Page 39 of The Court of the Dead (The Nico di Angelo Adventures #2)

“ M y trial?”

The words seemed to snap Hazel out of her daze. Nico watched as the grief on her face transformed into rage. She reached for her spatha, but she had no chance with the red-robed guard’s spear at her back.

So Nico raised the dead.

The floor splintered at his feet. Dozens of bony arms emerged from the crevice. But if he’d been hoping to cause a panic, he was disappointed.

Pirithous glanced at the undead wriggling forth and then waved his gavel lazily at the three gray men in the front row of the gallery. “Nice try. Take care of it, Dis.”

The gray man on the left, whose beard hung down to his waist, raised his hand and made a swatting gesture. Nico’s undead instantly turned to dust.

“What?” cried Nico. “How?”

The gray man’s mouth twitched. “The youth are so uneducated. Do you honestly not know who we are?”

Will sized them up like he was imagining lighting their beards on fire. “Sorry. Can’t say we do.”

“We are the di inferi,” said the man on the left, whom Nico assumed was Dis.

“Gods of the Underworld,” the middle guy chimed in. “We predate your Pluto by centuries , but apparently, people forgot about us when human sacrifice went out of style a few thousand years ago. The ungrateful wretches. I am Februus.”

“And I am Mors,” said the third god. “The personification of Death.”

Nico thought that was probably the least-engaging answer he’d ever heard to the icebreaker question So, what do you do for a living?

Nevertheless, the presence of these three gray beings made him feel even more helpless.

“Yes,” said Pirithous, apparently reading his expression. “You see that your parlor tricks are worthless here, Nico di Angelo.” He turned toward the godly trio. “And don’t worry, Februus. We will bring back the old ways, as they were meant to be practiced!”

“I’m counting on it,” grumbled Februus. “Call me old-fashioned—there’s no sacrifice like a human sacrifice!”

His two companions muttered in agreement.

Hazel seemed to have forgotten about her sword—because conversations about human sacrifice can be distracting—but she tightened her grip on its hilt when Pirithous addressed her. “And so, Hazel Levesque , here we are.”

She scowled. “How do you know me? Why are you doing this?”

“Two questions! With answers that should be obvious! But let’s start with the latter.” Pirithous spread his arms, letting the sleeves of his robe spill down like inky curtains. “There is no longer any real justice in the world. We are determined to bring it back.”

Nico sighed. “What does that even mean ? You just executed our friend! And for what ?”

“Do you deny reality?” Pirithous demanded. “ Monsters are only created to cause misery and suffering—to give you so-called heroes something to prove yourselves against. That is their purpose . If they do not serve their purpose, they need to be corrected!”

“Corrected?” Hazel cried. “Asterion died ! You killed him!”

Pirithous waved a finger in her face. “It’s remarkable how little you understand, girl.”

Hazel blinked. Her gaze fell on the pile of ashes left from the bull-man’s demise. “You mean…”

Nico wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but Pirithous didn’t give him time to speculate.

“I mean the court knows best !” he cried, eliciting a new round of applause from the gallery. “We have a plan, unlike some . We respect tradition, unlike some . Monsters should be feared!”

Cheers from the monsters in the audience.

“Gods should be worshipped!”

The gray trio of death gods applauded politely. Nico was unnerved to see that half a dozen other audience members were also clapping—all minor gods? Nico hadn’t been surrounded by so many deities since Tartarus. He didn’t like what that meant for their chances of survival.

“And heroes,” continued Pirithous. “ True heroes should be rewarded!”

He bowed to his audience as his fellow judges banged their gavels and shouted, “Hear, hear!”

Hazel scowled, clearly unimpressed. “And you three—you consider yourself true heroes?”

“Of course!” said Tantalus. “In my case, the gods had forgotten their own rules of hospitality. They would not share their ambrosia and nectar. I tried, in my own gentle way, to show them their error—”

“By killing your son, roasting him, and serving him to the Olympians,” Nico recalled.

“The details are not important,” scoffed the judge. “I should have been rewarded for my piety. Instead, I was punished. A rigged trial! A complete sham and mockery of justice!”

Queen Mary nodded in her grotesque gorgon mask. “And I should have ruled over a new golden age of England. My piety was unmatched.”

“Complete with burnt human offerings,” Februus said approvingly from the front row.

“And I,” Pirithous said, “as everyone here can appreciate, was the greatest demigod of my generation!”

This was met with awkward silence from the gallery. Apparently, Pirithous chose to take this as a gesture of respect.

“Yes, I know!” he continued. “I was overshadowed by my friend Theseus. Not his fault, of course, but I was always the greater man with the greater ambitions! My reward?” He turned his Fake Hades mask toward Nico. “Well…I’m sure your father has told you the story.”

“Sorry,” Nico said. “He never mentioned you.”

It probably wasn’t the wisest thing to say.

Pirithous waved his gavel at Nico’s face.

“This is the problem. Exactly. The Olympian gods have forgotten themselves! They need to be reminded of the proper order of things! And the only way to do that is to show them, to make it painfully obvious, just how wrong things have become.”

Will frowned at the tribunal. “And you’re the ones to do that? If you’re following the natural order, shouldn’t you all be in the Underworld…you know, dead?”

Pirithous snickered. “Why don’t you answer that, Hazel Levesque? Because you should be dead, and yet here you are, alive and well.”

She gaped at him. “I— That isn’t fair.”

“I agree!” He threw his hands in the air.

“It isn’t fair. Why were you allowed to leave the Underworld?

What about all the other souls in the Fields of Asphodel who would want a second chance?

What makes you so special? Just the fact that you’re a daughter of Pluto, saved by a son of Hades, so the rules don’t apply to you, you necro-babies ? ”

“Shut up !” Nico yelled. He inadvertently raised a few more skeletons from the cracks in the floor.

The god Mors snapped his fingers and the undead disintegrated. “You need to control your temper, young man.”

“I saved her because she’s my sister,” Nico growled. “But also because I knew she didn’t belong there. The fact that she still had memories of her life was evidence enough!”

“Oh, I see,” Pirithous replied. “We judges all have memories of our past lives—searing, painful memories of the ways we were denied our proper due. By your logic, that makes us worthy of saving, does it not?”

Hazel gasped. “I remember you now. You were the man stuck in that boulder in the Fields of Asphodel. I used to drift past you all the time! You never stopped whining.”

Nico frowned. The man stuck in a boulder? That rang no bells for him, but Pirithous laughed with delight.

“Finally!” he cried. “Finally she remembers! But I can assure you, Hazel Levesque, I have stopped whining. I have started to act . Queen Mary, if you would, please read from the defendant’s official record.”

The queen unfurled the scroll dramatically across the desk.

“We note that the accused did many heroic things in the war against Gaea. She rose to a place of honor in the Twelfth Legion. She has acted as a true hero on occasions too numerous to mention. Unfortunately, all this was done after her illegal return from the Underworld, and so her deeds must be struck from the record.”

Hazel choked. “Are you serious?”

“Prior to her death,” Mary Tudor went on, “the defendant was weak and easily manipulated—by her own mother, and by Gaea. At the time of Hazel Levesque’s death, she could not rightly be considered a hero.”

“That simply isn’t true!” said Will, his face red with anger. “I know her story! Hazel has always been—”

“Mind your tongue, Will Solace,” Pirithous snapped, “or you will lose it.” He glanced over at Mary Tudor. “Please continue.”

The queen cleared her throat. “As I said, since her illegal return, Hazel Levesque has behaved mostly in a heroic manner…until recently, when she aided and abetted other fugitives from the Underworld, namely the Minotaur and his followers, in trying to escape their gods-given purpose. She has set a dangerous example, suggesting that monsters and demigods can live in harmony!”

A surge of catcalls and boos rose from the crowd.

Pirithous banged his gavel. “Well, I have heard enough. Hazel Levesque, do you have any defense to offer?”

“Yes,” she said. “This whole trial is a joke.”

“AND YOU SHOULDN’T BE ALIVE!” Pirithous bellowed. His voice echoed so loudly that all the gossiping and murmuring in the courtroom stopped.

Pirithous took a deep breath. He conferred briefly with his fellow judges and then faced Hazel once more.

“The court has made its decision,” he said. “Hazel Levesque, it is our judgment that you shall be executed in such a way that your soul shall never return to the world of living. But do not despair. Your punishment shall help our cause in ways that should be a great comfort to you!”

The red-robed guard circled in front of Hazel, readying his spear.

“No!” Will shouted. His body flared like a supernova, filling the cave with blinding light. Nico squeezed his eyes shut, but the afterimage of Will’s shape still burned there in the darkness. Spectators screamed. The judges banged their gavels furiously.

Nico knew this was his chance. He blinked rapidly, desperate to clear his vision, and called out, “Cocoa Puffs, to me!”

Never since Pandora opened her pithos had so many emotions exploded from a container so quickly.

In the back row, Will’s backpack burst in a shrapnel cloud of canvas, nylon, and Kit Kat bars, unleashing a tiny cavalry of darkness.

The cacodemons swarmed over the rows of spectators, jumping from shoulder to shoulder, head to head, causing even more confusion in the crowd of half-blind monsters as the Puffs triggered every emotion from rage to despair.

Nico swung his sword, slicing the Cyclops Suzanne across her thighs—not a lethal strike, but painful enough to make her howl in surprise and drop her club.

Will turned on the nearest skeletal guard, grabbed the shaft of his spear, and screamed in the skeleton’s face, blasting the guard with such intense light that he blew apart in a bleached-white swirl of dust.

The Cocoa Puffs arrived, bouncing around Nico’s feet and chittering proudly as if to say Dad, we did a thing!

“Let’s get out of here!” Will yelled. “Shadow-travel!”

Nico grabbed his hand and started toward Hazel.

She was only twenty feet away. They could do this.

He’d barely taken a step when the second red-robed guard grabbed Hazel’s throat with one hand and lifted her off her feet. The other hand pinned Hazel’s spatha against her side.

“No, Nico di Angelo!” cried Pirithous. “You can’t stop the wheels of justice!”

The trio of death gods were in motion now, their eyes fixed on Nico. The monsters in the gallery were beginning to recover from their shock. They howled for blood.

Hazel caught Nico’s eye. She looked strangely calm, which terrified him.

“Go!” she croaked. “Nico, don’t believe it.”

The red guard jabbed her with his spear. Hazel cried out, and the entire cavern shook. Precious gems rained from overhead—more riches than Nico had ever seen Hazel summon from the earth, burying the courtroom under a hailstorm of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.

Nico screamed as his sister disappeared, her form burning into ash and fire.

Gems kept falling—smashing the skulls of monsters, forcing the judges to hide under their bench, causing howls of rage and pain.

The ceiling began to crack. Nico glanced up in time to see an entire stalactite hurtling toward him like a diamond-encrusted ballista bolt.

In utter despair, he gripped Will’s hand and dove into the nearest shadow, and the world melted to darkness.