Chapter 54
A Stitch In Time Saves…No One
LYRA
When broken time deposits me in the past, it takes me a second to adjust to the disorienting move from trying to survive the Lock to being taken to only the gods know when and where. Or it could be Demeter’s Kykeon kicking in. Does the hallucinogen work outside of her Lock?
The world isn’t spinning, exactly, when I finally force myself to look around, but it feels weird. Fuzzy and oversaturated with color and sound and…sparkles. Sparkles? There weren’t sparkles in the Lock, though. Or maybe it’s just the way the roar of the crowds hits my ears like jackhammers.
Which is when where I am becomes horrifyingly clear.
I’m standing in the shadows of an archway looking out over the temporarily rebuilt Colosseum in Rome. And Dex is about to kill Meike.
Like staring at my own life through the lens of a movie, I can see past Lyra down there.
Tiny from where I am now. In a haze of numbness, I watch as Dex takes advantage of Zai and Trinica and me pausing in our attack.
Because it gives Dex time to lunge for Meike, who’s still lying on the ground.
Then he’s back on his feet, holding her in the air by her neck with one hand. Eyes bulging, her face turns purple.
Past Lyra hurls her axe. I know what comes next.
“No!” I take off toward the stadium stairs that lead down to the floor of the Colosseum. To stop what happens next.
I’ve only made it two steps, still in the shadows of the arch, when arms wrap around me, jerking me to a stop. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Hades’ voice sounds right in my ear. “I can’t let you do that.”
“He’s going to kill her!” I scream.
Several heads of the gods and demigods filling the stadium seats nearby turn slightly, looking for the source. I kick out against his hold, but my powers are still stripped from Demeter’s Lock. I’m mortal. I have no chance against him.
“Hades.” His name escapes me on a whimper.
I can’t look away as Dex jerks Meike down…and suddenly I’m not standing in the Colosseum with the roar of the crowds. I’m on the dock on the River Styx. Charon’s pirate ship is tied up to it with a stream of dead souls entering the Underworld.
The harsh sound of my breathing feels like it only fills the air right around us. Hades is still holding me, arms wrapped around me, and I feel the tip of his chin as he sets it on top of my head, pulling me in closer.
Why did broken time do that to me? I didn’t have to see it again. Meike’s death.
I can still hear the crack when Dex broke her neck, still feel it in my own bones, in my heart. Still see the way her body landed all twisted up when he cast her aside.
Dead.
A second chance to stop it from happening, and I didn’t. A second time to have the same thought. I let Dex go.
I could have stopped him before he ever got to her, but I didn’t. I let him go. Then, in his glamour-crazed state, we killed him, too. We killed him, although we were only trying to stop him.
“Phi?” A new voice cracks through the air.
Hades spins me around, hand cupping the back of my head to bury my face in his chest, angling his body to block the rest of me. Does he not know that Charon has already seen me before? But maybe it’s better if he doesn’t now.
“What the fuck?” I hear Charon demand. “Did you interfere in the games again? The Daemones are going to do more than cut you this time—”
“Lyra’s still up there.” Hades cuts him off.
Charon’s voice is all shades of confused. “Isn’t that Lyra you’re holding—”
I blink into Hades’ shirt, still stuck on his words. She is. Past me is still up there, and she’s about to unleash on Athena, and… I clutch at Hades. “She needs help. Right now. She needs to get out of there. Send Charon.”
He doesn’t even hesitate, popping off orders. “Get up to the Roman Colosseum and get Lyra away from there.” I feel him glance down at me. “Not here. Olympus. My home. I’ll come when I can.”
A peek over Hades’ shoulder shows Charon grim and not leaving. “What in the name of Tartarus is going on?”
“I can’t tell you,” Hades says. “Go. And do not tell Lyra who you saw me with. That’s an order.” This time, the words are that of the King of the Underworld, all authority and dire consequences for not being obeyed.
Immediately, Charon disappears. I don’t know if it’s the impact of living that moment again or the hallucinogen still in my system, but the world spins. I mean vomit-inducing spins, and I clamp a hand over my mouth.
“Lyra?” Hades takes me by the shoulders, and his face is in mine, swimming in my vision.
I lift my hand from my mouth only enough to ask, “Why didn’t you save Meike? Why? The Labor was over. She won. It wouldn’t have been interfering—”
He grimaces. “You didn’t arrive soon enough. There’s nothing I could do.”
I shake my head, trying to clear it. “You were waiting for me in that archway already. Why?”
“You told me to.”
The world sets to spinning faster. Why wouldn’t I have told him to save Meike first? Why me? “When? When did I tell you that?”
“You came to me right after you gave yourself to me…in the water garden. After I took us back to your rooms in Olympus, late that night.”
In his current timeline, that was days before this moment.
Right before he went cold and broke my heart.
In my own future, I haven’t done that yet, but I must tell him how to put me through hell all over again.
But wouldn’t that be risking resetting everything?
I know the Titans reset time to make sure I end up in Tartarus. But would I do that?
It has to be true. Otherwise, how would he have known to be waiting for me today?
But even through my fuzzy, swirling brain, it hits me that there’s another explanation.
A worse one.
A more terrifying one.
“I think there’s somebody else,” I say, but now I’m slurring.
Hades’ eyes narrow sharply. “What’s wrong with you?” His face moves closer, silver eyes—several sets of them, now that I’m seeing him in double and triple—narrowed on my face. He scowls. “Are you drugged? Your pupils are blown wide open.”
“Kykeon,” I say, or try to with a thick tongue tripping over the syllables.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he mutters.
“Not important.” I shake my head.
“The fuck it’s not—”
I reach forward, putting a finger to his lips.
“Listen…” It comes out more like litha. I shake my head and smack my lips, which seem to be going numb.
Then try again. “Listen. There is somebody powerful with the ability to glamour gods and make it stick for longer than short periods of time. What if they glamoured you? What if they’re the ones lying to you? They could have told you—”
Something made of glittering red light shoots across the Styx, reflecting in the swirling blue waters. The damned fissure of broken time is coming for me. Fast this time. As if it doesn’t want me to say more.
Hades is looking at me with the kind of impatient disbelief that you treat someone stoned with, not really listening to what they are saying, just figuring out how to get them somewhere safe to come down from the high.
“Listen to me,” I insist. “Glamours. It’s bad.”
I know I sound wrong, but the words are true. Hear what I’m saying, I’m screaming in my head.
Hades sighs. “No one would be able to glamour me like that. I’d know it was you.”
Because I think it would break him, I can’t tell him that I know for certain that he and his siblings locked up their innocent parents in Tartarus, and that they are still glamoured to believe those lies centuries later. Millennia later.
That would definitely reset time.
“How would you know?”
I don’t hear his answer. Time swallows me and spits me back out in the silo, in the middle of trying to unseal Demeter’s Lock.
There is another figure trapped in the silo with me now. A girl. Splattered in bugs’ green-and-yellow blood and guts. A hallucination of the same Lyra who just came out of Athena’s Labor—who let Meike die and who was part of Dex’s death. I was part of that.
The monster of a human being I have to save this time is…me.