Ricki nodded knowingly. “And you’re afraid that if you destroy the scepter, you remove that impediment to Hermes’s power grab.”

  “Exactly. Right now, she has the upper hand. She’s made a deal with Cronus, and together they’re preparing to battle the remnants of the Olympic order, namely Hermes, and it won’t even be close. Hermes knows this—he’s been trying to bargain with her—but she doesn’t need him, not in the grand scheme of things, and I think he knows that too. If I destroy the scepter, he’ll run unopposed, so to speak. He’ll assert his authority there and here to prevent another ‘Persephone’ from happening.”

  I remembered how the box had spontaneously jumped from my upstairs lab several weeks ago back to the shadow realm, despite being packed in salt and stored in a casting circle. I wasn’t confident enough in the obfuscation sigil to believe it would keep the trickster god at bay for much longer.

  “Is there a way to destroy the tablet without hurting Alec?” Mae asked, seeming to read my face.

  “That’s the hope. Then I would be able to take care of Persephone’s scepter.” Shadow Budge had claimed that Hermes’s tablet supported Persephone, but now that I had a way to destroy her scepter, I wouldn’t have to take his word for anything. “With both objects gone, the support for the minor gods and beings will collapse. Everything should go back to the way it was.”

  I hated to put Claudius on the spot, but this was his department. “Anything yet?”

  He wiped his mouth and cleared his throat. “Yes, in fact.”

  From a jacket pocket, he pulled out the folded images of the box. When he spread them across the table, I was shocked to find numbers, writing, and sketches in the margins—lots of them, like someone’s graduate thesis on advanced mathematics. He peered up at me as though the arcane equations spoke for themselves and he was awaiting my assessment.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “When did you do all this?”

  “Yesterday. That was why I was so late getting to the lake. After finishing up with some other business, I really sat down with these.”

  “Wow, way to go. And what did you find?”

  “Well, ah…” He glanced from me to the images and back. “Maybe we should discuss this privately?”

  I looked around the table. Mae and Bree-yark were angling their head at the images in puzzlement, but my wife was staring at me.

  “Whatever you need to share,” I told Claudius, “you can share with the team.”

  “Well, okay.” He gathered the images up again, leafing through them as though to refresh his memory. “You asked if there was a way to open the box safely. I’ve studied these from every angle possible and, well, I believe I’ve discovered a way to open it without harming Alec.”

  “Really?” I said excitedly.

  “Yes, though it will require extremely precise magic.”

  “Magic within our means?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, absolutely.”

  I talked my jubilant heart back down. His expression was anything but triumphant. “So what’s the catch?” I asked carefully.

  “It would destroy the one casting the opening magic.”

  When Ricki’s hand tensed in mine, I massaged her knuckles with my thumb.

  “Alternately,” he continued, “we could spare the opener, but that wouldn’t bode well for Alec. No, not well at all.”

  “There’s no way to spare both?” I asked.

  “I’ve looked and looked, I assure you. I ate an entire bag of my ginseng candies in the process.” He grimaced as though only now remembering and scooted aside his half-eaten plate of pancakes, which Bree-yark quickly appropriated. “But no, Everson, it’s in the nature of the bonding. It was designed to be released by Hermes’s will and his alone. When another’s hand or tongue attempts it, the destruction visited on them is absolute. Indeed, the box has claimed many lives over the centuries.”

  Both Hermes and Arianna had told me as much.

  “The method I’ve discovered channels that destruction either outward or inward,” he continued. “Through the opener or through the bearer. But it can’t be neither.” He leafed through the images as if in a last ditch effort to find a loophole that had escaped him, but he shook his head. “It just can’t.”

  I fell silent, my mind chewing on the discouraging news.

  “Do you mind if I talk to my husband alone for a moment?” Ricki asked.

  With murmurs of “not at all,” “of course not,” and “you go right ahead, baby” rising from the table, Ricki and I excused ourselves and went to the bedroom.

  She closed the door and sat on the side of our queen. I lowered myself next to her and hugged her to my side. Her head nestled wearily against my neck. I closed my eyes until I felt her and our daughter’s energies moving through mine.

  At last she said, “I would never ask or expect you to harm Alec, shadow or not. You’ll find another way.”

  I kissed the crown of her head. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  She straightened, her dark eyes searching mine with a look somewhere between concern and resolve.

  “When I was in Persephone’s chambers,” I said, “Budge revealed that they’d acquired the remains of my shadow. They were in an urn, and I watched Persephone stir a bonding potion into them, a precursor anyway. He said that unless I destroyed the Tablet of Hermes, they would activate the potion.”

  “How long do you have?”

  “Until tomorrow night, at midnight.”

  “Do you think he’s bluffing? Do you know for a fact they were your ashes?”

  She was still Detective Vega. Under different circumstances I might have smiled. “I don’t, but I’m not ready to find out.”

  “Me neither, but if time runs out, you can destroy the scepter, right?”

  “And roll the dice with Hermes,” I said, completing her thought. “Yes.”

  I wouldn’t have a choice, and that’s what really bothered me. I’d gone to Greece and Italy to take control of my destiny. But without the ability to destroy Hermes’s tablet, it felt like I was right back to being putty in his hands. Unless, of course, I was willing to blow myself up, and that was a nonstarter.

  “Do what you need to do,” she said. “I trust you.”

  “That’s going to mean consulting my magic.”

  She released a long, pensive sigh through her nose. “I know. But if it tells you to sacrifice yourself, your magic and I are gonna fight. I’m serious. Before you do anything, I want you to tell me.”

  Wage, young mage, till your final breath

  And come night’s fall, accept your death.

  I pushed away the Doideag’s prophetic verses and nodded.

  “I will,” I promised. “But first I want to check in with Alec.”

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “Everything. It’s his life. He deserves to know.”

  A deep furrow formed between my wife’s glistening eyes. “Even what Claudius said about the box?”

  “That too,” I decided.

  “And what if he wants to sacrifice himself? What will you say to that?”

  I pictured Hermes’s demise, followed by Persephone’s. An explosive one-two bang. The conclusion of the godly wars, the end of the threats to our worlds. But I also thought of Alec. The son of my shadow. My flesh and blood. Because the question Ricki posed was a very real possibility.

  37

  I knocked on the basement door before cracking it open. Being after midnight, I was surprised to see a light on inside.

  “Alec?” I called. “Are you awake?”

  “Dad?” he said, then caught himself. “Is that Everson?”

  I pushed the door the rest of the way open to find him propped up in bed, the thick numerology book against his knees, an open notepad beside him. I exhaled, relieved he was still here and that he was himself.

  “How you doing, buddy?” I asked.

  In his semi-reclined position, his hair slightly tousled, he looked more at ease, more rested. Being confined here rather than playing host to Hermes had no doubt helped. But when I shifted to my wizard’s senses, I saw what Claudius had meant. While the obfuscation sigil may have been scrambling the signal between the tablet and Alec, the bonds were still biting into the corona of his soul.

  “Not bad.” Smiling, he rubbed an eye with the heel of his palm, then stretched the arm overhead. “A little tired. How did your thing go?”

  I wavered a hand. “So-so.”

  I’d carried down the salt-filled sack with Persephone’s scepter, and now I placed it in my warded safe beside Red Beard’s whip and a bottle of what remained of the energy I’d extracted from it.

  “Anything you can share?” he asked.

  God, where to begin? I thought as I sealed the safe.

  “Let’s hear about you first,” I deflected. “Looks like you’re pretty deep into that.”

  He followed my nod to the book on his lap. “Oh, yeah.” He gave a tired chuckle. “Sort of got absorbed.”

  “It’s a well-known Croft trait.”

  “Man, this is intense stuff. Eye-opening, too. I knew symbols and words could channel power, but I hadn’t given a lot of thought to numbers. Makes sense, though. Runes are geometric symbols, and sound is vibrational energy, right?” His hands grew more animated as he sat up straighter. “And some runes and sounds are more powerful than others. Well, that can all be represented by numbers and formulas, suggesting they can act as a medium to achieve similar or even identical results.”

  I smiled proudly. “That’s right. A practice known as numeromancy.”

  “As far as what you were looking for…” He swapped the thick tome for his notebook. It wasn’t until he flipped back to the beginning that I realized he’d filled most of it with his drawings and insights. It wasn’t Hermes’s influence, either. This was all coming from Alec’s head and our shared bloodline.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  I scooted up one of the chairs and took a seat. “Go ahead.”

  “Let’s start with the number twelve, because there’s a lot of info. But at its core, twelve represents entirety, wholeness. The number of months in the year, the signs of the zodiac.” He pointed at me, eyebrows raised. “The principal gods in the Greek pantheon. There were also twelve major Titans.”

  I nodded. If we were to refight the Titanochamy, even some stripped-down version of it, a force of twelve made sense.

  “Twelve represents a beginning and an end wrapped into one,” he continued. “So it’s robust. In fact, at the foundation of a lot of powerful spells you’ll find some element of twelve. It’s what holds the configuration together, keeps the energy from overwhelming it.”

  Damn, this kid was sharp.

  “And check this out.” He flipped back through his notebook. “I doodled some of my more powerful runes. Turns out that most of them feature twelve of something, usually major intersections. See?” He turned the notebook around to a runic drawing where he’d circled all of the intersections in question, twelve of them. In his eyes, I saw my own youthful excitement when I would make unexpected discoveries. I still experienced the odd joy, but nothing like in those early days.

  “There it is,” I said with a laugh. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

  “It’s amazing. It’s like seeing this new layer of reality that’s been in front of my face the whole time.”

  “That’s the essence of magic.”

  And you’re going to grow up to be a powerful magic-user.

  Though the thought came from nowhere, I held onto it. Seized it with both arms. No matter how dire things looked now, he was going to get the chance to grow up and become an advanced practitioner someday.

  “Okay, let’s take a look at the number eleven.” He flipped back to his early notes. “There’s some obscure mathematical significance, and some mystical traditions deem it powerful, but only much later. Most early societies regarded it negatively, believed it represented incompleteness. Stands to reason, one short of twelve. I went back over my runes again, and sure enough, I couldn’t remove any of the major intersections without the power falling apart. Not even when I tried to reconfigure them.”

  “How about the number one?” I asked.

  “That’s the whole enchilada. One with a capital O. The source of all numbers, One is all numbers. No more duality or many. It’s the ultimate, indivisible symbol of unity.” He backhanded the book beside him. “That idea, or some version of it, comes up no matter what tradition or period you’re talking about. In Greek mythology, it’s Zeus, even though he also belongs to the twelve principal gods. I looked for it in my runes, but I guess it’s the entirety of each one?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Something else that’s hard to see until you realize it’s right in front of your face. You can study it, but more often than not the revelation happens on its own, when you’re not looking for it.”

  I took a moment to revisit the Doideag’s prophecy: Allies gather, eleven and one…

  Was that just a fancy way of saying twelve, or did it mean the imperfection of eleven plus some vital, missing one that represented unity?

  And be not afraid of thine own blood…

  “Does any of that help you?” Alec asked.

  I blinked him back into focus. “It does. Thanks for doing this.”

  Now I’d have to take my own advice and let it sit, trust that if and when the time came, the significance would reveal itself.

  “And for doing this,” I added, gesturing to his confinement.

  Alec dropped the notepad on top of the numerology book and threw his legs over the side of the bed. “Your turn. I want to know where we are with everything.” His backpack had been crammed between his far hip and the wall, and now he pulled it up beside him in what seemed an unconscious act.

  “Would you mind if I took a look at that first?”

  “The pack?” He hesitated, but only briefly. He held it toward me by the haul handle, the freeness of the offer surprising me a little.

  “I just want to see something,” I said.

  Conscious of the bonds, I remained close to Alec as I took the pack and unzipped the main compartment. I dug a hand past his stuffed hoodie and reached into the pillowcase at the pack’s bottom. A low hum buzzed in my bones as I drew out the metal box with the glyphs, the container holding Hermes’s essence.

  Alec looked between the Kleftians’ box and me, his shoulders hunched as though coiled to reach forward if I dropped it or tried to yank it away.

  I turned the box around carefully in my hands. A box crafted by a thieves guild so Hermes could outlive them and their worship. I examined each glyph as I considered the conundrum: open the box to destroy Hermes, but destroy myself or Alec in the process. One or the other. As Claudius had said, there wasn’t a “neither” option.

  How in the hell to put that into words for Alec? Should I even try?

  A part of me was paranoid Hermes would hear, despite the obfuscation sigil. But more than that, I was thinking about Ricki’s question. What if after I explained everything, Alec volunteered to sacrifice himself?

  I could see him looking up at me expectantly, trustingly.

  Wordlessly, I replaced the box in the pillowcase, zipped the pack closed, and returned it to Alec’s hands. “Here.”

  I couldn’t put him in the position of feeling like he had to choose between my life or his own. I cared for him too much, and he was still a kid. This wasn’t his choice to make. It was mine as his father, his mentor, and his protector. And that settled the matter in my mind. The box would claim me or no one.

  “I’m stuck with it, aren’t I?” Alec said.

  Out of habit, he’d started threading his arm through the shoulder strap before stowing the pack beside him again.

  “No,” I said resolutely. “You’re going to grow up to be your own person.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t sound like you have a lot of answers right now.”

  “I don’t,” I admitted, taking a seat beside him. “But I’m asking a lot of questions. I’m gathering a lot of info.” I gestured to him and the numerology book. “I’ve come to some conclusions, but I’ve also run face-first into some challenges. Big challenges. That’s where being a magic-user comes in. It’s not all spells and invocations. It’s trusting that the work you’ve done—that effort and intention—that it’s swimming in the collective magic and will emerge as the right solution at the right time. That’s real magic.”

  “But… how do you know?”

  “I’ve told you the story of our bloodline. We’re descended from the First Saint Michael. In the battle against the nine elemental demons, he was the last one standing by dint of what he represented.”

  “Faith,” Alec whispered.

  “Faith,” I repeated. “To answer your question.”

  His lips pursed in thought, then he nodded with what I hoped was at least a small sense of optimism.

  “Oh, and there’s one more thing,” I said.

  He looked over, his eyebrows drawing in.

  “It’s all right to call me ‘Dad.’ In fact, I’d prefer it. ‘Everson’ makes it sound like we’re friends or something.” I punched his shoulder, drawing a laugh.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out.

  “Hey, Hoffman,” I answered, standing. “What’s up?”

  “We’ve got another shitshow spilling into the streets,” the detective growled.

  Crap. I’d all but forgotten about Hermes’s draftees. So much for their binding agreement. “Dewitt Clinton Park?”

  “City Hall Park. And they’re not the same yahoos.”

  My heart dropped into a dull, foreboding beat. “No?”

  “Zombies, and they’re not staying down.”