Pandora’s Claws (The Forbidden Gate #3)

Chapter 1

ONE

Aria

The air didn't split. It shattered.

One heartbeat, Athena was a lounging silhouette of arrogance on a fallen column. The next, she was a blur of starlight and lethal movement, erasing the distance between herself and Kaelen.

There was no sound of footfalls, no intake of breath. Just the sudden, sickening crack of her spear meeting Kaelen’s blade.

The impact sent a shockwave through the plaza that vibrated through me. Kaelen skidded backward, his boots carving deep furrows into the pristine marble floor. His sword, wreathed in black and gold fire, held the strike, but the sheer kinetic force of the goddess buckled his knees.

"Sluggish," Athena critiqued, her voice calm amidst the screech of divine metal grinding against divine metal. She twisted her wrist, a movement so subtle it was almost invisible.

Kaelen roared, a sound of blast furnaces and collapsing mines, as he was flung sideways. He crashed through a statue of Hermes, reducing the stone messenger to gravel.

"Kaelen!" The scream tore from my throat, raw and panicked.

The bond in my chest spiked with his pain, a sharp, hot jolt to the ribs, followed immediately by a surge of his fury. He wasn't broken; he was just getting started.

Athena didn't pursue him. She spun on her heel, her grey eyes locking onto Flynn, who was already mid-air, daggers drawn, aiming for the gap in her armor at the neck.

She didn't even look up. She simply raised her elbow.

Flynn slammed into an invisible barrier of force a fraction of an inch from her skin. The air rippled like a stone hitting a pond. The impact stopped his momentum dead, leaving him suspended for a heart-stopping second.

"Predictable," she murmured.

She backhanded him, and Flynn was launched across the plaza as if fired from a cannon, skipping off the white stone once, twice, before slamming into the base of a dry fountain.

"Spread out!" Elias shouted, his voice layered with the harmonic resonance of prophecy. "She sees the strike before the muscle twitches! Do not engage in linear patterns!"

The Phoenix Prince unleashed a wave of turquoise fire, not a direct attack, but a suppressing wall meant to blind her.

Athena walked through it. The fire parted around her armor of woven starlight like water around the prow of a ship. She looked bored.

"Elias," she sighed, flicking a finger. A bolt of white light, thin as a needle, shot from her fingertip. It pierced Elias’s shoulder, spinning him around. "Still trying to solve chaos with algebra."

She turned her gaze to me.

The weight of it was physical. It felt like the atmospheric pressure dropping before a hurricane. Those grey eyes dissected me, peeling back the layers of armor, skin, and magic to evaluate the mortal girl beneath.

"And you," she said, taking a step toward me. Her spear tip lowered, pointing at my heart. "The anomaly. The open door."

Thane stepped in front of me. He didn't rush. He moved with the tectonic inevitability of a mudslide, planting his massive feet and raising his war hammer. A wall of earth magic, brown and dense, rose from the marble floor to shield us.

"You will not touch her," Thane rumbled.

Athena paused. For the first time, a flicker of something like respect, or perhaps just amusement at the novelty, touched her lips.

"The Bear," she mused. "The only one of my brothers who understood that sometimes, the smartest move is not to play. Why start now, Thane? You know you can’t win. You are a beast in a suit of armor; I am a fundamental concept of the universe."

"Because she chose me," Thane said simply.

He swung the hammer. It wasn't a clumsy strike; it was an earth-shattering blow aimed at the ground beneath her feet.

The marble exploded. Shards of stone the size of tower shields erupted upward, aimed at Athena’s face.

She danced. There was no other word for it. She stepped onto a piece of flying debris, using it as a platform, leaping over the shockwave with graceful, terrifying ease. She landed lightly behind Thane.

"Sentiment," she said, driving the butt of her spear into the back of his knee.

Thane’s leg buckled. He went down on one knee with a grunt that I felt in my own bones.

"Is a tactical error."

She raised the spear to strike the back of his neck.

"No!"

I didn't think. I reacted.

I didn't reach for a weapon, there was no time, instead I reached for the bond, grabbing the golden threads connecting me to the four of them, and I yanked. I pulled on Kaelen’s rage, Flynn’s speed, Elias’s vision, and Thane’s endurance, funneling it all into a single point of focus.

I thrust my hand forward.

I didn't cast fire or lightning. I cast Void.

Be Not.

The command ripped through the air, a sphere of distortion that warped the light.

It hit Athena.

She didn't crumble to dust. She was a goddess; her reality was too dense to be easily unmade.

But her armor, the woven starlight she wore, flickered.

For a split second, the divine protection failed, creating a gap in her perfection.

The force of the blast shoved her backward, her boots sliding screeching across the stone.

She stumbled.

It was a small thing. A loss of balance that lasted barely a second. But in a battle of gods, a second was an eternity.

"Now!" I screamed, the voice harmonized, five throats speaking as one.

Kaelen crashed into her from the left, his sword engulfed in black flame. He struck the spot where her armor flickered. Metal shrieked.

Flynn was there an instant later, appearing from the shadows of the ruin, driving a dagger into the joint of her armor at the hip.

Elias clapped his hands, and the gravity around Athena doubled, pinning her to the spot.

Thane roared, surging up from his knee, swinging the hammer upward in an uppercut that caught her shield arm.

Athena grunted, the first sound of effort she had made. She was knocked airborne, tumbling backward. She twisted in mid-air, landing in a crouch twenty feet away.

She stood up slowly. There was a scratch on her cheek, oozing glowing gold ichor. Her armor was smoking where Kaelen had struck.

She wiped the blood from her face, looking at it on her finger.

Then she smiled.

It wasn't the cold, mocking smile from before. This was sharp. Enthusiastic. It was the smile of the Goddess of War finding a worthy opponent.

"Better," she said, her voice ringing clear over the sound of the disintegration storm on the horizon. "Much better. You’ve learned to coordinate. The pack is hunting the lion."

She spun her spear, the weapon humming with a pitch that made my teeth ache.

"But you are fighting like mortals," she said. "You are fighting with limbs and steel. Look around you, little fools. Look at where you are."

She slammed the butt of her spear into the ground.

The plaza shifted.

It wasn't magic; it was command over the architecture. The marble floor rippled like a rug being shaken. Columns toppled, not randomly, but aiming for us. The statues of the gods animated, dragging themselves from their pedestals with grinding, stony groans.

"This is Olympus," Athena declared, rising into the air on a platform of levitating debris. "The very stones obey the blood of Cronus. You are intruders in a living organism that wants you expelled."

A statue of Zeus, massive and headless, swung a marble fist the size of a carriage at me.

I ducked, not because I saw it, but because Flynn felt it. His warning spiked in my mind, a jagged impulse of DOWN. Kaelen’s fire surged in my veins, shielding me from the spray of stone fragments as the fist pulverized the ground where I had been standing.

"She’s turning the terrain," Kaelen roared, slicing a stone arm in half with his blade. "We need to get off the ground!"

"And go where?" Flynn shouted, leaping onto the back of a marble lion that was trying to eat him. He stabbed it repeatedly in the stony neck. "The sky is eating the city!"

He faced the horizon. The vortex of black nothingness, the Devourer’s influence, was closer now. The red lightning was striking with increased frequency, chewing through the outer districts of the High Seat.

"To the palace!" I yelled, pointing at the massive golden doors Athena had emerged from. "If she’s guarding it, that means Hera is inside!"

"Guard?" Athena laughed from above. She threw her spear.

It split into three bolts of lightning in mid-air.

Thane caught one on his shield, staggering. Kaelen deflected another. The third was aiming straight for me.

In my mind, there was no time for weapons. All I had was the bond, so I pulled on Elias’ power. Future.

I saw the path of the bolt a split second before it happened. I stepped to the left. The lightning scorched the air where my ear had been, smelling of ozone and singed hair.

Reaching out, I grabbed the bolt as it passed.

It burned. It seared the leather of Hades’s gloves, biting into my skin with the heat of a thousand suns. But I held it. I channeled the energy, feeding it into the Dragon’s fire in my blood, transmuting the attack into fuel.

I wound up and threw it back.

"Return to sender!" I screamed.

The bolt flew back at Athena, tinged with black dragon-fire. She caught it effortlessly, but the force of it pushed her hovering platform backward. Her eyebrows rose.

"Spicy," she commented.

"We need a distraction," I gasped, the effort of redirecting divine energy leaving me momentarily winded. The bond was humming, feeding me strength, but the cost was high. I felt hollowed out, refilled, and hollowed out again in rapid succession.

"I have an idea," Kaelen said through the bond. His mental voice was cold, strategic. Elias. Can you collapse the support structures of the hanging gardens?

The structural integrity is already compromised by the void-storm, Elias replied, his thoughts swift and fluid. A targeted strike at the third pillar would bring the entire southern terrace down.

Do it, Kaelen commanded. Flynn, harry her left side. Keep her shield up. Thane, get Aria to the doors.

On it, Flynn snarled.