by Nicole Thorn
Micha’s voice finally registered. “Aster!”
I looked over at him.
“Fuck,” he said, relief marking his face. “I thought you were dying and then I’d have to deal with Callie trying to kill me.”
“Thanks for the support, man,” I said.
That thrum of power grew stronger, despite Hecate’s chanting.
“What’s going on?” Micha asked.
Some part of me knew. I didn’t have the energy to tell Micha, but thankfully, I didn’t have to.
The air shook about a second before Hades appeared in the meadows. The souls seemed to know who he was, because they all backed away in fear, some of them running. They tripped over each other, colliding in their desire to get away from the Lord of the Underworld.
Hades didn’t look like something to be afraid of. Like all the gods, he looked almost human. Something about his mannerisms and his too good-looking face felt off, but a human wouldn’t have been able to spot it. He had blondish hair that had been combed back, and while I didn’t know what he normally wore, today he had on jeans and a loose-fitting t-shirt. Compared to Hecate, wearing a dress that flowed to the ground with hair that matched it in color, he didn’t look like much of a god.
But he felt like one.
Especially when he stood up and his eyes seemed to swallow all the light around us. They were burning cold, sucking up every bit of heat as well as light. I could barely look at him for more than a second.
Hades rose to his full height and waved his hands. The rocks that bound Micha and me fell away like nothing. He walked two steps forward and touched the back of Callie’s neck. She gasped, sucking in a hard breath and falling backward, her eyes clear. She looked up at Hades, her eyes widened, and then she ran toward me and Micha.
I took Callie’s hand and pulled her as far away from the gods as we could get, making sure that Micha followed close behind. The three of us ended up huddled up to a tree. Micha examined his wrists while Callie checked out my chest. I’d been burned badly enough that it hadn’t healed immediately. The skin still knit itself together slowly, bit by bit. When I told her that it’d be fine, Callie ignored me.
Hades turned to Hecate, and I swore that his eyes seemed to become even colder. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked.
Hecate lifted her chin. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Where are the souls?”
“They are gone,” Hecate said, her voice cold. “I’ve destroyed them.”
Hades’ eyes closed, and he took a step closer to her. Hecate betrayed her fear of the god by stepping back. “You . . . did what?” he asked, his voice so low that I could barely hear him. I took Callie’s hand, looking for a better place to hide. Somewhere the gods wouldn’t see us.
“I destroyed them,” Hecate said, defiance filling her every muscle. “They wanted to be something more than they were, something more than this.” She threw her hand out, and several of the souls screamed, tripping over themselves to get away. “So much waste, so much garbage, all because of the harsh rules that you won’t let go. I thought they deserved a chance to be something more, and they wanted it.”
“What did you do?” Hades asked, but it sounded more like a demand. His power vibrated around us, like a warning.
“What do we do?” Micha asked, his shoulders tensed for anything. He still bled from his wrists, but that didn’t seem to distract him.
“Stay out of the way,” Callie said.
Hecate turned from Hades, or she tried to. When she whipped around, he appeared in front of her again in the blink of an eye. Hades advanced on her. Hecate tried to throw up some kind of shield or spell, but that didn’t stop him. He broke the spell with a simple touch, and I felt the power it took like someone had punched me in the heart. Callie gasped as if she felt it too.
Hades grabbed Hecate by the throat, slamming her into a tree. She struggled against him, feebly trying to break the hold.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
She struggled for a moment longer before falling still. Hecate’s eyes started to glow white. She smiled slowly. “I made sure that they were helpful. They are with me now.”
Hades seemed to understand what that meant, as did Callie, who gasped.
I must have been stupid, because I didn’t understand until Hecate started pulling power from the air. She had destroyed the souls, she said. It looked like she had made them into power.
Hecate slammed her hands against Hades chest and he went flying back. As he sailed through the air, my heart slammed into my throat. I stood up, panic making me pull Callie along with me. The two of us stepped into the trees, hiding from the gods.
“I’m not some weakling demigod that you can push around!” Hecate shouted, her voice echoing throughout the entire meadow.
Her hands started to glow as she began to chant.
The ground under our feet shook as Hades hit the dirt. Then it continued to shake, vibrating with the rage of a god. Hades rose to his feet in one graceful motion. “Nor am I some pathetic minor god that you can bully into doing what you wish,” he said, his voice seeming to scrape the very air with power.
The earth split down the middle. Callie and Micha both screamed, but my gaze focused on Hades. We stood on one side of the crack, while he and Hecate stood on the other side. The two slabs of land moved apart, and I couldn’t help but feel that Hades did that to make sure that we wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire.
Screeching overhead made me look up. Three creatures had started to circle the playing field. They looked grayish in nature, stone-like, and with claws sharp as knives and wings that carried them in a circle. The furies.
The baying of hounds had Callie clutching at my chest. I looked over to see a small army of hellhounds appearing out of the fog like demons from an old horror movie. Their eyes seemed to glow, and their claws dug into the ground.
Hecate saw all of this and had the gall to look unaffected. She raised her hands, her power lacing through the meadows with her chants. I felt it trying to touch me, but it burned away a second later. The souls all around us didn’t look so unaffected, though. They turned toward Hades, their eyes darkening and their faces twisting around into horrible masks of anger.
“What’s happening?” Callie asked.
“I think the witch lady’s about to turn this into a real fight,” Micha said, watching the souls as they lost what little identity that they might have had.
“In the tree,” I said, lifting Callie before she could ask me what happened. She didn’t need to be told twice. I shoved her into the tree next to us, then did the same with Micha before joining them. Just as my feet left the ground, all hell broke loose.
The souls let out a scream as one and rushed Hades, as if they had a chance of killing him.
At the same time, the furies let out their own battle cry and swooped through the air. They started picking up souls one by one, and while I didn’t understand how a soul could be ripped apart, that was what I saw. The furies tore through their stomachs and throats with matching ease, they broke necks, they shattered skulls. I’d never seen anything like it before and found it hard to turn my eyes away.
I might never have if not for the baying of the hellhounds. I looked down and saw them charging, an entire pack of them. Whenever I looked away from the hellhounds, I forgot what they looked like and the sounds that they made, but as I watched them tear through the attacking souls, I felt as if I’d remember forever.
Bodies started to hit the ground, not a single one of them touching Hades.
“This is my domain,” Hades said, almost casually, his accent making the words sound a touch sarcastic. “You think you can defeat me within my own kingdom.”
Hecate, her eyes still glowing white, turned to watch her soldiers fall. “I think I have a bigger army than you do.”
Her power shot through the meadows again, seeking new people to seduce. Once more, it tried to wrap around me, but I burned it away. More souls started to ap
pear, all of them with that crazed look in their eyes. My chest tightened when they turned on Hades. I didn’t know if a god could die or what could kill one, but I worried that I’d see that happen today.
Hades watched the souls coming and shook his head. “You don’t get it,” he told Hecate, smiling. “This is my domain.”
He clapped his hands once.
The world around us changed. The tree we had been sitting in disappeared, dropping us to the ground. We all landed in a heap of legs and arms. Hecate and Hades stood off to the side, the battleground gone. Their armies gone.
I sat up, realizing that we had landed on a tiled floor. Black marble surrounded us, and we sat in an empty room.
Hecate stumbled forward a step, her hands going to her chest.
“Hard to control an army when you aren’t there, isn’t it?” Hades asked. “You need to be closer.”
She stared up at Hades with fury in her eyes.
I didn’t know what happened next. One second, they stood two feet from each other. The next, power swirled around the room, Hecate and Hades had attacked one another, and we couldn’t get away from the danger. I couldn’t tell what happened in the fight, who threw what punches, or even whose power had filled the room the most. I just knew that every time one of the gods got the upper hand, a concussive boom shook the entire room, throwing Micha, Callie, and me off balance.
I’d known my entire life that my power couldn’t compare to a god’s. I’d known in that offhand way, being aware the sky was blue. I’d known it in the way that I knew the sun would rise every day, and set every night. It was fact. A fact that didn’t need to be questioned.
I’d never needed proof, but now I had it. Each second that passed, another boom went through the air, another blast of power. I could still hear the furies shrieking in their rage as they plowed through the souls in the meadows; the baying of hellhounds that vanished from memory the second I stopped looking at them.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Micha said, a repeat of his earlier sentiment.
“We need to get out of here,” Callie said.
The world shuddered as the goddess screamed, her voice shattering the chaos of the fight. She stumbled away from Hades, her hand wrapped around her stomach. I didn’t know what happened to her, because I didn’t see any blood. Did gods bleed? How did they know they had been hurt if they didn’t?
Hades’ darkness seemed to have leaked out from his eyes, until it poured over the entire room. Not the kind of darkness that took away the light, though. A feeling of disquiet, more like. It had washed over me, making it hard for me to breathe.
He looked like a god right then. Not like a man that had wandered in from off the street, but the kind of person that could kill any thing around them.
He stepped toward Hecate.
Suddenly, another body appeared in the room. Hermes slammed something into Hecate’s wrist and she vanished from plain sight.
Hades let out a howl of rage and the next second, he had Hermes pinned to the wall. The entire room shook again. “What did you do?” he shouted into Hermes’ face.
Hermes swallowed. “Maybe we can bring her around,” he said.
Hades slammed Hermes against the wall again. “She was messing around in my domain. It is not for you to decide if she can be brought around or not!” His voice hurt my ears, it came out so loudly. The three of us cowered away from it, and I watched the fear in Callie’s eyes. We’d never seen a god act so . . . godly, and it terrified me. It looked like it terrified her too.
“I’ve already lost a son!” Hermes shouted.
“You’ll lost more than that now!”
Hermes slammed his hands into Hades’ chest, and the other god stumbled away. “You do not rule me!” Hermes screamed.
Hades rounded on Hermes, his eyes so furious that I couldn’t stand to look at him for longer than a second. I heard something hit the ground, followed by another bellow of rage from Hades. When I looked up again, I saw that Hades’ legs had been caught in some kind of contraption. He fell forward, barely managing to catch himself on the ground before hitting his head.
Hermes appeared in front of us. He grabbed my shoulder and Micha’s, and then the world changed around us again. When I opened my eyes once more, I saw that Callie had grabbed onto Hermes’ arm before we had been teleported . . . back into her kitchen. I slumped against the tiles, exhausted even though I’d barely done anything. Callie hit the ground next to me, while Micha shoved Hermes away.
“Why wouldn’t you let him kill her?” Micha demanded.
Hermes shoved Micha against the wall hard enough that some pictures fell down. “I do not need to explain myself to you.”
“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Micha shouted.
Hermes’ glare didn’t stop Micha’s anger. “I do know,” Hermes said. Then he vanished from the kitchen. Micha ended up sitting down next to us as well. All three of us looked around the too quiet house.
“Are you okay?” I asked Callie.
She nodded. “What about you?”
I showed her the perfectly healed flesh underneath my shirt, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
Micha shook his head. “Do you know what this means?”
We turned to him. “You saw what happened down there. If more gods join this war and they bring it to Seattle? We’re all gonna die.”
“Huh. Normally, I’m the one who is pessimistic,” I said.
“Tell me exactly what there is to be optimistic about?” Micha asked. When he turned to look at me, he seemed more tired than I’d ever seen him before. Like he had aged a thousand years in two hours.
Callie answered that one for me. “The gods always have a plan, Micha.”
He snorted. “They always have a plan, okay. What happens if that plans involves something that none of us will like?”
Callie shifted around. “They always have a plan. Even if we don’t get it at first.”
He shook his head. “I don’t like their plans any better than I like what Hermes did. Someone always dies when the gods start cooking up plans.”
Callie shrugged. “Well, the world’s not ending yet. We’ve still got a chance. Until then, let’s make some cookies and pretend that we’re not screwed.”
“I’m good at that,” I said, getting up.
Micha, after a moment, followed us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:
Why Do They Let Me Talk
Callie
DAD’S FOOT TAPPED so hard on the floor that I thought it would split the wood. He had his head in his hands while Mom rubbed his back. He’d seen better days. We all had, really, but this was one of those days that probably made him want to take up heavy drinking.
Mom and Dad had come home a little early after I’d told them over the phone that I’d become immortal. Looking back, maybe I should have told them in person. Though there might not have been any way I could have told them that would have ended with anything other than my dad passing out. Mom promised that he’d been fine after. Just shaken. You couldn’t really be upset when your kid got made stronger against the enemies that might come for them.
“You were in the underworld,” Dad breathed as the three of us sat at the kitchen table. “Again.”
“It could have been worse,” I said. “I’m one of only four humans I know of to go to the underworld and come out alive.”
Mom didn’t reciprocate my grin. “Are the other three your friends?”
“Yeah.”
“The ones that were violently murdered by something that was a mile or two from this house?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. Wonderful. Glad there are literal monsters this close to home.”
That led right into what I wanted this conversation to be about. Everything else had been settled for the most part, as much as it could have been. Dad still wasn’t happy about me dating a demigod, but he wouldn’t have been okay with me dating anyone, so I couldn’t let myself worry about it. I hoped that my par
ents would eventually be at peace with the role I’d taken in this world of gods, because it wouldn’t change. Not ever. I could be the Oracle for ten thousand years. Depending on the power Apollo had, I could have been the only Oracle this universe ever saw again.
I sat up straight, glancing up to look briefly at the boys pacing in the living room. They promised to keep a distance so my parents wouldn’t get twitchier. It might have done very little, but it really could have only gotten worse from there.
“Something bad is coming,” I told my parents. “Something that I’m not sure the gods can stop. Those visions I’ve been having, I finally understand what they mean. They were all leading to this one, awful fact. War is coming, and it’s coming close to home.”
Dad let go of his head to stare at me. “What?”
“The gods have been gathering us all together,” I said. “The seers were already in Seattle, but then the only demigod of Demeter was brought here too, and with another demigod. At first, we all wrote it off as Aphrodite matchmaking. But then I showed up. You got transferred here, and that wasn’t an accident. They wanted the Oracle with the seers. This is where Medusa’s been spending a lot of her time too, and that always brings Persephone. Then Verin came, and he’s one of only a few of Hades’ children. Now Aster. Micha. Who knows who else might show up.”
Mom held her hands out, stopping me. “Your father was transferred here . . . so you could be part of a war?”
I swallowed. “I’m how the gods talk to their people when they don’t have the time to come themselves. I’m important and the only one of my kind. Same as the seers. We’re kind of two sides of the same coin. Maybe the demigods were brought in for protection, like Micha was. Only now, the seers are gods. I can feel it tingle in my mind; this isn’t over. There are going to be more of us. More of them too. More danger that I can’t protect you from.”
My father paled. “I don’t think I like where this is going.”
I went on. “I talked with Aster about this, and Apollo too. It would be safest for all of us if I moved out. I’m only going to bring more danger to your door. It wasn’t like this when I first took the magic on, and I’m sorry for what it became. I didn’t know. But even if I did, I still would have agreed. I need to be part of this. I feel it in my soul that this is exactly where I’m meant to be.”
