by Aimee Carter
“Come,” said my mother, offering her hand. “Let’s get you someplace where you can rest.”
I wanted to protest. If Henry couldn’t rest, then what right did I have to do so while he was out battling a Titan? However, I knew better than to fight my mother on it. Stubbornness really did run in the family.
She and Ava helped me as I limped to the bedroom. It was humiliating, feeling as if my leg was on fire when the wound was gone and no one else seemed to be affected by injuries that were worse than mine. I tried to walk on my own and ignore it, but that only resulted in a few agonizing steps and the embarrassment of having to stop and lean against the wall. Eventually I gave in and let them help me.
Once I was settled in bed against the mountain of pillows and silk, my mother excused herself. “I would stay, but the others need me, too,” she said apologetically.
“I know,” I said. Whatever the others were discussing was undoubtedly more important and productive than hanging around with me. I wanted her to stay, but she wasn’t just my mother down here, and she had more responsibilities than holding my hand when I was upset.
After making me promise to let her know if I needed anything, she strode out the door, leaving behind a trail of worry she couldn’t hide. That, more than anything else that had happened that day, ate at me until I was sick with anxiety.
“Everything’s going to be okay, right?” I said to Ava as she settled down next to me. Pogo jumped up on the bed and snuggled between us, and I idly stroked his fur. At least I could count on him not to fret.
Ava didn’t answer right away. Wondering if she hadn’t heard me, I turned toward her, only to see that she was crying again.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. No matter how many fights they had or—or anything, they’ve never purposely hurt innocent people before. We’re supposed to protect them, and the six were always really, really adamant about that, you know? That’s why we never thought Calliope was the one killing Henry’s girls. It’s just—she’s never done anything like that before. None of them have.”
She set her head on my shoulder, and I forced myself to swallow the lump of fear in my throat. Ava needed reassurance much more than I did.
“They’ll figure it out,” I said, even though I had no way of knowing if I was telling the truth or not. “They’re strong, right? The council. And she’s one against thirteen.”
“But she has Cronus,” Ava said with a sniff. “When he regains his strength, there’s nothing any of us can do to stop him. It took the six of them ages to contain him the first time, and the only reason they won the war then was because they had the element of surprise. The Titans never thought they’d go against them. But now…”
Now Cronus knew what to expect, and he’d had nearly the entire span of humanity to come up with a way to defeat them. “There’s more of you now though,” I said, keeping my voice steady for Ava’s sake. It was easier to keep a lid on my own fears when she was in such bad shape. “You can win again.”
Ava wiped her cheeks, and when she gave me a hopeless look, I blinked, taken aback. Despite her moments of doubt, Ava had always been bubbly and optimistic, seeing the best in a situation no matter how bleak it was. After she’d died in Eden, instead of bemoaning the loss of her mortal life, no matter how temporary it might have been, she embraced being dead. Even when I’d imposed a harsh punishment for the role she’d played in the scuffle that had resulted in Xander’s supposed death and Theo’s grave injuries, she hadn’t turned on me. She’d fished my body from the river after Calliope had killed me, and she’d brought me back to Henry, believing he could do something to save me. Ava was the one who believed in the impossible, not me. When she lost hope, how was I supposed to have any?
“You don’t understand,” she said in a broken voice. “It took all six of them the first time. It doesn’t matter how many new gods there are. None of us combined are as powerful as a single one of them. Without Calliope fighting with them, we don’t stand a chance.”
I looked away, refusing to let her see my eyes fill with tears. Losing would mean destruction beyond anything I could comprehend. At best, it would mean enslavement for Henry and my mother and everyone I’d come to care about; at worst, it would mean our deaths.
The council might have had countless lifetimes to live, but I was nineteen years old, and I really wanted to see twenty.
* * *
I didn’t remember falling asleep, but when I woke up, Ava was gone and Pogo snored in the indent she’d left in the pillow. Sighing, I took inventory, pleased that at least some of the pain had dulled. Even if it did still hurt to move around, I was determined to grin and bear it.
But the moment I sat up, pain exploded behind my eyes, giving me a splitting headache. I moaned and lay back down, and Pogo licked my cheek as I massaged my temples. Apparently all the pain had gathered in my head while I’d been sleeping.
Someone to my right giggled, and my eyes flew open, taking in the rock walls around me. I wasn’t in my bedroom anymore. Instead I stood in the cavern where I’d watched Henry battle the fog I now knew to be Cronus, and the massive gate loomed before me, carved from the stone itself. I twisted around to find whoever it was that had laughed, and suddenly I was nose-to-nose with Calliope.
I froze. This was it. She’d somehow managed to kidnap me, and there was nothing I could do to protect myself. If she was half as powerful as Ava said she was, she could probably rip me in half with a single thought, and I knew better than to hope there was any way I could talk myself out of this.
To my amazement, she looked past me and stepped forward. Instead of running into me, she moved through me, as if I were nothing more than a ghost.
I wasn’t really here. Just like what had happened when I’d first arrived in the Underworld, this was another vision, and Calliope had no idea I was watching.
I hurried to follow her. She walked proudly through the cavern toward a smaller cave to the side, and I noticed an oddly shaped pile beyond the light that glowed from the ceiling. I could only make out shadows, but whatever it was made Calliope giggle again.
“I can’t believe it.” She stopped a foot from the cave entrance. “Eons of putting up with you, and this is all it takes?”
My insides turned to ice. I didn’t want to look, but my feet moved forward anyway until I could make out the three bodies piled together, bound by chains made of fog and stone.
Walter on the left, his head slumped forward as blood trickled down his cheek. Phillip on the right, an ugly wound running through an eye, down his face and disappearing underneath his shirt.
And Henry in the middle, as pale and still as death.
Chapter Five
Options
I flew to Henry’s side, too afraid to touch him, but too frightened to turn away, either. Desperately I searched all three brothers for any sign that they were still alive, but I saw nothing. No rise and fall of the chest, no telltale flutter of a pulse in their necks—except those were mortal ways of judging if someone was still living. Henry and his brothers weren’t mortal and never had been.
And finally, finally I saw Henry’s eyes crack open. Unlike Calliope, he seemed to focus directly on me, but whether or not he could really see me, I couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t seen me the first time. Then again, he’d been in the middle of a fight then, too.
“It’s okay,” I whispered as I tried to take his hand, but my fingers slipped through his. “Everything will be all right. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you, I promise.”
He sighed inaudibly and closed his eyes, and something inside of me flickered. Had he heard me after all? I reached out to stroke his cheek, stopping a fraction of an inch above his skin. At least this way I could pretend I was touching him.
“Father,” called Call
iope from behind me, and I tore myself away from Henry to watch her. “Are you prepared to subdue the others?”
A low rumble echoed through the cavern, no language I could understand, and the smaller rocks on the ground skidded a few inches away from the gate.
“Pardon me,” said Calliope, sarcasm dripping from her sugary voice. “I thought I’d woken the most powerful being in the universe. My mistake.”
In the time it took to blink, a tendril of fog slipped between the bars and lashed toward her. Calliope fell backward, and it narrowly missed, though I suspected that had nothing to do with her ability to defend herself.
“Stop!” she cried, panicked, and satisfaction surged through me. “You need me and you know it.”
The rumbling continued, and Calliope scrambled to her feet, every trace of dignity gone. “You do,” she said, and the uncertainty in her voice was glorious. “No one else is trying to free you, and without me, you’ll be trapped for the rest of eternity by that stupid gate. So you can either do things my way, or you can stay right where you are. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Of course it mattered to her, and Cronus must have known it as well, because his rumblings sounded suspiciously like laughter. Another tendril of fog crept toward Calliope until it was only inches away from her smooth skin. Trembling, she stood her ground as Cronus caressed her cheek.
As quickly as he’d appeared, the fog vanished. Calliope paled, and for a moment I almost felt bad for her. Then I remembered Henry and his brothers tied up in a cave a few feet away, and any drop of sympathy I’d ever had for her evaporated.
Pogo’s warm tongue against my ear brought me crashing back into reality. The rocks melted away, replaced by the red walls of the bedroom, and my stomach turned inside out as the full impact of my vision hit me.
“Mom!” I shrieked, kicking off my blankets and rolling off the bed. I landed with a thud on my hands and knees, and every inch of my body screamed in protest, but I forced myself to stand. Pogo trotted after me, his ears alert, and every step felt like knives as I ran out the door, nearly tripping on the hem of my silver dress.
I was halfway to the throne room when I rounded a corner and smacked into her, and for the second time in as many minutes, I sprawled on the ground.
“Kate?” My mother knelt beside me, her hands hovering as if she wasn’t sure it was safe to touch me.
“I’m fine,” I gasped. “Mom, Henry and the others—Calliope, she has them, and Cronus—”
“What about him?” My mother paled. “Did you see something?”
I nodded. Everything she’d told me about the Titans ran through my mind, making me dizzy. “Calliope has them, and I think—” My voice caught in my throat, and no matter how hard I blinked, I couldn’t stop my eyes from watering.
This was really it. They couldn’t defeat Calliope and Cronus on their own, and it was only a matter of time before Calliope killed Henry. It was a miracle he was still alive in the first place.
In a low, frantic voice, I relayed the details of my vision, my words stumbling and knotting together, making it that much more difficult to speak. “Mom,” I finally said in a small voice, desperate for her to do something to fix this. When I’d been a child, I’d been sure she could do the impossible. Now I was positive she could, but somewhere deep inside of me in a part I didn’t want to admit existed, I knew there was nothing she could do to make this mess go away. “She’s going to let Cronus kill them.”
Her face grew hard, and for one awful moment I saw the power behind my mother’s kind eyes and rosy cheeks. “Sofia,” she called in a voice that rattled me from the inside out.
Sofia was by her side in a second, and like my mother, every trace of gentleness was gone as waves of power radiated from them both. On her own, my mother was a force of nature. With Sofia standing beside her, I was sure they could rip the world to shreds.
“Come, sister,” said my mother. She looked at me, and for a moment a drop of humanity returned to her face. “Take care of yourself, sweetheart,” she said, touching my cheek. I shivered. “And put on a sweater. I’ll return to you as soon as I can.”
With that, she and Sofia joined hands, and like Henry and his brothers had sped off into the vast Underworld, so did my mother and her sister, the only two left who knew how to defeat Cronus.
Feeling hollow and more alone than I ever had before, I pressed my lips together and dragged myself back to my room to change, wondering how much of my family I would lose before this was all said and done.
* * *
The throne room seemed empty without Henry and the rest of his siblings. What was left of the council sat in a circle beside the platform, the chairs collected from all around the palace. I sat on a hard stool that reminded me of the one I’d endured six months ago, when the council had made its decision about whether I would become one of them. At least that one had been padded.
No one touched the two thrones. One was supposed to be mine, but the ceremony hadn’t finished, and even if it had, I didn’t want to be up there without Henry. I wasn’t ready to rule alone—I wasn’t even sure I was ready to rule by his side. With him and the others now gone, I didn’t want to think about what that would do to the natural order of things around the Underworld. Were souls stuck in limbo until Henry returned? What if he never came back?
No. I wasn’t going to think like that. There had to be a way for this to work out—something Calliope wanted more than revenge.
A sick feeling crept over me. She did want something more than revenge. She wanted Henry—and she wanted me dead.
That wasn’t an option yet. Even if I marched up to her and offered her my neck, there was no guarantee it would end things. Cronus was more powerful than I could possibly imagine, and from my vision it was clear that no matter how in control Calliope pretended to be, she wasn’t. She wasn’t the one who was going to decide when this was over.
“What do we do now?”
My voice echoed in the dead silence of the throne room. It’d been nearly ten minutes and no one had said a word, and I could no longer take sitting there while Henry and my mother were in danger.
“What do you mean?” said Ella, who shared a wide armchair with Theo. The two of them were wrapped together as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I envied them. They still had each other.
“I mean, how do we help them?” I said. “If Mom and Sofia can’t free them, if they—” If they got captured, too. “What are we supposed to do?”
Ella and Theo exchanged looks, and next to them, Irene sighed. “There is no helping them, not when Cronus and Calliope have them.”
I blinked. That was it? “There has to be something we can do.” I looked around the circle for support, but no one met my eye. Not even James. “We can’t leave them there. How is that even an option?”
“Because anything else would be suicide,” said Dylan with a sneer. “While you were getting your beauty sleep, the rest of us went over every feasible plan. With Diana and Sofia, our options were limited. Without them, we have no choice but to wait until Calliope makes her next move. We can’t face her head-on, not if you want there to be any of us left to fight Cronus when he finds a way to escape.”
When, not if. “There has to be something we can do.”
“They knew that this was a possibility,” said Irene. “They knew our powers are limited in this realm, and they took that chance and left us anyway.”
The note of hurt in her voice surprised me. Did they think my mother and Sofia had abandoned them?
“Besides,” added Theo, “there’s still a chance they’ll succeed.”
“And if they don’t?” I said. As much as I wanted to grasp on to the hope that my mother would come back safely without the rest of the council’s intervention, if three of the six couldn’t wit
hstand Calliope and Cronus, I didn’t see how it was possible that only two would.
“Then it’s only a matter of time before Cronus escapes,” said Dylan. “Once he does, he’ll tear the world apart, destroy humanity, and if we’re lucky, kill us quickly.”
The temperature in the throne room seemed to drop twenty degrees. “And none of you are willing to do anything about it?” I said, stunned. “You’re just going to sit back and let it happen, even though he’ll kill you anyway?”
“No,” said Ella sharply, and she glared at Dylan. “If we stay out of it, he might leave us alone.”
“So you’d rather lose the only hope you have of defeating Cronus and saving billions of lives, so long as there’s a chance you’ll be allowed to live?” I said. “Is this a joke?”
No one answered. Of course it wasn’t a joke. They were all serious, and I didn’t know what to say to that. These weren’t the people I’d met and gotten to know in Eden. They were cowards, and the idea that the most powerful beings on the planet could let humanity die—it didn’t make sense. They were supposed to protect them, not sit back and let Cronus kill everyone.
I balled my hands into fists. “You tested me for six months to make sure I was good enough to be one of you—moral enough and strong enough and selfless enough. And now you can’t even help save your own family?”
A small part of me understood that it must have been terrifying to face death when they’d lived for eons thinking they never would. Or at the very least, when they faded, it would be peaceful and without any pain. Death was part of being human, and I hadn’t forgotten what that felt like yet. They’d never had the chance to learn. But that wasn’t an excuse.
“Just because you had to be good enough to be one of us doesn’t mean the rest of us are.” Ava glared at Dylan as well, and he seemed to shrink under the intensity of it. “We’ve never exactly been upstanding, you know. We’re just good at acting holier than thou when it suits our needs. And some of us are better actors than others.”