Chapter 65
Every Time You Go Away
HADES
I let up my hold on Lyra’s throat, but my mind is so battle shocked that I don’t let go when I know I should.
Or maybe I just want to hold on to her and keep her with me this time.
No.
Rejection of that idea slams through me hard. Not with pain, not with bitterness, but with cold, uncrossable distance.
I’ve had a long time, more than an era, to think about this.
The last time I saw her, when I ended the Anaxian Wars, she used my power over the dead to make me confess my sins to her, then told me I could break my own fate and prophecy, and then, just before she left me again, confessed under my power to her love for me.
The sweetest words.
Words that made me rip her out of my heart.
I haven’t seen Lyra’s face in centuries. Not once. But that was for the best. It gave me the time I needed to harden my resolve. How I fell in love with her in what amounts to mere hours together, a day at most, spread across the ages…I can’t remember anymore.
Gods damn her. I don’t want to remember.
Even as I drink in every nuance, every curve and valley of a face I thought I had started to forget after all this time. I made myself forget.
For the sake of the world, I won’t let her back in.
Because when she faded away that day, with more sweet words of truth still tumbling from lips I have yet to kiss, I saw in that moment a different truth. A hideous reality that I forced myself to face in order to break my fate, the way she told me I could.
Lyra will be the reason I burn down the world.
If I let her get close, if I gave her more of my heart than I already did, if anything ever happened to her, all the control I’ve fought so hard to gain… It would snap.
I know it would.
She is the catalyst to my prophecy.
The deep-seated truth became my base, and I cut her out of my heart with the precision of a surgeon with a scalpel. The extra time she gave me was exactly what I needed.
I feel nothing now.
Then her gaze shifts just past me and her eyes widen slightly, and I know whatever comes to take her away is already here. She’s already leaving.
I bury the spark of reaction, the knee-jerk need to keep her. Keeping her would destroy more than me.
“She’s alive.” Lyra almost hurls the words at me. “Persephone.”
My world tilts on its axis. That is so far from what I expected, I give my head a disbelieving shake, trying to rearrange the words she just said to make sense. It doesn’t work.
Behind my confusion, anger rises like a striking snake. This woman truly is my torment, and I’m done with it. “Just go away, Lyra.”
She blinks. The first one is surprise, and in the second, her green-and-gold eyes fill with hurt.
I almost take back the harsh words.
Almost.
It’s much harder to be hard when she’s right in front of me, looking at me like that, than I thought it would be.
But then she sticks out her stubborn jaw. “You have to listen to me—”
“No. I don’t.” I slash my hand through the air. “I’m tired of you showing up and telling me things you have no place telling me. Go back to whenever you came from. I’m done.”
She flinches, green eyes going from hurt to so wounded, I have to take a step back, hands in fists to keep from reaching for her.
But then that stubborn little chin sticks out even more. “If you don’t want to listen because it’s me, I get it, after I’ve been so…flighty.”
“That’s not why—”
She cuts me off. “But for Persephone’s sake, you will listen to me.”
I snap my mouth closed so hard, my teeth click. Why can’t she just leave me alone? “There is nothing you can tell me. I have searched for her everywhere.”
“I know.” She gives me a small smile. A sad smile. The knowing in her eyes is firm. “You won’t find her because…” She takes a deep breath, wobbly, like she’s afraid. I don’t like wobbly from her. Or afraid.
“She’s trapped in Tartarus,” Lyra says.
Disbelief steals any other possible thought I could have. Disbelief followed by a flare of anger sharp enough that I can’t contain it all, and Lyra stiffens, watching me carefully.
She’s lying to me. There is no way that’s true, and now I know for certain she’s a liar. “That’s not possible.” The words come out in a growl.
She holds my gaze but takes several moments before she speaks, probably gathering more lies together. “I don’t know how she got there, but she’s there and she’s safe. I promise you.”
“Safe?” I bark a bitter laugh as all the hazy memories of being swallowed by my father, of fighting my parents and locking them up so that we and the world would be safe from them, bombard me with a mind-splitting pain. “You dare to tell me that she’s safe stuck down there with those monsters?”
Another glance past me. What does she see when she comes and goes?
You don’t give a shit, I tell myself. You don’t care anymore.
But even with her spewing lies, having her standing here before me is…harder than I thought it would be.
“There’s no possibility she could get down there, regardless,” I tell her.
“There are only two methods to get in and out of that place. One involves all seven gods who created the prison agreeing to something they won’t, and Persephone doesn’t have access to the other method. Neither do I. Only one person does.”
Her face lights up like I just gave her all the answers.
“Pandora’s Box,” she says.
She might as well have punched me in the nose, the way my head snaps back. “How the fuck do you know about that?”
But she glances past me, shifting to her right like she’s inching away from whatever’s coming for her.
I start toward her, intending to shut her down in Phlegethon again, make sure she can’t leave until I get answers. Again. After that, she can damn well disappear forever.
She doesn’t back away as I stalk her, not that she can go anywhere with the wall at her back.
My eyes narrow with every step until I invade her space, hands going to the wall on either side of her head, caging her in.
Her scent, familiar now—vanilla and citrus tinged with smoke, which I’ve always wondered at—hits me hard in that second.
I fight the urge to press my lips to her neck, to reach for her, to bury myself in her body before I send her away, work her from my system—
No.
Fuck, I’m losing it. She makes me lose it.
I’d never be able to let her go if I did that. If I touched her like that.
“Only the original seven who built that prison know about what Pandora’s Box really does. It is impossible for you—”
“It’s a jar. You put it in a keyhole that only you can see.”
Zeus might as well have hit me with every thunderbolt in his vast arsenal. The effect would be the same. “How…”
“It doesn’t matter how I know. I do.”
Her frantic glance past my shoulder tempts me to turn and look, but I know nothing is there.
“The only way you’re going to get Persephone out is with that key,” she says. “And the only way you’re going to get your hands on the box is if you become King of the Gods.”
Rejection curls my mouth into a sneer. “I have no use for that title.”
She gives me a look that is pure frustration, and I think she comes close to slapping me. “You do if you want to save her.” She takes a gulping breath. “The only way to take the throne of Olympus is to compete.”
I go deadly still, shaken to my core, unable to settle between rage, disbelief, and determination to send her away as fast as possible. Before I fucking claim her and punish her for these lies.
Before I believe her.
“You’re telling me to compete in the Crucible Games?” The competition my siblings came up with after I ended the Anaxian Wars, games that my actions brought down on mortals’ heads. Every soul lost to those games comes to me. “It’s rigged. And barbaric. I refuse.”
Her pulse at the base of her neck sets to fluttering like a trapped bird. I can see it.
Hells, I can’t fucking look away. Just one taste.
“I’ve seen you win,” she says.
That snaps my gaze back up to hers.
“There’s only one way, though. On the night of the Selection Ceremony”—she pauses for a moment—“not this coming Crucible but the next, in the twenty-first century—that night, wait at the back of Zeus’ temple in the city of San Francisco—”
“In the Americas?” I demand, mouth drawing down into a frown.
Why in the name of all my hells would she send me there? Why am I even listening to this?
She waves me off like I interrupted her, rushing her words more. “Yes. There. A young woman will appear and try to desecrate the temple. You must stop her, and then you must choose her as your champion and do everything you can to make sure she wins.”
I could kill her for what she’s doing to me right now. Does she even know the battle she’s set raging inside me?
Believe her? Don’t believe her?
Fuck her? Don’t touch her because that will make walking away from her unbearable?
I rake a hand through my hair. “You’re telling me to give up on Persephone for over a century. To wait. And then to throw some innocent human life to the horrors of those games.”
She doesn’t know what the gods make their human champions do. Just because my siblings can’t control themselves if they fight, like toddlers. As out of control as I once was. It’s pathetic. But that’s not the worst thing.
I was right. Lyra is dangerous to me…because she makes me dangerous.
Maybe I burn the world down now to stop this chaos. Maybe it’s already too late.
“I’ve seen it,” she insists. And in her eyes, I can see how she’s willing me to believe her. “Give your champion the rest of the pearls.”
Persephone’s pearls, she means. My eyes flare wide. “How do you know they aren’t pomegranate seeds?”
She shakes her head, talking faster. “And as one of your gifts, give her a kiss that will protect her in the Underworld.”
“Fuck me,” I mutter. “That doesn’t require a kiss. Any mark will do.” This is too much to take in. Only…I’m starting to take it in. She’s so damned…sure of herself. “How do I know that what you tell me is true?”
The lines of her start to blur, and I know she’s leaving me.
“I have to go,” she says.
I should take her to Phlegethon now. In the same instant, I reject that thought. Keeping her with me is worse.
I can’t.
That damned prophecy is tied to her. I know it to the depths of my immortal soul.
“Damn it, Lyra.” I grab her arms and pull her against me, holding on tight. I try to teleport, but nothing happens, as if the fire of my power was snuffed out as easily as a small candle. That realization brings with it a twist of fear.
“I don’t have a choice,” she says to the bottom of my chin.
“Fuck.”
“I’m sorry.”
My heart cracks as if those words squeeze inside without my permission, and I groan. What am I supposed to do? “I can’t do this. How do I trust anything you have to say?”
She clutches onto me convulsively for half a beat before she goes up on tiptoe and places her lips softly to my cheek.
“Because I am yours,” she whispers for me alone.
She turns even more hazy as she lowers to her heels, green-and-gold eyes tormented but still so damn certain.
She offers me a reassuring smile. Or tries to. It wobbles. “I have always been yours.”
Then, like every other fucking time with her, she’s gone.