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‘Which looked exactly like pigeons.’

‘Anyway,’continued Will, ‘maybe if we get through this quest …whenwe get through this quest –’ he took a deep breath – ‘we should visit your father’s palace sometime?’

Nico raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you joking?’

‘No. Why would I be? I think maybe it’s time.’

A smile grew on Nico’s face. He recalled the relief he’d felt when Will had been kind to Hiss-Majesty before entering the tunnel. Willwasmaking an effort, wasn’t he?

‘I suppose it’s only fair,’ said Nico, ‘after I spent all that time hanging out withyourdad.’

‘To beactuallyfair, my dad was a teenager at the time, so I don’t know how much that counts.’

Nico hesitated. ‘But do you really want to meet mine?’

Will looked up at him. ‘Of course. He’s important to you … so he’s important to me.’

In moments like this, the harder parts of being in a relationship with a child of Apollo were easy to forget. Will was so quick to bekind. There wasn’t an insincere bone in his body. So Nico sat on the ground in front of Will and leaned against him, comforted by his presence and loyalty and warmth.

‘Okay, then,’ Nico said. ‘Next time, we’ll visit my father.’

‘The son of Apollo wishes to meet Hades?’ said Screech-Bling, startling both Nico and Will.

The CEO and Hiss-Majesty had rematerialized as quickly as they’d vanished, each now clutching fistfuls of dead lizards. Nico had no idea where they’d found them.

Screech-Bling tossed one in the air, then caught it in his mouth, swallowing with gusto. ‘This is fascinating to me,’ he continued. ‘We troglodytes are not afraid of Hades, of course.CLICK!We are brave and fierce. But –’

‘We prefer to be brave and fierce from a distance,’ finished Hiss-Majesty.

The two trogs sat next to Nico and Will and gazed at Hades’s palace while they finished their meal. It was … nice, actually.

A nice moment in the Underworld. Even Will seemed to relax, though he turned down Hiss-Majesty’s offer to share their dead lizards.

Finally, Hiss-Majesty straightened their foam cheese hat, making sure it was sitting at the same angle as Will’s. ‘I think we should continue,’ they said. ‘If you’re ready,GRRR. We just have to make it past one more obstacle before we reach the shortcut to Tartarus.’

‘One more obstacle?’ Will squared his shoulders. ‘Well, I can doonemore. What is it, exactly?’

‘The farm,’ said Screech-Bling. ‘We have to make it through the farm.’

He said the wordfarmas if it were a new form of torture in the Fields of Punishment.

‘Peoplefarmhere?’ said Will. ‘How? There’s no sunlight.’

And, just like that, Nico’s creeping dread reappeared. It was two-pronged: first, he was annoyed that, once again, Will couldn’t seem to imagine life in the Underworld. Second, a memory started to surface from the depths of Nico’s mind … a vague recollection of something Hades had told him about a farm, during the same trip when Nico had found Hazel Levesque, his half-sister, wandering the Fields of Asphodel.

What had Hades warned him about? Nico wished he could contact Hazel – she’d probably have the answer. She had a better memory.

As Nico and Will followed the trogs, he thought about how much he missed Hazel. He was learning to make peace with that feeling. It was okay for him to miss people because that meant he wanted them around in his life. That idea wasverynew for him – he was used to either pushing people away or watching them recoil from his presence. There was a time when he’d even tried to push Will away. Where would he be now if he’d actually followed through with that?

Screech-Bling led the way, following a ravine that snaked between granite hills like a dry riverbed. Nico quickly lost all frame of reference. He knew his father’s palace was to the north, beyond the Fields of Asphodel, but this landscape looked totally unfamiliar. No spirits drifted across these hills. No wails of the damned filled the air – just the crunch of their feet on the gravel. The only illumination came from patches of blue lichen on the hillsides, which made Nico feel like he was walking through a crime scene being inspected under UV light for blood splatters. Ugh. He’d been listening to too many of Will’s beloved true-crime podcasts. (Another thing Nico didn’t understand about his sunny-natured boyfriend.)

Will shuffled along behind him, his pace slower than before. He was humming again, and the melody floated over to Nico, wrappingitself around him, almost as if Will were sending out his energy as a way to stay connected even while they were barely a metre apart.

Though Nico wanted Will to preserve his energy, he was perfectly fine with the comforting sensation of the music. He guessed he would just have to monitor Will for excessive glowing.

At last, they crested the ridge of a hill. Below, a sprawling patchwork of fields and orchards stretched to the horizon, and then the whole ‘farm’ thing started to make sense.

Rows of towering grey trees bristled with scarlet flowers. Ghostly farmhands wove through the orchards, some hammering syrup taps into the trunks while others carried buckets on yokes across their shoulders. In the pastures, herds of jet-black cattle grazed on yellow grass.