Chapter 8 #2
Another screech—this one different, almost shocked—sounds from the Nightmare at my side.
At first, I think it’s because of me, but then I realize that it’s looking behind me with those eyeless sockets. Then it drops to its belly on the ground, trying to scoot away, like it’s hiding.
I jerk around to see what it’s hiding from. Another one of those red crystal things is coming at me fast. I get a better look at it this time—glittering in a deep red sheen of jagged minerals, like a bloody gash ripping through reality. Bypassing the Nightmare, it swallows me whole.
In the next instant, after a new round of silence and blurring red, I’m standing in Hades’ office in our penthouse.
The shock is followed by a rush of relief that is like diving into the bracing cold of the Pacific Ocean. My hands fly up over my mouth as I stare around me at the familiar space.
Wait. Is this real? Or another Nightmare illusion? Is Hestia trying again? She got my deepest desire wrong and is trying to fool me again.
But this isn’t hazy like before. No rose-colored sheen to it. No pain in my head when I think of him or anything that was real. Which means this is real. I’m actually here in the penthouse. Just like I was in the water garden with Hades.
No fucking clue how. Or maybe all of this is a glamour. One giant hallucination.
Only…I can smell the bitter chocolate of him. Faint but here. My body lights up at the familiar scent.
This is real.
It feels like yesterday when I woke in his bed, the scent of him all over my body. Or like he’ll show up any second, stealing his arms around me from behind, feathering his lips over the curve of my neck. Coaxing. Teasing. Calling me his star. Making me burn.
I run toward the door.
“Hades!” I call out. “Hades—” I stop mid-step and stare at something that is…definitely wrong.
A chill slithers through me, stealing all the warmth of his scent from the room.
I’m facing his trophy wall. That’s what I call it. It’s a wall of glass shelves, brightly lit to show off the antiquities he’s collected through the years. Including…
“That’s not possible.” The words scratch in my throat.
Because a matched set of weapons is displayed inside—two axes with golden handles, the bottom halves of which are wrapped in turquoise leather.
The blades are silver with golden markings.
A circle with a symbol of Odin’s head divides the larger axe blade from a smaller one on the backside that’s shaped more like a tip of a spear. There are other symbols. Norse.
A gift from Odin to Cronos’ eldest child.
Our axes. Mine now.
Stripped from me when I entered Tartarus.
My hands start to shake. Did Hades put them here after I disappeared? I haven’t been gone that long. Have I? He wouldn’t give up on me so fast. He couldn’t.
Forcing my trembling fingers to work, I open the case but only have time to lift one of the axes before a shimmer of glittering red light catches my eye and the crystalline form passes over me again.
After another freaky soundless second, I find myself back in the rock pit with the Nightmares.
It’s like I didn’t leave at all. One is still cowering on the ground, and the other is holding Boone in the air.
The one closest to me springs to its feet and reaches for me.
I don’t hesitate, slamming the handle end of the axe into the side of its face. The creature crumples to the ground in a heap of long limbs. Not dead, though. I don’t think. They’re stuck down here just like me. I won’t kill them unless I have no choice.
Across the room, the Nightmare holding Boone aloft screams so horrifically I want to put my hands over my ears, but I can’t.
It goes to break Boone over its knee, and, in that split second, I hurl my axe at it.
I swear I hear the whomp, whomp, whomp as it turns end over end in the air before striking the Nightmare in the shoulder, lodging deep with a sickening crunch and suck of bone and blood and flesh that I can hear from across the chamber.
Throwing axes is the only thing I got any good at as a thief, so I hit exactly where I aimed. Not a kill shot.
The Nightmare stands there, still holding Boone in the air and staring at me with its creepy-as-sin blanks for eyes for a long second before it collapses.
Boone manages to roll away from the thing, coming to his feet in an enviably slick move, then hops out of the way as fuchsia-colored blood leaks from the wound I made in the Nightmare’s shoulder, pooling on the ground. Not dead but wounded enough to stop it.
Boone yanks the axe out and runs to my side, handing over my weapon and taking up a position at my back.
“They can’t be the only ones,” I say.
Boone doesn’t bother to argue. We turn in slow circles, looking up into the darkness, waiting for more of those things to come at us.
But they don’t.
Instead, a slow clap has both of us crouching tensely and looking behind us toward the curved back wall of the pie-shaped space.
There, where solid rock used to be, an archway intricately carved with all the symbols of Hestia—a heart and fireplace, a chaste tree, and a kettle—parts the wall.
And on the other side, in another massive room, stand a number of people lined up in a semicircle.
Cronos isn’t with them, but I can take a decent guess at who they are.
The Titans of Tartarus.
The rest of them.