don’t want to go down there after you.”
Neither did I. “What do you mean by ‘deal with him’?”
“What do you think, luv?” Hades asked as he mounted his horse with the kind of fluid grace I imagined only gods had. “We may not be able to kill him. Yet. But we can neutralize him.”
The iciness spread, seizing my stomach. “How?”
Hades didn’t answer, but he gave me a faint, mysterious smile, one that caused my stomach to dip unpleasantly. Guiding his horse around, he nodded toward Alex and Aiden. “I’ll be seeing you two soon.”
Then with a flick of his wrist, his horse turned again, toward the tear in the floor. His men followed, and all three disappeared into the smoke whirling from the floor.
Any other time I would’ve been shocked and awed by all of that, but not today.
“How?” I demanded once more.
“It doesn’t matter,” Apollo responded. “What you need to be focusing on is locating the other demigods—”
“I know what I need to be doing,” I cut in.
“And what is that? Running off after him?” Anger filled every word Apollo spoke. “As if what I’ve ordered you to do is not more important?”
I took a deep, even breath. “Alex and Aiden have agreed to—”
“I know what they’ve agreed to do. It does not matter.” Apollo turned his head to the side, but didn’t look in my direction. “You will locate the other two demigods and then wait for me at the Covenant in South Dakota.”
I almost laughed. “Oh, I don’t think so.”
“You’d disobey me?” Apollo queried in a voice too soft for comfort.
Across from me, Alex and Aiden looked like they wanted a bucket of popcorn, but both remained quiet as I stared at my father’s back. “I will do what I feel is right, and finding Seth is what I need to do. I love Seth. I love him when no one else believes in him and I will still love him when everyone realizes who and what he truly is. That will never change. And there is nothing you can say that will change my mind, so you might as well not even attempt it and just tell me how you plan to neutralize Seth.”
“You won’t love him when he drains you dry.”
I sucked in an unsteady breath. “He would never do that.”
“He wouldn’t? Because I’m pretty sure he has already fed from you.”
My gaze shot to Alex and Aiden. Had they told him? No. They hadn’t seen Apollo since I had. Or at least I didn’t think so.
“You don’t understand, Josie. You approach everything with Seth as if it is a black or white issue, as if there is not gray. You don’t know him like I do—like all of us do. Whether you want to admit it or not, we do not know what Seth is capable of. We never have and you did not know him when he worked alongside Ares.”
While a part of me recognized that Apollo had a point, he was still wrong. I didn’t know Seth then, but I knew that was a different Seth. People could and did change. “Since you seem to be watching from afar like a total stalker, then you know he stopped and he told me what happened.”
Apollo tipped his head back. A moment passed and then he said, “You sound like a foolish child in the middle of a tantrum.”
“Oh geez,” Luke murmured from behind me, and Alex’s eyes widened.
For a moment I was consumed with the skid mark his words had left behind. Just for a few seconds, and then I shed that hurt like I’d done so many times in the past whenever I thought about my father, where he was and why he hadn’t been a part of my life.