Page 9 of A Monarch's Fall

“Selene,” I said.

The pain in my side wasn’t mine. I wasn’t sure what other aches belonged to Selene or if the rest were mine alone. But that pain. That was what forced me down the hill towards the mansion in the first place. It was the rebels who made me change course to the maze.

“Selene needs me,” I protested. “Put me down.”

“Calm down, Percy. You’re in no state to walk. She doesn’t need anything from you. You’re safe now. She can’t hurt you anymore,” he told me.

I was shocked into a moment of dumbfounded silence before so much fury reared up within me at his words, and I began shouting and hitting his chest with my fist.

“Put me down!” I roared. “Are you seriously…after everything that happened…what is wrong with you?”

I was so full of unexpected anger. After the night of the Summer Ball, the way he stupidly betrayed me, his insistence that I was somehow under enchantments, how wrong he was proven then, but he was still riding the same horse.

“Calm down,” he said again.

I hit him harder.

“Calm down? You put me down, right now!” I practically screamed.

Selene needed me. I had to get back to her.

“I think you should listen to your girlfriend.” I turned to see who had spoken and saw an older man with dark, short hair and a face full of lines.

“Girlfriend?” I questioned, “I’m not his girlfriend,” I corrected and turned back to Dylan, “And if you don’t put me down now, I won’t even be your friend,” I warned.

The maze felt different from before, more agitated, and Dylan stumbled as the ground beneath us moved and upturned like a serpent slithering just beneath the surface.

“Not your girlfriend, eh?” Another man, younger, familiar in his appearance, if it weren’t for the green uniform he wore, the same as Dylan and the older man, I’d have thought he was part of True North.

Uniforms?

“Who are you?” I demanded, catching the eye of the older man who had walked towards Dylan.

“I’m Fredrick,” he answered, then he turned to Dylan. “You should put the girl down.”

“She can’t walk. You saw how her leg was injured,” Dylan defended, and I hated that all my whacks to his chest seemed to deter him not one bit.

“That isn’t for you to decide,” Fredrick told him.

“Dylan, I swear if you don’t put me down now—"

I was cut off by the ground rumbling, shaking violently beneath us and causing Dylan to lose his footing and release me.

I fell to the ground.

The landing hurt, and I gasped in pain.

I gripped my trouser leg; it was stained dark, and I carefully pulled the fabric up to reveal my swollen shin. The skin was bruised; such a deep blue it appeared almost black and was cracked open, grisly flesh visible, and blood seeping. What had happened to me?

The earth continued to rumble and growl, like an angry animal, before it split, and a wall, like a wave, erupted from the ground, fiercely. The younger man with Dylan screamed and ran from the wall; it was as if the maze were chasing him.

Everything happened so fast and so strangely cartoonish, like the strips in a newspaper, that it almost wasn’t real.

One moment, he was trying desperately to outmanoeuvre the wall that moved through the earth like an angry sea creature, and the next, he was…squished, smashed between two walls like a bug. The only evidence that he had even been there in the first place was a discarded shoe and blood leaking from the cracks.

“The Gods have mercy on us, does Ketos dwell within the sea or beneath the earth?” Fredrick gasped.

“Don’t look, Percy,” Dylan demanded, having crawled to my side and trying to turn my face away.