Chapter 72
Time Thief
LYRA
Time brings me back to Cronos in the small room, and the Titan searches my face. “Did you pull a string?”
I frown. “More like…confirmed that the string I pulled worked.”
“And you came back to now, rather than resetting.” He passes a shaky hand over his face. “I think you might be—”
His eyes go wide on something behind me.
I don’t even have time to turn before crystal light flickers around me. “Already?”
And then I’m in Hades’ water garden.
In all the celestial, peaceful beauty I remember from my time. The sounds of water all around me are soothing.
“Lyra, I don’t know if I can take much more of this.”
Hades is standing behind me with his arms crossed, and it’s impossible to deny the familiarity of this moment from the very first time I was swallowed up by broken time.
“Um…” I glance around. “Did I just kiss you?”
He stalks toward me, expression taking on a dark cast. “My mark on you alerted me that you’d shown up in the Underworld. But that’s impossible because you’re fighting for your life in Poseidon’s fucking Labor right this instant.”
That’s right. He mentioned that the first time. She’s in the Labor right now. I am.
Oh gods.
Isabel.
I couldn’t save Meike, but maybe Isabel. Mnemosyne showed me all the ways I could save them, save her, but I don’t remember seeing a version where I sent Hades to fix it. I have to try.
I grab Hades’ wrist. “You need to go back to her…to me—”
“Damn you, Lyra.” He shakes me off. “The girl you told me a hundred and fifty years ago to enter in the Crucible is you. Only she has no bloody clue that we’ve ever known each other.”
“I know, but right now—”
He takes me by both arms, fingers curling around me like he wants to shake me but is barely holding back. “You show up here, kiss me like you’re desperately relieved to see me, and then disappear like usual.”
“There’s something more import—”
“And now you’re back an instant later…” His gaze narrows on my clothes. “Only different.”
How can he tell?
“Isabel,” I snap. “She’s going to die in this Labor if I don’t stop it. You have to—”
His grip tightens before we blink out of existence. We arrive in the hallway just outside his rooms in his Underworld home, and he waves me inside.
“If you don’t want to be seen, I suggest you don’t leave.” Hades shuts the door in my face.
I run to the door. “The water dragon bites her,” I yell through the door. “Don’t let it bite her…or me!” I definitely died that way a couple of times.
No response.
Is he even still there?
A snap of fingers sounds on the other side, and then Hades is giving someone a gruff command. “Guard her. Do not talk to her. Ever.”
I don’t know what Cerberus says in return, but I know it’s him because of the smell of sulfur. Also, who else would Hades get to guard me? Especially down here?
My arms drop to my sides as I stare at the door. I don’t dare speak aloud. Cerberus probably shouldn’t hear my voice. “Please,” I mouth, then kick at the heavy wood.
A trio of warning growls comes from the other side.
The sound is so… Gods, I’ve missed that three-headed mutt, even more than I let myself think about until this moment.
I put my hand against the door, like he can feel me. Then my forehead. “Damn,” I whisper.
I think I’m already too late.
But I know Hades comes back to me here. After Poseidon’s Labor, after he holds me when I’m upset about Isabel, he leaves me to come down here. He left me up there to let me wander Olympus alone to come back down to…me.
And then everything goes dead and silent. Not with time travel. It’s the same gut-kicking, petrifying experience I’ve already felt once today. I try to cry out, but my vocal cords won’t work. My body won’t move, not even to blink. Not even to breathe.
Time is resetting. Again.
I made it reset. How? By sending Hades to save Isabel?
Just as panic starts to set in, that same strange skipping-record effect brings back sound and sensation.
And I’m not in Hades’ bedroom.
I’m in Tartarus just above the abyss to the Locks, looking at the crimson bloodstain where I died.
“What the fuck just happened?” Boone demands. “Why do I remember other things? Doing stuff before this?”
“It was me,” I whisper. I’m shaking so hard I have to sit down. “I reset us. Again.”
I guess because we’re down here with the others, inside Tartarus, for this new reset, Boone and I now remember everything from the previous life, too.
Boone squats down in front of me. “What did you do?”
I look at him, pleading with my eyes for him to understand. “I tried to save Isabel.”