Page 33

Chapter

Thirty

P ersephone

The sound that comes from the room is terrifying.

The screams, this time from a man, is nearly enough to peel the flesh from my bones.

The only thing that keeps me in place is the fact that I’m certain those screams are being pulled from the gladiator who’d slain the girl’s father, only to claim her innocence and life in the terrible hours following as his reward.

My knees quake, my body trembling with a violence that rattles my bones.

Unable to manage standing on my own, I sink against the wall for support.

I’m not certain that I would even hear someone approaching through the wild thundering of my pulse between my ears and the battle on the other side of the door.

A loud crash, like a body being thrown into metal, sounds a moment before all is harrowingly quiet.

My palms are slick with nervous sweat as I wring them into knots.

I’m so focused on the door that my heart leaps into my chest when, for a moment, my vision of it doubles. Then Ares slips from the room, and I realize it hadn’t been doubling at all, simply opening.

The breath of relief that began its escape stalls as my eyes drop to the lifeless girl in his arms. She is devastatingly battered, her body bruised beyond recognition.

My soul weeps and hot tears spring yet again to my eyes. I refuse to let them fall as I hurry closer. “Wh—what happened in there?”

Ares’ eyes slide to mine, the shift filled with lethal danger. They are almost completely red. Bloodlust, I realize.

There is a moment where I honestly don’t know if he recognizes me through the haze of it. My heart pauses its beats, as though it senses even it must stand silent amidst this lethal predator. My muscles seize, burning hotly.

He steps toward me and the fear that burns in my muscles seeps into my blood. His nostrils flare, as though catching the scent of prey.

I’m moments from running when there is a quiver deep in my belly, a soothing warmth.

Ares cocks his head to the side, dark brows slanting sharply inward. The menacing scowl smooths from his lips and he gives his head a single shake, as though to shake off the rage that clings to him, anchoring him to the dark rage that swirls inside him.

I watch curiously as the warming in my belly grows hotter, and the blast of red in his eyes is threaded with veins of gold. The scent of a bloody battlefield dulls to a fresh citrus.

Ares speaks around the gravel in his throat. “I killed him.”

“But—” I frown.

“He will rise again, and I will kill him again.” Ares’ eyes drift down the length of me, snagging on my stomach before rising again to my eyes.

I gesture to the girl in his arms, wanting to draw attention away from the life inside me. One in which he seems far too aware of. “When will she—um—rise again?”

He frowns, as though just remembering that he holds her in his arms. And that’s when I flinch, noting the blood that stains the flesh of his hands, deeper around the bed of his nails where it has dried. He’s splattered with it.

“Her soul will wander for a time, but the realm will call it back to her body.” He begins to move down the hall, and I hurry to follow.

“How long?”

“It depends on the death,” he grunts. “Some souls fight the return.”

“And her death?” The man has long legs and for every one of his steps, I have to take two, sometimes three of my own.

“She won’t return to her body willingly.”

His answer says everything. More, the bruises and cuts on her body speak all the words she can’t. Her death had been horrific. Her screams had been a nightmare, and yet I found myself foolishly clinging to the hope that it hadn’t been quite as bad as I’d imagined.

Turns out, it’d been worse.

My emotionally bludgeoned soul aches. “Where are we taking her to now?”

“Somewhere—” he pauses. “Safe.”

“Outside the castle?” I press as I hurry after him, down a flight of stairs.

“Shhh,” he bites out the command. Instantly, my teeth snap together.

We’re no longer in the wing of Castle Olympus where Hera shoves all that she does not wish to see. Somehow, we’ve made it to the ground level, but we didn’t take the wide sweeping stairs that would have brought us to the grand entrance.

Instead, Ares led me through darkened tunnels of stone entirely void of the grand lookouts that even the shunned wing of the castle displays.

We took narrow, spiraled sets of stairs that curled around pillars of marble, scuffed and not shining quite like the marble that glistened in the main passageways.

We’d taken the servants’ tunnels, I realize.

And now, we race to a weathered wooden door in an area of the castle that, I assumed considering I could hear the clattering of ceramic and steel, and the clucking of feminine tongues, was close to the kitchen.

Ares pushes through the door into air that reminded me of a summer night by a lake in British Columbia. Crisp and cool, but not cold. If Olympus had anything on the Underworld, it was this. The fresh nip in the kiss of clean air that tasted of morning dew and smelled like the mist before rain.

“Keep up,” Ares growls, and I hurry to do just that. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped to smell the air, hadn’t noticed the space that now loomed between us.

Ignoring the magic of the land I’d not been permitted to explore; I race after Ares. I nearly bump into his broad back when he stops suddenly.

His head tips back and he lets out a piercing whistle to the blanket of night that illuminates the vibrant cut of the land in shades of night. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, entirely otherworldly. It is beautiful. And yet, there is a dullness to it that can’t be ignored.

It’s like looking at a canvas of astonishing art and realizing that the colors are all wrong, diluted with white, gray, and black. It’s like the very realm wants to glow, aches to shine. And yet there is a hazy film that covers it all.

It’s wrong .

From the night, something appears. It’s dark, but not for long.

A blaze of flames that singe the haze just long enough I catch a glimpse of a radiant glow that snaps shut a moment later, leaving me to question if I saw it at all.

From the flames, four horses emerge towing a black chariot.

Each of the horses is a different color, red-brown, grey, black, and white.

All of them have manes and wings of gold.

“Are they—” I stutter.

“Pegasuses.”

The horses swoop to land in front of us, and Ares climbs into the chariot with the girl still in his arms. I don’t hesitate to climb onto the seat beside him, even as the horse, Pegasus !—closest to me, the red-brown one, noses at me curiously.

I can’t believe this is my life.

Just last year, I was an average girl doing average girl things. Well, maybe not entirely average. I was hearing a voice in my head, after all. A voice that turned out to be the God of the Underworld, my soul mate. Regardless, I had no idea any of this existed outside mythology texts.

The fact that I’m here now, pregnant with Hades’ babies and sitting in a Pegasuses flown chariot next to Ares with a dead girl who will reawaken, bound to the prison realm that is Olympus, is surreal.

Ares says one word, a name, “Hephaestus,” and the beasts take running flight.

We burst high into the sky, into the haze that seems to blanket all of Olympus. I can’t help but ask, “What is this?”

“It’s particularly bad tonight.” Ares shifts the girl in his arms. My stomach turns at the bruises on her flesh. I avert my gaze to give her privacy. “It mostly burns off in the day, though some days it is heavier than others.”

“But what is it?”

“Consequence.”

My head turns to him. It’s impossible not to see her when I look at him . “Consequence of what?”

“The greed for Atlantis.” Ice is a growing crawl inside me as he continues, “The fall of it.”

“What does Atlantis have to do with Olympus?”

His mostly golden eyes come to me. “Olympus, Atlantis, and the Underworld were conjoined for a long time. Zeus likes to deny it, but I believe the realms were all powered by one source. A source that first fed Atlantis, and from Atlantis the other realms were nursed.” Ares laughs.

“It’s just a theory. One I’ve been punished for. ”

“Punished?”

“When Atlantis fell, when she sank into the depths of the ocean, Olympus dimmed. In the centuries after, the haze only grows worse. Most hardly notice it anymore, the dulling of what once was. Like I said, tonight it’s particularly bad.”

My eyes fall again to the girl, and I have to knot my hands in my lap to keep from reaching out to touch her. To caress her hurt skin. To touch her in a way that is not evil, so that perhaps her flesh will remember when her soul returns to her body that not all touch promises pain.

Emotion is a burning brick in my throat I force myself to swallow. I croak, “Will she remember?”

Ares doesn’t give me his eyes. “Yes.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

“How cruel.”

Ares says nothing, and the Pegasuses massive gold wings carve into the misty sky, arching our direction rather sharply to the right.

Through the haze, I see that we’re flying through a valley of impossibly high mountains.

The high cut of the stone is dagger sharp and veined in blue that should shimmer, if it weren’t covered in the layer of haze that dulls the shine like dust on a shelf of ancient trinkets.

Without lifting the trinket and wiping away the dust, one can’t truly assess the value of the piece. I feel the same about the realm which currently holds so many prisoner.

“What were you doing in the hall?” When Ares doesn’t answer, I ask again, “Were you waiting for me?”

“I was waiting for her to die,” he says. Coolly, calmly, like he does it all the time. “You were…unexpected.”

I can’t help but study him. Can’t help but assess the way he holds the girl so easily when, in the short time I’ve been in Olympus, I’ve come to realize that Ares does not find physical touch easy. He’s always withdrawn from everyone and everything. An outlier. An outsider.

“You do this a lot, don’t you?” He doesn’t have to answer for me to know the truth. “Why does Zeus do this?”

“Sacrifice has always been the way of the Gods, as it was the way of the Titans before him.”

“That was not sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice happens in many ways.”

“That was murder, plain and simple.”

“Blood was spilled. The power of her soul was pulled for the realm to feast, and that power feeds the power Zeus wields. Without it, he would wither to dust.” Ares’ eyes pin mine. “Zeus will never wither.”

A shiver has me hugging my arms around my middle. Ares notices, his lips thinning. “We’ll be there soon.”

“Where is there, exactly?”

“Hephaestus’ home.”

“Isn’t he the…” I frown, mentally flipping through the catalogue of Gods I’d memorized in my readings.

“The God of Artisans,” Ares supplies dryly.

I snap my finger in an aha moment. “I knew that.”

“Of course, you did.”

My belly flutters as the Pegasuses dip. “Why are we taking her to the God of Artisans?”

“Because he has little to do with Castle Olympus,” Ares grunts, clearly tiring of my inquisition.

“You mean he doesn’t attend the nightly slaying of innocent humans?” I can’t contain the bitterness, so rather than try, I let it all spill free.

“He’s somewhat of a recluse.”

“Interesting.”

Ares’ brows pinch together. “Is it?”

I nod. “Yes.”

Ares sighs. “The slaying isn’t a nightly occurrence, Persephone. It happens, and far more often than most like, but it isn’t nightly.”

“Oh?”

“Your return to the world is, it can be a blessing or a curse. Zeus hasn’t yet decided which you will be to Olympus.

He is both gauging your power and how you respond to the ways in which he feeds his own.

He is asserting dominance over you. I advise you to abstain from reacting in future.

” The gold in his eyes spear with sudden daggers of red. “It will get worse.”

A sharp inhale snags in my lungs. “Worse?”

Could it get worse?

Ares dips his head as the Pegasuses swoop down and land smoothly on rough ground. I think I see a flash of shame before it’s cleared away under the mask of Ares.

Ares stands with the girl. “We’re here.”