This Wicked Fate (This Poison Heart #2)(12)

Persephone laughed. “I like the braids. And nobody does bald quite like you. I couldn’t compete.”

“Stop,” Nyx said playfully.

Marie came over and slipped her hand into mine. “Hey,” she said. She kissed me gently on the cheek. “You doin’ okay?”

“No,” I said honestly. “Not even a little. But we were about to sit down and try to make a plan. Maybe that’ll help me feel like we’re doing something instead of just hanging around waiting for the pieces to fall into place.”

Mo eyed our intertwined hands and smiled gently at me before sitting down in the only chair Persephone had left in the room. Circe rounded the table and rested the tips of her fingers on its surface as she surveyed the vast collection of papers, maps, drawings, and books.

“The Colchis family is tasked with guarding the pieces of the Absyrtus Heart,” she said. “We all know and understand this, but over hundreds of generations, the pieces have been separated as the branches of our family tree diverged. We come from Medea. She was the daughter of the goddess Hecate, niece of the legendary sorceress Circe, wife of the leader of the Argonauts, Jason. Magic—and poison—run in our veins.” She took a deep breath. “Jason’s line has always coveted the Heart’s pieces. They have always been hunting it—and us. Just before Selene was murdered—” Circe gripped the table and I held tight to Marie’s arm. “We had come to an understanding—the risk of continuing on this way just wasn’t worth the pain, the loss. We thought if we could find all the pieces, we could destroy them and be done with this treacherous work. I still feel strongly that we should try to finish what Selene, Persephone, and I started, and of course now we have a reason to do it as quickly as possible.” She looked at Mo. “We have to get Thandie back. I won’t entertain any other options.”

Mo sucked in a big breath and simply nodded.

“We have five pieces now,” Persephone said.

“But I drank the liquid Astraea gave me,” Marie said quietly. “That piece is gone for good.”

Circe shook her head, cast me a melancholy glance, and then turned back to Marie. “You are the piece now.”

Marie’s perfectly arched right eyebrow shot up. “What? How’s that supposed to work?” She whipped around to look at Persephone. “You too?”

“We are living, breathing pieces of it now,” Persephone said flatly. “Cleary neither of us read the fine print.”

Marie’s brows knitted together as she stared down at the floor.

“We are working against the clock, literally,” Circe said. She touched a notebook stuffed to bursting with handwritten notes. “We found the other pieces by chasing down stories of people who lived unnaturally long lives: Flamel and her husband, Nicolas, St. Germaine, Merlin. Nicolas and St. Germaine turned out to be one and the same, and we now have that piece in our possession. Merlin’s immortality came from another source, as does Nyx’s.”

I locked eyes with Nyx across the room.

“So, you just weren’t going to tell me?” I knew Nyx was strong. She’d folded a grown man up like a pretzel at the cemetery, but I didn’t know she was immortal.

She shrugged and the corners of her mouth pulled up into a smile. “It’s not even the biggest thing I’m keeping from you at present.”

“Ummm. I don’t like the way that sounds.” I couldn’t imagine what would be a bigger secret than finding out she was immortal. “And did y’all say Merlin? Like from King Arthur?”

“The same,” Persephone said. “Arthur’s legend was greatly exaggerated by Merlin himself. The table wasn’t even round, and his name wasn’t Merlin. It was Myrddin.”

“Hold up,” I said. My mind raced as I thought through what she was implying. “What are you saying to me right now? How do you know that?”

“Focus?” Circe asked impatiently. “Persephone will tell you her life stories soon, I promise.”

I glanced at Mo, who had interlaced her fingers on top of her head and was slowly rocking side to side. She looked like she was about to implode.

“We tracked the pieces down,” Circe said. “And now we have one more to find. The Mother. Luckily for us, I have some idea of where it might be.” She ran her finger over the map and let it come to rest in the open waters of the Aegean Sea. “These waters are where Jason and his Argonauts sailed. The land surrounding them is the site of Prometheus’s eternal suffering, and somewhere in these waters is the island of Aeaea. It is the last place we knew Medea to be, in the company of the eponymous Circe from Homer’s Odyssey. It has to be there—in the place where Medea kept the original Poison Garden.”

I stared at the map. There were hundreds of islands of various sizes dotting the waters to the east of Greece. Some of them had been marked by little red dots. “What are the dots for?”

“Those are the ones I’ve been to and have crossed off the list,” Circe said.

There must have been two hundred red marks. Circe hadn’t been lying when she said she’d been searching.

“And that’s the issue,” Circe said. “Aeaea’s true location has been lost to time, and there are so many possibilities. There are thousands of islands in these waters, but because we have no idea how big or small the island actually was, we have to look at them all. People have searched for it for thousands of years. Researchers have said its location is anywhere from Paxos to Cyprus. Most of them don’t think it exists at all. But I think they’re all wrong. It’s still out there somewhere. I can feel it.”