Page 40 of The Court of the Dead (The Nico di Angelo Adventures #2)

D on’t believe it .

As Nico came to, Hazel’s words floated through his head.

His hands pressed against cold concrete. The thrum of traffic filled his ears. The air smelled of eucalyptus. Someone was tugging on the sleeve of his jacket.

“Nico!” Will’s voice sounded far away. “Nico, get up!”

Don’t believe it , Hazel had said.

Then fire and ash.

Nico was crying. He reached out with his senses, trying to locate his sister’s life force. He felt nothing.

“I know,” said Will, his voice cracking. “But we can’t do anything for her right now. We have to tell Frank.”

Nico managed to sit up.

They had shadow-traveled back to where they’d started—the sentry post outside the Caldecott Tunnel. Deion and Yazan were still on duty, staring down at Nico with shocked expressions.

In a single morning, in less time than one changing of the guards, Nico’s world had turned inside out. Asterion…gone. Hazel…

He wanted to scream. He wanted to summon every restless soul from the Underworld—to rip apart the entire East Bay until there was nothing left but overturned earth and roaming skeletons. But he barely had the energy to stand, even with Deion and Yazan’s help.

The Cocoa Puffs swarmed him, hissing and growling in agitation. Will pulled him into a fierce hug.

Nico buried his face in the crook of his boyfriend’s neck. Will’s whole body trembled as they both sobbed. Nico could smell traces of soot and smoke in his hair.

Nico tried again to reach out for Hazel—to see if he could feel the ripples that her death should have caused.

He had lost so very many people over the years, he’d become adept at sensing when someone important to him had died.

But this time he felt nothing.

Please not her , he prayed. Please not again .

Darkness swirled at the edge of his consciousness. He wanted to pass out, to give in to it, but Will was there, holding him up. Nico pulled back just enough to study Will’s face. He looked so angelic in that moment, his eyes pleading and concerned.

“Wait.” Will sniffled, then rummaged in the pockets of his cargo pants. He produced a chocolate chip cookie. “Eat.”

Nico wanted to refuse. How could he think of food? But his body had its own ideas. He wolfed down the cookie in three bites.

“What happened?” Yazan’s voice was filled with dread. “Where’s Hazel?”

Nico’s and Will’s faces must have told him all he needed to know. Yazan’s expression hardened.

“Deion, use the tessera,” ordered Will. “Call Frank. Now. ”

If Deion said anything else, Nico didn’t hear it. He collapsed against Will and sank back into a bottomless void.

His dreams fluctuated.

First, he was stuck in that room again, with someone knocking at the door, but this time the space was brighter than Will’s energy—brighter than the sun itself.

He kept his eyes shut. Still the glow burned through his eyelids, searing his retinas.

He heard the door open. That was a first. But he couldn’t bring himself to look.

He sensed her approach—a shift in the light, a coolness in the air. She drifted toward him. Her fingers caressed his face as lightly as the whiskers of a cat.

“Brother,” she said, “why did you leave me?”

“I’m right here, Hazel!”

The light made it impossible to look. He wanted to reach out, to take her hand, but his arms remained frozen at his sides.

“I can’t find you!” She sounded farther away now. And her voice was no longer Hazel’s.

It had been months since he’d last heard his big sister speak, when his father had granted him a final chance to say good-bye to her.

“Bianca!” he cried. “Help me. Tell me what to do!”

“You were supposed to help me ,” she said.

Somehow the voice became both Hazel’s and Bianca’s—a blend of their gentle tones.

Nico tried to distinguish Hazel’s slight Southern lilt from Bianca’s softer consonants, a remnant of her Venetian accent, but he couldn’t.

He realized it didn’t matter. His sisters shared one voice and one fate. He had failed them both.

Next, he found himself lounging in a grassy field on a warm afternoon.

Cherry trees swayed overhead, their branches heavy with white-and-pink blooms. A few feet away, an expanse of water shimmered in the sunlight.

The opposite shore was so far away it might have been a lake or a bay, but Nico recognized where he was—the Potomac River, the park where his mother had taken them in Washington, DC, during those first few weeks in America, before the fire that destroyed their lives.

A picnic basket sat between him and Bianca. She was reading her well-worn copy of Anne of Green Gables for the millionth time. As usual, she wore wide-legged trousers and a polo shirt, the way she preferred to dress whenever she was out of school. Her feet were bare, of course.

Their mother knelt beside the wicker basket, rummaging for something inside.

The older version of Nico, the one who was dreaming, wanted to focus on her, to memorize the details of her face that had faded over the decades.

She was wearing a blue gingham dress, and her dark hair was tied back in a bow.

She hummed an Italian tune, maybe “Vivere”—“To Live”—because even Nico’s dreams had a dark sense of irony.

Her face, however, was hazy on the edge of his vision. The younger Nico, the boy in the dream, was mostly ignoring her as he shuffled through his Mythomagic deck. Finally he found the card he’d been searching for: Hades. He held it up and studied it in the light.

“Nico, did you remember to pack the fresh mozzarella?” his mother asked.

Younger Nico didn’t answer. He was too busy staring at the dark-robed figure on his card. The god reclined on an onyx throne. An iron helmet rested on his knee. His face was half-drowned in shadow, but he seemed to be peering sternly out at Nico, as if asking Why do you come before me?

Nico wondered what life would be like if all the gods and monsters were real. Would it be as exciting as Mythomagic made it seem?

“Nico!” His mother cursed in Italian. “Che cosa stai faccendo? You packed your figurines?”

She pulled a Mythomagic statuette from the picnic basket. Nico saw that she had pricked her finger on one of its sharp points as she was searching for the mozzarella.

Nico had never seen this game piece before, but he knew exactly what it was: Hazel in her final moments, just before the two-pronged spear touched her and reduced her to ashes. The miniature Hazel held her spatha up high, and now a drop of Maria di Angelo’s blood glistened on its point.

His dream changed again. He and Will were descending the stairs to the Underworld, as they’d done months ago on their quest to Tartarus.

Will stopped and frowned. “I’m having déjà vu. Weren’t we just here?”

This time, Nico could grasp the edges of the dream. Nausea washed over him as he tried to reconcile the different layers of reality.

“Ugh,” he muttered under his breath. “I want to wake up.”

“Wake up from what?” Will asked.

“I’m in the middle of a dream.”

“You mean we’re in a dream, right? Because I could swear this stretch of steps keeps repeating itself.”

“That too,” Nico said, his head throbbing. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, everything matters.” Will grabbed Nico’s wrist so tightly it hurt. “You can’t ignore what you’ve done, Nico.”

Suddenly, the underground passageway turned darker. Much darker.

Nico focused on his boyfriend’s face…but it was now hidden behind a golden mask, a grotesque, leering caricature of Will Solace.

Nico lurched away. His foot missed a step. He tumbled backward, spinning in the void while Will’s malevolent laughter echoed in his ears.

Nico awoke abruptly.

Fear was cuddled against his face, its hedgehog-like spines digging into his cheek.

He sat up, his mind still swimming through the images from his dreams. He wanted to believe the nightmares had been caused by the Puff, but he suspected that wasn’t true.

Fear had found him, snuggled up to him, because it had sensed Nico needed him.

It seemed to be sending him a message: This is my emotion you are feeling. Recognize it. Embrace it. I will help.

The cacodemons were more complex than Nico had given them credit for. He should talk to Hazel….

That’s when reality came crashing back over him.

Hazel was gone.

He sat bolt upright, frightening his Puff so badly that it leaped off the bed.

“Sorry,” he told it, rubbing the spine marks on his face.

Fear bounded away and joined its siblings, who were all curled up on the next bunk over.

Will wasn’t there. Nico was alone in the guest barracks, with no memory of how he’d gotten there.

He was glad the Romans were used to hard work, because they seemed to be spending a lot of their time dragging his unconscious body back to bed.

Hazel…He closed his eyes and tried once more to sense her life force.

He remembered the vacancy he’d felt when Jason died—like a piece of the universe had been hacked away with a dull knife. This didn’t feel the same. Instead of emptiness, there was a distant pain, deep and aching, and it had a shape.

Don’t believe it , she had said.

Nico tried to hold on to that glimmer of hope. She must be alive. Otherwise, he would fall apart, and too many people still needed him—Will, Frank, and the other mythics.

But he also worried. Was he being delusional? Was his hope overriding his instincts as a child of Hades?

Nico’s stomach grumbled. One thing about being alive: his body didn’t care how sad he was. It wanted food.

He headed to the bathroom to freshen up and change clothes.

He grabbed his bomber jacket but froze when he found a four-inch gash on the left sleeve.

The black leather had been ripped open—maybe by a nail on Suzanne’s club, or by a falling stalactite.

Nico had no memory of it happening. The inner wool lining sprouted from the tear like dandelion fuzz.