“You didn’t see this coming?” Hermes smirked. “Aren’t you supposed to be the Goddess of Foresight?”

When she turned her level stare upon him, he smothered that smirk with a cough. “When next we meet,” she said, low and deadly, “I will share what I foresee for you.”

“I, uh… was only teasing.” He swallowed hard. “Only teasing…”

“And that is why I haven’t found it necessary to hurt you. Yet.” Her sword cut the air in front of Hermes’s nose. To his credit he did not flinch. Much.

She gathered herself, and with a twitch of will she burst from the chamber, leaving Hermes gaping owlishly behind her. At the speed of thought, Athena descended from Mount Olympus to the rain-lashed cliffs. She arrived as Kratos hurtled into the ragged clouds below.

The messenger had had the right of it. She’d had no inkling that suicide would be the end of Kratos’s story. How could she have been so blind? How could Zeus have let this happen?

More important: How could Kratos be so disobedient?

The Grave of Ships, she thought. That’s where Kratos’s fall had really begun. It had to be. The Grave of Ships in the Aegean Sea…

ONE

THE ENTIRE SHIP GROANED and shuddered, lurching upward into the fierce winter squall as though it had struck unexpected shoals here in the Aegean’s deepest reach. Kratos threw his arms around the statue of Athena at the prow of his battered ship, lips peeling from his teeth in an animal snarl. Above, on the mainmast, the last of the ship’s square sails boomed and cracked in the gale like the detonation of a nearby thunderbolt. A huge flock of filthy, emaciated creatures like hideous women with the wings of bats swooped and wheeled above the mast, screaming rage and lust for the blood of men.

“Harpies,” Kratos growled. He hated harpies.

A pair of the winged monsters shrieked above the wind’s howl as they dove to slash at the sail with their blood-crusted talons.