Chapter 45
Pass The Test Of Time
HADES
Numb.
The sensation has taken me over—my mind, my limbs, even my skin. The horror of what I just had to do… The only way to stop them was to shut down entirely and let rage consume me.
I haven’t felt that in ages.
Not since I mastered my powers.
It felt…right. It felt—
I stop dead at the sight of someone in my bed, and it comes back to me finally that Lyra’s here. She’s been waiting for me, but I never thought it would be in my bed. If someone had asked me any time before this night how I’d feel about that…
But right now, after what I’ve done…
Fuck.
She should leave. Immediately.
Lyra should get as far from me as possible, to the farthest point in time from me that she can find.
Hells, everyone should. She once told me I would be good.
I would do the things that no one could but that needed to be done, using power that even I feared at the time.
But I bet she didn’t think that I’d do something like I did tonight.
But…I can’t make her go. I don’t want to.
Selfish as always.
So instead, I snap my fingers, instantly clean of the blood I spilled, wearing only a tunic to sleep in. Then I slide into the bed on the opposite side.
I don’t touch her. Hells, this bed is big enough for Cerberus to sleep in between us comfortably.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Her soft, husky voice breaks the silence.
I tense, tight as a drawn bowstring, but stay facing away. “I don’t need one more person calling me a monster today, Lyra.”
“Why would I?”
“I leveled Olympus.” I hear myself say it like I’m outside myself, my voice dead.
Like I feel inside.
My mother is buried alive in Tartarus with our father. After helping us all to escape his bowels, she still chose him. Olympus was the last remaining thing I had of her. That and… I glance down at my arm where my sleeping tattoos lie.
“Is that the worst consequence you can come up with? Being called a monster?” Lyra asks the question almost idly.
Is she fucking bored? I just did the worst thing I could, and she thinks I’m weak to hate it?
“Not now, Lyra.”
I hear a rustle of the wool blanket, the material tugging a bit as she moves around. “I mean…were any mortals harmed?”
I’m not talking about this.
“What about immortals? Did you kill any?” Then she’s musing aloud to herself. “I can think of a few I wouldn’t mind seeing less of.”
Which makes me twitch under the covers.
“Any world-ending, apocalyptic consequences?”
Fuck me. She’s not going to shut up about this, is she? “No,” I snarl, turning over to glare at her. “And I’m tired of this game.”
She purses her lips, nodding like she’s some kind of sage, wizened witch. “What I’m hearing is that whatever you did was the only way. If there was any other way to stop your siblings from sending more mortals to you before their time, you would have.”
“Would I?” How would she know?
She looks back at me with eyes clear and trusting.
You shouldn’t trust me! I want to yell it at her. Pound it into her until she believes me. Until she runs and never comes back.
“None of the truly worst consequences happened today,” she points out. “So I don’t know what you’re whining about.”
Fuck this.
I move with a violent kind of speed that makes her gasp, but only after I’ve already pinned her under me on the bed, gripping her hands back on either side of her face. “I told you. Enough.”
She bucks against me with a glare. “What did you do? What makes you a monster?”
“Stop.”
“What can be that bad?” She hurls the words at me.
“Stop it, Lyra.” I give her a shake, my grip around her wrists tightening.
“Confess!” Her voice when she utters the word is not a roar to match her fierce expression, but like a song. Not one voice but legions. A choir raised in angelic music of such beauty even my eyes sting with tears.
It’s the same as the voice I use when, as King of the Underworld, I demand the truth of a soul’s actions in life so that they might be judged.
And I want to fight it, fight the influence of it.
But I can’t.
I feel my face slacken, and my eyes go unseeing.
I’m no longer in my room in Erebos but in some place inside my own mind that both exists and doesn’t.
A place where only the truth can be told.
Must be told. I hear myself speak. “The Anaxian Wars are ended. I have wiped the last traces of my mother from the world. Olympus has fallen, and all that remains of Rhea is her rotting carcass in Tartarus.”
Then Lyra is here in this foggy place in my mind with me, and I focus on her face as she listens. “What is your judgment, my queen?”
Through the fog, she slips her hands out of my grip to frame my face. Am I… Am I shaking? Fuck, I am. My whole body is as I wait for her words. Her punishment.
But when they come, they are as sweet as honey. “My judgment is that you were the only god protecting humanity when the rest of your siblings would have trampled over humans like giants clomping through anthills.”
Words that absolve me. Words that forgive me. Words that understand me, even when I’m a monster. I still can’t move, still float in this haze, but I feel the cool wetness as a tear slips down my cheek.
Lyra wipes it away with the pad of her thumb. “Your penance is to let go of your guilt, knowing that if there had been any other way, you would have found it.”
It’s like she punched straight through my ribs to my heart, but instead of ripping it out, she’s pumping it for me, keeping me alive while she makes me face myself and what I’ve done.
A guttural yell explodes up and out of me, and I struggle to choke it back down, to hold in my pain.
But the haze lifts from my eyes, and she’s here.
Lyra’s still here with me.
Even knowing what I’ve done. What I’m capable of.
I collapse around her, pulling to one side so I don’t crush her as I gather her up in my arms and bury my face in her hair…and heave with my cries.
Lyra runs her palm up and down my back in soothing circles and lets me work through my penance. She waits.
She waits for me.
And when I draw in a long, uneven breath and finally relax against her, going quiet, she whispers in my ear. “I could never think of you as a monster.”
The last of my tension drains out of me in a huff. “Why? You don’t even know me.” Not really.
“I see you all the same, Hades.”
What does she think she sees? “I’ve just told you that I destroyed Olympus. None could stop me. Do you think they didn’t try?”
“I know they would have.”
I pull back to glare down into her face. “That alone should have you running from this bed screaming. Everyone fears me. Can barely bring themselves to be in the same room. Even my parents feared me, or my father would not have swallowed me and my mother would not have let him.”
She shakes her head. “Others fear what would happen if you were to lose control of your power or, perhaps worse, consciously decided to use it to the full extent that you can against them or the world.”
“But you don’t fear that?”
“No. And tonight is proof.”
“Proof?” The word comes out on a scoff.
She gives me that stubborn, determined look of hers. “Yes, proof. You didn’t lose control of your power.”
“But I did. I let the rage take me.”
She shakes her head. “Exactly. You let it. The rage didn’t control you. There’s a difference.”
“You didn’t see, Lyra.”
“I didn’t have to.”
I want to walk away. Leave her in this bed and not come back until she disappears again.
But I can’t. Because my heart is screaming at me to keep her.
To never let her go. Because—and maybe this scares me the most—she’s right about the rage, but only partially.
My control over it, limiting what I destroyed to Olympus alone—it came from picturing her face.
From holding her image in my mind. Not wanting her to look at me with disgust.
And that scares the ever-loving shit out of me.
How, in the course of only a few short encounters across the span of my long life, has she become this…important…to me?
“You’re a fool.” I don’t know if I’m saying that to her…or myself.
“Maybe I am,” she murmurs.
I need to make her go. Make her leave me. Never come back. This is getting out of hand…dangerous.
“There are visions of me,” I tell her. “A prophecy from long ago. I do terrible things. You should have seen their faces today…” My throat tightens so much around those words that I trail off, unable to utter more.
She looks me in the eyes. “Have you done those things yet?”
Confusion sneaks through my self-directed anger. “No, but—”
“Then stop serving penance. Stop feeling guilty for things you have never done.”
I grunt as those words hit hard, and yet… No. My grandfather believed this prophecy enough to try to kill me. I am doomed. I should not doom her with me. “What if I do—”
“The Hades I know doesn’t sit back and wait. He plans. He schemes. He prepares. Can you do that?”
Just like that, the heaviness that has threatened to drag me to the depths of my own hells, to bury me alive there with my evil parents, lifts.
Like sunlight peeking over mountains to chase away the darkness.
I stare at her, at her beautiful, stubborn face.
“Do you believe I can do that? With my own fate?”
Her smile is so assured it hurts and yet lessens the ache inside me. “Yes.”
That simple.
She believes this much that I can master my own fate. The same way she told me that I’d master my powers.
And I did.
I did that.
Heavens, this woman… My torment, my hells, and my salvation are all wrapped up in one person who abandons me over and over and yet lifts me up every time she sees me.