Chapter 46
A Time To Kill
LYRA
I cut off my confession to Hades on a yelp as the horribly familiar glassy water rushes up at me. Again.
Because broken time deposits me right where it picked me up before. Over the fucking electrified water.
I have just enough time to yelp and flail before something—or someone—tackles me from the air.
We hit the hard ground and roll. After a stunned second, we both get to our feet to stand beside the pool of the training course. Me…and Cronos.
I thought he ran from the Pandemonium with Rhea and Persephone? Did he come back? We stare at each other with wide eyes, and I’m breathing hard from the scare of being dropped over that damned water out of nowhere.
“We need to get out of—” His gaze jerks up over my head.
I don’t even have to look. “You’ve got to be kidding me—”
The sound of my own words gets cut off in the silence of another broken shard of time. Am I some kind of time magnet? What the hells is happening?
At least I’m not falling when it drops me off in a rocky area surrounded by big boulders. Me only. Not Cronos.
These cracks of time really do seem to be selecting the who, what, when, and where.
“That would’ve hurt to fall on,” I mutter to myself as I look around, trying to get my bearings.
As I round one of the boulders, I pull up short, then tuck myself back behind the rock, where I can see but hopefully not be seen.
Not too far away is a small boy with hair so black it gleams in the sunlight sitting on a rocky beach. He’s holding a little creature that wriggles in his hands, and he can’t be more than three years old, based on the size of him.
Hades.
Seriously, it’s almost like the broken fissures of time have an agenda. At this rate, I’m surprised he wasn’t in the room when I took his axe.
I don’t move closer. Being seen again is a particularly bad idea, although he mentioned seeing me on a beach. I glance up the hillside to the structure at the top—the same building where I saw the whole family together.
Is this that moment? That beach?
A childish giggle floats across the sea air, brought to me by the gentle breeze, and I smile because even as a child Hades’ giggles are reserved. It’s also clear that whatever he’s holding is delighting him.
The beaches are empty, other than him and me, so I sit down on a flat rock, mostly hidden by the larger boulder, and draw my knees to my chest while I just watch and wait.
I used to do this in San Francisco. Go to a spot along the Pacific coast that was lonely for lack of human company, sit, and stare out at the ocean.
One of the few places where I felt safe or peaceful.
At home, though, the breeze was chilly, coming off the colder water.
Here, it’s near perfect. I tip my face up to the sunlight, soaking in its warmth.
“No!”
The shout has me snapping my eyes open to find little Hades on his feet.
He’s turned slightly sideways now, and I get a better view of whatever is in his hand.
An octopus, I think, based on the tentacles that drape out of his fingers.
The creature turns black, even as I watch, and Hades is crying something in a language I don’t know, but just like every time I’ve visited his past, I understand him anyway. Some power of the gods, I guess.
I know what he’s saying. “It’s dead. It’s dead. I killed it. I’m a monster.”
Small shoulders are racked with sobs that I can feel from here, each an arrow to the heart. Then, beyond where he is, the sea suddenly and violently rises and reaches for him like a giant, translucent fist.
Self-preservation abandons me, and there’s only one thought in my head—get to Hades.
I run so fast that the world blurs around me, and then I’m scooping him up.
If I had both my axes, I’d use them now, crossing them at the hilts to create the force that blasts things away from me.
But I only have one, so I do the only thing I can think of and jerk around, placing my back to the water and bracing for the crash of the giant wave to slam into us.
Only it doesn’t come.
After a second, I jerk around to find a man I’m not familiar with standing between us and the angry ocean, his arms raised high, bare back rippling with muscles. “I will not let you harm him, Father.”
The water, as tall as a three-story building at this point, falls straight down with an enormous splash, and the Titan between us and the sea holds it at bay again as it rushes around us, touching us only with a fine, salty mist. When the water recedes, a man with white hair and a time-aged face stands on a rock outcropping exposed by the receding surf.
“Open your mind, Oceanus,” he calls. Not a boom, not a yell, but a plea. “Let me show you.”
Oceanus? I jerk my gaze to the Titan, studying him. This is the traitor who abandoned Tethys in Tartarus, who refused to fight as the gods imprisoned his own family?
The two stare at each other, the water turning more and more calm between them.
And then the older man—he must be Uranus, the Primordial father of creation and the Titans—sags, his shoulders dropping, although I can’t tell if it’s in relief or sadness.
“Don’t you see,” he calls to his son. “We have no choice.”
For his part, Oceanus turns slowly to look not at me but at Hades.
The sadness written across his features is like a story I can read without words.
Whatever his father showed him, he believes it.
“Whoever you are, you have no part in this,” he says to me.
“Set the child on the ground and leave now.”
Cheeks wet with tears and ocean spray, little Hades buries his face into my neck on a whimper, and I tighten my grip around him. “I will never let you harm him.”
Neither Primordial nor Titan hesitates, both raising their hands. “You made your choice, woman,” Uranus says. He even sounds sad about it.
As I back up slowly, struggling not to trip on the rocks, the only thing I can think to do is try to run, but these are a Primordial and a Titan. Even at goddess speed, I doubt I’ll be faster.
The water, when it comes at me, rushes so wild and hard I don’t even have time to take more than a few steps. For the second time, I turn my back to take the brunt of the impact and pray I can hang on to Hades in the violent torrent.
Also for the second time, nothing happens.
Instead of the roar of ocean spray, the silence is almost obliterating. Did another shard of time take me away?
“No hurt you,” Hades says in his small voice.
I look down at him, his eyes like sharpened steel, and then beyond him, and gasp. He has erected a covering of rock all around us. Black and glassy—obsidian.
My jaw drops as I stare at the child. Even this young, he can do this much.
Outside, through the translucent rock, I can see when the water recedes in a rush, like they’re cocking it back to shoot again with better aim.
But Hades plays his fingers over the obsidian, which shatters, turning into dagger-sharp shards at his silent will that hover in the air.
I don’t have to ask to know what he plans to do next—embed those jagged daggers into his uncle and grandfather.
Before he can, something runs at us from the side in a blur of speed. It shoots between us and them.
The deadly daggers drop, and one embeds itself into Hades’ forehead right at his hairline. He screams before that shard and all the rest abruptly dissolve into nothing.
But the obsidian already did its damage. Golden ichor gushes out of the wound.
I put my hand over it. “Shouldn’t you be healing?”
Which is when it occurs to me where the injured spot is. Right where the streak of pale hair is for future Hades.
Zeus didn’t do that to him?
Pushing my blood-soaked hand away, Hades points with a childish smile at a younger-looking Cronos, who stands between us and death. “Dada!” Utter trust shines in the child’s eyes. He thinks we’re safe now.
Lightning lifts from Cronos’ clothes and his hair as if his entire being is charged. “I will not make my son a killer this young, but if you will not give this up, Father, then you leave me no choice but to do it for him.”
For a split second, it’s almost like Uranus shrinks, changing from the Primordial he is—one of the original sources of life and power and death—to something more human and frailer and broken.
That lasts only the single beat of a hummingbird’s wings before his features harden.
“I showed you what he will do to the world if you let him live. Do not make me go through you.”
“Do not do this,” Cronos whispers harshly.
The depth of the Titan’s despair and determination is like a living thing—a glacier of ice growing colder, gathering height and weight, crushing and destroying all in its wake.
For the tiniest second, I think Uranus might soften, but then his silver eyes—eyes just like Hades’—sharpen.
“Forgive me, Mother.” Cronos’ whisper is broken.
In the next blink, the Titan shoots across the water to where his father stands, so fast I don’t even see him move.
As he produces an obsidian scythe out of thin air, so like the weapons Hades just made, I vaguely hear Oceanus shout to stop him.
But Cronos castrates his father and then slices through his gut, spilling his intestines and blood and semen into the ocean waves.
Then Cronos holds the blade out from his side like he can’t stand to touch it. After a sickening second, he drops it into the now-still waters—like the ocean itself just died—and the Titan yells to the skies his rage and devastation.
Oceanus stares with a slackened jaw, turning a sickly shade before, while his brother is distracted, he slowly turns a gaze filled with blame and hatred on Hades. Once more, he raises his hands to wipe us out.
Before I can yell, Cronos rounds on Oceanus. “The scythe is the god killer, brother.”
Holy shit. There’s a weapon that kills gods? Primordials, too, apparently.
“If you do not want to meet the same fate,” Cronos says, “I suggest you remove yourself from my sight. If I ever see you again, if you ever even think to come near my child, I shall do the same to you.”
A stark shiver works its way down my spine and out to my extremities, and Hades pats my shoulder with a small hand, like he could feel it.
Cronos means it. Every single word.
Oceanus must see this, because after an excruciating moment in which the two brothers lock eyes, saying everything with a mere look, he disappears. And then, faster than even my goddess eyes can track, Cronos is standing before me. Without a word, he takes Hades from my arms.
The boy goes eagerly but then seems to remember the moment earlier with the octopus, his bottom lip quivering. “Dada, I killed it.”
And then they’re gone, too, and I’m alone on the beach.
The sea gently washes up over my feet, and I look down only to gasp and stumble back. Because the waters are golden with the blood of Uranus.
Uranus, who predicted that Hades would do something terrible.
Did the Primordial have the same vision that was given to Rima during the Crucible?
Did he see Hades burning down the world?
Destroying everything? A prophecy so powerful it would make a grandfather try to destroy his own grandson as a child.
What did I do? I just came from telling Hades that he would never do that.
But what if I was wrong? What if he does have that in him? My god of death has more secrets than stars in the sky. If I’m going to discover them all, I need to get back to him. I need to escape Tartarus.
I don’t know how long I am here, backing up from the water a step at a time as the bloody tide rises higher and higher. I can’t make myself care.
Not after what I just saw.
A father defending his son.
The gods were glamoured. The Titans are innocent. And Cronos has always loved his children.
What kind of world is this?
I should leave. Find my way back to the present.
Except I know from past experience that I could be stuck here longer.
What, exactly, I’m supposed to do if I’m stuck here for days—or years, like Iapetus once was—I don’t know.
Learn to sleep in trees, I guess. I may be able to understand and speak all the languages, but I have no money or goods.
So basically, yeah, being stuck this far back in time, I’m screwed.
I don’t need training to unseal the Locks. I need…history and ancient cultures lessons.
You’re a thief. Act like it, Lyra.
I lift my gaze from the horizon and glance around me. I’ll need to steal clothes that fit in here and find a place to hole up. It’s not a great plan, but it’s a plan.
I’ve made it about halfway up the beach when a sound like a burbling stream reaches my ears over the rhythmic roll of the waves, and I turn.
And stare.
Because the ocean is…frothing.
There’s no other word for it.
The water churns gold and white above the blues of the Mediterranean. It’s not the waves. This isn’t natural. And I’m stuck out here on this damned beach like a sucker.