Chapter 89
The Worst Thing You Can Do Is Nothing
LYRA
Me.
I stare at Hades, and the single word he uttered rattles around in my skull, which empties of its brain entirely—shocked away to nonexistence—giving the sound lots of places to rattle. “What? Why would you try to destroy this place? Do you think—”
“Not me.” He points an impatient finger at the skies over the beach. “Me.”
My thinking capacity is only just now booting back up, so it takes longer than it should for me to realize what he means. I feel the way my eyes widen, even as I’m hoping that the answer I’ve reached isn’t right. “My Hades?”
The replica of him winces. “Yes. I draw power from the god who made me. I think you already know that’s why the Hestia down here doesn’t work so well.
We can feel them. I can feel him, my maker.
The stronger the emotion or the closer he is to me in the Underworld, the more I get from him.
Flashes.” His eyes trace over my features again.
“Even after I was placed down here, I’ve seen you. I used to think it was dreams.”
A shaved-off piece of a soul can dream? “That’s…” I shake my head. “I don’t know what that is. It seems…wrong, somehow.”
He scowls. “I don’t need your pity.”
I bark a sharp laugh. “Never that.”
He slowly closes his mouth, considering me. “You filled a long existence with something…new…every so often,” he says. “I thank you for that.”
I don’t know what to say to that, either. Or maybe I do, as I mentally flip through the flashes of me he might have gotten and a snort escapes. “I’m sure it was quite entertaining.”
I think maybe he’s going to grin, or even laugh, but he doesn’t. “He’s trying to help you.”
We both go still like we’re both surprised at the words that came out of his mouth. “Hades?”
The copy of him shrugs. “Apparently, you are quite important to him. I don’t know everything, but it’s obvious to me since you’ve been down here that the other gods who created these Locks have refused to open their Locks and let you out.”
I wrinkle my nose. “So he’s trying to bury me?”
“No.” He gives me a patient look. “Something else. I’m not sure what.”
My chest expands on a sharp inhale. Hades is trying to help me. “Is he burning down the world?”
This Hades’ eyes narrow. “The prophecy?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure.” His vision goes hazy, like he’s looking beyond. “He’s…gone dark now. Like I can’t feel him.”
I close my eyes.
“Lyra?”
“I believed,” I whisper, then lift my lashes to look at him. “I truly believed he could choose not to give in to it.”
Getting out of here and back to him was already at a near-panic level inside me every second of every day, but now…
“I have to help him.” I swallow. “Is there any way to help him while I’m still down here?”
Hades hesitates. “I don’t think so.”
Olympus be damned.
“But you shouldn’t stop him.”
I frown. “What?”
“Some destinies are fated for a purpose. He is what he is—I am what I am—for a purpose. If I were in his place right now, I would find another way.”
I have to bite my lip to keep it from wobbling and only release it when I’m sure that it won’t. “Would you try to get me out?”
He doesn’t have to answer aloud. Because I already know. He would if he was up there and I was down here.
“Even if it let out the Titans?”
His face goes hard, and he takes a measured step away.
I don’t need him to answer out loud. He already did.
“Boone and I are not fated in any way. It was a lie.” I don’t know why I tell him that.
Maybe it’s to see the way he takes the tiniest inhale like that means something important to him.
“How long do you think I have before this place collapses?” I ask, glancing around. The cracks here aren’t as bad as above the pillars, but they’re visible now when they weren’t before.
When he doesn’t answer, I pull my gaze back to him to find him watching me like he’s not sure I can handle the answer.
“Hades?” I prompt.
His eyes narrow slightly. “Given the size of that last earthquake, not long.”
Urgency is like an immediate burst of blood-boiling need inside me. We have to get out of here. Now.
“What is the secret to Aphrodite’s Lock?”
Disbelief clouds Hades’ eyes a heartbeat before his eyebrows snap low over them and the silver turns a flat, gunmetal gray.
Instantly, the illusion of the beach we are standing on dissolves, and we are back in the round rock room of his Lock.
“You would ask me to go against what I was made for? I am a guardian. That is my only reason for existence.”
“You would ask me to stay down here, trapped?” I demand right back.
“If it means not unleashing them—” He flings a hand in the direction of where Cronos is. “Then, yes.”
And that’s the difference between the guardian and the god above. My Hades would get me out of here either way. Even if it meant I left him behind. Apparently even if it unleashes evil.
“I’ll be buried alive,” I say.
“When that happens, time will simply reset—”
My turn to take a jerking step away from him. “Then you expect me to go through this over and over, including the pain, just so that I won’t let them out?”
“You’ll be with me—”
I take another step. “Except that you aren’t him. Not all of him. And I need—”
The way his face spasms, I don’t keep going, swallowing the words back.
“Don’t you see? I can’t leave him up there thinking he did this to me, blaming himself for all eternity.”
Something in his eyes dies. “But you can leave me down here for an eternity, getting only glimpses of you?”
“I…” I shake my head. I know that he’s not a fully formed person, but he is so real. And he is a piece of Hades. Hades, who I love every part of. Can I just leave him? “You could come with me.”
The sadness and truth that stares back at me is too much. Too big. Too hard.
My eyes well with tears that threaten to spill over, and I can’t blink them away fast enough. He sees.
“Lyra,” he whispers. “Don’t—”
Then he’s across the space I put between us, mouth crashing down on mine before I can take another breath.
He kisses me like he’ll never again have the chance. Like he’s willing me to stay and saying goodbye all at the same time.
I whimper against his mouth.
Hades whirls us around at the rock-on-rock slide of the Lock door opening. He tucks me behind him as he faces whatever just opened that door, an animalistic growl unleashing from his throat.
Boone stands on the other side. Or, more accurately, is propped up between Hyperion and Iapetus, with Persephone hovering behind him, face pinched with worry. That didn’t take Boone long. He’s visibly in much better shape, even if he can’t quite stand on his own.
He ignores Hades, his gaze locking on me.
I lay a hand on the guardian’s back, feeling him tense under my touch. I also feel the way he surrenders in the next breath, hunching slightly even as he straightens to face the small gathered crowd. “I should keep you here with me,” he murmurs for me alone.
“I—”
He looks me right in the eyes. “I won’t, Lyra. I wouldn’t do that to you. Even if it means we end up enemies.”
My hand, still resting on his back, curls into his shirt. “Hades.” His name comes out as a whisper.
And he closes his eyes against it. “Go, my star. Before I change my mind.”
Even knowing that I’m not walking away from my Hades, it still takes every ounce of willpower to make my legs work, to make them take me away from him.
He’s leaving me no choice. We can’t stay down here.
When I cross the threshold of the door, the last to step out, it whooshes closed behind me. Those doors close the same way every time, and yet this time, it feels…final.
“Thank the gods you made it back,” Boone says. “They told me…that we aren’t actually fated.”
It takes me a second to switch from what just happened in there to what came before. The glamours. His healing.
“I’m…” I make a face. “I’m not sure if I should say I’m sorry or not.” We didn’t know what it meant…but it gave us hope to get out.
Now that hope is gone.
“We’ll find a way through Aphrodite’s Lock,” he says. Back to cocksure. “I know we will. Thieves don’t need fate for that.”
I glance past him to the Titans and Persephone. “Who could do such a thing, make a glamour of that effect?”
Koios’ scowl tells me everything. They don’t know. And worse… “How did they do it down here?” he asks.
I glance past him to Persephone, who won’t look at me, and finally, it sinks in.
All the implications. Because someone might have glamoured Boone while we were still outside of Tartarus, but Persephone has been here over a century, and her new glamour was about me.
The person who cast it had to be down here to do it.
I swallow around my fear, the bile of it stinging my throat. “The earthquakes are Hades trying to help me in some way—I don’t know if it’s to dig me out or protect me.”
“Fuck,” Cronos mutters. “If that’s the case, then he’s not thinking of how that might collapse Tartarus and the possible effect on the Overworld.”
“Exactly.” I look at Boone, who stares back at me.
He shrugs off Hyperion and Iapetus’ help, straightening to his full height. “Only one more Lock,” he says, already on my page. “We go now.”
One more because he already unsealed Zeus’ without me.
I give him an off-kilter grin. “Let’s hope it doesn’t take as many tries as Hera’s. That really sucked.”