Page 19 of A Spell of Bones and Madness (Nostos #2)

Chapter Fourteen

Ember

K ora lay bound on the floor, her blonde hair streaked with crimson.

A slit lay across her throat, hot sticky blood pooled around her.

The breath left Ember’s lungs. Why was her mother here?

There was nothing left inside Ember except pain, bone-chilling, icy pain that had her frozen in place with nothing but pure terror.

Not again. She would not lose someone she loved again.

Ember willed her lead-filled legs to move, to carry her to her mother. It couldn’t be real.

Body still shaking, Ember knelt down next to her dying mother, bloodied coughs and raspy breaths leaving Kora’s mouth. She reached her hand out to try to stop the bleeding, but when she pushed down her palm met stone, not flesh. The body was gone. An illusion.

Sensing an approach from behind, Ember turned to see a figure cloaked in black.

Ember’s hand went to the hilt of her sword and she drew the long bronze weapon.

Another illusion? Was it the same male they encountered at the river?

The cloaked figure lifted its tanned hands to the hood, dropping it back.

Deep brown eyes, hair the color of pure darkness, wicked white teeth.

“Father?” Ember’s hands began to tremble. He approached her, his strange stare tracing over her features.

Aidoneus brushed the blonde hair back from Ember’s face, tucking it behind her ear. “You look just like her,” he whispered, gaze narrowing on her face. Her throat bobbed as she looked back up into the black abyss now in place of his eyes.

“Father?” Ember whispered again. There was something innately wrong with the way he spoke. It was not the warm caress that she usually heard, instead a sound that made her very soul recoil. “Aidon?”

A wicked grin spread across her father’s face. “That is one name I have gone by over the centuries.”

Goosebumps crept up Ember’s arms, her breath catching in her throat.

It couldn’t be. Katrin had warned her of the Olympi they raced against time to keep bound in his tomb.

Had told her that King Athanas and King Edmund both wanted to resurrect the god, but they had not yet succeeded.

They could not have—yet, it was the only explanation for the man that stood before her.

Because this man was not her father at all.

“Hades,” she whispered.

“Smart girl. So, you have heard of me. ”

Pounding of boots echoed from the halls behind her.

Ajax, Thalia, and Dimitris must have caught up at last. She wanted to scream, to let them all know that she was here—in whatever dungeon here may be—assure herself that they would not round a different corner, that they would indeed find her. But no sound left her throat.

One set of boots drowned out the rest. She knew that gait, the hurried pace of the commander coming to find her, could feel that it was Ajax in her very bones.

Appearing from the same archway she ran through, Ajax sprinted to her.

He gripped Ember’s wrist, stepping a foot in front of her.

Possessive and protective, not that it would matter much if the Olympi truly stood before them.

“It’s not my father, Ajax. That man is—”

“Hades, yes, we have already gone over that,” the Olympi hissed, snapping his fingers, beckoning something toward them.

Ajax let out a low growl, throwing his sword up and pointing it right at the Olympi’s heart. “You take a single step toward her and I will be forced to strike.”

Hades smiled, cruel and damning. “I have no plans to harm the girl, archer.”

Archer? Lady of Spring? What were all these names? These riddles?

“But how? How are you here?” And why did he look exactly like her father?

Only their eyes were different. In place of Aidon’s deep brown, endless pools of black surrounded his pupils seeping out through the whites of his eyes.

And blackness crept up his neck to his face.

Thin veins snaking about his skin. He looked like a monster.

One that should not be allowed beyond the lowest levels of Aidesian, beyond Tartaros.

“Your blood called to me. Aidon is weak without his Fated in this realm. It was easy for me to slip inside his mind. Even if only for this moment. To see you. To see what she created.” The gleam in his eyes was nauseating, and despite the chill of the underworld, sweat poured down Ember’s back.

Her blood . The drop that had disappeared into the riverbank before they crossed into Aidesian.

“What do you know of my mother?” Ember said, her voice like a sword against stone.

Hades disappeared in a cloud of smoke. In his place towered a foul, shaggy-haired beast, nearly five times the size of a wolf. Curved horns splayed from its head, leathery veined wings tucked in close to its back. Bubbly black drool dripped from its lips coating the ground before Ember’s feet.

“Get behind me, Ember!” Ajax roared, sword gleaming in the low light of the dungeon. These were the creatures her father had always spoken of. Ones that would haunt her from now until the end of her days.

The beast's hot breath smelled of death and decay, of dirt and burnt flesh.

It stalked toward its prey, Ember now pinned up against the stone wall, unable to find her own weapon.

Ajax gripped the broad sword with two hands as he lunged toward the beast, slashing the creature across its front legs.

Metal met flesh, but did not cut deep. It let out a feral howl before it took its other clawed foot and slashed across the commander, throwing him to the floor.

Ember looked about—where were Thalia and Mykonos? They could use the help of the mountain lion right now. Could use the help of a particular wolf as well. She had heard them racing after her, multiple sets of boots on the stone stairs, yet only Ajax had emerged.

The sound of Ajax’s body cracking on the floor jolted Ember out of her trance.

The beast stalked toward where he lay. If it was just the two of them and this creature, Ember would have to fight with every ounce of power she had left.

They would not fall. Not today. She drew both swords from her back, racing at the creature, aiming straight for its heart.

The beast dodged her oncoming attack, whipping Ember against the wall with a swipe of its horn, her head hitting the stone with a bang.

Tiny stars blurred her vision and instinctively her hand went to the back of her head. Warm, oily blood coated her palms.

Mangey, black fur raced in front of her so fast she could barely make it out. Its course was set for Ajax, who tried to stand up from the stone floor. A low growl left its menacing jaw, reverberating off the damp walls of the dungeon.

“Get up!” she howled at Ajax, who kept trying to push up from the floor, even with the cracked bone that now protruded from his leg. But the beast was too fast, making its final lunge toward him.

“No!” Ember screamed as the beast rammed its horn through Ajax’s stomach.

The beast pushed him off with its paw and then ripped into his flesh with its elongated fangs.

A guttural scream left Ember’s throat as she crawled to the fallen commander, scrapping her hands and knees on the rocky floor beneath. It was an illusion, it had to be.

“Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop!” She couldn't get the images out of her head.

Each inhale met with the copper and excrement of the body in front of her bleeding out, his lifeless brown eyes turning a milky white.

The shaggy-haired, black beast stood above him, its tongue sliding over the blood that dribbled off its canines.

Picking flesh out of its teeth with its claws, Ember could have sworn the beast chuckled. Deep and deafening and earth quaking.

“It isn’t real. It isn’t real. It isn’t real.”

Just like her mother, this was just one of Hades' wicked illusions.

Something used to torment her. To get her to bend the knee.

To get her to go with him to the pit that was Cyther.

Ember reached out her shaking hand, and when it met cold, slippery flesh—when Ajax's blood coated her palms—she began to scream once more.