Chapter 41
But I’m Not The Only One
LYRA
When time takes me back to Tartarus, I find myself sitting, arms still wrapped around my knees, in between the pillars of the cosmos. The ground between them is decorated in black-and-white tile depicting the history of the Primordials and Titans in a winding spiral of squares.
I rub at my damp cheeks with my shoulders, although they’re already drying from the heat off the lava flows.
The stark rock-and-obsidian ceiling overhanging the wastelands is beautiful somehow.
Terrifying. But beautiful. Not nearly as beautiful as the sparkly blue constellations on the ceiling of the Underworld that I’ve been staring at for hours.
Or Olympus. Or, for that matter, the Overworld.
Skies the Titans haven’t seen in ages.
The question is…was that real?
Did what I saw and felt and heard and witnessed really happen? I had enough time sitting and waiting in the Underworld to start asking myself that.
It felt damned real.
Part of me wants to run to Rhea and Cronos and hug them, to check that Koios has his leg, to make sure Phoebe wasn’t harmed by Hestia and Aphrodite. But I gut check that urge in favor of a logical approach.
A crimson form catches the corner of my eye, and I jerk my head around to stare at the broken shard of time floating through the air.
“Not again—” The words stutter to a stop on the tip of my tongue.
Because a figure appears on the floor—and the man is sizzling.
I mean literally. Including a hissing sound coming off him.
“Boone! Holy shit!”
I crawl over to where he’s lying on his back, knees bent. His dark hair is standing on end, and some of the strands look melted at the tips. His shirt is torn and charred at the edges, which are singed, and smoke rises off his body. But his eyes are open.
Not in death, thank the gods.
He’s glaring at the ceiling thousands of feet above our heads. “What a dick,” he mutters.
“Who?” I ask as I check a nasty burn that streaks down his arm in the strangest pattern. What on earth did he encounter?
It’s healing quickly, at least. I peer closer and wrinkle my nose. Maybe too quickly.
Boone winces as I gingerly peel up a scrap of shirt that’s partially knitted into his regenerating skin. “Sorry,” I whisper.
With a groan, he lets me guide him up, and he pulls off his shirt. Two more spots stick in the skin.
I sit back on my heels. “Who’s a dick?”
He scowls. “Zeus. Motherfucker threw a lightning bolt at me.”
My eyes go wide, and I take in the angry-looking burns with more interest. “I’d say he hit you.”
“Glanced off me,” Boone insists.
“Yeah. Okay.” Male pride is such a sad thing to behold sometimes. “Do you know when you were?”
Blowing out a sharp breath, Boone drapes his hands over his knees, gaze going unfocused as he thinks about it. “Shortly after the gods claimed Olympus, if I had to guess—the clothes, the way Olympus was laid out…”
“You were in Olympus?”
He nods. “At the main temple… You know the one high up, above the waterfalls? Only it looked…different. That god is power hungry. I’ll tell you that much.”
I believe it. Zeus still is. “What did he do?”
Boone’s lips tighten. “I was spotted by Poseidon and Hera as soon as I showed up where their individual fancy houses currently stand in our present day, but instead there was one long, giant structure there. Looked much older. Byzantine, maybe.” Like any good thief, he knows his antiquities.
“They saw you? Why didn’t they recognize you during the Crucible?” Or Hera, at least. Poseidon wasn’t much of a joiner after the first Labor, when his champion, Isabel, was killed.
“Who knows.” He shrugs, then winces as the action pulls at his wound.
“They took me straight to Zeus, almost as if they were afraid to deal with me on their own…” He pauses.
Thinking. “No. Not deal with me. If I had to guess, they were afraid of him and what he’d do to them if he found out they’d seen me and hadn’t brought me to him. ”
“That’s even worse than he is these days.”
“I know. So they took me to the temple, where there’s a statue of Zeus out front so large it’s almost as big as the mountain the temple is on.
And inside, that god is sitting on…get this…
a throne. Not just any throne, either. Solid gold.
Ornate. I’ve never seen anything more ostentatious.
And lightning everywhere.” Boone frowns, thinking.
“But the weird part is that it looked like he’d been there a while. ”
Seriously? “How could you tell?”
“There were plates and bowls everywhere. Goblets. All within reach of him. Half-eaten food. Like they’d been feeding him there. And he was not his usual preening self. His blond hair was longer, hanging in his face and matted. His clothes rumpled.”
Zeus is nothing if not a diva. That sounds wrong. All wrong.
“He never once got off that seat, either.”
I adjust to sit beside him on the floor. “By any chance, was there a mesh veil made of iridescent light over his face?”
“What? No.” He squints at me. “Why would you ask that?”
Which is when I lay it all out for him. When I’m done, we’re both still sitting on the ground and he is stone-still and silent. And thinking.
He shakes his head once. A single, jerking rejection of a move.
Then again.
Then sighs. “My initial thought is you’re the one being glamoured…”
He says this slowly, brows drawing together, and just as slowly, I feel my stomach sink. I’m not sure why I want to believe all the things I’ve seen. But…I do.
“I mean…” Boone rubs a hand around the back of his neck. “It would be much easier to glamour one brand-new goddess still waiting for her powers than it would be to glamour a bunch of gods.”
“I know.” I thought of that, too.
“There’s the amount of power that would take.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think even Titans could manage it. They seem…limited down here…but still.”
I nod. “I figured they had to have help, maybe. Or multiple people working together?”
“Maybe. But gods don’t like to share power or secrets. If someone did do this, they’ve sat on the truth for a long-ass time without a single leak? How?”
Also something I thought of. “What if the person responsible glamoured other gods to help them and then forget they helped?”
I wince. Because when I say it out loud, I can tell that’s reaching.
Boone’s already shaking his head. “Think about it, Lyra. It’s not just the Greek pantheon that person or persons would have had to glamour.
The gods of the other pantheons—Norse, Egyptian, Sumerian, Celtic, Mayan, you name it—they interact.
I don’t think Odin would have let the Greek pantheon lock up their parents if he knew the Titans were being wrongly imprisoned. ”
“That, I hadn’t thought of yet,” I mutter, glaring at a pink flower waving lazily in the breeze at the base of the earth pillar.
Pink doesn’t feel like the right color for my mood, which was dark enough when I got here.
“What about Zeus?” I ask. So far, it’s the only explanation my brain has accepted.
The way Boone squints, I can tell he’s thinking through it but not buying it.
I start ticking off my points on my hand.
“He became King of the Gods, and that comes with extra power. What if it came with all of Cronos’ Titan-level power?
I mean, Hades got Pandora’s Box because he became king.
He couldn’t have done that without the crown. So clearly that position gets…extra.”
“Okay,” Boone agrees.
“And what you just saw…clearly he went a little power wild.”
He huffs an unamused laugh. “That’s putting it mildly.” Then he shakes his head. “What about the other pantheons?”
“As king, Zeus would have more interaction with and access to them?”
“Afterward,” he points out heavily.
“Yeah.” I drop my head into my hands. “I don’t know what to think.”
Gods, that headache that started during the battle is only getting worse. Maybe it’s a side effect of getting my goddess power?
I pause.
“What?” Boone asks from above me, voice slightly muffled by the way I have my hands over my ears.
I lift my head. “Have you figured out how to glamour yet? Even small ones?”
“No. Why—” Realization snaps in his eyes. “You want to test out your power.”
“Exactly. Let’s start there.”