Love or Fate by Clea Hantman Page B

“Cerberus’s slobber is deathly poisonous to mortals. So you better hope you are in fact the one and only Apollo!” And then she cackled and howled so hard, it hurt Apollo’s ears.
    No problem, thought Apollo. He was a god.
    But then he had a thought.
    He might be a god, but the body he was inhabiting was all mortal.

FIFTEEN
    P olly was finishing up chore number seven: “Make jewelry out of Alek’s earwax.”
    “Done—that’s only thirty-two thousand, three hundred and thirteen left to go!” she said cheerfully, and then she frowned at how pathetic that sounded.
    Era and I were scrubbing the yellow stains out of the armpits of all the Furies’ lace tops. They had given us eyelash brushes and a small vial of baking soda to complete this task.
    “Go on, finish your story, Pol,” I said, rubbing at a particularly difficult stain. Polly had been telling us of a time when she and Mother had happened upon a lost lamb on one of their long walks through the pastures back home.
    “Well,” Polly said, shifting back into storytellingmode, “I wanted so desperately to pet it, but I knew better, so I just watched from afar. But then Mother said that it was okay, that we could take it home because it was an orphan. So she picked it up and placed it in my arms. You know, she was so gentle that lamb didn’t seem scared at all.”
    “She was gentle,” Era repeated, her eyes taking on a faraway look.
    “Gentle but strong,” I agreed. “She was kind, but she had so much strength in her. Everybody says so.”
    “Strength? Strength? That woman had about as much strength as a caterpillar!” The voice was coming from behind us.
    Polly, Era, and I turned to see that there was a fourth person in the room. It was Hera. Hera the Horrible. As if this place wasn’t bad enough already. She was wearing some tacky fur-lined bikini under a black velvet robe that barely covered her pasty white flesh. She began to laugh her horrifying cackle, the one that makes you feel like pins are burrowing into your skin with every chuckle.
    She snapped her fingers, and suddenly Meg, Alek, and Tizzie appeared beside her, looking as surprised to see Hera as we were.
    “You really need to do something with thisplace,” Hera boomed. “It’s a dump! Some drapes would be nice, wouldn’t they, Tizzie? Polly, you really should conjure some up—OH, WAIT!—you don’t have any powers!” And the cackling started all over again.
    “Seriously, though.” Hera tried to catch her breath, but she started to wheeze. “Lack of powers does not excuse poor taste. You really could have spruced up the place a little for me.” Green smoke oozed from under the impossibly long, velvety train of her cover-up as her eyes fixed on each of us, one by one, with mockery and glee.
    “Now, on to the business at hand. A little bird told me that you little weasels tried to escape. Stupid, stupid girls. Needless to say, I am not pleased, not hardly. Nor am I pleased with you three,” and she turned on the Furies a furious glare. “You’ve all interrupted my lovely vacation with Zeus. We were enjoying a seaweed wrap when I got the news. Let the responsibility of my uneven tan rest upon all your shoulders!” She swept her robe above us, indicating us all.
    Hera waited a beat or three, clearly expecting some kind of response—most likely from me, the loudmouth. My face grew tighter, and I grew angrier, but I didn’t have a clue what to say or do. Maybe I was just too beaten down and scared to come up with sassy comebacks.
    Then she continued with her yelling. She went on and on about how useless and horrid we were and how we weren’t worth the fur on her fur-lined sandals. I had to drown it all out by singing inside my head for fear that I would just explode with anger. Hadn’t she done enough to us?
    “Thalia! Thalia!” she yelled.
    I met her eyes, but still I said nothing.
    “Why so silent? I expect more from you,” she said.
    But I said nothing.
    “Meg,