Page 32 of Deathless
"Explain," I said.
Rhadamanthys lifted his chin. Blood soaked through his pant leg where Eight had opened him up, and he knelt in it without looking down. He'd blocked my blade with his guns instead of shooting me in the chest when he had four clear shots. I wanted to dismiss that. I couldn't.
"Achilles and his Myrmidons are at every exit out of this valley." He said it to the yard, not to me. "They move at dawn. Every man, woman, and child under this roof will be dead before the sun clears the hills."
A man to my right spat on the ground. "And why should we believe a Pantheon dog?"
Rhadamanthys turned to him. He clenched his jaw against whatever the leg wound was doing to him.
"Because I walked through that blockade to get here." He held the man's stare until the man shifted back. "I walked straight through it. Achilles knows my face. He knows my name. He let me walk past his men because he knew I would never walk back out."
"Let him talk."
Diego's voice cut across the yard, and the crowd split for him. The bruise along his jaw had darkened since the basement, and my ribs tightened at the sight of it. He'd bled for me twice today. Three times if I counted the fight he was about to walk into tomorrow, which I did, because my body had already started tallying the cost.
He came through the gap with his jaw set and his lip still split from Danior.
"Let him talk," he said again. "And then we decide."
He pressed his arm against mine. The heat came through my jacket sleeve, and my whole side leaned into it before I could stop myself. I'd had his hands on me hours ago. I'd had his mouth on my throat and his nails on my skin, and the sound of him calling me perfect still vibrated through me like a blade struck against steel, the hum that stayed after the impact faded. The soldier in me needed the contact filed away and locked down. The rest of me wanted to turn into him and put my face in his neck and stay there.
I kept my weight forward because that was all I knew how to do.
The wind shifted off the hills, carrying the diesel stink of idling SUVs from the roadblock below. Rhadamanthys looked at Diego like he'd been waiting for exactly this.
"I burned my position, my authority, and every protection my title afforded me to deliver a warning I could have kept to myself." He kept his voice level. "If that is not enough for you, kill me and find out at dawn whether I lied."
The man who had spat studied the ground. The rest of the yard studied Rhadamanthys.
Then he played the card I had not known he held.
"Luka Aleksandar is alive," he said. "Rafael Oliviera is alive. There is a resistance building against Zeus, and I am part of it."
The yard split open. Romani and Spanish crashed together, voices climbing over each other, and the noise hit my skull like a pressure change. My vision tunneled. The courtyard, the crowd, all of it shrank to the size of a single name, and the blood in my ears roared louder than the shouting.
Luka was alive.
Luka Aleksandar, who'd challenged Prometheus and lived. He'd stood up to one of Zeus's dogs and disappeared, and I'd written him off because that's whatdisappearedmeant in our world. I'd written him off the way I'd written off everyone, the way I'd tried to write off Diego and Eight, because grief was easier when you skipped straight to the end.
My knees tried to buckle. Diego caught my elbow and leaned his weight into my side. He held me up in front of forty people and made it look like he was just standing close.
A door banged open behind me.
Lorenzo came off the porch and across the yard. The crowd split for him because he moved like a man who would go through anything that did not step aside. His shirt hung half-unbuttoned, his feet bare, and none of that slowed him down.
He dropped to his knees in the dirt in front of Rhadamanthys and grabbed the front of his jacket with both fists.
"Say that again." His voice broke on the second word. "Say his name again."
"Rafael is alive, piccolo." Rhadamanthys said it quietly, just for him. "He's alive, and he's fighting."
Lorenzo tightened his grip on the jacket. He shook once, hard. Then he pressed his forehead against Rhadamanthys's chest and stayed there. On his knees in the dirt in front of forty strangers, he made no sound.
I knew that sound. The one he was swallowing. I'd made it in the basement with my face pressed into Diego's hip, and I'd made it at the olive tree with my daughter's fists against mychest. The sound a man makes when the thing he'd already buried comes back breathing.
Diego pressed his thumb against the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse point, and I let him because nobody looked at us. Everyone looked at Lorenzo.
An older man spoke from the edge of the crowd, one of the clan leaders I'd marked at the funeral. He said something in Romani, and the yard shifted around it.
