Chapter Seventy-Five
Persephone
Explosions peppered the air between screams of the terrified and the injured, crumbling and decimating entire walls of House Hades.
Fire melted the very cobblestones I had traipsed over even earlier today.
I paused, sweat slickening my clothes to my back.
Apparently, hellfire from a demon was hot enough to melt stone.
But the scars being carved into the walls of House Hades didn’t lie, didn’t exaggerate the violence surrounding us. Every brick, every petal, every dead tree choked under a paste of ash and blood and ichor as we careened through the halls, weapons drawn and magic primed.
Shades and nymphs alike ran past us with eyes rimmed with panic.
Aristocrats of the Underworld and its see through servants rushed through the halls, all running for their lives and afterlives. And it didn’t take long to see why when we raced outside the walls of House Hades to the rear lawn where we finally glimpsed the sky.
Earlier, the break in the sky was small. A paper cut to the overcast sky.
Now, a garish open wound slashed the atmosphere.
The sky fissured, a crack like glass fractured the sky, discoloring its usual overcast with an ugly red stain against the darkening horizon.
The green light of the Styx combined with the red from above dazzled my brain in all its wrongness, but it was a short-lived affliction. Things fell from the sky in droves, birthed from the crack above. Serpentine demons with a myriad of weapons—
—No. I blinked, focusing. They weren’t holding blades at all.
Blades, maces, axes, all fused directly, horrifyingly, into sinew and bone.
One dragged a chain that disappeared into its neck.
Some had extra limbs attached wrong, like they were broken and reset incorrectly.
Another didn’t have claws where it should have, but ragged hooks split the knuckles in a bloody array, some clicking together like teeth of a starved animal readying for a feast. Carrion birds flew in an combined arial assault, awash in black flame.
Skeletons swathed through with their forearms sharpened with blacksmith precision.
“Cut them down. Leave none alive!” Hades’ command came as he raised his bident overhead as the demons spotted us, roars descending over us all.
His face was grim when turned to Hecate.
“Suture that fissure. Get it closed.” She was gone with a nod and a flourish of moonlight, disappearing as she does and reappearing near the rift.
He called to all of us as we braced ourselves for the first wave to hit, only seconds out. “Protect Hecate!”
Ares cackled maniacally, launching himself into an all-out charge against the nearest demon, a horrid combination of leathery skin, metallic claws, and bloody fur. “Finally, a meeting worth attending!” His axe swung in gleaming arcs, blood spraying immediately, pairing with monstrous screams.
Hades’ smile was sinister, and every bit as terrifying as the cleave in the sky.
The bident pulsed, reverberating to the Styx.
The green water churned in a great circle, lazily at first but gaining momentum with each cycle.
“Scylla!” he commanded. I balked—having seen no sign of the beast in my time here, I’d thought her a myth. “Your feast awaits you!”
“The Scylla is real?” I remember him vaguely threatening to leave Minthe in its clasp, but I’d forgotten about that.
Now, as the green waters of the Styx turned turbulent, as two of several dragon-like heads peeked from the water I knew I had questions.
Questions that were cut short when Hades shoved something warm into my hands.
My lips parted on a gasp. The shadow bident.
Just like he gave to me in Olympus. “Also, what am I supposed to do with this?”
Hades launched his bident over my shoulder, impaling a screaming ogre. “The pointy ends go in the other guy!”
“But it’s shadow!” It felt corporeal enough even as I said it.
I could grip it. I swung on instinct more than skill as a snake with poison dripping from its fangs and horrific, blood-red eyes shot towards me, my eyebrows raising as the shadows sliced through its hissing neck.
Bile surged into my throat, my stomach threatening to release my breakfast.
“Your powers of observation are really quite astounding.” Hades dispatched another skeletal monstrosity straight out of mortal nightmares in a spray of black ichor that resembled ink.
“When this is over, remind me to smack you. Preferably with your pitchfork.”
“It’s. A. Bident!” Hades’ hearty laugh sounded just as another chorus of screams did. His bident sliced the air, ending three demons in one cleverly placed stroke.
“Fall, wretches!” Zeus streaked the sky with lightning, sending splinters of it at clusters of winged fiends and turning them to dust that drifted into the green waters of the Styx.
The Scylla roared, each of her six heads garishly gnashing at her fiery, airborne prey with her rows of needle-like teeth.
I drove the bident through another demon, and another. Hades remained ever at my back, carving and swathing his way through each adversary like a dance. The ground became slippery with blood and ichor, and it was hard to keep our footing.
Two winged demons dove, talons sinking deep into the shoulder of Athena before she could strike them off.
She roared in pain, staggering as Zeus cut them down, just in time for a cut to appear across Athena’s cheek.
Despite the blood loss, the goddess of war and wisdom did not falter.
Her spear slashed and parried, sending more demons to the abyss, as if her pain only spurred her on, methodical and furious.
Hecate smiled viciously at all who dared come near her, pausing in her mission with a look that could only instill terror. Her staccato laughter backdropped the battle as we fought. “Let’s play.”
Her magic flared to life, erupting into an army of spectral hounds, tearing into any demons stupid enough to take her on and taking no damage as their prey fought for their lives, buying her more time to sew the wound in the barrier shut in a flurry of sparks and shadows.
Cerberus, more massive than I’d ever seen him, easily twice the size of my home back in the mortal realm, lashed out with all three heads, destroying each assailant as they broke through the barrier.
I growled. If anyone hurt that dog, it would be the very last thing they did.
A crackling rumble shook the ground, my feet struggling to find purchase between the vibrations and the thick layer of ichor coating the lawn.
I glanced to the source; a stone staircase winding around a turret collapsed, demons below crushed beneath the weight of the stone.
Athena stood atop it all, triumph shining in her eyes.
More explosions shot stone and debris up when lightning struck, sending everything in stark contrasts of white and black for a moment.
More battle cries came from the tear despite Hecate’s efforts to suture it.
More fire, more monsters came through like blood coursing from an open wound.
The piles of ash and blood became impossible to find purchase through.
A scream, far too familiar and pain-filled, rent the space, rising above all others.
A scream that turned my blood to ice. I turned, following the sound through the fray of bloody, flailing bodies to glimpse Mother skewered through the shoulder, falling to her knees.
Her cries echoed in my ears. The world shrank down to a needlepoint as I watched the demon lift its blade, eyes glinting triumphantly.
My hand rose before I consciously made the decision to do so, vines bursting from the cracks in the stone floor, thorned and dripping with poison.
They seized the demon, tearing it apart in midair, raining blood and gore down around Mother.
When I reached her, seeing her wounded shoulder and the blood that poured from it, my wrath settled over me like the quiet after a scream, where all sharpens rather than fades.
There was too much unsaid between her and I. She would not die now.
I would not allow it.
She slashed her sickle through another demon that dared to get too close, eyes wide. “Persephone!”