Chapter 36
Time & Time Again
LYRA
I lie on the stone floor under a glamoured blanket, my head on a glamoured pillow, staring at the rock ceiling overhead.
When I asked about glamoured beds, the Titans only said that they try to save their powers.
I didn’t know we could run out. But when I asked about it, they hedged.
More secrets they can’t share, apparently.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I pull my pillow over my head and try to force away the spinning, yapping thoughts.
Not that it helps.
In my sightless and muffled state, I don’t know what alerts me that something is off. The silence changes. Turns oppressive.
Slowly, I lift the pillow just in time to see the crack of broken time disappear, leaving me in a small, open field in a forest. Those shards are coming for me. It really feels like it, like they have an agenda of some sort.
Who in the name of the gods is controlling them, though, if not Cronos?
I scramble to my feet.
Or try to.
The concussion of an explosion blows me back off them before I’m even upright. It takes a second of crawling around, coughing in the dust and debris that blew up around me. But I eventually manage to gain my feet again and get out of the clouded air.
And the first thing I see when I do is a perfect sunset sky, all pinks and oranges and purples, and one of the hecatoncheires—the hundred-handed ones—as she hurls bodies into that beautiful sky.
And by bodies…I mean it in the truest sense of the word.
Another boom blasts somewhere nearby, and I duck even as I watch whoever she hurled shoot like rockets toward the ground, then wince when, obscured by trees and hills beyond, the earth spits more dirt and rocks straight up in the air with those pour souls’ impact.
“Ouch,” I mutter. “I hope to Hades those were not mortals.”
Or they’ll be seeing him soon.
The only warning I get before lightning cuts across the field is the strangest sensation, more familiar after today’s training—an electric ripple over my skin.
“Drop!” someone yells. A familiar voice.
I don’t look, hitting the deck flat on my stomach, and I reach for my axe as fire blasts overhead from the mouth of a chimera at Zeus’ side. I’ve strapped it to the leg sheath that held the curved knife during Hades’ Lock.
The flames stop midair directly overhead, like the blaze hit an invisible wall.
Almost as if something is sucking it out of the chimera, hovering in the air overhead and pulling it into themselves.
The fire is extinguished a little at a time.
When the intense heat lets up, I look straight up into the pristine blue eyes of a man standing so close I could grab his foot.
“Cronos,” I whisper.
A younger Cronos, though not as young as when I saw him with his family, I think. He’s started to grow the beard, but there’s no silver in his hair yet.
The Titan’s eyes widen when he sees me. “You.” The single word comes out almost as an accusation.
Me?
Given his state of dress—quite ancient in design, as far as I can tell—I’m pretty sure we’ve never met at this point in his life.
Whenever this is. Some point between that family scene and when he was thrown into Tartarus, I assume.
Unless he saw me when I witnessed him with his family during that visit to the past. But I don’t think he did.
Did Hades tell his father?
Cronos sounds so much like Hades did that day, hard and suspicious, that I feel a tremulous smile try to take hold. It disappears when he says, “You saved my son.”
What in the name of all things Olympus and the Underworld is he talking about?
Saved his son? Which one? When? Oh my gods. Is that why Hades thought I was a guardian angel? That’s what he said, when I met the teenage him.
Don’t tell them anything.
“Whoever you are, you may have to save me this day,” Cronos says. “From—”
Lightning slams into the Titan’s chest, catapulting him high into the air and miles away, his shout lost in the wind and distance.