Chapter 39
Devil Of A Time
LYRA
I stand slightly to Hades’ side, and I can see the shimmer now. The veil over his face. Hades is glamoured, too.
“Mother.”
Even I flinch. So much hatred. So much rage. He doesn’t even acknowledge my presence, as though I’m insignificant, but he has to be aware that I’m here. Right? Does he not recognize me? Has the glamour made him forget me?
“Hades,” Rhea implores him. “You are bewitched. You’ve been lied to.”
His shoulders stiffen, but he does not react beyond that, still facing down Rhea. “Don’t fight me. Don’t make me harm you, Mother. Just come quietly.”
The look she gives her son is one filled with a myriad of emotions—quiet desperation, forgiveness before he’s even laid a finger on her, fear. A deep-seated fear. That rips at me the hardest. That she would fear her own son that way.
But there is also love.
I can see it in the way she raises her hand to reach out to him only to lower it again when he growls at her.
“You let him eat me,” he snarls, reminding me of a wounded animal in the woods.
His body is barely leashed, vibrating with his fury.
“I was a baby, and you let Father eat me. Eat all of us.”
Hades grows quieter with every word. More venomous. More deadly.
Rhea shakes her head. “I didn’t. Cronos didn’t—”
He cuts off Rhea’s denial with a sharp slash of his hand. “Enough, Mother. It’s over.”
His voice cracks on the word, and Rhea closes her eyes. “I will go with you,” she says. “Because the last thing a mother would ever want is for her child to regret what they did in a moment of brokenness.”
“I’m not the one who is broken.” The smoke cage lifts Rhea off the ground, drawing her closer until he can grasp her by the arm. “Where I’m taking you, you can no longer hurt your children again. Any of us.”
“No!” I cry out. Without a clue of what I’m doing, I rush forward to wrap my arms around his neck, pressing my palm to his cheek. “Don’t do this. Don’t do this.”
He’ll hate himself when he learns the truth. He’ll blame himself.
For the tiniest fraction of a second, his eyes clear and the veil that covers his face wavers.
“Lyra?” he asks, staring hard like he can’t quite see me. The veil wavers more, like fog blown by wind, and his gaze focuses on me narrowly. “What are you doing here?”
Rhea reaches out and taps her middle finger gently to the center of Hades’ forehead. “Sleep.”
Her son collapses to the ground, sliding right out of my grasp. All the smoke around her dissipates into a fine mist as he lies there, his chest moving with deep breaths.
Rhea kneels over him and brushes the white curl off his forehead with gentle fingers as tears silently slip down her cheeks.
“He used to have nightmares as a child,” she says to me quietly, never taking her gaze from his face.
“Always about the things he would have to do and be for humanity. Fears that his power would escape him and cause harm and devastation. I got very good at helping him sleep.”
She closes her eyes tightly. “Those nightmares stopped after he met you the second time.”
I have no idea which time would be the second time for him, but it doesn’t matter. I have to swallow down the sadness that tries to choke me—for her, for him. She sighs, then grasps him by the wrist. I don’t see what she’s doing at first, but then there’s…movement.
Movement on her skin. And I gasp when I see what.
My tattoos. Or not mine…but Hades’. The ones he gave me as a gift during the Crucible, to help protect me. I lost them when I entered Tartarus. His mother gave them to him, he once said.
This is when she did that? Right before he sent her to the lowest depths of the Underworld.
“They won’t live beyond the gates of what our children have built,” Rhea explains, giving a sad smile as the spider, butterfly, owl, fox, and panther obediently crawl from her skin to his.
The owl waits until last, flapping at her mistress, but Rhea just tips her chin at it, and the owl flies to her son, settling into his flesh before they all fade from view.
Then, with a sigh, the Titaness gets to her feet.
“He couldn’t see me,” I say. “Why?”
“I made sure he couldn’t. It would have broken his trust in you. My Hades has never trusted easily, and doubting you, I suspect, would be the end of something important.”
My heart beats against the cage of my ribs like a trapped thing. “Thank you,” I whisper.
The look she gives me is all things sadness and resignation. “You need to hide. This won’t last much longer. We’re losing, and we won’t fight if it means harming them.”
I know she’s right. But leaving them here to be unjustly imprisoned feels all kinds of wrong. I swallow. Hard. “Listen to me…”
How in the name of Olympus do I word this without revealing too much, without resetting time?
“If you…lose this war. If you end up somewhere you can’t get out of… I’ll come for you.” No. That’s not true. They had to drag me down there. “I’ll help you. You’ll have to convince me at first, but I’ll help you fix this. Phoebe will see.”
She’s been staring at me like I’m losing my shit, but at those words, the look in Rhea’s eyes hardens, turns into a command. “Keep your promise to me, Lyra. Help us.”
“I…will. I swear on the River Styx.”
Rhea’s eyes widen slightly.
Did I really just make an unbreakable oath to the Titans to help them?
The world has turned upside down.
Again.
It keeps doing that on me.
“Now hide,” she says. “Far from here.”
I close my eyes and think of the only place I can go right now. Hopefully everyone is busy with this war and it’s empty at the moment.
Also…hopefully I can get that far on my own.
This time, teleportation comes easily and without the tingling surge, as if finally manifesting my power over glamours means I have more control overall.
I picture where I want to go, and almost instantly, the cacophony of battle goes dead silent and a perfect breeze drifts across my skin.
I open my eyes to find myself in the Underworld, staring at Hades’ castle-like home in the subterranean mountains.
It is smaller than the version I know in the future.
Different. Fewer wings and turrets, more ancient in style.
“Water gardens,” I whisper.
Not quite the size and extent of what I know so many centuries from now. But he’s started creating the water gardens.
I sit down on the ground under a weeping willow, wrapping my arms around my knees as I wait for broken time to return me to Tartarus.
Return me to the Titans, who have been wrongly imprisoned there for eons in a way I don’t even want to contemplate.
Even as I try to squeeze them back in, I can’t stop the tears from falling.