The taste of blood thrills her.

She should be choking on it, but the splattering of bloodied spittle against the flesh of her lungs is making her shiver instead. Her teeth are deep in meat and tissue. Her nails have been dipped in gore. Her eyes are stung and shining, tinted green and splashed with a crimson spray which blurs her focus out of view.

Said focus is still screaming. How lucky for her. His stolen divinity will be good for at least one thing.

Juliette takes her time.

An arm chewed off and spit out for the days she spent without the sun. In a cage and feverish.

The other arm torn for the moments she was allowed to see the sky, but only if her hands and knees were dusted with death and sand.

Juliette removes his nose. His ears. For the burns she'll carry for the rest of her life. For the metal fused to her skin, which she'll never be able to remove. For her knowing what it feels like to have her body move against her will. She pulls his tongue from his mouth for the kind hearted creatures he sweet talked into doing his bidding. For the Blemmyae. For Lityerses.

For herself.

He stops screaming at some point during her meticulous process. His blood stops gurgling. Rattling breaths stop escaping his gaping, broken jaw.

It's a wonder that his heart stayed beating for as long as it did. His body is in pieces, scattered around the clearing between the two armies. The faint drops of rain falling around them have done nothing to dampen the scent of iron lingering in the city street.

Her knees land in a puddle of blood when her transformation falls. Blood and broken asphalt cling to the denim of her jeans. She loses control of herself and nearly swoons forward, right onto the faceless, limbless leftovers of the man who tormented her for most of the last six months of her life.

Her hands wind up on his chest. What's left of it. Her forehead rests against the gold of Commodus' armored breastplate.

Blood is dripping from her nose. She thinks she might be entirely bathed in it.

Jason's wind breezing through her hair eventually reopens her eyes. When she lifts them from the corpse beneath her forehead, he's just beside her. His knees are also in a puddle of blood. His cyan glow reflects off its surface. His eyes are on hers: soft, understanding, grief stricken. Not a word leaves his lips, but he drafts another breeze against her hot face and inches closer.

Juliette almost regrets her instinctive brutality simply because he was here to see her do it.

Almost. The blood on her skin feels warm like a family gathering.

There's a retch behind her. Several, actually. And then a sweet, tentative voice.

"Julie...?"

Oh, right. She'd forgotten it wasn't just the three of them on this street in the dark.

Juliette lifts her head from Commodus' still chest and looks behind her.

Frank's teeth are dug into his cheek. She can smell the blood in his mouth from here. Apollo is openly weeping. Her silver bow is at his knees. He's collapsed onto the road, pale, black veined, and clearly barely conscious. He smells sickly and weak. There's a primal instinct within her that urges his elimination. If he can't protect her family, he doesn't deserve to live.

"Are you okay?" Jason's whisper startles her out of her scrutiny. Why he's whispering, she doesn't know. No one can hear him but her.

The answer is 'no,' but she looks at him and nods. She straightens up on her aching knees.

"Well, then..."

This voice is less sweet than Frank's. Her head turns to follow it. On the other end of the road stands Caligula. His dark hair is mostly hidden beneath his gold, feathered helmet. The pandai behind him are wide-eyed and green. The emperor himself is squinting at her. She can tell that he's paler than he was when she landed beside this tunnel, but his eyes are calculating. They're intense and focused. She feels suddenly violated. Like he's been watching her closely enough to hear the very thoughts she's thinking at this moment.

Like he can smell her blood too.

Jason sucks in a gasp.

Juliette would love to say that what she's just done to Commodus gives her pause. When she tells an abridged version of this story to Chiron weeks later, she pretends that it does. She tells him that she has to sit on the street for a while, numb, and stew in the wickedness that she's just allowed to possess her.

In reality...Juliette gets slammed by a shockwave of fear from the ghost floating beside her. Jason's eyes go dizzied, aimed in Caligula's direction but without any true subject. His mouth is opening and closing without releasing sound. His chest, still housing the head of his murderer's spear, is heaving, trying uselessly to capture quick breaths that his body no longer requires. He looks suddenly small and fragile. A little boy checking for dangers beneath his bed.

He's frozen. Quiet. And he's staring at Caligula like he's the doorman to Tartarus.

Juliette lifts her gaze from her first victim to her next. She looks across no man's land, and on the other side stands the man who tried to sever her tether.

At the touch of her gaze, Caligula's hand finds the weapon at his belt, drawing Juliette's eyes down to its glinting gold surface.

She pauses, staring at it where it hangs, unsheathed and on display on his belt. She second guesses what she sees. Triple guesses. Because there is no way.

That sword.

The bloodstained blue ribbon tied around the handle of it...That came off of the early Christmas gift she'd presented to Jason back in November. She'd given him an enormous set of Greek-themed Legos to build his models out of. He'd laughed himself silly at the shirtless, bearded Lego version of his father that the set had come along with, and he'd told her it was the best gift he'd ever received.

Once she notices the ribbon, her mind fills in the rest. There's a custom grip guard on the handle too. Leo attached that while they all hung out in Bunker 9 just days before setting out on the Argo. Hera's symbol is etched into either side of the gladius' Imperial Gold blade. She remembers the way it had gleamed with divinity, freshly forged, in the dim light of the Wolf House where they'd rescued the Queen of the Gods.

It isn't.

It couldn't be.

It definitely is. That son of a bitch.

Her knees don't spend long submerged in that puddle of blood, bone, and gravel on the street. Juliette stands through the wave of exhaustion crawling over her eyes with beetle-like legs. Her bad foot nearly collapses underneath her as she does, but she just reaches down and rights it again with her bloodslick hands. This is no time to show weakness.

She has no weaknesses.

For once, Juliette is invincible. And she'll be damned if she doesn't put that to good use while she can.

"Juliette. I-"

She turns to Jason. He blinks at her, eyes wide and childlike, filled with terror, and she wishes with all her black, rotted, empty heart that she could place a stabilizing hand on his shoulder. Her skin and his don't get to touch yet, though. Not until they're finished in New York. And this is the next step for them to get there.

"I'm going to kill him for you," She tells him. "And then we can go home. Okay?"

Jason's mouth opens. She raises a hand to cut his protest off. He looks at the emperor on the other side of the clearing and the cloud of fear around him doubles.

He doesn't like it when he can't help her. So, she'll let him this time.

"Watch my back?" Julie requests. Her question is intended to be encouraging. It seems to work. Jason snaps out of his fearful stupor long enough to look her over from head to toe.

"Kill me?" Caligula laughs. "I do not remember that working out well for the last one of you children who tried."

Julie grows out her claws once again.

Emperor Caligula betrays himself. He releases a flash of panic when she takes a step his way. Juliette gobbles it down greedily and allows a yearning smile to stretch her cheeks up towards the sky.

Yes. No taste compares to the fear she can cause in a man who has harmed her family.

Caligula puts a hand on the pommel of his stolen sword and glances at the army behind Julie. "Well, Zhang. I'd say your guard dog has evened the odds a bit," He jokes. "What was that solution we were discussing? Spolia opima?"

Juliette doesn't know or care what that jibber jabber means. She steps over Commodus' corpse (the biggest piece of it), and runs her eyes down the veins of Caligula's neck. A bead of his nervous sweat races her gaze. It reminds her of the rain drops running into Jason's empty eyes on that beach.

"It seems a much fairer fight now, yes?"

Which piece of him should Juliette destroy first?

"Romans, stand down," Frank says tersely. "Prepare to defend the tunnel."

Julie isn't Roman. She doesn't care about some tunnel. She's covered in too much red to even argue she's wearing Camp Jupiter colors. Jason is just behind her, the cold radiating off him bracing her. Julie continues her advance, sclerae bleeding green, and Caligula grits his teeth.

"Zhang! Leash your creature, or my forces move in," He snarls. "This is your final warning to save your city!"

Frank says nothing. And then, she hears him sheathe his sword.

"You wanted single combat," Her friend reminds the emperor. "Unless you would rather surrender?"

Julie steps again, and Caligula steps backwards.

A cloud of delicious fear floats out around him, and Juliette's mouth waters at the sight. The emperor looks behind him at his men. The pandai all take a step back as well, eyes wide, and shake their heads.

When her gaze connects with Caligula's again, determination has wiggled through his fear. He narrows his eyes and curls his lip.

"Fine," He hisses. The red cape is snatched from his neck and tossed back onto the front line of his soldiers. He crouches into a defensive position and motions for his army to take a large step backwards. "You want to duel, slave girl? I would be glad to show all of Rome how pathetic your kind truly is." He sneers at her. "Just try to make it more interesting than your boyfriend did, would you?"

That's the very boyfriend whom she looks to for permission now. She catches Jason's eye and holds it. She watches him realize she's awaiting his signal. He pauses. He glances at the emperor. Then at the sword in his hand. Then the gore on hers. Then, looking conflicted and ready to throw up, Jason closes his eyes and nods.

Juliette gives Caligula just long enough to unsheathe Jason's stolen sword before pushing off the gravel to attack.

It doesn't even occur to her for the first few clashes of Caligula's blade against her forearms that Julie didn't bring a weapon with her. His eyes go wide at the first deflected strike, realizing just what he's up against. She's reaching mostly for Caligula's face and chest, hands clawed and still dripping with Commodus' blood. The emperor is on the defensive, slashing her arms away from him every time she strikes outwards. His blade does no damage. Silver sparks erupt each time it clangs into her enchanted skin. Caligula is snarling at her, grip on his weapon white-knuckled.

Up close to her, he looks strained and nervous. But his voice is mocking as he talks through their scuffle.

"Commodus was a blithering idiot, but he did have one thing right," He laughs harshly. "A cage is the only place where something like you belongs."

Juliette fucking hated that cage. And she fucking hates this greasy dude for bringing it up again. She takes a swipe at his gut that he barely dodges. Caligula makes a deliberate slice at hers in return. It skates over her skin. He frowns to himself.

They exchange more blows, and Juliette gets to feel what it's like to tear chunks of flesh off the man who killed her best friend. Julie rakes gashes down both his arms. She renders his breastplate useless. He eventually abandons it in a hurry, and Juliette manages to open up three deep wounds on his back, stomach, and right upper thigh.

Every strike she lands makes her even more bloodthirsty. And it makes him even more afraid.

Both the armies are silent and tense. It makes every sound from their battle deafening to listen to.

"Or perhaps I should have allowed my other colleague to return you to his custody," He muses, a pained, forced smirk on his bleeding face as he stabs at her neck. It bounces off, and he grits his teeth. "He'd have reminded you what Venus-spawn are really good for."

A burst of lightning scorches his back, knocking him forwards into a stumble. He gasps. Caligula's eyes widen in confusion, and Juliette smirks.

"Keep talking," She encourages him. "It's making him feel better about what I'm going to do to you."

Julie lands her best hit after that comment. She gauges her claws through his face and left shoulder and knocks him off his feet onto the smoking electrical burns now on his back. Caligula finally shouts in surprise at the pain - the first sound of weakness he's made this whole fight. His blood mixes with Commodus' under her nails, but it isn't easy to differentiate the two by color.

Mm. She'll have to draw some more.

She lunges towards him, intending to do the same thing to his right side, but he rolls around behind her. A sword skitters harmlessly off the backs of her ankles this time. Juliette kicks a foot back and hears her opponent grunt and back away. When she turns to him, puzzled at the random place he just tried stabbing her, he's rubbing his jaw a few feet away and scanning her body scrutinously.

Given his last comment to her, this makes her want to kill him even more.

"Achilles' curse," He realizes, breaths short and sharp. "Now, how did you pull that one off?"

"You tell me, Nancy Drew," She drawls. Caligula is breathing heavier now. He'll slow down soon. All it will take is one well placed hit before he's dead.

Julie will have to make sure she doesn't let him bleed out too quickly. She'd like to watch his eyes when he goes.

Caligula makes the attack this time. And while it doesn't matter if Juliette lets his blows land, he's moving startlingly fast. His realization of her new advantage must have brought on some kind of second wind in him. He's a blur around her as he attacks, moving so quickly that it's easier to track him by the drops of blood he leaves behind than by his actual movements.

That does nothing to hide the dread in his aura, though. Julie basks in his terror as she lets the Curse do the heavy lifting, limbs jumping up nearly on their own to block his blows. Well, well. He's finally living up to his millennia old reputation. This reminds her of the times she's watched the Big Three demigods duel back home in the practice arena, their feet and weapons moving so fast that Julie's eyes can't keep up. The Curse is carrying her through right now. It's hijacked her instincts so that her body will move to block at least most of the attacks. The ones that she doesn't block, she pays no attention to.

All they do is send sparks out into the darkness when the blade fails to scratch her flesh.

A slash across her cheek.

"After I finish with you here and New Rome is mine-"

An unsuccessful stab into her lower back.

"Do you know what I think I'll do then?"

His blade skitters over the nape of her neck.

He's attacking with no logical pattern in mind, seeming to be striking in the most random places. Impatient, Juliette elbows him in the nose. Before she can sink her claws in anywhere useful, though, the emperor has snatched her wrist upwards and driven his sword into the flesh of her underarm.

What the fuck is he doing?

A memory hits her.

Luke raises his arm, showing off the bloody stab wound just below his armpit. "Make sure you pick an anchor spot. Keep it secret. You know how it is."

Oh, okay. He's searching. Well, guess what? He's not getting any warmer.

More sparks, and the weapon slices through nothing but the sleeve of her t-shirt. Caligula grits his teeth and narrowly dodges Julie's next attempt to disembowel him with her talons.

"I think I'll pay your Greek camp a visit that has been long overdue," He decides.

Juliette feels a surge of ire. It must show on her face. The emperor laughs right in it and takes a stab at the underside of her chin.

Before he makes contact, Julie grabs the blade in place, hardly even straining her magically enhanced biceps to keep it there as Caligula attempts to tug it back away. Annoying. Like a fly. She feels as if she's confiscating fire crackers from Harley, sparing no real effort, but irritated beyond belief as the loudmouthed little heathen punches at her stomach.

His black eyes make her think of Nico, and the warmth in Julie's veins grows to a scalding, steaming, red(gold)-hot glow. Irritation becomes rage. For some strange reason, Caligula takes that as a sign to make her even angrier.

Still fighting to pull his sword from her grip, Caligula forces a chuckle.

"You know the Greek traditions better than I do. Tell me. Would it be more of a statement to toss down your body or Jason Grace's?"

Enraged doesn't even cover it. That question signs the man's death warrant, and she's decided that this fight is taking too long.

Juliette bares her teeth at him, all anger and adrenaline. Julie reaches out with one hand, intending to slam Caligula's head down onto the point of the sword in between them and just be done with it.

His eyes widen. He starts to pull away, but she catches him by the hair. She aims the point of the gladius up with Caligula's left eye socket.

He fights her, and that makes the forced bow down into the blade slow and unsteady. The emperor grunts with effort. But she's almost got him there. Just a few millimeters, and he'll have a sword through his face, and all of them can go home.

Something stops her, though.

Swift and unexpected. Loud. Bright. Painful.

Lightning.

Not at Caligula, though.

Lightning aimed straight at her.

"MOVE!" Jason yells from somewhere. She doesn't react quickly enough.

A bolt of it, more powerful than she has ever seen from Jason or Thalia, slices from the pitch black sky into the crown of her skull. Juliette feels fire explode her cells. She screams. Caligula's face drops in surprise, and he yanks his hair from her grip, rearing back and patting away the forks that jumped to him. This is nothing like the nervous sparks which Jason has flung at her accidentally in the past. This is pain like she hasn't felt in a long, long while. From a source more powerful than anything she's ever faced.

Achilles Curse or no, it strikes Juliette only, right where she stands.

Julie's body jolts and crumbles. In her lapse of strength at the strike of electricity arcing through her, Caligula wrestles his stolen sword from her grasp. He slices it sideways, likely just meaning to pull it away so to make another attack. But the gold sweeps down the left side of her torso, and Juliette feels it leave a shallow sting in its wake.

She gasps. Sparks are burning inside her, setting flame to her muscles. Her mouth tastes like soot and blood. Her hand darts to lay flat against the upper plane of her chest, and she falls down onto her side on the rain drenched asphalt, twitching.

For a moment, everything stands still.

Caligula is staring at her, black eyes wide and pleasantly surprised. Julie can hardly see him through the blurriness that's swam across her vision. She coughs. Smoke leaves her lungs. Black dots splatter her pale arm that's curled in front of her as her body continues twitching and jolting with electrical shocks. She feels hot. Hot and like sandpaper has been drug over all the most sensitive patches of skin on her body.

It must not have been, because her skin is still impenetrable. Or, it is everywhere except the tip top of her left breast, where purple ooze is leaking between her fingers.

Caligula's eyes find the violet stain from where he's standing above her. Her blood is very easy to differentiate from Commodus'. Even in the rain that's picked up from a drizzle to a downpour.

He looks baffled by whatever just occurred, but not unhappy. A wicked grin contorts his rat-like face.

He nods, smiling at her.

"There it is."

Remember when Julie said that she felt like he could smell her blood?


Is it enough yet?

Hera sits beside her husband. The space between them could not fit a feather, but no part of them is touching. A queen sits beside her king, but Hera is long beyond when she could once allow her skin to touch his. If his leg were to brush hers or his hand were to seek her fingers out, revulsion is all she would feel. Hera is long beyond the time when she loved him.

Jupiter gets to his feet. This does not happen often. He only rises from his throne or his place on their sofa when he feels a need to be larger than what or whom he is looking at. He has risen this time to stare downwards through their transparent tiles at the events occurring outside the entrance to his namesake demigod encampment.

Hera stares with him, but she does not rise. She peers through her black mourning veil, and she breathes in deeply so that she may not crumble the goblet of nectar in the grip of her black silk gloves from her ire. Hera stares down at the fallen demigod girl lying on the road to Camp Jupiter, and she asks herself if this is enough yet.

Juliette Aster never impressed Hera before. She is a rejected daughter of Aphrodite. She holds no special skills aside from a general talent for destruction. She began her journey in their world an enemy of the gods, serving Kronos and his henchmen. The war with Gaea left her crippled and ugly. Angry - so far below what Hera wanted and planned for her champion, hardly worth the dirt her golden soldier walks upon. Jason Grace could do so much better, and Hera knew that one day he would. Once he had his fun and got the silly Aphrodite girl out of his system, he would move on to a more fitting match. Just like his father has time and time again.

And yet...

Hera watches the girl on the concrete attempt to move. She cannot even make it to her hands and knees. No. The moment she begins to have some success, bracing herself on her elbows, Jupiter jerks the Master Bolt again, and another spear of electricity pierces the poor girl's skull.

She can hear the child scream from all the way up in their palace in the sky.

Is that enough?

"I thought you wished for no interjections into Apollo's quest," She reminds her husband, voice bland.

Jupiter jerks his head her way. His eyes are violent. He tilts the weapon in his hand her way and curls his lip.

"Be silent."

Hera narrows her gaze. Jupiter returns his attention to the mortal girl on the road. Hera watches her champion's spirit kneel down over his love's twitching body. Jason looks up at the sky and raises his hands, palms to the air. As if he can stop the cosmos from harming his lover anymore. As if he can use his father's powers to protect her.

Hera watches Jupiter throw another bolt, this time striking Aster on her spine as the emperor who murdered his child laughs himself hoarse. She watches panicked, frustrated tears escape her champion's - her son's eyes as he watches the scene helplessly. She looks at the man she married, her once dearest brother, whom she watched grow from a boy into a king. Hera watches him lean forward eagerly as Caligula - a heretic and scourge on their Roman side's legacy - strides forward to murder a young woman fighting to give Hera back the only mortal child she's ever been allowed for herself.

With the very gladius that she gifted him.

Caligula raises the weapon's point to Juliette Aster's mortal anchor, which lies deep in her chest where Aphrodite's handmaidens tied her to Hera's boy over a decade ago. The Imperial Gold breaks the skin, and the girl's eyes squeeze shut. Jason Grace uselessly thrusts his hands at the man, but Jupiter's power is far from his grasp, held at bay by the King of Olympus as he watches on from above.

"STOP!" The boy cries. Jason lifts his eyes to the heavens. "PLEASE!"

He sounds agonized. He is on his knees. Her proud Roman eagle. Begging. He did not even beg her when it was himself at the other end of this emperor's blade.

Hera grits her teeth, closing her eyes against the realization she has come to, and she gently places her goblet on the table beside their sofa.

This is enough, she decides. She has finally had enough.

Hera strides to Jupiter's side. She stands next to him and looks him in the eye as she raises a hand towards the girl on the street - the one who never has impressed her. Hera reaches out to Juliette Aster, who is watching courageously, unblinkingly as her attacker drives his sword deeper into her flesh. The goddess closes her palm, and in a whirl of peacock feathers and light, the demigod vanishes before Caligula's sword can breach her heart.

The sword Hera forged strikes a puddle of rain on the empty asphalt.

Jupiter's handsome face drops. He whirls her way and opens his mouth to question her. Before he bothers, Hera answers his words with actions. She looks away from him and peers down at the So-Called-Emperor glancing around in confusion at the empty clearing he is now standing in.

She curls her lip in distain.

She will never find value in the boy god Apollo. But even that nuisance is more deserving of their divinity than this false ruler who dares wield Hera's symbol unblessed.

Jason Grace looks up once again, blue eyes wide, fearful, and so unlike his father's. Hera waves one black gloved hand his way. Her boy, so handsome and brave, relaxes into her familiar protection. She wafts him away on the winds as well. East. To where his other half awaits him now that she has managed to finally impress his true patron.

Her other hand, she waves at Caligula. She takes control of that symbol of hers on the side of his stolen weapon. It glows brightly. Blue and green. Her colors. The emperor blanches at the sight and drops it as if she'd heated it like a poker in his grip.

Jupiter realizes what she is doing. He snatches her arm and pulls her close enough that his beard prickles against her chin as he growls down at her.

"I have warned you, Hera." Threats. Danger. His tone of voice promises suffering should she continue her actions. "Do not interfere."

Hera glares at him through the netting of her black funeral veil and juts out her chin. Jupiter's face is less than a feather from hers, and all she feels is revulsion. "You used to be a king," She reminds him, grieving the man he once was long ago when her throne sat only a feather from his in the council chambers and he was not afraid of a demigod child who might call him unwise. "You disgrace the Jupiter whom Juno and I once loved."

Hera's hand snaps closed, and Jason Grace's sword buries itself in Emperor Caligula's black, unbeating heart. She hears the Master Bolt zip her way. She feels her husband's rage through the shockwaves she's set off in her own domain, destroying her own marriage at its roots and going against every instinct within the very atoms that make her.

But Hera is the elder sibling. She is a wife and a woman. She will be meek when that is what her station requires, but she is foremost a goddess. She is a queen. She is an Olympian.

Hera evaporates into the air before Jupiter's attack can strike her. And she listens to him scream her name through her own relieved, exhausted tears as she reforms herself as far from her husband, family, and home as she can get.

When they meet again, she is not sure what she will do to reconstruct what she has torn today. She does not know if that is even what she wishes for. Perhaps Olympus is long overdue for change. Perhaps there are others who have had enough of what goes on without their permission.

Hera does not know what the coming days will bring - be it war, pain, or peace. Regardless of what it may be, her champion will live.

If Hera has had enough of grief in her long lifetime, she cannot imagine what it must feel like to be a mortal.