Chapter 62
All Else Confusion
LYRA
The door to Poseidon’s Lock suddenly opens, and we all jump to our feet, ready to fight. But only Persephone stands in the chamber beyond.
Boone starts toward her in a jerk but seems to catch himself. I’m not sure if anyone noticed but me.
Definitely not Persephone, who holds a finger to her lips, which tells us enough. She’s not sure where the others are or what state they are in. When we emerge, it’s with a plan.
Spread out. Stay quiet. Know where we’re going to run and hide at all times, until we reach safety.
I have to say that stepping over copious amounts of gold blood that drags in a trail out of the room and down the tunnel we are going through doesn’t make that plan feel like a good one.
Neither do the melted spots where lava obviously hit, still glowing with heat all over the place.
Iapetus can do serious damage, it seems.
Cronos leads the way, and we spread out, with Boone in the middle of the pack and me at the very back with Rhea.
I’m vaguely aware that Persephone is up by Boone, talking to him too quietly for me to hear back where I am. Seems serious, though. The goddess doesn’t offer him a single signature sweet smile. They pause just at the entrance to the tunnel itself.
My steps slow as I study them.
Are they arguing?
Just as that thought strikes, Boone grabs her by the wrist and drags her out of sight down the tunnel.
Of course, that’s when the bell goes off. Again.
The tinkling, unearthly sound doesn’t feel real, and my thoughts twist up under am onslaught of fear. It’s too soon. It hasn’t gone off again so fast before. We still don’t even know where Iapetus might be or what state he’s in. Phoebe or Koios, either.
The shock of it slows my mind.
Rhea, right at the entrance to the tunnel, spins toward me, but when she sees how far behind I am, terror seizes her features.
“You won’t make it to me fast enough,” she yells. “Run for the closest unsealed Lock.”
I don’t argue. I take off, and with every step, thoughts are firing like electric shocks. Last time the bell rang, Iapetus didn’t make it to us. Neither did Phoebe. And they’re faster than I am. Was he farther away? Is there any scenario where I don’t end up a rage monster next?
Those invisible things, whatever they are, are silent.
Every single step, every breath, every thump of my heart, I’m expecting to be hit. To bend backward like Iapetus did and come up foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. I’m not even sure how my powers can turn on me.
The closest Lock to me is Hades’. But the door is closed.
The doors are closed for all of them that I can see from here.
“Hades!” I yell.
It’s a risk. The Pandemonium are drawn by sound, but I’m pretty damned sure I won’t have time to escape them if I have to stop to try to open the door first.
The door that’s still closed.
“Hades!” I’m screaming now, throat raw.
I flinch with every step I take. Waiting for the attack I know has to be coming.
Abruptly, the stone door of the archway flies open and he’s there. He’s there and looking beyond me, and the stark dread that crosses his features is worse than Rhea’s a second ago.
Can he see them?
The Pandemonium?
“Run!” he yells.
I push my body faster than it’s probably safe to go, risking losing control and stumbling. And I run.
For him.
Out of all the screaming terror trying to consume me, my mind reminds me of how this feels so much like Artemis’ Labor when I was running from the dragon. Running to him.
Because Hades is, and always will be, my safe place.
“Faster.” I see his lips form the words.
An answering burst of adrenaline sends me shooting forward, into his arms, which close around me, and the door slams down behind me so hard and fast, I feel the wind of it within an inch of my back.
The harsh sound of my breathing fills the empty room. Turns out even goddesses, at the speed I was going, get winded. Or maybe it’s the fear making me struggle this way.
“You…” I have to pause to suck in again, and I back up, meaning to step out of his arms. Except the stone door is at my back and I can’t move away, instead pinning his hands behind me. “You can see them?”
After only the slightest hesitation, Hades’ copy nods.
Now I’m distracted. “What do they look like?”
“Hard to describe. Like a dark hole in the air. No one shape.” He tilts his head. “With your new power, you should see them, too.”
I frown. “Are they glamours?”
“No. But like the magic of a glamour, they exist in another realm, one that is layered over our reality.”
“Oh.”
He leans down, face in mine, serious as a heart attack. “The question is, why couldn’t you see them just now?”
“I turned my power off.”
“You turned—” His scowl is so deep, I think his dimples might have been buried forever. “Why the fuck would you do that?”
“It’s distracting.”
“It’s needed,” he insists, his fingers biting into my back as he grips me tighter. “It will keep you safe from them.”
Them.
The Titans, he means.
Do I tell him that they aren’t the evil in this place?
Would he even believe me? Hades created this copy of himself when he was glamoured to believe lies.
So this Hades only knows the lies. Except this Hades also knows other things.
He’s been watching. He’s been around for all my past lives and remembers them.
Shouldn’t he know the truth by now? “I don’t need protection from them.”
Hades frowns. “Of course you do. They’re using you to get out of here, so they won’t kill you. Not yet—”
“Not ever.”
He cuts off, going scary silent as he stares at me. “Explain.” A single, clipped word that is every inch an order.
Usually I’d push back, but he clearly doesn’t know…and he should.
“You…or the you who put you down here to guard your Lock…you were deceived. Glamoured.”
His eyes narrow, but he doesn’t say anything.
So I keep going. “The Titans aren’t monsters. They were loving parents who—”
Hades pushes away from me as if I carry a plague that could infect even him. “Lies.” He spits the word. “You fell for their lies.”
“They didn’t tell me… I saw.”
“Then you are the one who is glamoured.”
I take a small step forward, shaking my head, but he’s not interested in listening.
Every inch of him screams furious denial, from the anger etched across his face, to the way his hands are so stiff they look like claws, to the smoke rising around him.
Only a small amount of the real Hades’ power, but it’s nothing to sneer at.
“I should just kill you now.” He takes a prowling step toward me.
I can’t run. I can’t go outside. It’s just as dangerous out there. So I don’t move. “I’m telling you the truth.”
His head lowers in a way I’ve seen predators do in films, gaze tracking me like a lion tracks a baby gazelle.
Fuck me.
“I kill you, and I reset time. Erase these lies from your mind.” Every step brings him closer, but I still don’t run. I know I can’t evade him, and it would only trigger a chase. One I’d lose.
“You would do that?” The words force their way out of my mouth, sounding small. “You could hurt me?”
He grabs me roughly by the shoulders, and the look in his eyes is so cold, so remote that I can’t help the shiver that spears me like a harpoon. The true Hades has looked at me that way before—when he was trying to break my heart purposely. I’ve lived it twice now.
“I keep telling you,” he snarls. “I’m not him. I’m a different beast entirely.”
I don’t know what I’m expecting. Maybe a quick snap of my neck, maybe a surge of power ending me, all before I wake up in a new timeline, oblivious to everything that has happened.
But it doesn’t come.
I search his eyes—sharply silver and still so damned cold. “Then get it over with,” I whisper.
His jaw works for several heartbeats before a new kind of anger flashes across his features. “Fuck,” he snaps.
Then his mouth is on mine.
His mouth is on mine, but unlike the last kiss, this time, I feel it. I feel him. Hades.
My Hades.
It’s like a piece of his soul is here with me, and the way he’s kissing me—harsh and demanding, like he doesn’t want to but can’t help devouring me—that’s my Hades, too.
On a sob of something dark and terrified and despairing that I think I’ve been trying to pretend I haven’t been carrying around every second I’m down here, I wind my arms around his neck, going up on tiptoe to meet him kiss for kiss.
I’m not holding back.
I’m not thinking.
I’m just here, in this moment, with Hades.
Which is when the ground shakes. For a second I think it’s me, that his kiss has hit me so hard I’m shaking. But then I realize…this is another earthquake.
We break the kiss to both glance up just in time for fine dirt to rain down on our faces, making us look away. And the ground continues shaking.
Still holding on to me with one hand, he places his palm flat against the door. “The Pandemonium—”
“No. An earthquake. It’s probably making the cracks worse.”
“What are you talking about, cracks?”
I glance around, realizing for the first time that there aren’t any cracks in the Locks. Not that I’ve seen. Not even on the outside.
Then again, they are built to withstand everything the Titans can throw at them, to keep them imprisoned in Tartarus.
“We’ve been feeling these quakes in the cells that hold the Titans.” And whatever else they hold. “Cracks have appeared at the tops where the pillars of the cosmos feed into the Overworld.”
Hades frowns. “We don’t get quakes in Tartarus. This is the bottom of the world. The base. Nothing to shake.”
I roll my eyes. “But you felt that, right?”
“Yes. But it’s not possible. It has to be something else.”
“I’m certain. I’ve felt them on and off ever since I arrived here, seen the cracks with my own eyes.”
Hades steps back very deliberately, and I feel the space he’s putting between us like an uncrossable void between universes. “The same way you saw the Titans’ innocence?”
We’re back to that now? “Haven’t you felt the shaking? It’s impossible to miss.”
“If I’m not awake, I don’t see much,” he says.
“Awake?”
“There’s a lot of time to do nothing. I often put myself in a…hibernation of sorts.”
A nothing existence. I think that might be worse than a curse to be unlovable. Has he only ever known me, the entire time he’s been down here? Themis died in Hestia’s Lock. Has anyone else ever gotten this far?
Does it even mean anything?
He feels so real, and yet my mind tells me he’s not. “I don’t understand any of this.”
Frustration flattens his lips. “I can’t do this,” he says quietly, almost like he’s speaking to someone else not here. Then his shoulders pull back, body in a rigid state of rejection that hurts me to see. “You may stay here until it’s safe to leave.”
Then he disappears.
Not like smoke or even teleporting. It’s like he was never here to begin with.
A hallucination.
The fact that he is, for all intents and purposes, exactly that, and yet is so real to me, scares me the most. What if I truly can’t trust my own mind? What if none of us can? What if Tartarus is designed to break us, not just hold us?
I lean back against the stone door, sliding down until my ass hits the ground.
And I wait. Again.