MANY HAPPY RETURNS

It always happened with gods. You left the house in the morning for a simple meet and greet and returned in the evening after a battle, an impromptu obstacle course, and a trip halfway to the underworld.

Henry’s stomach growled loudly and he mumbled, “Excuse me.”

Andie shrugged. “What for? It’s just your stomach. Not like you can control it, or even like it smells bad.”

He grinned. “Next time I’ll let a burp fly. Isn’t it nice that we can make out and somehow still talk like this?”

“It’s not that nice. I’m a lady, for Christ’s effing sake.” She laughed. He loved to watch her laugh. Teeth out, like a donkey yawning. It was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen.

“Can you come in for awhile?” he asked. “Or do you have to go home?”

The slightest flush crept into her cheeks.

“I can come in.”

Had he not been so focused on Andie, thinking ahead to her warm curves on the soft, familiar surface of his bed, he might have noticed that something was different about his house. That yellow light flooded nearly every room. That it looked like a house again instead of a vacant building. But he didn’t even notice that Lux wasn’t barking.

He and Andie opened the door with their hands and lips already on each other. The awkward, embarrassing sound of their mouths smacking apart when his mother shouted would replay in Henry’s brain for days afterward.

“Henry!”

At first his mom’s face was all he could see. Her smile stretched so far across it might literally have gone from ear to ear. That smile was rare. He’d only seen it a handful of times in his entire life. The question in his mind—what could be that good?—was answered less than a second later, when he saw Cassandra on the couch with his dog half on her lap.

“Oh my god,” Andie whispered. Then she shouted it, and ran to hug her friend. Lux disengaged and came to snuffle Henry’s hand.

“She came back today,” his mother said. “Just came back. Showed up on the front steps with…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked farther into the den, to where a stranger stood.

A god.

Not one they’d ever seen before, but Henry saw past the college-boy clothes in an instant. It was hard to believe that his parents hadn’t. But then, they’d had far less practice.

“Zack,” the god said. “Thanatos.”

Zack. Cassandra’s eyes flickered vaguely at the name.

That’s not a name she’s heard often. Just something made up? For our benefit?

“Henry.” His mom gestured for him to come closer, but his feet stayed planted. Sitting on the couch, one hand held limply by their dad, Cassandra looked like a ghost. She looked like a rag, worse even than she had in the days following Aidan’s funeral. Whatever had happened to her after Olympus had been bad to the point of trauma, and his parents’ smiles seemed at best mismatched and at worst wildly inappropriate.

“Cassandra.” The god who called himself Zack stepped up and knelt beside her. “I’m going to go, so you can be with your family. But I won’t go far.” He and Henry’s parents stood. It seemed to take forever for his father to work up the nerve to shake the boy’s hand.

“Thank you,” his dad said. “For bringing her home.”

“Sorry I couldn’t convince her to come back sooner.” And he sounded like he meant it. When he walked past, Henry grabbed him by the arm.

“Where are you going?”

“I thought I would stay at my cousin’s place.”

Henry looked into his eyes.

“She has a lot of cousins.”

Thanatos looked back. “Not as many as she used to.”

A minute after he left, Henry heard a car start somewhere on the street. They must’ve driven right past it without noticing.

With the stranger gone, the tension in the room was plain. No one knew what to do after so long apart. His parents puttered around Cassandra like square pegs navigating round holes. They wanted to yell and scold, but were too happy to see her. They wanted to baby her and stuff her full of food, but it wasn’t right to coddle a runaway.

“So you and Athena came home,” Henry said.

Cassandra looked at him. Wherever she’d been, it was sunny. And hard.

“Hi, Henry.”

“Hi, Cassie.”

They all looked to him for what to do. As if he knew any better than they did. He was sick of being the one to figure it out and hold it together. But everyone else seemed ready to break.