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Nico watched him come to the realization that there were still things …bigthings … that Nico had never shared, and dread filled his own heart.

‘I never told you,’ he admitted, his voice soft. ‘I never told anyone. Not Chiron, not Mr D, not Percy or Annabeth, or …’ He couldn’t bring himself to add Jason’s name – not so close to the land of the dead.

He felt the gaze of the troglodytes as they watched him in anticipation.

But it was Will he focused on. Nico was used to people looking at him with a mixture of sadness, awe and maybe a touch of pity in their eyes. How could he blame them? There was such a relentless darkness to Nico’s story. But Will didn’t look at him like that … He looked hurt, and that was worse.

‘I just couldn’t talk about it,’ Nico said. ‘I … tried to tell people the minimum about what happened to me in Tartarus. I only hinted at whatactuallyhappened down there, kind of hoping no one would ever ask me for more.’

And they hadn’t, Nico thought.

Even his closest friends had respected his silence … or maybe they were just too terrified of learning the details.

Will’s expression softened. He ran his fingers through Nico’s hair. ‘I get it. You don’t have to tell me. You’re the only one who can decide whether talking about it will help. And if it won’t, I don’t want to re-traumatize you.’

Nico marvelled how Will could shift from being hurt to being a caregiver so quickly. He was like one of those dent-resistant carsthat just popped back into their original shape no matter how bad the fender bender.

Nico wanted to believe that he could choose not to share. He wanted to disappear into Will’s light and warmth, to purge the memory that was awakening in him.

But he shook his head. ‘No, Will, I think Ineedto tell you this.’

Nico wiped his face, annoyed that it was already wet with tears. He faced the trog council.

‘Youallneed to hear what really happened to me the last time I was in Tartarus.’

Nico had walked for a few hours over the grim and lifeless terrain, past his father’s palace and the Fields of Asphodel, before he’d found the cave.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. The entrance to Tartarus looked like … well, a hole in the ground. Nothing special. Surrounded by enormous boulders, the pitch-black entrance sank into the earth at a steep angle. Maybe the air coming out of it was a little warmer than the rest of the Underworld, like the exhalations of a living creature. Otherwise … yeah. It was a cave. Very cave-like, all things considered.

So this was it. For the entrance to the worst place in all existence, it felt oddly anticlimactic. But if the Doors of Death were down there, then maybe Nico could close them and stop Gaia before things got worse.

Things always get worse, he thought.Don’t let your guard down.

The irony, of course, was that as he stood there, worried about what lay ahead of him, he didn’t sense the thing coming up behind him.

By the time he heard its hiss and spun around to meet it, the Chimera was upon him.

It was twice Nico’s size, its lion’s maw caked in dirt and blood. Its shaggy goat body swarmed with blow flies, and its scaly tail lashed back and forth like a diamondback rattlesnake.

Nico whipped out his Stygian iron sword, but it didn’t matter.

It was the tail of theothermonster that caught him across the chest.

Nico slammed against the nearest boulder, the breath knocked out of him.

‘Nico di Angelo,’ said a gloating voice. ‘This time, you don’t have anywhere to escape to!’

He tried to suck in air, but it was like a giant had clasped their hands around his chest. He pushed himself upright, pointing the tip of his sword towards …

Nonna?

Nico immediately felt ashamed for making that comparison, but the creature looming over himdidlook a lot like his grandmother back in 1930s Venice. Her coiffed hair was gunmetal grey, her stout upper body clothed in a faded flower-print dress and a hand-knitted sweater. But Nico’s grandmother hadn’t had eyes slitted like a reptile’s, a flickering forked tongue, or a massive snake’s trunk instead of legs.

‘You know,’ said Nico, ‘you could just say hello instead of trying to kill me.’

‘I am the Mother of Monsters,’ she said, her voice thick with bile. ‘You will address me as Echidna!’

‘Like that hedgehog animal?’