“I hate you.”

“You wound me straight to the heart, bud.”

My patience was just about the same as that of Cerberus after someone tried to take a squeaky toy away from him. “What about the girl, Apollo?”

He dropped down into the leather chair, his large form nearly swallowing it. “It’s a long story.”

“Go figure.”

That comment went largely ignored. “It all started with your birth, so there’s something else you can add to your mountain of suck.”

I wondered if there was an anti-god repellent and where I could find it.

“We knew the moment you were born that there would be the possibility of a God Killer, since Alexandria was on schedule to make an appearance a few years later. We didn’t know who among us was responsible for your birth, but we knew they’d want to use you for their own gain.”

“This walk down history lane is boring me.” I crossed my arms.

Unaffected, he eased himself closer to the bed, kicked his booted feet up on it, and stretched out leather-clad legs. “The risk of you two joining forced us to come up with a contingency plan in case the proverbial poo hit the fan.”

My brows knitted. There was something wrong with hearing Apollo use the word “poo” in a sentence.

“The Twelve agreed we had to do something,” he continued. The Twelve were the core of the Olympians, the most powerful. There were more gods, so many that no one could keep track of them, since they populated like rabbits, but the Twelve called the shots. “So we decided to do something none of us had done in thousands of years. We created twelve demigods.”

Twelve? Holy roasted Hades’s balls. “So, let me guess. You and Zeus, Hephaestus, Dionysus, Poseidon, Hermes, and Ares,” I spat that bastard’s name out, and then moved on, “got human women knocked up, and then Hera, Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, and Demeter got pregnant?”

“That’s usually how making babies works,” he replied dryly. “Once our lovely ladies conceived, they transferred their offspring into mortal women. And before the twelve demigods were born, their abilities were bound so that they, until needed, would be nothing more than mortal. We couldn’t have demigods running amuck in the mortal world.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Demigods are more powerful than pures. You know that, Seth. The aether we pass onto them has not been diluted. They can control all the elements, including akasha. We could not allow them free reign.”

“Of course,” I muttered.

“Two of them were killed off immediately. Zeus got jealous and took out Hera’s child, and in retaliation, she snuffed out his. You know how those two can be.”

Gods.

“That left ten. Of course, as we know, Ares had a stick up his ass and was planning to turn the mortal world into his personal playground of carnage. He knew of our plan. He went right along with it. He knocked off four more during his little reign of terror, leaving six remaining. Of course, his own kid wasn’t one of the ones he killed.”

A muscle began to thrum along my jaw. During my time with Ares, he’d mentioned none of this. Not that I was surprised. There was a lot he hadn’t told me, and even more I simply hadn’t questioned, because I hadn’t cared. Not at first, at least. Tension crept into my shoulders. “If you had at least six demigods, why weren’t they used to help defeat Ares?”

He wiggled his booted feet. “Everything we do has a cosmic checks and balances system. The demigods’ powers can only be unbound two ways. At least six of them have to be in the same location at one time, and then it’s like a universal remote. All of their abilities are released naturally, like a system hitting critical mass. The second way is for us to release their powers, but that’s… that is messy, and we can only unbind the demigod who belongs to us. If we make that decision, it weakens us considerably and it would take time for us to recover. Another cosmic check and balance.”

Rolling my shoulders, I worked out the creeping tautness. “I still don’t get why you guys didn’t pull the demigods into the fight against Ares. They could’ve changed the—”

“The outcome wouldn’t have changed. Alex would still be where she is now. Moving on,” he said. “What matters now is that we need them to entomb the Titans. Besides the fact there are no longer twelve of us, we don’t have the cosmic mojo to do so. Now that they’ve escaped, we can’t put them back. The chore would fall to those who carry our blood. It won’t be easy for them. There are things they must accomplish first. You know, checks and balances, Seth.”

I didn’t care about the checks and balances. “Then get them together, power them up like it’s a game of Super Mario, and get this shit over with.”

“It’s not that simple. We don’t know where all of them are. We have our guesses.”

“How in the hell do you not know where they are?”

“When we bound their abilities, it also blocked us from sensing them. Over the years, we’ve been able to keep track of a few of them. It really depended on the god who fathered or mothered them and how interested they were in keeping tabs. Many weren’t.”

“Yeah, because you guys are paradigms of good parenting.”

He smirked as he crossed one ankle over the other. “Can’t argue that. But, we’re actively searching for them. Two that we did keep track of went missing about three weeks ago. They disappeared. Poof. Gone.”