Even as I promised myself I wouldn’t, I scream.

Chapter

Thirty-Five

Persephone

The ground rushes toward me.Wind screams as it whips by, lashing at sun stung skin.

Black dots dance in my vision.

Just when I think they’ll claimallmy vision, I see Ares’ head snap up as though pulled by the string of my scream. From the blown red of his pupilless eyes, a misty aura of red and black leaks into the air. In seconds, that aura is bleeding ominous ribbons into the space around him.

A massive hand whips out to hook one of the gladiators around the ankle, dragging him close. Athena snaps her arms around me, halting my fall in time for me to see Ares rip the man in two, right down the middle. Entrails burst from within his body to begin a scene of utter horror.

Ares grabs hold of another body. The man screams as his arm is ripped from him and tossed to the other side of the arena. A leg follows. A head rolls.

Bile rises.

Athena squeezes me around the middle as she holds us hovering above the devastating scene and I taste the bubbling acid of my bile on the back of my tongue.

Gladiators, grown men trained to maim, scream as Ares finds his feet.

He no longer looks human at all. His change is nothing like when Hades changed for me, cleanly and of his will. This had been forced, the flesh stripped from him in ribbons. Some still hangs in tatters from the stone flesh of his Gods’ Form. The loose flesh slaps against his body as he moves, forcing one foot in front of the other.

I’m not even sure he feels the pain of the beating he suffered any longer. He’s consumed by the bloodlust they forced him into. I realize with a kind of devastation that bludgeons the soul inside me that bleeds for Ares, that this is normal for him. This is something he suffers often.

Like so many others, he suffers in silence the atrocities of Zeus.

I didn’t think I could hate the Golden God any more than I did before. But I do. I hate him with every piece that crafts the soul that feeds my body. I hate him with every breath I breathe, every dream I dream.

And I vow now to see his destruction, after he pays penance.

Chaos whirls inside me now. The spirit of the House of Judgement, from which the blood of my innocence birthed it from the depths of an ancient primordial God born of the first mother, hums with the hunger to bestow her eternal judgement on the God of Thunder. It is a hunger that will not die, will grow in demand until it is sated.

It is a hunger I will see filled if it is the last thing I do. Because I know that if I don’t, there will be no safe world for my daughters to live in. No safe world for the children who already are or who will come.

A battle cry rips from Ares as he charges the men who beat him with whips and chains, toothy hooks and war hammers. A sword arcs high as Ares lifts one of the gladiators by his throat, squeezing until the man’s eyes burst red and finally pop. Blood pours from his nostrils and between his lips, running in rivers from his ears to pour over Ares’ hand that squeezes his throat even tighter.

I gasp in shocked horror when the man’s head simply pops off. His head bobs in the sand as his limp body drops to a heap of flesh and bones at Ares’ feet.

The sword, having landed in the sand blade tip down is pulled from the earth by the man who’d been fighting for his life in the arena. The man who, until now, was pinned to the stone wall as he watched the impossibility of the scene play out before him.

And now, I watch another impossibility as the man lifts the blade and drives it cleanly through the gladiator charging Ares with a hammer swung high over his head, ready to connect with Ares’ spine.

Ares spins at the sound of a blade slicing through flesh to find the man gasping in shock as he yanks the blade from the belly of the gladiator, watching as he falls to his knees in the sand.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on.” The man’s voice shakes. “Don’t know what the fuck you are—but after that, I’ll help you.”

Ares growls one word, “Name?”

“Gideon.”

“You will die here today, Gideon,” Ares tells him matter of fact as he swings down to grip the fallen war hammer. “But my soul will owe yours a blood debt.”

“I don’t know what that means.” Gideon’s voice—hell, all of him—trembles.

Ares’ beastly face morphs into what I’m certain is meant to be a smile as he swings the hammer over Gideon’s head, narrowly missing him and instead connecting with the gladiator Gideon has been initially fighting.