The Games Gods Play, page 36
“You said it wasn’t good if he saw me now.” The whisper comes out harsh, an accusation aimed directly at Hades, but I don’t take my gaze off Boone.
“You needed me.” Boone tips his head. “You kept calling out for me in your sleep. So I came.”
“But what if you get confused? What if you want to go back and get trapped?” I need to get up and push him out of the room.
“I’m fine,” Boone says.
Hades makes a gesture off to the side—hiding it from me, I think—and Boone glances his way. “I can’t be here much longer. I need you to listen.”
After a moment of fighting back my overwhelming tumult of emotions, I manage to nod.
“I need you to do something for me, Lyra.”
I nod, the movement making my head spin. “I know. Win.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I need you to fight, for you. I don’t want to see you down here with me. Not yet. Do you hear me? Stop worrying about me. I’m fine.” His smile is both real and forced. “Better than fine. But you’re going to die if you don’t let me go and try to live.”
“No—”
“Let me go. I’ll see your face again in about eighty years, after you’ve had a long life.” He’s fading away.
“Boone—”
“Promise me you’ll live, Lyra.” His voice is coming from far away. “Promise.”
“I promise.” I swallow. “And I’ll see you sooner than eighty years. I’ll win the Crucible. It’s in the bag.”
He shakes his head again. I think. I can hardly see him now. “You live for both of us. That will be enough.”
I can’t see him anymore.
“Eighty years, Lyra-Loo-Hoo.” His voice whispers around me. “I’ll be counting down the days.”
And then he’s gone. I feel it when he goes.
I clamp my free hand over my mouth, holding back the sobs that want to break free.
Hades nods at someone, and for the first time, I realize there’s another man in here, one I’ve never met. He inserts a needle into my IV line and depresses the plunger. Immediately, warmth hits my blood, working its way up my arm to my chest, then to the rest of me.
I turn my head, staring at Hades, even as my eyelids grow heavier.
“Why?” I whisper.
His face twists. “Maybe now you’ll let yourself sleep and heal…and fight.”
For me. He brought Boone here for me.
“Thank…” I’m not sure I get to “you” before I’m out again.
The nightmares don’t come anymore now. It’s more like I’m trapped in my own body, drowning in heat and pain. Every so often, I manage to swim back up to the top for a breath. Whatever they’re trying, it’s not working. I’m not getting better.
But I’m holding on now, at least.
Hades’ voice is my anchor.
His touch. Even when I’m deep under, I can feel him here. When I’m closer to the surface, he’s never far away.
One of the times I manage to swim up and open my eyes, he’s arguing with someone. Charon, I think, though the other person is standing backlit in a doorway. Another time, he’s asleep sitting in a chair, head lolled back. He looks awful. Exhausted, with purple bags under his eyes. I didn’t know gods could exhaust themselves. I reach toward him, but I’m already sinking again.
80
The Only Voice I Hear
Sensation flushes through me in the dark and pulls at my consciousness.
“What…” I hear myself from far away.
Like a cool breeze off the bay after a hot summer day, the sensation moves through me again. Breaking through the heat of the fever. Not eradicating it. But this is the first hint of relief I’ve felt since I’ve been trapped in my own body.
Worry wriggles through the relief like a worm. And I think I frown, because why would I worry? This is…relief.
“Is it working?” Hades’ voice comes from a long way off.
Is what working? Are they trying another medicine? Another treatment? “Not the ice bath again.” I try to say the words, but my lips won’t move.
That was agony. Fire and freezing at the same time.
Another flush of cool, like the relief is inside me. In my veins.
Then another, but this is more like a wave moving through me, and I sigh my relief. Audibly. I know because it’s loud in my head.
And yet a dark emotion coils in my stomach. Doubt? Dread? Hope?
I don’t think I’m the one feeling those things.
“I think it’s working,” someone says. They’re closer now.
Or I’m closer to consciousness. The lessening heat and pain is buoying me up to the top. Please don’t let this stop.
“Lyra?” Urgency lines Hades’ voice.
I want to answer him, tell him I’m okay. More than okay, but I’m still having trouble making my mouth and eyes work.
“What’s wrong? Is it killing her?” The panic in his voice would be adorable if it didn’t seem to be wrapping around my heart and squeezing hard. Like his panic is feeding into me.
I try to reach for him, for his hand, but I can’t move yet. The sick exhaustion is still trying to drown me.
Another wave of that blessed cool.
I manage to make my mouth work. “Hades.”
“I’m here.” His voice sounds…tortured. “I’m here, Lyra.”
His hand wraps around mine, anchors me to reality, and that single, simple touch is heaven.
“It’s getting better,” I try to say. I’m vaguely aware that the words come out as gibberish.
Another bolt of worry hits.
“Help her!” he orders someone in a voice that is all King of the Underworld. So much authority. So much power.
“We have to let it work,” someone says in a voice that quavers. “My apologies, Lord Hades.”
So much fear from them. Because of him. Him trying to protect me.
“Hades,” I whisper.
He lets go of my hand, and I whimper a protest. Then his palms cup my face. “I’m here,” he says.
That touch, the closeness of him, that voice… It’s all I need.
A final rush of that relief-giving sensation flows into me, through me, and it feels as though my body is being soothed and cleansed and rebuilt from the inside. Starting from my bones and working its way outward.
Followed by…fear.
Not my fear. I’m not afraid. I’m relieved. What is happening?
“Elysium save me,” I hear him whisper. Feel his breath brush my lips. “Is she—”
“I feel…better,” I mumble, exhaustion already reaching for me. But a different kind. The type of sleep that heals instead of traps you in your own tortured body. “Much better.”
That odd sensation has receded, so the emotion that barrels through me isn’t that. And it definitely isn’t mine. I’m sure of that now.
Shock and relief and dawning realization are followed by worry-tinted, supremely masculine satisfaction.
It moves like a lightning bolt through my chest—there in electrifying clarity, then gone, leaving me buzzing.
Not my feelings…
That was Hades. I felt what he was feeling.
How?
81
I Promise You
I frown, Hades’ hands still on my face. That can’t be right. Feeling Hades’ emotions like that. Am I hallucinating? More dreams?
Someone in the room coughs. “I’d say that worked remarkably well, Phi,” they say. A low, male voice. Charon, I think. He’s the only one I’ve heard call Hades Phi.
There’s silence.
“Lyra?” Hades says, still close to me. “Can you open your eyes?”
I really don’t want to. My body is drifting away, the exhaustion easing into something more like comfort.
“Please.” Hades never begs, but he’s begging me now.
I force my eyes open, squinting against the light of the single lantern in here, and his face comes into vague focus.
He releases a small breath that probably only I hear. “Thank the Fates. I didn’t want to do this until you woke up.”
“Do”—I have to clear my throat because it’s like talking through gravel—“what?”
He holds up a bronze chalice where I can see. It’s simple, with his symbol of the bident and scepter engraved on it. “I’m trying something dangerous.”
That doesn’t sound good. I frown as his face sways before mine. “What?”
“You’re not getting any better, Lyra. So I gave you some of my blood.”
My lips hitch in an attempt at a smile. Ichor, the golden blood of the gods, famed for its ability to do…just about anything, as humanity tells it. “I’m…a goddess.” Then it hits me what he’s saying, and my eyes widen as much as they can while I’m barely keeping them open. “Oh. That was…why…I’m better now?”
He shakes his head. “No. That was so you can survive the next part. Hopefully.”
Next part? What’s he talking about?
He holds up the cup again.
Oh. Right? What about it?
“Water from Styx.”
I blink as my mind tries to glom onto what I know about that. “Poison,” I whisper.
“That’s why I gave you my blood.”
Now it’s coming together vaguely. Only a few mortals have survived touching the Styx. Achilles was one of them. It made him invincible everywhere except his heel where his mother had held him when she dipped him in the waters, and that part didn’t get wet. That one entirely mortal spot became his only weakness.
Did Achilles survive because he had a deity’s blood in him? His mother was Thetis, a sea nymph. Did that make him enough of a demigod to survive it?
Hades must be desperate.
“I’m…that…bad?” I ask.
He hesitates, then nods.
I search his face. “You…look terrible.”
Hades’ lips crook. “You should see yourself, my star.”
“Wow.” I take a labored breath that shudders through me. It’s getting harder to stay here with him. “Guess you…better…do it…then.”
He doesn’t, though. He hesitates visibly. It’s got to be pretty damned dangerous. “If you die, I’ll take care of you,” he tells me. I get another lightning bolt of emotion from him. I’m sure it’s from him, now. Desperation this time. “I promise.”
He is tearing himself apart with guilt. Can’t have that.
“Seems like…” I lick my cracked lips. “You’re…taking care…of…a lot…of souls…these…days.”
His expression alters, and my heart thumps heavily at the odd combination of exasperation and tenderness on his face. “I hope you’re not rubbing off on me,” he says. “Always running around trying to save other people.”
“Heavens…forbid.” I try to chuckle, but it turns into a cough that racks pain through every part of me. “But…don’t…worry about…mine.”
“What?”
“My soul. I…like it…down here.”
“Fuck,” Hades mutters darkly.
“If you’re going to do it, Phi.” Charon’s voice reaches through the shadows. “Do it now, before the effects of your blood wear off.”
Cool hands lift my shirt. The air is oddly cold against my skin, and I glance down and grunt at the sight—my wound not only hasn’t closed, it’s a pit of black flesh, like acid has eaten its way through me. Like Isabel. Only different. Black spider veins crawl out of the wound into the graying flesh all around it in every direction.
I’m no doctor, but even I know that’s bad.
“This is going to hurt—” Hades doesn’t bother to finish warning me before he pours the contents of the cup over the wound.
Agony and fire. A thousand times worse than the dragon burn. I’ve never screamed so loud in my entire life, the sound torn from my throat, my body bowing off the bed as if it’s trying to escape itself. He doesn’t stop. He’s pouring more and more. Then he rolls me to pour more on the exit wound on my back.
I scream until my voice goes hoarse, and then the darkness reaches up and yanks me down so fast it’s like that wild rush down the river from Hades’ waterfall in Olympus.
“No! Lyra!” I hear Hades shout at me.
But I’m too deep, and in the darkness, for the first time, I find total, true oblivion.
82
His Star
When I open my eyes next, my head isn’t muzzy anymore, and while I’m stiff and achy from lying here so long, I feel no other pain. Also, they’ve removed most of the tubes that were stuck in me, so that’s better, too. Charon sits at my bedside instead of Hades, reading a romance novel. I smile. I didn’t peg him as the type.
“Good book?” I croak.
He lowers it and grins at me, and I blink. Gods really are extraordinarily beautiful.
“I’ve been debating if we should call you Sleeping Beauty or Snow White.”
I guess the River Styx did its work, and Hades’ blood kept me alive. Barely, it felt like.
It took several more days, or…however long. I’m not exactly keeping track of time. I only remember patchy pieces, but at least most of them didn’t involve pain or fever or even delirium. Just exhaustion as my body mended.
“Weren’t both of those fairy tales a sleeping death?”
“Hence the debate.” He puts his book on the table beside his chair. “Given how pale you are and the raven-black hair, I’m leaning toward Snow White.”
“Hephaestus could be the huntsman.”
Charon laughs at that. “And Aphrodite the evil queen?”
I shake my head. “She didn’t mean for things to turn out so bad.” I saw how she’d cried herself puffy over Dae’s grandmother. Those emotions were real.
“Hmmm… And prince charming?” His gaze turns sharp, curious—not in an idle way. “Seems like you have a few options.”
No use denying it. “One is a ghost who doesn’t love me more than a friend. And one is a god. Doesn’t seem like either prospect has much of a future.”
“Not to mention the ally,” Charon says.
“Also just a friend.” While these games are played, at least.
What I don’t tell him is that Hades was the rock I held on to through all of it. Boone’s visit helped ease my guilt, helped give me a goal to work toward and something to live for. But Hades?
He was my peace. He was my strength. He was my haven.
Definitely didn’t see that coming. Though I probably should’ve.
“I’ve never seen Hades…distraught before,” Charon admits. Not like this.”
For a minute, I worry that I spoke my thoughts out loud or that he could read them. But then his actual words sink in, and heat flushes through my face. I try and fail miserably to be casual. “Was he?”
He searches my expression. “Enough that it scared me.”
I stop tracing a pattern on the blanket to look at him more closely. “Scared?”
Charon shrugs. “He’s king down here, but I couldn’t make him leave you. For days. This is the first time he’s been out of this room since he brought you here, and I still had to force his hand. If he loses it…” Another shrug.
But I get the idea.
The heart monitor beats a little faster, the sound of it pinging and obvious. I really hate those machines. With a flick, I remove the gadget from my finger.
It flatlines, and Charon turns it off with a not-so-secret smile. “You don’t think you have a future with him? Why? Because he’s a god and you’re mortal?”
I really don’t want to have this conversation, so I say nothing.
He doesn’t let it go, though. “You don’t seem the type to let details get in your way.”
“What are you saying?”
“What has he told you about Persephone?”
I press back into my pillow. Where did that come from? “He told me she was like a sister to him. How losing her devastated him.”
He glances away. “There’s that, at least.”
“What does that mean?”
He shakes his head. “It means he’s being up-front with you.” He pins me with a pointed look. “Hades only shares information for two reasons—either you’re in his very small circle, or he’s using it to get something from you.”
“Which am I?”
He runs a hand around the back of his neck. “I’m hoping the former.”
“‘Hoping’ doesn’t sound promising.”
Charon huffs an unamused laugh, and yet he seems to want me to give Hades some kind of chance.
Mine.
Hades’ claim, his word, bounces around inside me.
But the way he takes care of me feels like more than possessiveness over his champion.
I try to push up in the bed, and Charon grabs a pillow and stuffs it behind my back gently. Just getting situated takes all the fight out of me, and I close my eyes for a second. I don’t want to go back under. I’ve had enough of that.
When I make my eyes open again, he’s still here. Charon asks, “Did he tell you—”
At the click of the door, I look directly into mercury-gray eyes.
The second Hades sees me sitting up, it’s like all the tension drains from him. And a memory strikes. A real one, I think. I stare at him as I recollect.
A moment in the middle of the night when I swam to the top of consciousness, after the Styx fix, and Hades’ face blurred into view.
“You can leave me, you know,” I remember slurring. “I’m not going to die now.”
“That’s debatable.” Then he frowned. “Or do you want Boone again instead?”
Both irritation and a genuine offer laced his words.
I tried to shake my head, but my body just wasn’t cooperating. “No. You.”
“You want me?” His face did that supremely satisfied thing. When it’s not annoying, his arrogance is slightly endearing. “Good. Get well and I’m sure we can figure something out. I have plans.”
“You needed me.” Boone tips his head. “You kept calling out for me in your sleep. So I came.”
“But what if you get confused? What if you want to go back and get trapped?” I need to get up and push him out of the room.
“I’m fine,” Boone says.
Hades makes a gesture off to the side—hiding it from me, I think—and Boone glances his way. “I can’t be here much longer. I need you to listen.”
After a moment of fighting back my overwhelming tumult of emotions, I manage to nod.
“I need you to do something for me, Lyra.”
I nod, the movement making my head spin. “I know. Win.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I need you to fight, for you. I don’t want to see you down here with me. Not yet. Do you hear me? Stop worrying about me. I’m fine.” His smile is both real and forced. “Better than fine. But you’re going to die if you don’t let me go and try to live.”
“No—”
“Let me go. I’ll see your face again in about eighty years, after you’ve had a long life.” He’s fading away.
“Boone—”
“Promise me you’ll live, Lyra.” His voice is coming from far away. “Promise.”
“I promise.” I swallow. “And I’ll see you sooner than eighty years. I’ll win the Crucible. It’s in the bag.”
He shakes his head again. I think. I can hardly see him now. “You live for both of us. That will be enough.”
I can’t see him anymore.
“Eighty years, Lyra-Loo-Hoo.” His voice whispers around me. “I’ll be counting down the days.”
And then he’s gone. I feel it when he goes.
I clamp my free hand over my mouth, holding back the sobs that want to break free.
Hades nods at someone, and for the first time, I realize there’s another man in here, one I’ve never met. He inserts a needle into my IV line and depresses the plunger. Immediately, warmth hits my blood, working its way up my arm to my chest, then to the rest of me.
I turn my head, staring at Hades, even as my eyelids grow heavier.
“Why?” I whisper.
His face twists. “Maybe now you’ll let yourself sleep and heal…and fight.”
For me. He brought Boone here for me.
“Thank…” I’m not sure I get to “you” before I’m out again.
The nightmares don’t come anymore now. It’s more like I’m trapped in my own body, drowning in heat and pain. Every so often, I manage to swim back up to the top for a breath. Whatever they’re trying, it’s not working. I’m not getting better.
But I’m holding on now, at least.
Hades’ voice is my anchor.
His touch. Even when I’m deep under, I can feel him here. When I’m closer to the surface, he’s never far away.
One of the times I manage to swim up and open my eyes, he’s arguing with someone. Charon, I think, though the other person is standing backlit in a doorway. Another time, he’s asleep sitting in a chair, head lolled back. He looks awful. Exhausted, with purple bags under his eyes. I didn’t know gods could exhaust themselves. I reach toward him, but I’m already sinking again.
80
The Only Voice I Hear
Sensation flushes through me in the dark and pulls at my consciousness.
“What…” I hear myself from far away.
Like a cool breeze off the bay after a hot summer day, the sensation moves through me again. Breaking through the heat of the fever. Not eradicating it. But this is the first hint of relief I’ve felt since I’ve been trapped in my own body.
Worry wriggles through the relief like a worm. And I think I frown, because why would I worry? This is…relief.
“Is it working?” Hades’ voice comes from a long way off.
Is what working? Are they trying another medicine? Another treatment? “Not the ice bath again.” I try to say the words, but my lips won’t move.
That was agony. Fire and freezing at the same time.
Another flush of cool, like the relief is inside me. In my veins.
Then another, but this is more like a wave moving through me, and I sigh my relief. Audibly. I know because it’s loud in my head.
And yet a dark emotion coils in my stomach. Doubt? Dread? Hope?
I don’t think I’m the one feeling those things.
“I think it’s working,” someone says. They’re closer now.
Or I’m closer to consciousness. The lessening heat and pain is buoying me up to the top. Please don’t let this stop.
“Lyra?” Urgency lines Hades’ voice.
I want to answer him, tell him I’m okay. More than okay, but I’m still having trouble making my mouth and eyes work.
“What’s wrong? Is it killing her?” The panic in his voice would be adorable if it didn’t seem to be wrapping around my heart and squeezing hard. Like his panic is feeding into me.
I try to reach for him, for his hand, but I can’t move yet. The sick exhaustion is still trying to drown me.
Another wave of that blessed cool.
I manage to make my mouth work. “Hades.”
“I’m here.” His voice sounds…tortured. “I’m here, Lyra.”
His hand wraps around mine, anchors me to reality, and that single, simple touch is heaven.
“It’s getting better,” I try to say. I’m vaguely aware that the words come out as gibberish.
Another bolt of worry hits.
“Help her!” he orders someone in a voice that is all King of the Underworld. So much authority. So much power.
“We have to let it work,” someone says in a voice that quavers. “My apologies, Lord Hades.”
So much fear from them. Because of him. Him trying to protect me.
“Hades,” I whisper.
He lets go of my hand, and I whimper a protest. Then his palms cup my face. “I’m here,” he says.
That touch, the closeness of him, that voice… It’s all I need.
A final rush of that relief-giving sensation flows into me, through me, and it feels as though my body is being soothed and cleansed and rebuilt from the inside. Starting from my bones and working its way outward.
Followed by…fear.
Not my fear. I’m not afraid. I’m relieved. What is happening?
“Elysium save me,” I hear him whisper. Feel his breath brush my lips. “Is she—”
“I feel…better,” I mumble, exhaustion already reaching for me. But a different kind. The type of sleep that heals instead of traps you in your own tortured body. “Much better.”
That odd sensation has receded, so the emotion that barrels through me isn’t that. And it definitely isn’t mine. I’m sure of that now.
Shock and relief and dawning realization are followed by worry-tinted, supremely masculine satisfaction.
It moves like a lightning bolt through my chest—there in electrifying clarity, then gone, leaving me buzzing.
Not my feelings…
That was Hades. I felt what he was feeling.
How?
81
I Promise You
I frown, Hades’ hands still on my face. That can’t be right. Feeling Hades’ emotions like that. Am I hallucinating? More dreams?
Someone in the room coughs. “I’d say that worked remarkably well, Phi,” they say. A low, male voice. Charon, I think. He’s the only one I’ve heard call Hades Phi.
There’s silence.
“Lyra?” Hades says, still close to me. “Can you open your eyes?”
I really don’t want to. My body is drifting away, the exhaustion easing into something more like comfort.
“Please.” Hades never begs, but he’s begging me now.
I force my eyes open, squinting against the light of the single lantern in here, and his face comes into vague focus.
He releases a small breath that probably only I hear. “Thank the Fates. I didn’t want to do this until you woke up.”
“Do”—I have to clear my throat because it’s like talking through gravel—“what?”
He holds up a bronze chalice where I can see. It’s simple, with his symbol of the bident and scepter engraved on it. “I’m trying something dangerous.”
That doesn’t sound good. I frown as his face sways before mine. “What?”
“You’re not getting any better, Lyra. So I gave you some of my blood.”
My lips hitch in an attempt at a smile. Ichor, the golden blood of the gods, famed for its ability to do…just about anything, as humanity tells it. “I’m…a goddess.” Then it hits me what he’s saying, and my eyes widen as much as they can while I’m barely keeping them open. “Oh. That was…why…I’m better now?”
He shakes his head. “No. That was so you can survive the next part. Hopefully.”
Next part? What’s he talking about?
He holds up the cup again.
Oh. Right? What about it?
“Water from Styx.”
I blink as my mind tries to glom onto what I know about that. “Poison,” I whisper.
“That’s why I gave you my blood.”
Now it’s coming together vaguely. Only a few mortals have survived touching the Styx. Achilles was one of them. It made him invincible everywhere except his heel where his mother had held him when she dipped him in the waters, and that part didn’t get wet. That one entirely mortal spot became his only weakness.
Did Achilles survive because he had a deity’s blood in him? His mother was Thetis, a sea nymph. Did that make him enough of a demigod to survive it?
Hades must be desperate.
“I’m…that…bad?” I ask.
He hesitates, then nods.
I search his face. “You…look terrible.”
Hades’ lips crook. “You should see yourself, my star.”
“Wow.” I take a labored breath that shudders through me. It’s getting harder to stay here with him. “Guess you…better…do it…then.”
He doesn’t, though. He hesitates visibly. It’s got to be pretty damned dangerous. “If you die, I’ll take care of you,” he tells me. I get another lightning bolt of emotion from him. I’m sure it’s from him, now. Desperation this time. “I promise.”
He is tearing himself apart with guilt. Can’t have that.
“Seems like…” I lick my cracked lips. “You’re…taking care…of…a lot…of souls…these…days.”
His expression alters, and my heart thumps heavily at the odd combination of exasperation and tenderness on his face. “I hope you’re not rubbing off on me,” he says. “Always running around trying to save other people.”
“Heavens…forbid.” I try to chuckle, but it turns into a cough that racks pain through every part of me. “But…don’t…worry about…mine.”
“What?”
“My soul. I…like it…down here.”
“Fuck,” Hades mutters darkly.
“If you’re going to do it, Phi.” Charon’s voice reaches through the shadows. “Do it now, before the effects of your blood wear off.”
Cool hands lift my shirt. The air is oddly cold against my skin, and I glance down and grunt at the sight—my wound not only hasn’t closed, it’s a pit of black flesh, like acid has eaten its way through me. Like Isabel. Only different. Black spider veins crawl out of the wound into the graying flesh all around it in every direction.
I’m no doctor, but even I know that’s bad.
“This is going to hurt—” Hades doesn’t bother to finish warning me before he pours the contents of the cup over the wound.
Agony and fire. A thousand times worse than the dragon burn. I’ve never screamed so loud in my entire life, the sound torn from my throat, my body bowing off the bed as if it’s trying to escape itself. He doesn’t stop. He’s pouring more and more. Then he rolls me to pour more on the exit wound on my back.
I scream until my voice goes hoarse, and then the darkness reaches up and yanks me down so fast it’s like that wild rush down the river from Hades’ waterfall in Olympus.
“No! Lyra!” I hear Hades shout at me.
But I’m too deep, and in the darkness, for the first time, I find total, true oblivion.
82
His Star
When I open my eyes next, my head isn’t muzzy anymore, and while I’m stiff and achy from lying here so long, I feel no other pain. Also, they’ve removed most of the tubes that were stuck in me, so that’s better, too. Charon sits at my bedside instead of Hades, reading a romance novel. I smile. I didn’t peg him as the type.
“Good book?” I croak.
He lowers it and grins at me, and I blink. Gods really are extraordinarily beautiful.
“I’ve been debating if we should call you Sleeping Beauty or Snow White.”
I guess the River Styx did its work, and Hades’ blood kept me alive. Barely, it felt like.
It took several more days, or…however long. I’m not exactly keeping track of time. I only remember patchy pieces, but at least most of them didn’t involve pain or fever or even delirium. Just exhaustion as my body mended.
“Weren’t both of those fairy tales a sleeping death?”
“Hence the debate.” He puts his book on the table beside his chair. “Given how pale you are and the raven-black hair, I’m leaning toward Snow White.”
“Hephaestus could be the huntsman.”
Charon laughs at that. “And Aphrodite the evil queen?”
I shake my head. “She didn’t mean for things to turn out so bad.” I saw how she’d cried herself puffy over Dae’s grandmother. Those emotions were real.
“Hmmm… And prince charming?” His gaze turns sharp, curious—not in an idle way. “Seems like you have a few options.”
No use denying it. “One is a ghost who doesn’t love me more than a friend. And one is a god. Doesn’t seem like either prospect has much of a future.”
“Not to mention the ally,” Charon says.
“Also just a friend.” While these games are played, at least.
What I don’t tell him is that Hades was the rock I held on to through all of it. Boone’s visit helped ease my guilt, helped give me a goal to work toward and something to live for. But Hades?
He was my peace. He was my strength. He was my haven.
Definitely didn’t see that coming. Though I probably should’ve.
“I’ve never seen Hades…distraught before,” Charon admits. Not like this.”
For a minute, I worry that I spoke my thoughts out loud or that he could read them. But then his actual words sink in, and heat flushes through my face. I try and fail miserably to be casual. “Was he?”
He searches my expression. “Enough that it scared me.”
I stop tracing a pattern on the blanket to look at him more closely. “Scared?”
Charon shrugs. “He’s king down here, but I couldn’t make him leave you. For days. This is the first time he’s been out of this room since he brought you here, and I still had to force his hand. If he loses it…” Another shrug.
But I get the idea.
The heart monitor beats a little faster, the sound of it pinging and obvious. I really hate those machines. With a flick, I remove the gadget from my finger.
It flatlines, and Charon turns it off with a not-so-secret smile. “You don’t think you have a future with him? Why? Because he’s a god and you’re mortal?”
I really don’t want to have this conversation, so I say nothing.
He doesn’t let it go, though. “You don’t seem the type to let details get in your way.”
“What are you saying?”
“What has he told you about Persephone?”
I press back into my pillow. Where did that come from? “He told me she was like a sister to him. How losing her devastated him.”
He glances away. “There’s that, at least.”
“What does that mean?”
He shakes his head. “It means he’s being up-front with you.” He pins me with a pointed look. “Hades only shares information for two reasons—either you’re in his very small circle, or he’s using it to get something from you.”
“Which am I?”
He runs a hand around the back of his neck. “I’m hoping the former.”
“‘Hoping’ doesn’t sound promising.”
Charon huffs an unamused laugh, and yet he seems to want me to give Hades some kind of chance.
Mine.
Hades’ claim, his word, bounces around inside me.
But the way he takes care of me feels like more than possessiveness over his champion.
I try to push up in the bed, and Charon grabs a pillow and stuffs it behind my back gently. Just getting situated takes all the fight out of me, and I close my eyes for a second. I don’t want to go back under. I’ve had enough of that.
When I make my eyes open again, he’s still here. Charon asks, “Did he tell you—”
At the click of the door, I look directly into mercury-gray eyes.
The second Hades sees me sitting up, it’s like all the tension drains from him. And a memory strikes. A real one, I think. I stare at him as I recollect.
A moment in the middle of the night when I swam to the top of consciousness, after the Styx fix, and Hades’ face blurred into view.
“You can leave me, you know,” I remember slurring. “I’m not going to die now.”
“That’s debatable.” Then he frowned. “Or do you want Boone again instead?”
Both irritation and a genuine offer laced his words.
I tried to shake my head, but my body just wasn’t cooperating. “No. You.”
“You want me?” His face did that supremely satisfied thing. When it’s not annoying, his arrogance is slightly endearing. “Good. Get well and I’m sure we can figure something out. I have plans.”
