Chapter 33 Sacrifice
Sacrifice
Ispluttered. Sucked down water. Coughed it up. My lungs burned. I scrabbled at the King’s carapace for purchase, but it was as slick as oil. In an instant I was whipped underwater again.
I almost lost hold of the crown. Blindly I grabbed for it in the water. Its dagger-sharp points sank into my hand. I hissed at the pain and again as the icy water bit at the edges of my wound. But I slammed the crown points-first into the King’s carapace. They sank in like a pick into a rock face.
The King roared. His attention was jerked away from Elke instantly. He slammed one of his human fists into my face.
I felt the flesh of my face split. Heard, rather than felt, the bone crunch. One more hit like that and I’d be dead.
I grabbed the King’s arm, wrenched the crown out of his body and smashed it in again. Higher up. This time, I hauled myself out of range of the King’s fist, although I was just an instant too slow. The blow landed on my thigh. I screamed as the bone cracked.
But I was high enough up now to get my fingers into the ridges of his carapace.
I ripped the crown from his body a second time and climbed.
The crown, and the King’s body beneath my feet, were slick with his blood.
In the strange blue light of the Lake, the King’s blood was neither red like mine nor green like Mackr’s had been, nor black as I might have expected of a creature half-absorbed by the god of Chaos. It was rainbow.
The King stopped trying to punch me. He floated in the Lake.
I paused my climbing. I searched wildly for what had made him fall still.
The Vizeking? No, the Vizeking was standing in the same place, looking enraged.
Elke or Calix? No, Elke was nearly at the shore.
She had reeled Calix and my mother up with her silk and cocooned them so that only their heads stuck out.
Calix looked disgusted and furious and scared shitless.
For half a beat I worried that the Vizeking or his lackeys would try to stop Elke when she reached the shore, but they were all focused on me. Me and their King.
Hades was still unconscious. From here, I could not be sure he wasn’t dead.
The King’s body was thrumming.
Then something sharp punched out of his body.
It sank into my arm. I screamed and let go of his carapace.
I tried to grab on again an instant later, but it was too late.
I fell like a stone, frantically thrusting the points of the crown at his body again; at the last second the crown dug in, arresting my fall, but the sudden jolt felt like it had ripped my shoulder out of its socket. I prayed it hadn’t.
A few more minutes, I begged silently, terrified. That’s all I need.
I blinked through the blood of my broken face. I couldn’t see Hades anymore.
But I did see what had punched out of the King’s body and stabbed me.
It was a spider leg.
The King was growing more legs. I couldn’t see — he was so big, and I was so close, and my vision was going hazy, I had lost so much blood — but I thought that he now had sixteen of them. Eight human, eight spider. I had never seen a chaosgotter with more than eight legs before.
The King growled furiously and leapt into the air to shake me off. I gasped with terror. I hung on for dear life. For a moment we were both weightless.
He landed on the cavern wall. The impact jarred me to the teeth. He was upside-down, with me hanging a hundred feet above the Lake. From here, the Lake’s liquid surface looked as hard as ice. Even unwounded, I never would have had the strength to hold on like this.
But I didn’t have to hold on. I just had to get the King to let go.
One of his human arms was dangerously close to me, the hand balled into a fist. His whole body was shaking, booming.
He was laughing at me.
Not for long, I thought, half-dead. I grabbed the fist as it swung toward me and sank my teeth into it.
The King howled. He shook and shook his arm but I hung on. I took some small solace from the fact that his human flesh was as soft as mine. I tightened my grip on the crown and wielded it like a clumsy dagger. I wrenched it from his carapace and I drove it into his arm.
He tried to grab at me with another arm, one higher up (or lower down? I was so disoriented). I seized that one, then, and did the same thing, which let me haul myself up a few feet, toward his head. Again, again, sometimes with a spider-leg, working my way all the way up to his head.
Until I was face-to-face with his eight blue eyes.
They were Hades’s eyes.
They were so human.
But there was nothing human in them.
I smashed the crown into them. Points-first.
I prayed that behind those human eyes was a human brain. That the King, like any human, could be killed by stabbing it.
But I would never know, because two things happened at once:
The crown clanged against an internal carapace. A skull? It was like hitting steel. My heart stopped.
The King screamed a bloodcurdling scream.
He released his grip on the wall and fell like a stone.
And I fell with him.
I lost my grip on the crown. It stayed embedded in his face.
We both hurtled toward the water. I put my arms up but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I felt the blood whipping out of my face, my arm, snatched by the wild air.
But it didn’t hurt. I was too shocked. I couldn’t believe I had failed so badly.
My mother, still dead.
The King, still alive.
Calix and his soldiers, about to be eaten.
Hades, lolling unconscious.
No. Wait. Where was Hades?
I couldn’t see him. Everything was moving so fast. The Lake’s surface rushed toward me like a wall. I squeezed my eyes shut —
And thunked into a pair of muscled arms.
Hades had woken up. He had worked free of his bonds. He had leapt forward when I had fallen.
And he had caught me.
We splashed into the water.
The King struck the water at the same time. The resulting wave carried us both back to the candlestick. Hades grabbed it. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I couldn’t hold onto anything anymore. One of my arms was bleeding and the other was dislocated.
My eyes filled with tears. To think, just two days ago I had thought that Hades would drown me with these arms. And here he was, saving me from drowning.
We both bobbed up and down, watching with horror as the King clawed at the crown in his face and screamed. He was moving in crazy circles, not twenty feet from us, but he took no notice of anything. He could not see us. I had blinded him.
Hades whispered, “What did you do?”
“I couldn’t get to his brain. His skull was too thick.”
“Persephone, that’s my father.”
“No it’s not. It’s the Monarch.”
“What?”
“The Vizeking is bringing Him back. The Monarch. To earth. In the body of your father. Remember the book, the one we both have? It’s all in there.”
“That’s a fairy story,” Hades hissed, but I knew him too well at this point. I could see his mind working. The muscles in his face tightened. He knew I was right. He looked up at the King. He blanched
And then I had a thought that made my blood run cold, and I watched the realization dawn on Hades’s face at the same time:
Now that Elke and Calix had gotten my mother out, there was nothing left in this Lake to eat but us.
And I — a human woman — was the only one of us to the Monarch’s taste.
As if on cue, the Vizeking howled, “A meal, a meal! You don’t need your eyes! You need to eat! Eat the —” I heard his stuttering breath as he realized my mother was no longer floating in the Lake. But he changed tack fast. “Eat the girl! Eat the Prince! Eat anything!”
The King was not obedient.
But he was hungry.
He froze. Slowly, he lowered his hands from his eyes.
He turned his great face toward us. The punctured eyes. The rainbow blood soaking his spider-fangs.
His fangs twitched.
Hades and I did not move an inch.
For a breathless instant I thought we might get away with it. The blinded King would not find us.
Then the Vizeking shouted, “Yes, there! Right in front of you! THERE!”
The King’s spider-fangs grinned. He charged.
Hades tried to swim away with me. The King barreled into us and snatched us up. He was so big. He lost interest in Hades at once and threw him off to the side as he had before. As he had done for all of Hades’s life.
But Hades caught onto one of his spider-legs. The King did not even notice.
The King raised me to his gnashing mouth.
I screamed.
Hades climbed up his father’s body like lightning. He wrapped his fists around the crown that was buried in his father’s eyeballs. “Don’t do this, Father!” he yelled. “Please! I’m begging you!”
The King could not hear him anymore. It was not clear how much of him was even the King.
And then the King ate me.
He tossed me into his mouth. It was not the size of a human mouth. He closed his jaws around me. My hips cracked. The pain was blinding.
But my head and arms were still dangling free.
So I was able to see when Hades, far stronger than I was, forced the crown all the way into his father’s skull.
It was the Vizeking, not the King, who howled in fury.
Because the King didn’t even have time to.
His jaw fell lax. I tumbled, hurtling toward the Lake again. This time it was Elke, not Hades, who caught me — she had made it to shore, and she fired a fresh tendril of silk and caught me in midair and jerked me over to her. She caught me in her spider-arms.
I twisted my neck just in time to watch the King thud into the Lake.
He was dead. I could see his face from here. His spider-skull bleeding, his jaw still hanging open, his eyeballs shredded. Hades sat on top of his father’s body, as if he had summited a mountain.
Hades still held the crown in one hand. It was coated in his father’s rainbow blood.
I watched him look at it. Watched his shoulders slump. But he had nowhere to put it.
So he put it on.
He looked levelly at the Vizeking. He looked so exhausted. My heart ached for him.
But at least it was over.