by Mila Young
I really was an asshole.
I leaped into the fight, helping her against X. Because as strong as she was, and as determined she was, she was still mortal and X was almost a god, like me.
“What are you doing here?” she snarled when I appeared beside her. We fought side by side, but we weren’t in unity. “Change your mind? Bored again?”
X started using a lot more power behind his hits, and Elyse was driven back, her expression fierce. She wasn’t giving up, and she carried a lot of her own energy, but she wasn’t used to fighting with her magic. This was where I came in—manipulating magic was like breathing for a god. Perhaps it was a crutch since we wouldn’t have been able to live without it.
“I’m here to help you,” I declared.
“Bullshit. You only ever help yourself. What will you gain from this?”
“Believe it or not, I don’t want you hurt.” I pushed X away with my magic, throwing as much force into him as I could. My skin buzzed as my attack shot out from my hands.
But he didn’t stumble backward. He was immune to me—he was a part of me, after all.
He laughed, blowing out a long breath that rattled his lips. “Look at you, trying to be the hero. Had to save your little damsel in distress?”
X threw another fiery ball at me that did the same to me as my power did to him. It was like fighting against myself. Except I wasn’t a murderer. All I wanted was to live in peace for a little while, to forget what everyone had done to me. I’d been ignoring it for so long, hoping, praying to be left alone. But it looked like that just wasn’t going to happen.
“I’m sick and tired of not knowing who you are,” Elyse shouted. The fight increased in intensity, the power so strong, she was starting to buckle under it, driven backward. Her arms trembled, but the fire in her eyes blazed, willing her to keep going. “Why can’t you just decide if you want me or not and stick with it?”
I couldn’t answer. But even if I could, X didn’t give me a chance. Instead, he moved in a flash and snatched Elyse’s arm, then disappeared with her.
“Fuck!” No way would I let her suffer the same fate as her human friend. But X had something else in mind for her, didn’t he? After all, he wanted to kill her so she wouldn’t be a problem for him anymore. It didn’t take a lot for me to understand his thinking. It made sense—in an alternate reality, that was what I’d do, too.
I followed the darkness, moving through the air in a flow of magic that prickled down my flesh, until we took form again at the top of a building in downtown Chicago. For some reason, X had taken us far away from my place, the quiet neighborhood where I’d decided to hole up.
And I knew exactly why.
Here in the middle of the city, even though it was nighttime, many more humans could get hurt. Even if X didn’t consume them, Death drove him. It didn’t matter how he killed them; he’d make sure he took down the whole building and destroyed a lot more than just Elyse.
“You’re so fucking predictable,” I shouted at X. He was trying to fight Elyse, but he spun around when he heard me. “You’re not going to get away with this. I won’t allow it.”
He laughed and lunged at me. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he hissed. “You couldn’t stop me even if you tried. I’m part of you. Doesn’t it scare you, knowing you have this in you? That this death is really a part of you?”
He attacked me, and we fought, our magic pressing up against each other, our power battling it out all around us while we punched and kicked.
With a cry, Elyse jumped into the battle, too. Her scythe sang as it lashed through the air and the sharp edge connected with X’s back. It wasn’t as though she could kill him, but he definitely felt pain, and he cried out with a screech nothing short of demonic. He turned on her and unleashed his darkness, wrapping it around her, using it to suffocate her like a straitjacket.
Her eyes rolled in their sockets, and she gasped for air she wouldn’t get. Panic latched on to my chest, squeezing me. X was going to kill her, and even if she bounced back, it would be the last death she could recover from. That was his plan.
I couldn’t let it happen and cracked my knuckles.
“No!” I cried out. “This isn’t part of me.” I attacked X, and we fought each other. Our power flared, growing around us. We shrouded the top of the building in darkness and energy. A storm of Underworld magic.
“Get out of here!” I shouted to Elyse, wherever she was. “He’s going to kill you!”
X chuckled, the sound forced and bitter. “Too late, little Hades. You think you can stop this, but you can’t. When you drew the short straw, this became your inheritance, your legacy. Nothing follows you around but death.”
Then, suddenly, X was gone. He disappeared, and I was alone on top of the building. I looked around.
“Elyse!” I called, frantic. She wasn’t here, and she was supposed to be standing on the rooftop. I’d told her to leave, but she was a human and she would’ve used the stairs. And that door remained shut.
When I couldn’t see her, my stomach dropped. She could only be in one place. I ran to the edge of the building and looked down. The street was horribly far away, since this building was tall. I ran around, looking on each side. On the third side, I saw her, and my blood ran cold.
She lay at the bottom of the building, her legs twisted at unnatural angles. People scrambled on the street. They must have seen her fall.
I disappeared and reappeared at her side, not caring who saw me. Blood seeped from a crack in her head, ran out of her nose and ears, and her lifeless eyes stared into the distance. I grabbed her lifeless body and let out a cry that had everyone in the street looking at me in shock. Grief expelled with every breath, smothering me, clawing at my heart. Time stood still, and icy tendrils embraced me.
I told her I wouldn’t help her, but I never wanted this for her. I’d tried to stop X, but somehow she still died. I hadn’t been the one who’d killed her—I’d kept him busy. Elyse must have tripped and fallen off the edge, unable to see with all the darkness cloaking her.
After everything she’d been through, this was almost ironic. I’d killed her before, then she’d taken her own life, but in the end, her third death—the last she could recover from—had been a pure accident. Though I still blamed the fuckhead X because she wouldn’t have been in danger if not for him.
Chapter 19
Elyse
Darkness shrouded me, leaving me unable to hear or see a thing. The silence deafened me. And I struggled to breathe. It was almost as if the blackness around me was a cloud and breathing through the humidity was impossible.
Where was I? Why couldn’t I find myself? I wasn’t in my body because I’d died. I had no idea how I knew these things, but something about me felt ridiculously detached. I wasn’t ready to go through to my final resting place or be dragged down to the Underworld like the rest of the humans.
But for some reason, I couldn’t go home, either.
“Hello?” I called into the abyss.
No reply. The emptiness around me seemed so vast, and it echoed with my loneliness. I couldn’t find anyone, and there was no one here to help me, no one to reach out to, no one to bring me back. This shouldn’t have happened—I still had one more life. I should’ve been able to wake up.
How had I died, anyway? I couldn’t remember anything or anyone. But a terrible darkness pressed in on me and kept me isolated from everything that should have anchored me.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus on who I was. Elyse Lowe. Descendant of the Lowe family. Protector of the humans. Zeus’s power ran through my veins. And it was for this reason I couldn’t die. Not yet. I still had business to take care of. My story wasn’t finished.
As if this affirmation was all I’d needed, I started floating. I drifted through the darkness, up, up, up.
When I opened my eyes, I gasped for breath, as if I’d been drowning. I sat up on the bed and groaned, feeling as if I’d been hit by a bus. Everything ached, and a ter
rible headache thrummed through my skull. But when I inspected my body, there wasn’t a mark in sight. No bruises, no blood, aside from some on the clothes I still wore.
So why did it hurt so much? Before, the pain had been gone completely. The other two times I died, I’d woken up perfectly restored.
I lay back onto the comfort of my bed, cocooned by the blanket, and closed my eyes. Now I was conscious again, I remembered everything from my last death. Hades had fought X, stepping in so he wouldn’t kill me. The darkness had been too much, a thick cloud of black fog that wrapped around me and wouldn’t let go. I’d whirled around, trying to shake it off. It had suffocated me, and I hadn’t been able to breathe.
And the next moment, I only knew the sensation of falling, the wind whistling past my ears.
And then, nothing.
While I lay on the bed, the aches in my body started to fade away. It was almost as if my body was slow on the uptake, trying to figure out what was going on after I’d woken up again from being dead. It took a while, but eventually I stopped hurting. I felt stiff and tender, but I wasn’t sore. Still, I’d lost my last extra life, and that reality chilled me. When I died next time, there was no coming back. I’d either join the other souls or vanish from existence if X got his claws into me. And it terrified me to know how close I stood to losing everything, but I refused to let fear exist in my mind. Not when I had X to defeat and Catina to save. Those were my priorities.
I pushed myself up on the bed, sitting again.
“Hello?” I called out, the same way I had in the darkness. I expected an answer. Every time I’d died before, someone had been here.
But this time, there was no answer. I was completely alone.
I didn’t even know who’d brought me home. Hades? It was almost too much to expect from him. He’d made it very clear he didn’t care. I wasn’t sure why he’d then attempted to save me, but I wasn’t taking it as something I could hold on to.
In a lot of ways, Hades had betrayed me. Even though this time, it was X’s fault that I’d died. Indirectly or not, the bastard got what he wanted.
I slid off the bed, stiffly staggered to the bathroom, and splashed water on my face. I studied myself in the mirror. The reflection of myself showed me looking hollowed out, as if I hadn’t eaten for a couple of days. Dark circles sat under my eyes. Maybe I hadn’t slept, either.
Did being dead count?
What day was it? How long had I been out for? I headed to the bedroom and looked for my phone, finding it on the carpet near the door. Whoever brought me back must have dropped it on the way in. I picked it up, and the battery was dead.
After putting it on charge, I sat down on the bed again, overwhelmed by another wave of darkness. The power was strong this time, death’s call so loud that for a moment, I couldn’t hear anything else. It was as if I was back in that strange limbo, with nothing but darkness to keep me company. Was this how my dad felt during his last life? He’d once mentioned something to me about feeling like he was drowning all the time, and now I understood what he’d meant. The sensation crashed through me like waves, engulfing me, pulling me under.
I scrubbed my face with my hands and shook my head, trying to get rid of the feeling. Instead, I dug deep for my power to push the new energy away, but just as with any other time I’d died, the power felt unstable, fluctuating.
It would take a while before I figured out how to use it. This was the part I hated most about dying. You know, aside from actually dying.
What bothered me most was that the darkness grew worse each time. I was terrified of what would come next. Would I drown in darkness for eternity? I shivered, unable to shake off the tendrils of death that still clung to me.
What if I didn’t want to do this anymore? What if I was tired of battling the inner energy? I couldn’t die another time without it being final. If X found me again, if anything went wrong this time, it was the end of the line for me. My hands trembled at my sides, and sweat drenched my skin. My awareness grew that I’d been a fool to sacrifice one of my lives when X confronted me in this bedroom before. Now, with no more lives left, I worried. I should’ve thought it through. Should’ve considered what it meant.
But I’d been thinking as a warrior, focusing on quick survival. I’d only thought about the here and now, not about the complete war.
And now it was too late.
When my phone had charged a little bit, I switched it on, waited for it to boot up, and looked at the date. It was Sunday—only one day after I’d died. I’d woken earlier than in the previous deaths…was that why I felt so exhausted? Why hadn’t anyone been here when I woke up. Did no one know? Were they all out of town searching for X?
But it had only been one day, and I spent longer than that on my own without my men, so they probably didn’t know any different. The first time I died, it was in front of Hades and Apollo, so they took care of me. The second time, Oliver who found me, called Heracles to tell him of my death. And this time, it was only Hades who’d brought me home. Plus, the gods didn’t actually sense my deaths, but they should have picked up on my battle with X, yet none of them came.
Thinking back to the battle on the rooftop, I was caught in X’s darkness, and I’d never felt so isolated from the world. Could his power have lacerated my connection to the gods? They’d always sensed me fighting him in the past. I couldn’t understand their absence.
But Hades had known. And he hadn’t bothered to stay with me. Maybe he hadn’t told anyone else, either. While anger ought to have boiled deep inside me, I felt something else. A sorrow that I’d been right about Hades. Especially after getting my hopes up when he showed me a vulnerable side of himself. A softer side. The only fool then had been me.
His behavior just confirmed what I’d thought for a while now. Hades only looked out for himself. He was selfish and unkind, a son of a bitch who should go back to the Underworld where he’d come from.
Even if he wasn’t the one who set X free, I understood his horrible view of love had caused something like this. But that didn’t give him the right to act the way he did. It didn’t allow him to do whatever he wanted without consequences.
Hades had chosen to let his past to define him. It was such a stupid, human sentiment. It shouldn’t have been something an immortal god would do.
But there it was. Hades was self-centered, and he hadn’t learned.
A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over me, and I lay back down on my bed. The fact I was struggling so much after waking up bothered me. My body should’ve recovered by now, flooding me with energy.
Instead, I lay there, contemplating giving up the fight. Exhausted by battling against everything and everyone.
When I closed my eyes, Catina’s face flashed in front of me. Oh, God. How was I meant to save her? How was I going to enter the Underworld and bring her back when I’d be dead for good if I died again? X might not have been the one to kill me this time, but he’d still achieved what he wanted—I was down to my final breath.
And I was fucking terrified of that. Scared if I went down to rescue Catina, I’d fail again. What if she died? What if I died? I didn’t know how I was going to do this now.
Before I died this time, I’d been so damn confident I’d would enter the Underworld and find Catina. Now, going at all—even if I had a team of three or even four gods—seemed like the most foolish thing in the world.
I couldn’t go to the Underworld to get Catina. And she was counting on me, waiting for me to rescue her. But so was X.
After dying, I should’ve been even more powerful. If I practiced for a while, I would be. But right now, my magic was unstable and out of control and out of my grasp. I wasn’t going to be able to fight X, no matter where we wound up battling or what the circumstances were. He must have known something like this would happen, that he was buying himself time by forcing my third death on me.
I hated that we’d somehow played right into his hands, given him the upper hand, even.
>
But whatever his ploy, whatever the reason for my weakness, I couldn’t do it. Going to the Underworld wouldn’t end well. Not even with the other gods.
Fuck!
I couldn’t save Catina. My best friend caught up in this mess because of me.
And after a while, X would tire of entertaining a human and keeping her alive in a place where only dead souls belonged. She was waiting for someone to rescue her and it would never happen. And then, eventually, she’d die. And there was nothing I could do about it.
This was the end of the line for my friend.
I rolled onto my side and closed my eyes, curling my knees up to my stomach, feeling hollow. An empty shell with nothing to offer. Every emotion pushed out from my body. Where I once had hope and light and drive, now only emptiness lay. The urge to cry came and went, hot tears spilling down my cheeks. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, focusing on every muscle group, forcing myself to relax bit by bit. Slowly, sleep crept up on me, and the darkness that clung to me didn’t scare me as much anymore. All I wanted was sleep, to run away from this mess, to escape from the life I’d chosen for myself.
Oh, how I wished I hadn’t chosen to follow in my father’s footsteps. How I wished I’d chosen to be one of the Lowe family members who forfeited their power, gave up who they were completely. I’d always thought they were a waste of space since they turned their backs on their calling to do something so much bigger. But right now, I envied them. They all lived simple lives, with taxes and relationships being their biggest worries.
If I were transported into a new life where I didn’t know any of the gods, and I didn’t have to deal with any of these difficulties, I wasn’t so sure I’d be upset about it. Except, thinking about the men in my life, I changed my mind. I’d lose them, and I couldn’t bear such an existence.
So how was I going to manage this?
I wasn’t.
Chapter 20
