38. Chapter 38
Chapter thirty-eight
Corre
C orre stroked his face, combing her fingers through his wavy hair. She couldn’t look away from his tender gaze, those dark eyes she never stopped thinking about. Her heart turned to goo, and emotion swelled in her chest. She didn’t have much time to tell him everything, but there was something she had to say before anything else.
“Markus.” Her voice shuddered as she sucked in a breath. Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry.” The words came out in a whisper. His gentle gaze deepened.
He shook his head and held her face in his hands. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I do. When I left, I trusted Thanatos over my own judgment. I betrayed you.” Tears spilled from her eyes, and that heavy weight that had been stuck in her stomach ever since she’d left Tartarus continued sinking, pressing deeper into her until she could barely move. “You’ve had so many people stop believing in you. I shouldn’t have been one of them.” She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and fear pricked up her neck. Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything. “But it was only a moment,” she added quickly. “I’m so sorry.”
He smiled softly and traced her jawline with the back of his hand. “I never blamed you for a second.”
“You should have, though. I’m so sorry.”
“Stop apologizing,” he said, his voice soft. “Really. I understand everything was confusing. My master is devious. I’m just sorry I couldn’t remember what happened that day.” His face fell. “I still don’t know. So you shouldn’t feel bad. For all we know, I did . . .” He paused before saying, “Kill your parents.”
“No, Markus. You didn’t. I know that now. I know what happened that day, but I can’t explain now. We have to hurry. Before anyone finds us.”
He sighed with a nod. “Okay. What are we supposed to do?”
Corre nervously twisted her dress in her hands. “Well . . . I don’t know exactly. Your father only told me what we had to do. There’s . . . um . . .” She fumbled to get the words out. It was a lot more complicated to explain than she thought it would be. Thomas explained it so effortlessly. “There’s someone in a . . . a room or something. Down below Tartarus.”
“Below Tartarus?”
“Yeah. Apparently, Thomas was told that there’s been a strange energy sensed by some of the spirits down here. Tyche has heard whisperings, over time, I think, that something is going on in a cave down there, guarded by the deity Hypnos. It’s his grotto, but it’s almost impossible to get to because one must go over the river Lethe. Tyche hasn’t been able to investigate because of this, but your father thinks incantations can get us through long enough not to get our souls sucked out.”
Markus’s eyebrows shot up. “Wonderful.”
Corre lowered her voice. “Did you know you have a sister?”
Markus didn’t say anything at first, but then he nodded. “I know Tyche is my sister. She’s visited me a couple of times, but she always tries to stir trouble. I don’t know how reliable her word is.”
Corre shifted her weight. “Well, Thomas seems certain she cares about you. She’s just a little rough around the edges, I think.” She shot him a grin. “Like someone else I know.”
Markus let out a half-chuckle. “Fair enough. I guess we don’t have any other leads.” Corre wanted to tell him more. She wanted to explain that on Tyche’s other side, she was her half-sister, too. But now wasn’t the time. She’d tell him sometime in the future, but first, they needed to secure that they’d have a future. They needed to hurry.
“Right. Apparently, she heard about some of this through gods on Olympus, too.”
“What did she hear exactly?”
“Just whisperings about the same sort of thing. She heard them talking about how the humans’ sleep has been disrupted for a while. More and more. They think Hypnos might be behind it somehow. It makes sense. He’s the only one with power over sleep.”
Markus nodded, but he still didn’t look convinced.
“It’s the only lead we have, and it seems promising. Your father has been trying to figure this out for a while now. He told me, when I first came here a few months ago, that Thanatos shouldn’t still be on the throne and that something isn’t right.”
“You saw my father before, too?”
“I didn’t know who he was at the time. I only found out before meeting you here today.” He stared off, his expression heavy. She wasn’t sure what was going through his mind, but she did know they didn’t have time to think. They needed to act. “Which way to the river Lethe?”
He ran his hands through his hair and looked the opposite way down the corridor he’d just come from. “It’s quite a way from here. There are rivers all over Tartarus.”
“Then we better get going,” she said, grabbing his hand.
His lips flickered into a smile. “Okay. This way.”
Nikias
The river was unnervingly empty. Where were Charon and that girl? Thanatos had given him very specific instructions. He was to fetch her and bring her to him. And she needed to be watched. Carefully.
The general’s face tightened. “Charon!” he screamed, but he didn’t let his composure slip as he waited for the ferryman to appear.
After no more than a second, the hooded figure skated over the water with his long staff. Nikias couldn’t help but notice the boat was very girl-less. When the ferryman was close enough to respond, Nikias glared straight at him. “Where is she?” he hissed.
The boat docked. “The girl?” the ferryman croaked.
“Yes, the girl!”
“I was told you had urgent business to tend to. Someone else fetched her in your place.”
The blood drained from the general’s already pale face. “And you believed that nonsense?”
Charon didn’t answer. He even looked bored.
Nikias ground his teeth, vibrating with fury. “Who took her?”
“A mortal.”
His eyebrow flickered. “A mortal ?”
The figure nodded.
“Where did he take her?”
Charon pushed his boat back into the water. “I wasn’t told. Somewhere in the labyrinth.”
“Where are you going?” Nikias wailed, but the ferryman kept rowing back down the river toward Olympus.
“Back.”
“Back?”
“This is your problem, general. Not mine.”
Nikias seethed and let out an angry yell before wheeling around and running to Thanatos’s palace.
Corre
“I don’t think Hypnos guards this river. I actually remember coming down here as a young boy,” Markus said, stepping down into a gravelly ditch, carefully helping Corre down with him. “I don’t remember much, but I remember searching for answers. Strangely, it felt familiar at that time, too, but I was sure I’d never been there before.” He helped her over another short rocky wall. “But I do know that this is his grotto, and the river is tied to him. This whole place is Hypnos’s domain. But, as far as I’ve been told, Lethe doesn’t suck out your soul. It just wipes out your memory.”
He led her over a hump of jagged rocks. The air in this pocket of Tartarus was thick and extremely damp, and the farther they crawled into the narrowing tunnel, the darker it became. She could barely see him by the time he led her down the last dip of rock before an unnerving ledge. She had to trust him. If she let herself be scared, she wouldn’t be able to do whatever it was they had to for Markus to take the throne. So she kept her hand in his and kept going.
“That’s just as frightening,” she said, wobbling over a slick bed of stone. “I don’t want to forget my life. After all this, after all we’ve been through, forgetting would be worse than death.”
She didn’t see him turn around and wouldn’t have known he had if she hadn’t felt his lips brush against her knuckles. He pressed a kiss into the back of her hand, and her heart flipped.
“I agree,” he said, “So let’s be careful.”
“But what about the incantations? Your father said we have to recite them.”
“Incantations,” Markus mused. “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t get the story right. I guess I don’t know if the river or grotto could suck our souls out for certain. We’ll be careful. Just stay with me. I won’t let anything hurt you.”
Warmth filled Corre’s chest. She squeezed his hand. “Okay. I trust you.”
He led her down another path, and finally, a light appeared—a shocking, flashing light emanating from the end of the long, rocky tunnel. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but she might have been half-expecting a horrific dungeon at the mouth of such a river. But that’s not what she saw when she stepped out of that tunnel.
The sight was beautiful. There were poppies so expertly crafted that she wondered if her mother could even make flowers so alluring, and who had possibly made them. They spread across the opening of a large grotto. At one end was an ebony nest of some sort, and Corre couldn’t help being drawn to it. The dark wood it consisted of was perfectly rounded, as if it had been formed by a giant tool, smoothed to perfection by the Titans, ready for a giant fowl to rest in it. It looked like an enormous bowl set in a field of lush grass and beautiful flowers. The deep red of the poppies spread before the mouth of the river like a tongue crowning the entrance to the incredibly lethal body of water.
“How do we get across?” she asked. There was no way around the river and into the depths of whatever lay beyond the grotto other than to sail through it.
“I guess we have to recite those incantations,” Markus said, turning to face her, his fingers still threaded in hers. “What did you say they were?”
She grimaced. “I didn’t. Um . . .” She thought hard about what Thomas had told her, but he’d poured so much information into her. It was hard to remember it all. But this was the most important of all of it. She groaned and rubbed her temple. “I think it was something like, ‘You raise the dead from slumber, wake from . . . underwater?’” She winced.
Markus scanned the water, then looked up at the nest. “I don’t think that’s it, but I do think that’s a proper incantation, or at least most of one. It rings a bell . . . though I can’t place from where . . .” He trailed off before smiling at her reassuringly. “Still, that doesn’t seem like one we need right now. Didn’t you say you learned multiple incantations?”
“There was another one. I think maybe this one could help.” They had no choice. She might as well place hope in it. “‘Where the magic flows, power swells, we reach inside to skate this well.’” As soon as she uttered the last word, a large crash roared from the river.
They staggered back, and Corre gasped as a large wall of water burst from the river’s murky surface. When the surface calmed, a small rowboat was revealed. A smile stretched across her face, and she swung to her left to face Markus. “We did it!” She took his hands in hers and jumped as she led him to the boat. But there was a hesitance in his steps that made her stop just before placing her foot inside the ebony craft. “What’s wrong?”
“This doesn’t seem right.” His eyes darted to the large bowl-like nest at the far end of the grotto. “Doesn’t this look an awful lot like that thing over there?”
“Yeah . . . So?”
“I don’t know. Something feels off.”
Corre’s shoulders fell. “Markus, we don’t have any other choice right now. I think someone is looking for us.”
“Who?”
“I think your father said he was a general.”
“Nikias. Right. Why didn’t I think he’d be on our tail? I’m sure he won’t stop until he’s caught us.” He sighed. “And I’m sure Thanatos gave him an army to fulfill the task.” He sighed again, an even longer, louder one. “Okay. I guess we have no other choice. Let’s go.”
Without further ado, Corre stepped toward the boat, but before she could get inside, Markus said, “Wait!” She swiveled around to see him narrow his eyes on the boat and walk closer to it. “Let me get in first, so I can help you in. I don’t think I could live with myself if something went wrong and you weren’t safe. If you fell in the river . . . and . . .” His eyes were distant before he looked back at her. “Something could happen to you. Let me help you in.”
“Okay.” She suppressed a smile. Why did it feel so good to be loved so much? She watched as he carefully stepped into the boat. He stood still, examining the structure with his arms out like he was waiting for something ominous to happen. When moments passed and nothing so much as stirred, he offered her his hand.
She took it, and off they went.
As they floated out of the grotto, Corre smiled at Markus. “You’re doing this so effortlessly.”
He looked back at her with baffled eyes. “Doing what?”
“Pulling the boat?”
“I’m not pulling the boat,” he said, and something eerie fell against her shoulders. A pounding pulsed in her ears, crawling into her mind. The veins in her temples throbbed uncontrollably. She let out a cry and toppled over. It was loud. A muffled ringing in her head. Words were trying to reach her through water, but she couldn’t make them out.
“Markus?” she thought she said, but she couldn’t hear her voice. Her body was paralyzed, and a force unlike anything she’d ever felt was crushing her. An unseen weight, making it hard to breathe and impossible to move.
Finally, she managed to look at Markus, but he wasn’t sitting at the bow of the boat anymore. He’d fallen to the floor of the small vessel, his hand on his forehead, also racked with whatever power this was. But he appeared to be withstanding it a lot better than she was. He turned to face her, and, at the sight of her struggle, he crawled over to her. “Correlia,” he mouthed, but she couldn’t hear him. His eyes widened in panic, and he looked around as if searching the walls for what to do.
She couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore, but as soon as she closed them, the pain left her mind. It was sucked from her head, and when she opened her eyes again, she saw Markus’s hand positioned close to her face, turning slightly and then pulling back. All the pain was extinguished, and she felt completely clear. Like she’d never been racked with pain at all.
As soon as relief eased her shoulders and spread through her body, she couldn’t help but feel a surge of attraction to him. His strength and focus. His devotion. If they weren’t in such a precarious position, she’d definitely be on top of him right now.
His eyes were closed, but his face was tight, his body rigid. He was concentrating. Meditating, or something similar. Then his features relaxed, and he opened his eyes.
“How did you do that?” she asked, unable to hide a smile.
“A lot of discipline and years of training,” he replied. “But I’ve never felt a sensation like that before. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to fight it off.” His eyes fell to his hands, and her heart ached for him. She wished she could help, but this was far from any knowledge or abilities she possessed.
She tried to think of something to say, but the boat jerked to an abrupt stop, and she almost fell out of it. Markus caught her before she toppled out. She let herself rest against his chest before he stood up and helped her out of the water.
She looked past him and spotted an ominous door, but before she could take another step, her body constricted in pain. Another wave of that horrid sensation thrust into her head. Her temples throbbed, and she could barely stand.
Markus quickly made his way in front of her and pushed the magic radiating from the massive steel doors away from them, throwing it out to his sides. The thick, oozing, translucent material dissipated, and the doors swung open.
There was a moment of silence after the doors slammed against the grotto walls, sending echoes skipping across the water. Markus turned to her. “Are you okay?” He held her close to him, and she nodded. “Good. We’re here,” he said, and the blood drained from her face.
“How do you know?”
“I’m not sure, exactly,” he said, his voice low, “but something tells me this is where it all ends.”
Her mouth dried up. She couldn’t speak, as if there was anything she could say to that.
“There’s a lot of power here. Whatever we need to find, I think we’re in the right place.” He took her hand and led her forward, and she followed him into the dark.