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“Well, then finish your drink and let’s go.

Your ass is going to vote for me to leave and we need to get back to the platform.

Anna’s grabbing Walter and Eletha.” I let out a heavy breath with my words and realized how much everything was starting to get to me.

There was a chance that the I wouldn’t get chosen to leave this realm and the thought alone of being trapped here made me feel damn near barbaric.

If I didn’t leave this tier and soon, I was going to lose my fucking shit.

I could think about Anna from the Elysian Fields, away from this place.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said slowly, looking off into the distance. I realized he wasn’t going to move, and there was not much I could do to make him.

My eyes kept glancing to the darkened corner, where a couple was arguing and were growing louder.

The man, a large, sweaty-looking brute, kept ordering her around roughly.

She was trying to get up and leave, I realized, and he wasn’t letting her.

Blood pounded in my system, and I had the immediate urge to run over and help, but I stopped myself.

The tavern was filled with able-bodied men and women that all could help—it didn’t have to be me. I was hoping to step away from that .

“So, hurry up,” I began. A chair crashed across the room from the darkened corner, where the man began to yell louder, swearing at the girl. I realized I’d stood up and was glaring in their direction.

“Oh, great,” grumbled Bexley. “Go on, get out of here. You’ve gone and brought your illusion into mine.” He quickly finished his drink, tipping it up until the last drop was gone.

“What illusion?” I asked, turning back around. “Look, he’s being awful to her. I can’t just sit here.”

The girl, though she looked tough herself—I would have guessed her to be able to take any man in this bar—continued to endure the onslaught of swears, curses, and name-calling from who I assumed was her date.

I looked around to see if anyone else was readying to intervene, but no one was even looking.

“Leave me alone in here, for crying out loud. I can’t get one drink alone in this place,” Bexley grumbled.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I was next to the woman in a second. “Hey, man,” I shouted when the man raised his hand to smack the girl. I moved in front of her. “Go ahead, follow through with that,” I challenged, now in the man’s space.

He didn’t waste a second before backhanding me across the face.

“Are you all right?” I asked the woman as I punched her date in the face.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said. “Thank you for helping me. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“Oh brother,” I heard Bexley say from the other side of the bar.

“Why don’t you go stand over there, where it’s safe?” I told her, putting the man in a headlock and smashing his head against the bar top.

The girl walked away, surprisingly calm.

“Do you know what I hate?” I smashed his head into the bar again. “When men like you”—another hit to the bar— “can’t keep their sweaty hands to themselves. ”

“Fuck off,” he said, punching me in my gut.

Several of his friends joined in, seemingly coming out of nowhere. With no powers, it seemed like it might be too much for me to take all at once.

“Bexley!” I shouted. Surely he could come help a little. “Oh, fuck off,” he said.

“What good are you?” I shouted back, annoyed.

Two men towered over me, swinging wildly. Somehow, I managed to fling the original man into the other two and knock them down, but it wasn’t enough, and they were up much quicker than I expected. I was smart enough to know when I was in trouble.

Suddenly, Bexley was at my side and grabbed both men around their throats, his palms high under their jawlines.

It didn’t look like it took much effort, and honestly, it didn’t even look like he was holding very tightly, but before I knew it, the men fell to the ground, clutching their throats before evaporat- ing, while my traveling companion grabbed a stray drink from the counter and took a hefty gulp.

“What the—?” I mumbled.

Another man charged at me, and Bexley stepped in lightly and touched the same spot under the man’s jaw. Just as before, the man’s eyes rolled back, and he let out a cry of pain before his eyes glazed over and he dropped to the ground, disintegrating into nothingness.

Bexley slowly turned, walked back to the bar, and sat in his original seat as if nothing had happened.

I picked my jaw up off the ground and walked back over to him. “Uh, what the fuck was that?”

“Stop bringing your shit in here. This is my illusion. Leave me alone,” he said, taking a few tall, thin green and brown bottles from behind the bar and tucking all but one away in various pockets in his coat.

“What do you mean, this is your illusion?” He went to grab for more bottles, but I leaned over the counter, blocking him. “It’s my illusion,” he said, taking a drink from the bottle i n

front of him. “This is the Tier of Greed. It gives you everything you could possibly want. This is always how it starts.”

“And you thought I wanted to have a bar fight? That’s what I most wanted?” I said sarcastically.

“Yeah, obviously,” he said, smiling—a surprisingly charming smile, I might add—when the bartender brought him two more drinks.

“Don’t you think you should slow down? I’m not carrying you back to the platform,” I said.

“You want more than anything to be needed—you want to be the hero. That’s exactly what happened,” he said, waving his hand in my direction as if he were shooing a fly away.

“You know what I want more than anything? To get the fuck out of here! And you think that’s going to make me greedy?

Helping some woman that was getting beaten by her boyfriend?

” I scowled at him. Even though the fight had ended, my desperate thoughts of needing to leave brought on a fresh tingle of adrenaline.

At this point, I wasn’t sure where the Tartarus itch ended and I began.

“That’s the illusion,” Bexley said. “This is how it starts. It’s glorious, isn’t it? Since you’ve been here, how many amazing things have happened to make you feel good? This is magical, isn’t it?”

A certain wariness crept up my spine. He wasn’t wrong, at least not entirely.

“Let me guess, something really special happened, and now you’re thinking maybe you don’t want to leave this place,” Bexley said, looking off into the distance, watching a group of patrons playing some game with tiny lizards in the corner.

“No, I definitely want to leave. That’s what I’m doing here. Get your ass up, you are going to vote for me to be the one to leave, do you understand? Let’s go,” I said then it dawned on me, and I sat down. “You’ve been here before.”

He was silent.

“In this tavern,” I pressed.

“This one? Possibly not. One frightfully similar, perhaps,” he replied. “It’s always a friendly tavern with an endless supply of drinks and people that like me.”

“That’s how you knew how to get here. You knew when we landed there was a tavern nearby, and that’s why you took off.”

“He’s a wise one,” he said sarcastically, taking another pull from the bottle.

I could tell the drinks had started to catch up with him as his words began to slur and his body started to sway. It was no surprise. He had drunk enough to take down a Ladon dragon. “You want to tell me what happened back there?”

He looked at me with blurry eyes.

I put my hand up to my neck, mimicking the gesture he had made to the men, and made a dramatic interpretation of being choked out.

“What the fuck?” I didn’t know anyone with powers like that, not someone whose touch alone could kill.

Mendax had his smoke. I had the sun…once, but that was a tool we wielded, a gift from the gods.

Our mere touch did nothing. “If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not from around here,” Bexley said.

“Yeah, I know. The whole angel mom, demon dad thing…” I trailed off.

He shook his head. “Angel mom, Devil dad,” he corrected. “Much different than a demon.”

I ran my hands through my hair, feeling frazzled. “So what does that make you?”

He shrugged, taking another long swig of his drink. With each word about his past, I noticed his intake of alcohol increased.

“So you just keep doing the same cycle again and again?” I asked. “Get drunk in Eromreven and sleep on the floor like a nobody?”

“I am a nobody,” he mumbled.

As much as I hated to admit it, I could empathize with him. Without my powers and the comfort of Seelie, I wasn’t feeling much like myself .

“Then what? What’s the point? Why go through the tiers just to return again?”

He was out of his chair in an instant, looming over me with lightning-red veins in his eyes.

His hand widened in front of my throat. “I should kill you right here,” he said, voice low and menacing.

“I should end it all for you. And you know why?” “Why’s that?

” I asked him as I told myself to remain calm and not give him a reaction even though adrenaline coursed through my body, begging me to fight back.

“Because I see a lot of myself in you,” he rasped.

Okay—offensive and it also made no sense.

“So you want to kill me because I remind you of you?” I asked.

His hand trembled in front of my throat before he sat back down, cooling off as quickly as his anger had flared. “You should thank me,” he muttered. “I’d be doing you a favor.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Eromreven isn’t for people like us,” he said. “People like us,” I repeated.

He shot me a look. “People that want to help and aren’t pure evil.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Do you think Eletha and Anna are pure evil?”

“Eletha, possibly. Anna, no. But she’s one of us too.” “What do you mean, one of us?”