Chapter 86
A Time When It Was Magic
LYRA
When I come back to myself, I’m wrapped in Hades’ arms, in his bed—our bed—in the Underworld. My lips part on a soft gasp.
“What?” Hades’ voice is an amused rumble against my back.
“I can see the bond.”
“What?” He shifts against me, propping up on an elbow to see my face. “You can see it?”
I nod. “I can see glamours.”
I guess my power turned back on while we were wrapped up in each other.
“That’s not a glamour, though,” he says.
Oh. “I suppose I can see invisible things, too, then.”
“You don’t know?” he asks slowly.
I still, my gaze caught by our discarded clothes on the floor. He doesn’t know when I am from, and he can’t know that he loses me in Tartarus. I need to be careful. “It’s…new…and still evolving.”
Silence to that.
I trace a finger over the glittering golden lines around my arm. I think maybe I thought the celestial ribbon had been more for show, but I’d never wish it away.
I turn over, fascinated, and trace the lines across his arm, his neck, his chest. Until Hades captures my hand with a grunt, then kisses the tips of my fingers. “I’d love to continue that, but first…”
When he doesn’t keep going, I raise my eyebrows at him. “First?”
He opens his mouth, pauses, then says, “Don’t go.”
The fascination fades. Don’t leave him again, he means. I don’t think that’s what he meant to say, and I feel every part of that down in my deepest heart. “I—”
He shakes his head. “Never mind. I know.”
Will it make a difference that past Hades created this bond with future Lyra, though? I bite my lip. It’s a worry that will have to answer itself.
Hades seems to gather in on himself and goes back to what he originally meant to say. “First, I think you need to give me more. What else should I know?”
“I have to be careful when I tell you things as much as what,” I say slowly. Reluctantly.
“I understand.”
“Do you?” I ask his clavicle.
He gathers me closer, face to face, heart to heart. “I think so. I know you are a future version of yourself. That you are helping make sure things go the way you need them to. Me too, I assume. Right so far?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure that this is the right way?”
A thousand different witnessed pasts tell me so. “As sure as I can be.”
He nods. “I also have to assume that my father is dead.”
His words might as well be Poseidon’s electric eels shocking me to stiffness. “What?”
Hades frowns at the way I said that, and I have to reel myself in. He has no idea about the truth when it comes to the Titans.
“Why would you say that?” I ask in a calmer tone.
“Because only he has control over time in this way. Now you do, even if you’re still learning it. He’d never give it up willingly. That power of his is the most important thing to him. Always has been.”
His bitter words are like a snakebite. Meanwhile, though, I try not to let myself visibly relax.
Hades thinks I have power over time. If he figured out that some version of Cronos from a future I haven’t reached yet is the one sending me to him, he’d stop doing anything I tell him. Stop trusting me entirely.
The veil over his face is there. Not even a hint that it’s weakened over time. It’s so hard not to try to remove it, to pull it away from his face, to relieve him of that burden.
But I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
“I told you that when I win, you have to get Pandora’s Box.” It’s the only thing my brain comes up with to redirect the conversation.
He gives me a look. “You told me that a long time ago now, but yes. I remember.”
Clearly, given where past me is right now. “Persephone will be waiting at the gates of Tartarus. Bring a few helpers with you. Charon. Cerberus, me.”
“No.” The word is a snarl. “Not you. It’s too dangerous.”
I press my hand over his heart, finding it thudding, and melt a little. “This is the only way. At least give me the choice.”
Wince. It’s not entirely a lie. I may still be down there, but I’ve gotten as far as I have. I will get out of there, damn it. Back to him.
Hades’ jaw works as he grinds his teeth. “Anyone else?”
I hesitate over the other two. Boone hasn’t been saved yet in his timeline, is still a soul in the Underworld. And I haven’t tried to tell Demeter about her daughter yet. Neither would make sense to him.
I shake my head. “Others might join. That’s up to you and…me…when the time comes. But those three are important.”
I’ll have to trust that I’ll bring Boone again.
“Anything else?”
I burrow into Hades and think. Hard. Is there anything else I can tell him at this point? “Oceanus?” I wrinkle my nose. “You probably haven’t had time—”
“I looked into him. He hasn’t left that cave since the day the Titanomachy started.”
He hasn’t. Then… “How does he know things he shouldn’t?”
Hades leans in, nose to nose. “How do you?”
I wrinkle my nose at him.
“Can’t tell me?”
I shake my head, my long hair rustling against the pillowcase with the movement.
After a second, Hades relaxes against me and touches my hair, winding one long tress around his finger. “This is why I know you’ll be safe after all this is over.”
“My hair?” It grew instantly in Hestia’s Lock and didn’t go back, but why—
“You must be from far ahead in the future to have grown it this long by the time you come to me. Even when I was younger, millennia ago, you looked like this when you came to me.”
It takes everything I have to control my reaction, my expression.
“And now you’ve made me promises in the bonds under our skin.” He tips my chin up and kisses me softly. Sweetly. “I’ll believe in that and get you through the rest of the Crucible, no matter what it takes.”
“Don’t forget. You can’t show me you love me. You have to keep my heart broken.”
His arms curl tighter around me. “You ask the worst things of me, my star.”
He’s going to hate me.
When I disappear into Tartarus.
He’s going to believe I lied. That I broke the bonds of these promises. My heart wants to crack, shatter for him, for the future I make him endure.
“Lyra?” he murmurs into my hair.
“Hmmm?”
“When we marry in the future, don’t ever leave me again.”
I squeeze my eyes shut tight. Oh gods. What have I done to him?