93

93

Crystal Labyrinth

With a snarl, the panther leaps over my head, just avoiding the glass ceiling, and comes down on top of the bullet ant. The cat’s powerful jaws sink into the back of its armored skull with a sickening crunch.

Axe in hand, I drop my arms to my sides in a sort of anticlimactic realization. My animals can fight for me as well as direct me? Hades didn’t say anything about that, but I should have guessed. Very handy.

My panther comes away with greenish goo around her muzzle, which she proceeds to spit out, pawing at her own face.

Above me, Samuel runs by, looking closely at a copper disc of some kind in his hands. Hades said he won Hephaestus’ Labor. The prize was a compass that always points the way to go. A lot like Meike’s mirror.

With a chuff, my panther runs past me in the direction the fox went.

I follow, axe in hand.

We come across the fox making his way back to us, and he turns to run in the same direction. More running and following.

We run until we come to another T, one way leading up, the other on the same level. We do the same thing, just to be sure, but this one seems obvious. Sure enough, the fox returns first, and we head upward, after the panther.

We emerge onto the second level. This one is all glass, the level between the stone maze below my feet and the top level above. Sunlight dissipates the shadows here…and I can see bugs everywhere, running this way and that. I catch sight of several of the other champions, too, and when I look up, I see faces in the immortal crowd filled with bloodlust and fascination, their cheers audible even down here.

I block all of that out and focus on only what’s directly in front of me. Solve one problem, then the next. And every single second, I’m expecting to hear Hades’ voice offering advice. Or maybe his butterfly showing me the way.

But I don’t.

I’m standing at another crossroads when a pounding on the glass has me whirling, heart thudding harder, crouched and ready to defend. But I find Trinica standing under my feet.

I drop to my knees as she stares up at me.

“Which way?” Her voice is slightly garbled through the floor.

Because of the clear tunnels, it’s impossible to tell if I’ve been in that section before. I point. “That way, I think. But I’m not sure.”

Easy to get turned around in here with the glass.

She frowns, hands going to her hips. “You’re not sure? Or you’re not helping me now that you need to win?”

I give her a look. “I wouldn’t not help you.”

After a second, she looks down at her shoes, then back up at me. “Okay. I believe you.”

I’m not sure she does. “You can do this. The way you should go always feels a little cooler and smells sweeter. It’s subtle,” I tell her.

“Subtle. Great.”

I put my palm to the glass. “I’ll see you on the outside.”

Which is when a wicked, stinger-tipped tail rears up out of the shadows behind her. “Scorpion!” I yelp.

Immediately, she scrambles straight up, using gauntlets at her wrists and ankles to climb the walls to the ceiling with apparent ease. Her gift from Hephaestus, I assume. The scorpion scuttles by underneath her, then tries to climb up after her, only to slip on the smooth walls. It can’t reach her with its tail, either.

Trinica, hanging upside down, grins at me. “Thank the gods those and the spiders can’t climb glass—or the spiders not without webs, at least.” She makes a face. “The hornets and the ants, however…”

Giving up, the scorpion keeps going, and Trinica drops to the ground. With a wave, she runs off in the other direction.

Which is when a sensation like being shot with a gun point-blank, like a metal bullet shredding through my flesh, strikes me in the thigh before my panther tackles the bullet ant away from me.

Already on my knees, I clutch my leg and rock back and forth as I try to breathe through agony. “Fuck,” I mutter. “They weren’t kidding around when they named those things.”

The bug is dead in seconds, but I am dying more slowly over here. I expect to see blood leaking out of me, but I don’t. Because it wasn’t a real bullet, just a stinger the size of my thumb.

The panther prowls over and noses at me, as if to say she’s sorry she didn’t get to it sooner, but a second, still-oozing corpse to my left tells me why—a hornet, its stinger like a knife protruding from its yellow-and-black abdomen. I hadn’t even heard it coming.

“Thank you,” I force out through gritted teeth.

The pain isn’t subsiding. It’s still pounding with every heartbeat, throbbing. I can’t just sit here, though.

“Lyra?”

I jerk my head up to stare through a blur of tears at Dae standing at the other end of the tunnel. Nothing separating us.

Oh gods. This is it.

He’s going to kill me while I lie here in so much pain that I can’t run or fight. I grab my axe, which I dropped on the ground earlier, and hold it above my head, ready to throw. I’ll aim at his shoulder, try not to kill him.

Dae’s wary gaze is on my panther, though, who has curled back her lips to bare her predator’s teeth at him.

“If you tell your animals to let me by,” he says slowly, “I’ll give you the petal I took from Amir during Artemis’ Labor.”

Petal? Is that what Amir was eating in that junkyard? What does it do? Heal? Wait…if he had that, why didn’t Amir offer it to Meike during Dionysus’ Labor? Or maybe he did while I was gone helping the others.

Not a question I need to be answering right now. I stare at Dae. Does he mean it?

His gaze flicks to me, then back to the panther. “For Boone,” he says. “Because I wish I could help him.”

I stare at him another long second, but it’s a deal worth taking. “Don’t hurt him,” I tell my animals. “Let him by.”

Dae is still cautious as he scoots past us, but he drops a white petal in my lap as he passes. “Eat the whole thing,” he says.

I nod, stuffing it into my mouth. “Take a right at the T,” I tell him. “We already checked it out. I’ll count to sixty before following.”

I meet his stark, assessing gaze, and he nods. An acknowledgment, I think, that this is how these games should be played. At least by the champions.

The petal’s effects are immediate, but not healing like I’d thought. More like a shot of adrenaline straight to my heart with an added kick of invincibility. Not sure I needed that part. Overconfidence tends to get people killed, in my experience. After waiting the time I promised, I take off down the maze yet again, leg as good as new—or at least I’m not feeling the pain anymore.

Thank you, Dae.

I don’t know how long we’ve been down here by this point or how many times I’ve gone up and down levels, the number of twists and turns, but I trust my animals. With more and more frequency, I run by bug carcasses instead of live insects.

It’s not until I burst into the topmost level and the roar of the crowd rattles the glass like thunder that I know I’m close. I’m so close I can damn well taste it.

Just one win closer. Please the Fates.

I take precious time first to look at Athena’s clock—fifteen minutes left. It took me forty-five to get this far? I look around, trying to get my bearings. It’s easier to see the various tunnels up here, but the glass still makes it difficult to figure out which way to go.

“Move your ass, Lyra,” I say to myself.

And we run again. Two more Ts, and I’m waiting at the second one, which I think must be in the dead middle of this level, when I hear the slap of feet coming at me, pounding the glass floor of my maze cage. I spin, axe ready, only to find nothing there. But the pounding of those steps is still coming.

Horror crawls all over me like the bugs in this Labor.

This could only possibly be two people. Diego, with the Ring of Gyges he won in the first Labor, but I’m pretty sure he’d identify himself and, like Dae, simply ask to pass. Which leaves only one person.

Dex.

Fuck.