In another body, some seventeen hundred years earlier, Amphitrite had spent her violence against the last in a long line of bastards once sired by her husband’s ungodly lust. The carnage, the only one of its kind at her hand, had left her feeling hollow and dejected. Much had changed since then, but some things remained the same: vengeance was the province of others in her far-flung family—Hera, chief among them.
No longer nymph or sea creature, Dimitri shrugged his shoulders and slid onto the bench beside the woman who had once been friend and sister and ally in a world of foes. “I’ve heard it said it suits me well,” he answered in a man’s smooth voice, with a man’s wandering eye. He said nothing of the author of such opinions; families were complicated structures, no more stable than a house of cards, and who could say how a mother might feel about a son's enduring hatred? “Tall and broad of shoulder, that’s me... I’d heard a rumor you went into teaching but I couldn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.”
Human eyes, but the only ones Amphitrite had left. Whatever instinct had whispered of Hera’s whereabouts belonged to a different age and scores of jagged slivers of bad memory. Still, they had been kindred spirits, once, and some affections outlasted the altitude of their high celestial perch. The two of them had met before, though not for many years.
Amphitrite inhaled a human breath and spoke with Dimitri’s voice: “I also heard you go by Katherine now. I like that; it’s a good name. A name with history. What do you teach?”