"Why haven't you killed me yet?"
Khione shrugged at her almost amused victim. "I'm trying to figure out if you might be useful or…" But she stopped mid-sentence, because his eyes had begun to glow red, and she'd made the mistake of looking into them—you stupid goddess!
As he watched Khione writhe and scream at invisible horrors, the boy began to actually enjoy their encounter. He might have escaped without so much as the chills, had the cold-hearted immortal not frozen her own hand to shake herself out of the frightening delusion.
"Ugh, I should've known it was you," Khione said, freezing him to the spot before he could dissolve like he usually did.
"What are you waiting for then?" the boy asked. He was trying to look tough, but with her refusing eye contact, and, consequentially, his best weapon, he was anything but. "Finish me off! My brother's busy terrorizing your city, so there'd be no one to hear us."
"Are you really as stupid as you look?" Khione retorted with a smile, stepping closer to him. "Think about your father. Think about who you are. We could do great things together in this war."
The boy wanted to turn away. He wanted to think about all the trouble going against the Olympians would cause him. He wanted to scare her into getting the fuck away from him.
But as Khione's raw hands touched his shoulder and she spoke imploringly of all the victims she could hand over to him, the boy felt frozen in a way that had nothing to do with the ice.
The long-awaited battle started well enough. The children of Ares and Mars were on the frontline. The charmspeakers of Aphrodite and Venus were convincing the innocent mortals to leave the city while they could. The children of Demeter and Ceres were armed with poison ivy. The children of Hephaestus and Vulcan were making sure their new and improved dragon knew who the enemies were. And, most importantly, the previous amnesiacs were keeping the peace between the Greeks and the Romans.
Clarisse La Rue, arrogant and bloodthirsty as ever, was certain that the odds were in their favor. The enemies may have had gods on their side, but so did they, along with countless other demigods. She was going to make Mother Earth sorry she ever woke up, and she didn't care what bitterly forgotten goddesses she had to face on the way there.
And in the first second of battle, Clarisse maintained this confidence, her mind filled with too much rage to absorb anything else—My best friend died to save this world, and I'm not going to let you guys ruin it.
Then her eyes landed on the goddess of snow, and she nearly fell back in shock as she saw that smirking suspiciously close to Khione was none other than her half-brother, Phobos. And as her worst fears of being defeated by her own family hit her in the gut, Clarisse suddenly wasn't so confident anymore.