A Tangled Web by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LUNA
Published: 2012-10-08T04:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

Demeter had absolutely refused to make Leo immortal. She had flounced off to her temple to sulk for the seven months of winter, while the rest of the gods were still celebrating the Harvest Moon feast at the mouth of Hades’s realm.

Once she was well gone, Hecate appeared in her customary puff of blue smoke, this time without her dogs, but with a large amphora dangling from one hand as if it weighed nothing. Bru greeted her with a grin, Leo with a matching one.

“Stubborn woman,” Hecate muttered. “Well. As I told you both, thanks to Hades’s helmet, I was able to watch her when she was working the magic to make that little mortal child an immortal. I tried it out on that little lad Zeus kidnapped for a cupbearer, so I know it works. This is why I was making sure you never ate anything but ambrosia for the last five months.” She eyed Leo suspiciously. “Please tell me you obeyed my order to the letter.”

“I swear!” Leo protested. “Lady, I know how The Tradition works, and if you wanted me to eat nothing but ambrosia, then there had to be a good reason for it.”

Hecate sighed with relief. “All right, the last part is this.” She heaved the amphora at him. It definitely was much heavier than it had looked. Leo caught it with a grunt. “Come with me, we need privacy for this.”

Without any preamble, the blue smoke enveloped all three of them, and when it cleared, they were in a windowless chamber that held a very comfortable-looking couch and a central hearth on which a fire burned. There was a good supply of firewood next to it. Leo smiled. Things were already improving.

“Now, Leo, you get completely undressed and bathe yourself in the nectar in that amphora.”

He waited. Hecate showed no signs of vanishing.

“Ah—a little privacy?” he begged.

She snorted. “Mortal, you have absolutely nothing I haven’t seen before, and nothing I am interested in. Strip. Bathe.”

Feeling his manhood withering under her gaze, Leo meekly did as he was told, covering himself in the sticky nectar. Which would have been very, very nice if Bru was going to lick it off, but with Hecate standing there looking like the incarnation of his disapproving old nurse, was less than erotic.

“Now go sit down in the fire,” Hecate ordered. “Or lie down, you might as well. You’re going to be there all night.”

“What?” Leo yelped.

“And every night for the next month.”

“WHAT?”

She tapped her foot impatiently. “Do you want to be immortal or not? By Kronos’s severed goolies, I didn’t get this much fuss and protest out of little Ganymede, and here you are a fully grown man! Bru will tend the fire, you’ll toast in it all night long while I recite the spells. It will take thirty nights to burn the mortality out of you. That’s how it is.”

Leo’s heart sank. It had been almost a whole year, and he had not wanted to spend his first night with his beloved separated by ten feet of pavement and a fire.

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