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send the vase flying.
    I dive for it, launching myself full-body across the marble floor, arms outstretched and reaching desperately for the fragile vase. I won’t make it. Hematheos instinct kicks in and I try to neofacture a huge feather pillow before the vase hits the floor. But no pillow materializes in the powers-free Mount Olympus. I watch helplessly as the vase falls to the floor. Then, two inches from impact, it bounceslike it hit something soft and then rolls across the air. I lay there, frozen, my heart pounding.
    Yet another supernatural protection—the gods must really love their art.
    I’m lucky. If this thing had shattered into a million pieces, there’s no way I get out of here without being detected.
    â€œNice move,” I mutter to myself.
    Jumping back to my feet, I dust off my bruised ego and then reach for the vase. As I lift it off the invisible cushion, something rattles around in the base.
    I grin.
    I turn the vase upside down and almost laugh when a shiny golden egg rolls out onto the invisible cushion. I set the vase back on its perch, careful to make sure it’s facing the same way—the gods are notoriously anal about their objects—and then snatch the egg off the air.
    It’s a little tarnished after a decade in a vase, but it’s still a pretty thing.
    The egg goes a little blurry and, as I squint to clear the vision, I realize it’s not the egg. It’s my eyes. A renegade sheen of tears is blurring my sight.
    No way. Shoving the unwelcome emotion aside, I jam the egg into my pocket and take a deep breath. Just like the egg, Griffin and I used to be shiny. We used to have all the promise of a bright future, but the gods took that away from us.
    I refuse to let things stay as they are. All the egg needs is a little polish. All Griffin and I need is to undo that moment in the past. And I’m going to make that happen for both of us.
    Hurrying down the hall, I find myself on autopilot to Zeus’s chamber. Three right turns and one to the left. Last door at the end.
    I break into a jog—come on, like I’m gonna sprint? I still hate running—and quietly push open the door without stopping to think. But as I slip inside, I know I should have held back a little on the impulse.
    There, twenty feet across the room, bent over a huge stack of scrolls on his massive marble desk, is Zeus. My great-grandfather.
    My heart feels like it wants to pound right out of my rib cage, up my throat, out my mouth, and onto the marble floor at my feet. I can’t breathe. For at least thirty seconds, I stand there utterly still, my pulse throbbing in my ears, and not even daring to take a breath.
    Part of it is the fear of getting caught, sure. I mean, here I am in the office of the king of the gods and he is sitting right there ! Getting caught could mean more than a simple banishment. Troy would have to search the four corners of the earth to find all the pieces.
    But the other part—probably the bigger part at this point—is seeing my great-grandfather. I haven’t seen or heard from him since the day we were sent from Olympus. It was like he disowned me when they banished us.
    That hurt. It took me a long time to come to grips with that.
    Even if your great-grandpa is an Olympic god with hundreds, if not thousands, of grandchildren—don’t even get me started on the great-grandchildren—you still want him to bounce you on his knee. You still want him to teach you how to climb a tree or to help you do your homework.
    The official punishment, being banned from Olympus, having my parents banished and Griffin’s smoted, was bad enough. But the emotional punishment was almost worst. The little girl inside me wants to run across the room, climb onto his lap, and have him hug me and tell me everything will be okay.
    Ha, as if that would ever happen. The little girl would be forcibly removed from the palace and probably chained to a rock or