Chapter 92
Gods Of Death
LYRA
The goddess of time.
Me.
I’m still too stricken to take it in. My first, gut-level reaction is that I don’t want it. I can’t do this. Not this way. Not ever.
Rhea must see it, because a small sob wells out of her, but she swallows the next one down. “It’s his gift to you,” she whispers.
My face crumples as my shoulders heave even while I’m trying to hold it in for her sake. She has even more reason to grieve than I do. “I don’t want it,” I whisper. “Not like this.”
“I know.” Her lips tremble so hard she has to press them together as she moves her hands from my face to my shoulders. “But you need to be strong now. Honor his sacrifice.”
Guilt piles onto the heaviness already trying to crush my heart to a bloody pulp. She’s right. I owe him that much. I try to take a deep breath but only finally manage it on the third try.
A gift. This is a gift from him.
Forcing air into my lungs, I reach for the strength Cronos would want me to have, and I nod. I find strength in her eyes and gather calm around me like a dome of shields, then nod again. “It’s not over,” I say.
We still have to face a world full of gods glamoured to believe the Titans are evil.
Determination narrows Rhea’s eyes. “Not yet.”
Which is when a violent explosion of light knocks us all to the ground.
Shielding my eyes, I duck as a column of pure energy—beams of light of different colors wrapped around one another into one giant thing—pounds into and through the room we are in and into Tartarus, and before we can get up, the ground starts to shake.
It shakes so hard, my brain rattles in my skull.
The quake doesn’t stop as I surge to standing. It just gets worse, making it hard to stay upright.
There’s a sharp, groaning crack from under my feet, a sound that sends dread rippling through me. The bridge is going to collapse. That’s followed immediately by an ear-splitting bang overhead, and the ceiling falls.
Instinct kicks in hard.
One second, I’m on the ground inside Aphrodite’s Lock. The next, I teleport so I’m standing outside the double gates of Tartarus, looking in.
And I’m looking at Hades’ guardian, who is holding up the ceiling in Aphrodite’s Lock as the other Titans get out.
Because I beat them all out here.
“Run!” I shout to him as Koios, the last one through, clears the doorway.
Through the smoke and debris, I see Hades’ face, and I know…
The guardian can’t leave. He exists only in Tartarus and within the Locks themselves.
His lips form words. Three simple words that I don’t have to hear to know what he says.
“Go to him.”
My heart screams a denial an instant before the guardian lets go, and Tartarus implodes, collapsing down on top of him.
Debris blasts out toward where we are, and someone drags me over the bridge, away from the abyss on this side.
Pure power continues to explode into the ground.
Then a scream of sound that makes my bones shudder fills the entire cavern, and a new power slams into the column of light.
Three streams made of fire and billowing smoke go after the light.
They pulverize it, like they’re beating it to dust.
Even through the chaos, I can see that the fire is still attacking the light, trying to dig and drill its way through it into what is now rubble.
We emerge on the other side of that war of powers into clear air, all of us coughing, but my heart wants me to run back. To dig Hades’ guardian out. To dig the others still trapped in their cells out. Medusa is down there. Some, I don’t give a shit about, but her… I promised her.
“Fuck!” Iapetus whispers.
I stop struggling against Boone’s hold to jerk around and gasp.
Because we’re not alone.
Facing us here in the pits of the Underworld are…gods.
Close to a dozen of them—and the light is coming from them. Each of them combining their powers to attack Tartarus.
Were they…trying to kill us?
I glance behind me. The smoke and fire is from Hades. It has to be. He wasn’t burning down the world. He was trying to stop them from killing me.
Slowly, I face them, death rising in my heart.
They get one look at us and stop, power shutting off so fast that the cavern dims suddenly. I blink through the dimness, trying to determine who my new enemies are.
Not Charon. Not Cerberus, either.
Hermes is here, though, slighter in build than the other gods but no less dangerous.
He’s hovering above the others with his sandals flapping like hummingbird wings.
The woman below him, hiding a pale face behind flowing black hair, is Hecate, a goddess of many things, including a small corner of the Underworld. We haven’t formally met yet.
But there are other gods with them who are not of the Greek pantheon.
A red-blood-spattered skeleton with eyeballs floating in black eye sockets has to be Mictlāntēcutli of the Aztecs.
I think the woman beside him is Hel, of the Norse, with half blue and half pale-oak-colored flesh and dark hair cropped close to her head.
There’s a two-faced god beside her who flicks his forked tongue in my direction.
And the Egyptian god Anubis, with his black-furred jackal head, is also kind of hard to miss.
Who they all are is also impossible to ignore.
The gods and goddesses of the Underworlds. Of Death.
They’re here for us. For the Titans.
I know this because of both the fine veils of glamour over their faces and the way each slowly assumes a stance of battle, weapons and hands raised, ready to fight.
The Titans all tense around me.
They don’t assume fighting positions, but…
they are all wearing armor now, with weapons in their hands.
Gleaming, plain armor. Not the fancy decorated shit their children wear.
Armor and weapons they didn’t have inside Tartarus.
No more loud print shirt for Iapetus. Instead, in his hand is his famous spear.
I look down to find I’m back in the clothes I wore the day I was pulled into Tartarus, including my vest and, judging by the weight of them, both my axes.
Then the strangest sound, somewhere between a roar and a cat’s yowl, bursts from just behind them, and two of the death gods have to duck as a pair of massive male lions—one with a dark-black mane and one with no mane at all—leaps over them to run to Rhea, who kneels to take the impact of their ecstatic greeting.
They curl and rub all over her, making frantic sounds.
“My babies,” she coos. “You waited for me?”
My eyebrows shoot up. Did Hades know they were down here? Have they been waiting for their mistress all these ages?
Across the way, the gods facing us shift on their feet, glancing at one another in question.
“Are you Lyra?” Anubis calls out to me. His jackal-mouth moving as he speaks is weird as fuck.
I glance at Boone. “Why does the Egyptian god of the Underworld know my name?” I whisper.
He whistles the signal for no idea.
“Yes,” I call back.
“You are needed urgently in Olympus. Hades sits on the throne.” His gaze moves past me to the crumbled remains of Tartarus and the arms of smoke still hitting the rubble. Trying to get to me now? Dig me out?
He must not know that I got out first.
Doesn’t he feel it?
Is he so far gone? Shit. I can’t leave yet, though.
“He will kill us all,” Hermes yells at me when I don’t respond. “Already, Zeus—”
He can’t finish the sentence, and the implication hits me like one of the thunder god’s bolts of lightning, straight to the chest. Is Zeus dead?
“We were here to stop the Titans from being released,” Anubis says. “It seems as though we are too late. We now must fight on two fronts.”
Fighting no matter what. No listening to arguments first. That damned glamour.
“Titans of Tartarus.” Anubis addresses the others around me. “We cannot let you live outside your prison.”
Yeah. It’s a no-matter-what situation.
I take three purposeful strides to stand before my family, and Boone joins me on one side, Persephone on the other.
A serious-faced god dressed in a traditional Korean hanbok of beautiful reds and purples—Yeomra, I think he is called—beckons me to cross the unmanned divide between us and them. “Come, young goddess. You are safe now. Go stop your lover.”
I will. But I won’t abandon the Titans.
I skate my gaze across the gods before us, trying to catalog who we are facing.
Hades was just starting to familiarize me with all the other gods of death and the Underworlds when I got stuck down here.
I almost sigh in relief when I realize there is no woman with talons for feet.
Ereshkigal isn’t here. Hades told me that the powerful Sumerian goddess of death was the only Underworld deity who he feared could destroy him.
Someone was smart enough not to invite her.
“Lyra.” Hel’s voice is gentle, flowing like water, like the sweetest music, at direct odds with her downcast face. “Come to us.”
The effect drifts over me, soothing and yet disturbing at the same time, and I have to close my eyes, giving my head a shake to dislodge her. Only when I don’t feel the urge to obey do I open my eyes again to find her staring at me with her own narrowed into angry slits.
I give her a pointed half smile. I’m a goddess of the Underworld, too, I silently remind her.
“You misunderstand,” I say. “We will stay here to protect the Titans…from you.”