Tuck had been dead a week. He'd been gone a week, and it had been a nightmare, but his name was alive and kicking on the page and on the screen, read and watched by mortals every day, so even if he hadn't come back pretty, he'd come back fast. Much, he'd had it worse, he'd lost a good half of a year, and that was chilling enough, but—
Nine months.
And if he took the time to rationalise it, maybe it made some sense, because there were a lot of Greeks and the Muses might be the ones who inspired the stories but they didn't tend to get a starring role, but— but she was a goddess. And gods didn't... they always seemed more...
(But he knew that wasn't true. He'd seen the scars on her back. She'd confided her fear and her pain. God was just another word for immortal, and immortal was not the same as indestructible.)
Oh, Jesus.
She'd been so calm when he'd told her about the Sheriff. She hadn't blinked. He'd told her what the Sheriff had done to him, to his friends; what he feared in the pit of his gut the Sheriff would do to her. And she'd looked him in the eye and said I choose to stay, even knowing...
Will gripped the side of a pew. Standing upright suddenly seemed to take more focus than he could manage. He sat, heavily, and rubbed a hand across his face. "I didn't know," he said quietly.