“What does it look like?”
“You’ll see it when I find it.”
“But I could help -”
“Don’t. Stay behind me.”
I smarted under the bite of Ares’s brusque rejection but did as he said. I had already convinced him somehow to look for the moly out here; I needed to pick my battles sparingly. Next time, I doubted I would get away so easily with throwing another petulant outburst, and the last thing I wanted to do was truly provoke his temper and make him change his mind. If he turned around and marched me back to the lake this instant, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Not really.
Hence, my quiet complacence as I trailed after Ares, giving him a reasonable berth of a few paces so that I wasn’t treading on his heels. I glanced up at the sky every once in a while, gauging the moon’s positi
