95

95

Cool It

The second we blink back into being, I’m vaguely aware that Charon and I are in Hades’ Olympus home, but not much more than that. Fury is still eating me alive. Fury that Dex killed Meike. Fury that someone got to him and altered him somehow. That we couldn’t stop him. That our hands were forced. Fury that Athena put those heads on spikes. Fury about the entire cursed Crucible.

The emotion burns me, scouring me from the inside like acid and poison, turning me rancid. So much that I’m thrashing in Charon’s arms. “That bitch needs to pay! They all do!”

Charon locks his arms around me in such a way that I can’t move. “Settle,” he says.

“Fuck you.”

Meike.

Gods, the warmest of hearts. Always smiling. All about the adventure.

“Settle, Lyra.” There’s so much command in that one word that despite the rage still pumping through me in hot spurts, I do.

I go dead still.

Charon doesn’t let me go as I stand here breathing loudly through my nose like a bull ready to charge.

“Are you going to start back up if I let go?”

I clench my teeth but, after a beat, shake my head. Once. “I’m calm now.”

He still takes a moment before he loosens his arms a tiny bit. When I don’t start thrashing again, he lets go and steps back. I don’t turn to face him.

I also don’t start raging again.

The anger has abandoned me for something way worse. Grief. For Meike, of course for Meike. For Rafe, Dex’s poor nephew, who will miss the uncle he hero-worships. For Dex’s sister, who lost the brother who was trying to help her through illness. For Zai, who will carry Dex’s death around with him, along with Isabel’s, for the rest of his life. For Trinica, who is comforting him without me.

For me.

“Hades sent you instead of getting me himself.” The words I direct at Charon are not a question.

“He couldn’t come right that moment.”

Couldn’t come? I was fighting for my life, and he couldn’t… What was he doing that was so godsdamned important? “Did he even watch?”

“He was…called away.”

Called away? “By whom?”

“He wouldn’t say.” There’s an edge to those words. Is Hades pushing Charon away the same way he is me?

No. That doesn’t make sense.

My gaze skates past him and out the window at his back, looking over the brilliance of Olympus in the sun. It’s all so gaudy to me now, after the Underworld.

“He wouldn’t have gone if it wasn’t important, Lyra.”

“Don’t make excuses for him. He was in my bed last night…” I’m vaguely aware of the way Charon startles, but I’m still stuck following the runaway train of my thoughts. “And today he can’t be bothered to watch while I fight to win that fucking—”

I cut myself off, because the anger is rushing in on the back of resentment toward Hades, toward all of them, and the overwhelming sense that I’m even more alone than ever. It’s like there’s a dam I keep building up only to have it break again behind the weight of the flood. Over and over.

I force myself to move, like I’m shrugging it off, like I’d reject a touch. “He warned me he had nothing to give beyond…” I shake my head. “I just didn’t realize—”

I walk away. If I don’t move, the anger will drown me.

Charon goes to follow, but I ignore him, stalking out the back of Hades’ house, down the terraces to the lands beyond. I keep walking through the fields of soft grasses and summer flowers toward the closest mountain. A path catches my eye, and I follow it.

I just need to not stand still.

The steps are small, forcing me to shorten my strides, and they never stop going up. And up. And up. Winding around the curves of the mountain. And with each step, I’m going over and over every single moment since I tried to throw a rock at Zeus’ temple.

This doesn’t feel right, Hades’ rejection. The callous treatment. It doesn’t feel like who he is. Who he’s shown me. To abandon me this way, and just because he fucked me?

The drop to my right gets so sheer, it would make mortals with a fear of heights plaster themselves against the stone wall. I barely notice. I don’t see the end of the path until I round the last bend and pause, for one small second shocked out of my spinning thoughts and emotions.

Hera’s observatory.

“Wow,” I whisper.

White Corinthian pillars lead up a pathway to a set of floating stairs. Literally floating, not attached to each other or the ground. Those wind up to a domed building, also floating on a bed of clouds. It’s an observatory made of a pink stone of some sort—maybe pink quartz, because the glow of lanterns inside is visible. Over the top of the observatory, like a sail, is a thin, intricately carved sliver of a silver moon. It’s set on rails, and I imagine that it moves with the telescope inside so that it doesn’t block the view.

Even from below, from where I stand, the sky here seems so much closer. So much bigger. I imagine that at night, it would feel like I could just reach out and touch the moon itself. Feel the heat of the stars.

Stars.

Hades calls me his star.

“Are you all right, Lyra?” Cerberus’ serious voice drifts through my mind, and I glance back to find the hellhound standing on the path behind me, all three heads cocked, each set of oddly colored eyes reflecting concern. “I felt your distress.”

Am I all right?

“Not really. No.” Not okay.

All that pounding, restless anger has abandoned me the same way Hades did today, leaving behind confusion and a ton of other shit, and I plop down in the grass right where I’m standing.

After a second, Cerberus lumbers over and proceeds to lay his big body down beside me, curling around me like a shield, positioned so that I can lean back against his shoulder, with his three heads hovering to my right and his hind quarters to my left. His fluffy tail flops in my lap, like a very big, smoky-smelling fur blanket.

“Hades wouldn’t have slept with you if he felt nothing,” Charon says.

I guess he followed me, too. He’s standing now where the stairs from the mountain meet this field, looking poised to turn and walk away if I tell him to.

I sigh and drop my head back against Cerberus, looking up at the brilliant blues of the cloudless sky. Rain would be more appropriate weather for my day. Thunderstorms, maybe. “He told me that there was nothing he could give me. I knew it was…just physical.”

And I convinced myself a little bit that he didn’t really mean it. Because of the way he touched me, the way he looked at me, the things he said, the way he made me feel…

Charon takes a step closer.

Ber’s head comes up, baring a fang. “If you upset her, you answer to me.” He lets me hear what he’s saying to Charon.

“All of us,” the other two tack on.

The ferryman’s eyebrows wing high. “Now I see what Hades means about changing loyalties,” he grumbles. “I will try not to upset her, but she needs to hear this.”

Hear what, exactly? There’s nothing he can say that will change Hades’ mind.

Charon approaches and goes down on one knee before where I sit, expression earnest on that boyishly handsome face. “He’s different with you.”

“That’s true,” Cerberus confirms in triple stereo.

I brush a hand over the tail in my lap. “Because he needs me to win.”

“Because he actually smiles around you,” Charon insists.

I frown. “He smiles around others, too—”

Charon shakes his head. “He’s looser with Cerb and me. Relaxes a bit. But even more with you. And smiles? Not the calculated ones, but sincere ones… No. Never.”

That can’t be right. I would have noticed. Although lately, my powers of observation seem to have been glitching.

“So, I’m an amusing toy—”

“You know better.” Charon leans his elbow on his knee, earnest. “He just needs time to be able to figure out what he really feels. If he could have gotten Persephone out, that would have helped—”

Out? Of what? “What are you talking about?”

Charon stutters to a halt to stare at me, confusion drawing his brows down over his eyes. “You said Hades told you about Persephone.”

Trepidation tightens the muscles in my shoulders, and my hand stills on Cerberus’ tail. “Pretend he didn’t tell me everything.”

Charon shoots an agitated hand through his sandy-brown hair, blue eyes turning squinty. “Fucking hell, Phi,” he mutters to himself.

I sit up straighter. “Now you really need to tell me.”

He grunts, looking at Cerberus, clearly debating what to do.

The hound shifts restlessly against me. “Tell her,” he says—all three heads.

I watch Charon expectantly, watch the battle of indecision cross his features. He’s already told me one of Hades’ secrets about Persephone, but I’m guessing this is bigger.

“Fuck,” he mutters again, then looks me in the eyes. “She’s not dead. She got trapped in Tartarus.”

A laugh, like the shot of a gun, bursts from me.

Not a normal reaction, I know.

I’m vaguely aware that Charon and Cerberus exchange a glance, but I’m still so much in my head that I can’t deal with them.

Then Cerberus growls at my back, all three heads coming up in snarls of warning, eyes trained on a single person standing at the top of the path that leads to where I sit.

Hades.