Free The Wicked Within by Kelly Keaton Page B

small laugh escaped him, and he shook his head as though the idea was still unbelievable. “She would at that.”
    Our drinks arrived and we placed our order, though I had to wonder if my father had an appetite after all this; I knew mine was lagging. After the waitress was gone, I asked him if it bothered him that I was going out with Josephine’s grandson.
    “It’s your life, Ari. Your decisions. I have not been a father to you.”
    “You haven’t been a father to me because you couldn’t. Not because you didn’t want to. You do have input here. It matters to me, what you think.”
    He took a drink of his sweet tea and then cleared his throat.
    “Sebastian’s her grandson ,” I stressed. “It doesn’t bother you that her blood runs through his veins?”
    He studied me for a long moment in that calm way of his. “No. It doesn’t. I watched him suffer at the hands of Athena for nights on end, watched him annihilate her minions and carry you to safety. It’s actions that matter. Not the blood that runs through one’s veins. Or the curse. Your mother taught me that. She was young, but she had the wisdom of an old soul. I only saw the danger she posed to the gods until she set me straight.”
    When he put it like that . . . I liked knowing my mother had changed him and made him a better person.
    Our appetizer arrived. I picked up a fried calamari, my appetite returning. “I’m glad we did this.”
    “So am I. Once a week, dinner here, sound good to you?”
    I chewed through my grin and nodded.
    He tried to suppress a smile of his own, but it came anyway. He chuckled. My father was really good-looking, but when he smiled and that smile went all the way to his eyes, he was striking.That realization made me feel a little proprietary. I glanced around the restaurant and noticed not one, but two women casting glances his way. Yeah, good luck with that, ladies. He’s not interested. Not now, anyway . I wanted him to be happy and not alone. But this was our time; our time to make up for the lost years and get to know each other.
    “What makes you frown?” he asked.
    I shook my head, “Nothing.” I popped another calamari into my mouth.
    My nervousness had disappeared, wiped away by what we shared, by a bond that was Eleni Selkirk, and the betrayals we’d both faced at the hands of the same two people. It always came back to Athena and Josephine.
    “I met a witch. Out in the bayou.” I proceeded to tell him the entire story, including everything I knew about the Hands of Zeus, and that the handless statue in Athena’s temple was really the god himself frozen in stone. My father didn’t seem surprised by any of it.
    “Were you there when it all went down, when Athena went to war with Zeus?” I asked.
    “No. It was before my time. My grandfather, however, was. I heard stories, tales of how Athena was in the old days. She cared about mankind, if you can believe it. All those myths they teach to humans about her were true. But like many old gods, she’schanged since then. Slowly. Over millennia, she became jaded by mankind’s greed and wars and vices. But she was still fundamentally good. Athena did have a child. Only her inner circle knew of this. My grandfather was her hunter at the time, so he was part of that circle. This was in the tenth century, right before the War of the Pantheons.”
    Our food arrived. I added a little hot sauce over my oyster plate as my father grabbed his burger and took a bite. I gestured for him to continue the story.
    “Anesidora—Pandora, as legend calls her—prophesied that the child would one day bring down the king of the gods and start something called the Blood Wars. Word reached Zeus, and he did what he’s always done: He protected his position. He took the child from Athena. That’s what started the War of the Pantheons, which might be the same as the Blood Wars that Dora prophesied. Athena sent the gorgon after Zeus. Only it didn’t go as expected, and her