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new look as distinguished. Wasn’t that how women often described men with gray in their hair and lines on their faces? Of course, those men weren’t scarred and less than handsome to begin with.
    He studied the silver at his temples. Thankfully, his hair remained mostly dark brown, the tight curls only streaked with occasional gray. And at least he still had hair! That was more than might be said for many men in their forties. If he was in his forties—how could you actually mark your age progression when you were nearing twenty-six hundred years? If he had to guess, he appeared some five or six years older than he had at the day’s outset, before Ares had touched him with his vile cloak.
    Old. He’d been old for so long. Ares had merely worked his dark power to reveal that plain fact. With a last look in the mirror, he wondered what he would see the next time he gazed in its reflective surface. The thought made his hands tremble as he reached for the doorknob.
     
    Daphne stood on the edge of Eros’s eternal pool, watching red rose petals drift lazily toward a waterfall on the far side of the water. Eros leaned against the smooth rocks that lined the pool’s edge, shoulder deep in the magical waters. His long blond ponytail floated behind him, and his face glowed with the pool’s mystical power.
    She’d not known where to go at first, after leaving Leonidas. So she’d come to Mount Olympus and wandered the rocky trails, thinking. Knowing there had to be a way to help Leonidas, she could only return to him, really, with some solution. He’d been furiously hurt with her—even as he’d then apologized, begging her to stay. But she understood his wrath and sense of betrayal. She should have told him months ago, but a part of her had been ashamed that her own flesh and blood could be so monstrous, and equally afraid that if she told Leonidas, then Ares would strike him down immediately.
    All those decisions had been mistakes, but she could rectify things now by offering solutions. That was why she’d come to Olympus, knowing that if an answer to Leo’s plight existed, it would be here.
    Among the pantheon of gods there were only two whose assistance she might realistically hope to obtain. The first was Eros. He was the god of love, after all, and as Ares’s son, he naturally worked at cross-purposes to his father’s warring nature. And Eros doted on her because she’d always been kind to him, defending him to Ares who held his son in disdain.
    The second god who might help them was far more of a mystery to her, even though he was the one she’d always served as a Delphic Oracle. Apollo was remote, usually unreachable at the high peak of Olympus, his palace invisible, his moods inscrutable. She knew, as had all the Oracles throughout the ages, that Apollo safeguarded his own, that no one dared touch or harm the Daughters of Delphi without fearing his punishment. But what she did not know was how to gain an audience with him, especially being only a demigoddess and half human, so much less than the mighty Apollo. Truthfully, she’d always been enamored of his mystique and indomitable supremacy, but also too intimidated by him to engage in more than the simplest syllables when in his presence.
    So Eros had been her most logical choice. He’d helped them all recently, when Ari’s beloved Juliana had been bound to a demon—and he’d given Juliana immortal life by allowing her to swim in this powerful reflecting pool.
    She came here now hoping that Eros would offer the same healing salve to Leonidas. He smiled up at her lazily, seeming—if she honestly admitted it—almost half-drunk off the pool’s magic. His eyes were a bit dazed, his smile a bit too languid.
    “Aunt Daphne,” he purred, sliding deeper into the water. “What a pleasure ! But why are you here, and not with your beloved?” His grin broadened, his eyes drifting shut. “That love you share with the king is divine. A true thing of beauty. If