Page 35 of Wildfire

Now, she pursed her lips and stared over all of them. Her cropped hair was combed back smoothly toward the nape of her neck, and she was so imposing that Hermes didn’t notice right away that she had staff carrying weapons into the range from the archives. Lysandros, behind her, looked none too pleased about it, but he’d never been a fighter—he was just drawn to them.

“So, you all have elected to stay.” Her voice carried easily across the training room, and everyone came to a stop to listen to her. “That being the case, you deserve to know what we’re up against.”

Her tongue ran over her lips, and she caught Wilder’s eye. Hermes realized it then—she didn’t hate Wilder at all. She needed him, but not trapped in an office. She needed him training soldiers, not students. Perhaps she hadn’t foreseen this exactly, but she’d known as well as Hermes did that Wilder Pratt was wasted grading papers. He had the first gift Prometheus had given mankind—fire. He wielded it better than anyone Hermes had seen in the last century. What good was reading essays he didn’t care about next to real-world, practical training?

“There’s a monster hunting your peers—an ancient evil that’s crawled from the pits of hell to prey on mages. He’s seeking strength to feed to his master. And his name is Typhon.”

The students around scowled, but it wasn’t like ancient Greek myth was taught to every student in America. No, Olympus had turned its back on the world, and the world had done the same. But there were some old gods these children would have heard of.

“This is Hermes,” she said, waving a hand from his head, down, as if she were presenting him on Jeopardy. “No surname. Yes, that Hermes, Greek god of thieves and merchants, messenger of Olympus.”

A grin plastered itself on his face, and he shrugged. “Something like that.”

“You expect us to believe that we’re dealing with gods and ancient, primordial evil?” a girl asked, crossing her arms.

Athena cocked a brow at Hermes. She didn’t want to out herself to every student at Banneker. It would raise all sorts of questions about what kind of person, or god, was allowed to oversee the education of young magical minds. It would affect the prestige of the college. If she stayed, every decision, every conversation had about the school, would hinge on her presence there. The mortals would speculate on whether she was truly a goddess, if it was appropriate for her to teach mortals, what they could gain by impressing her. And that wasn’t what she wanted.

So for once, Hermes had to step up and be the big man in the room. The students only had to know that there was one god present to convince them of the danger they faced.

“That’s pretty much what she’s saying, yup,” Hermes said. He zipped across the room,justslow enough that they could track the movement, but too fast for a human. Too fast for a vampire.

The students spun to watch him, and he leapt up the wall. Then, just for good measure, wings flitted out the back of his shoes and he hovered in the air. “Golden son of Zeus here, pleased to meet you.”

The students stared up at him, every set of eyes wide, and for the first time in centuries, Hermes felt the thrill of being recognized, beingknown. As much as he’d wanted to avoid this whole mess, the awed attention of mortals was a hell of a drug.

“I’m here to help you fight back,” he said when he set his feet lightly back on the ground. “Typhon is old. And vicious. His skin is poison, and he’d tear his way through everybody at the school without a second’s hesitation. So, if you all are ready to work, Professor Pratt and Dean Woods can help those of you who don’t have offensive or defensive powers find a weapon that suits you, and we’ll begin.”

The Big Ham

The way Hermes grabbed attention from Dean Woods—fromAthena—was breathtaking. Wilder knew he could move faster than he’d shown them; he’d done so when he’d been in a rush to change the sheets the night they’d had sex in Wilder’s bed. But this time, he hadn’t been doing it to finish a task at speed, but to show off.

Sort of like a man who needed to constantly compete for the love of his own father. Maybe there wasn’t a lot Wilder remembered about Greek myth, but he knew damn well that a man, or even a god, with dozens of kids wasn’t paying much attention to any one of them. A little like a man who was more interested in jetting off on vacation with his wife than in anything to do with his son.

Wilder wouldn’t fool himself into thinking he’d had a hard life. He’d never wanted for anything but attention. But he thought he at least had an inkling what it was like to deal with bad parents.

Hell, Dean Woods had been more mother to him over his years at Banneker. First suggesting that he stay at the school to teach instead of going elsewhere; saying that he would be wasted on the “sloppy government military.” Then, when he struggled with his bluntness toward students, she had been more sympathetic than anyone else.

He still didn’t know why it was a good idea to lie to them about their potential, but he at least tried not to discourage them from bettering themselves anymore, even if there wasn’t much to better.

Four hours after their arrival, well into the time that should have been Wilder’s second class of the day, Dean Woods clapped her hands, and it felt like thunder. “It’s time to break for lunch. I won’t have any of you passing out from overexertion. This is going well, and I’m proud of you all. Go eat.” She waved everyone toward the door, and grateful, sweaty students filtered toward it.

From the slump of so many shoulders, the heavy breathing, they were exhausted. Wilder watched as one young man downed half a bottle of water in one go, impressed he could hold his breath that long.

“I’m better looking than him,” came Hermes’s voice from nearby.

Wilder turned to look at him, rolling his eyes. “You’re also not a student.”

With a playful sparkle in his eye, Hermes leaned in. “Oh, admit it. You wanted it.” Something hard and cold pressed into Wilder’s chest like the most welcome cool breeze off the ocean, and he looked down to find Hermes holding a bottle of water against him. His smile widened into that manic asshole smile that Wilder... was learning to like quite a lot.

“The water,” he agreed.

Hermes’s smile didn’t drop a fraction. “Sure, the water. But let’s be serious, if I offered you something a little hotter, you wouldn’t say no.”

“Stop distracting my protégé and go get him lunch, Hermes,” Dean Woods announced, loud enough for half a dozen of the last students in the room to hear it and turn to look. So Wilder wanted to die, a little, when she followed it up with, “You can have sex later if he’s amenable.”

Hermes, far from offended, snapped off a salute, and a second later he was gone.

“—really is a god,” one of the students whispered.

---