Enraptured (24 page)

Orpheus leaned down to her ear. “His absence doesn’t make me feel any more reassured.”

Her either.

They crossed to the dock. Beneath their feet the River Styx swirled in shades of red and black.

“Will Charon come back or should we start swimming?” Skyla asked, eyeing the water, not sure she wanted to touch it. She was pretty sure she saw an arm floating by.

“He’ll come back,” Orpheus answered, hefting Gryphon’s motionless body higher on his shoulder.

“How do you know?”

For a moment Orpheus said nothing, then his brow lowered. “I just…know.”

Skyla’s stomach tightened as she searched the distance for Charon and his ferry. Closing her eyes, she fought back the nausea. And for the first time she thought about what could have been, and probably was, done to Orpheus when he’d been trapped down here.

Nearly two thousand years. Gryphon was a muttering, blubbering mess and he’d only been here three months. What must Orpheus have endured?

“Look. There.” Orpheus pointed upriver. A light shone far off in the distance, growing brighter with every second.

Skyla swallowed around the lump in her throat and told herself not to think about what might have been done to him. He was alive, with her now. If he remembered anything she would have noticed. She glanced at his chest where the earth element lay hidden beneath the shirt he’d put back on, then up to his strong jaw and chiseled cheekbones, and finally to those eyes like melted silver. She’d do whatever she had to do to make sure it never happened again.

“Get out your coins,” Orpheus said.

Skyla rifled through her pockets for the coins he’d given her earlier. The ferry approached, bumped against the dock. Charon didn’t speak, but this time, unlike before, there was a pitying, almost sad look in his eyes.

Her hands shook as she handed him three coins, stepped onto the boat. Orpheus moved on after her, spread his legs to balance Gryphon’s weight as the ferry pushed off and turned in the swirling red water. No one spoke as they traveled upriver. And though she tried not to notice, that feeling they were being watched lingered. As did the feeling everything was about to come crashing down.

They’ll strike when you think you’re free.

Her pulse picked up as they reached the dock, as the ferry bumped its way to a stop. Heart thumping beneath her breast, she climbed off the boat and reached for her bow and arrow again. The tunnel they’d ventured into at the start loomed ahead. Empty. Dark. The perfect hiding place for something or some
one
waiting to attack.

“Get my light,” Orpheus said as the ferry pulled away and Charon disappeared into darkness.

Skyla reached into his pack, grasped the flashlight and flicked it on. Orpheus held out his hand. “I’ll light the way. You just stay ready.”

He was thinking the same thing as she. For some reason, that put her at ease. She nodded, brought her bow up, readied her arrow. They headed into the tunnel without a word.

A chill spread down her spine, the heat of Tartarus long gone. As they picked their way around stalagmites and eased through narrow corners, then passed pools of murky white liquid, she imagined the worst: Cerberus jumping out at them, Hades appearing in a poof of smoke, a fire daemon swirling in a vortex. But none of those scenarios came true. No apparitions, no interference, not even a sound, other than their boots scraping rock and their rapid breaths as they moved.

The tunnel came to an abrupt halt. Skyla stared at the wall of rock, the uneven edges and mottled stone, as Orpheus ran the light from floor to ceiling to look for an opening.

“There has to be a way through,” she said.

“Don’t suppose that book has any key phrases that’ll open it?”

She shrugged out of the pack, reached in, and grasped the book. After flipping pages she frowned. “No, nothing.”

One corner of Orpheus’s lips curled, just a touch. “You could charm it with that Siren voice.”

“My voice calms things. It doesn’t destroy them like…” Her eyes widened. “Where’s the vial?”

He reached into his pocket and handed her the glass vial the mystery guy in the marshes had given them. Skyla twisted the lid and flicked the glowing water at the rocks.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened, and then stone began to crumble.

“Get back,” Orpheus called.

Skyla grabbed her pack and scrambled backward. The wall gave way with a crash of rock and debris until light shone in from the other side.

Light from lanterns inside the Cave of Psychro.

Relief rippled through her chest as she picked her way over the rocks and through the narrow opening. And when she reached the other side, when she set foot on the solid, dirt-strewn earth, she felt like dropping to her knees and kissing the soil.

They’d made it. They’d ventured to the Underworld, rescued a soul, and survived. How many people could say they’d done that?

Not many.

Rocks slipped and scraped one another as Orpheus stumbled through the opening, his brother still deadweight in his arms. “Thank the Fates,” he breathed.

Skyla’s gaze shifted to Gryphon. “Look, Orpheus.”

Gryphon no longer appeared solid, but ethereal, the only thing concrete about him the blanket still wrapped around his naked hips.

“Let’s get him back to Demetrius. Quick.”

She nodded. Headed for the arched doorway that had led into the next room. Too late she realized there were no tourists around. No people milling through the birthplace of Zeus.

In a poof of smoke, Hades appeared on the stairs that led to the bridge that would take them to freedom, all towering menace and malevolent doom. At his side stood Persephone, dressed in a gown as black as her soulless eyes, looking less than thrilled.

Skyla’s feet drew to a stop. At her back, she heard Orpheus’s steps still as well.

“What do you think, wife of mine,” Hades said to Persephone without taking his eyes off Skyla. “That looks like stealing, don’t you think?”

Persephone wrapped her long, clawlike fingers around the handrail at her side. “I would say that’s most definitely stealing.” Heat flared in her eyes. “Hello, Orpheus. It’s good to see you again.” Then to her husband, “Whatever shall we do with them?”

A wicked, sinister grin curled the right side of Hades’s mouth, and dread dropped like a rock into the pit of Skyla’s stomach. “I can think of several things.”

Gryphon came awake with a start. The foul energy he felt in the air pulled him from the brink of unconsciousness where he’d been hovering for…he didn’t know how long.

The snakes came back to squirm through his mind. He tried to push up, to get away, but couldn’t. They were eating him, biting his skin, injecting their venom deep into his veins. Gods, the pain. There was so much pain. There was…

His mind stopped its frantic spin cycle. And he realized in a daze there were no snakes. Just the lingering memory of their striking, biting, slithering away only to strike again. Of spiders crawling over his flesh. Of vultures tearing at his muscles. Of monsters he couldn’t name ripping his limbs from his body as if he were a rag doll. And burning. There’d been burning. He could smell the charred flesh as if it were happening now. But over it all, floating in every single memory, there was Atalanta. What she’d made him do. What she and Krónos had done when…

Agony churned inside him. Melded with shame and a sickness he couldn’t ignore. He needed to run. He had to get away. He—

“
Skata
.”

The voice, a voice he recognized, brought him back around. He turned his head and saw the profile of his brother’s face. Orpheus’s strong nose, the solid cheekbones, the square jaw covered in what had to be three or four days’ worth of stubble.

“O?” he whispered. Panic rushed in. No, no, no. His brother couldn’t be here. Not in the Underworld. No one could be here. No one—

“The vial?” a voice just past Orpheus whispered. A female voice.

Gryphon realized he was sitting on the ground. He looked up past Orpheus but couldn’t see more than watery shapes, one haloed in gold.

“They’re immortal, remember?” Orpheus muttered.

“What about your spells?” the female whispered.

“They’d be as useful as your singing against these two,” Orpheus said. “
Skata
, we get all the way back to the human realm and
this
is where it ends?”

Growls echoed somewhere close. Growls Gryphon recognized as hellhounds waiting to feast.

“Don’t do anything foolish,” Orpheus warned.

“Define
foolish
,” the female snapped. “Because right now all options are on the table.”

“You’ve caused me quite a bit of trouble, hero.” Hades’s voice rang out in a humorous tone somewhere close. “You find the Orb, you lose the Orb to my treacherous wife, you find the Orb again, then lose it to a scheming warlock.” Hades chuckled. “You are all sorts of heroic, now aren’t you?”

The
Orb.

Gryphon’s mind locked on those two words, and all of it, every detail of how he’d ended up in the Underworld, flooded his memory.

Orpheus didn’t answer, just clenched his jaw and glared at the god.

“The soul of a hero is valuable,” Hades said, obviously realizing he wasn’t getting a reaction out of O. “But some things are worth more than a simple soul. For the Orb, you and your band of marauders can be on your way.”

Don’t believe him
. Panic lanced its way up Gryphon’s chest. No matter what he’d been through, it would be a million times worse for so many more if Hades got his hands on that Orb.

“Ignore him,” the female next to Orpheus whispered.

Yes, listen to her!
Gryphon shouted, scrambling to his feet. Only when he reached for Orpheus’s arm, his hand passed right through skin and bone and muscle.

Gryphon’s eyes grew wide. Lifting his hand, he realized he could look through it to the rock walls of whatever cave they were in. At his back, Hades laughed.

“Oh, to go from corporeal to ethereal. Must be a bitch.” His voice hardened. “Now the Orb. The wife and I grow tired of this drama.”

Persephone sighed.

Orpheus shot Gryphon a pitied expression, then his hand slid to his chest. To the outline of something beneath his shirt

“Orpheus, don’t,” the female warned again.

“I’m not letting him send you both back to the Underworld,” Orpheus muttered.

“If you give him that, the whole world will become the Underworld,” she countered. “Don’t do it.”

“Skyla…”

There was agony in the word. And emotion. An emotion Gryphon had never heard from his brother. Promise and pain and a future that would never be.

Gryphon looked down at his hands. His shaking, ghostly hands. His soul was in the human realm. He was free. He didn’t have a body, but his soul…that’s where the power had always come from. The power he’d gotten from his forefather and rarely used because it was unpredictable.

But unpredictable was better than nonexistent.

Before he could change his mind, he closed his eyes and focused in on that power. It would render him immobile, but what did it matter? He was a ghost here. Power flickered through his limbs, condensed in his chest, and shot up his spine. His eyes flew open and he zeroed in on Hades and Persephone, whom he could now see standing on cement steps ahead, smug expressions on their chiseled, perfect, immortal faces.

Someone gasped. A voice cursed—Hades’s voice. And then as Gryphon continued to channel his power, all sound ceased.

His legs gave out. He crumpled to the ground. Or maybe he floated. Gryphon wasn’t sure. The only thing he knew was that he felt like a deflated beach ball. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, but he could hear.

“What the hell just happened?” the female beside Orpheus gasped.

“Gryphon, you super-fucking-smart sonofabitch,” Orpheus exclaimed in an excited voice. “Help me get him up, Skyla.”

Air whooshed over his back.

“He’s a ghost!” she cried. “How the hell are we going to…?”

Weight pressed down on him. Fuzzy weight. A blanket. They were draping the blanket over him.

“Ah, good thinking, daemon,” the female exclaimed. “Gives him solid mass.”

Gryphon felt himself being hoisted into Orpheus’s arms.

“We don’t have much time,” Orpheus said, jostling Gryphon as he raced up the stairs. “They won’t be immobile for long.”

“How did he do that?” Skyla asked, her voice breathless.

“His one gift,” Orpheus answered, his own words breathless as he moved. “He gets it from Perseus. I can flash in any realm, even through solid walls, but his power is better. He can’t turn things to stone like the legendary Medusa, but when he taps into the energy Perseus got from the monster, he can freeze things.”

“For how long?” Skyla asked.

“Long enough for us to get outside.”

“And then what?” she asked.

“Then we run like hell.”

A crashing sound echoed. Voices hollered. Growls erupted far below.

Hurry. Hurry. Hurry…

“Orpheus!”

The last voice Gryphon recognized. Not because it had come from the female, or from the gods he’d just pissed off, but because it had come from his kin.

Theron. The leader of the Argonauts.

Sunlight burst over Gryphon’s face. Warmth penetrated his soul. Orpheus was running, shaking him inside the blanket.

They drew to an abrupt stop, then Orpheus laid him against something cool.

Grass. He’d laid him in grass. “Stay here, Gryph. I’ll be right back.”

Gryphon’s vision came and went. He focused long enough to look across the rolling field of brown toward a cave surrounded by olive and cypress trees. A cave they must have just run out of. The Argonauts were all there, blades drawn for battle: Theron, Zander, Titus, Cerek, and Phin. The only one missing was Demetrius.

Demetrius…The last time Gryphon had seen the guardian had been in that field outside the colony. After they’d rescued Isadora. When they’d been overrun by daemons. Just after he’d been hit with the warlock’s energy that had sent his soul to the Underworld.

A female also stood with them. Dressed in knee-high boots, slim black pants and a tight-fitting top, her bowstring drawn back, arrow ready to release.

“Orpheus?” Theron called.

“I’m on it!” Orpheus called. He held out his hands and began chanting in that witch language of his. The ground rumbled. Hellhounds broke through the cave opening and charged. A blur of black slithered off to the right. While the Argonauts fought the beasts back, Orpheus continued chanting. Through the darkness Hades appeared, walking toward them in a swirl of smoke, with murder shining in his soulless eyes.

Orpheus’s chanting grew stronger and something glowed red against the skin under his shirt. The ground rumbled again as if a great earthquake was building. Then the entire mountain came down, rocks and boulders and tree limbs crashing in to destroy the cave.

Teeth gnashed, a bloodcurdling howl echoed through the air. Gryphon watched as the Argonauts decimated the five or so hellhounds that had come through before the mountain had collapsed. The Argonauts and the female with the bow.

The battle was over in seconds. In the aftermath, shaking began, but this wasn’t from the ground. It came from within. Gryphon could only curl into himself and the blanket. Voices drew close as he ducked his head. Voices of his warrior kin. Kin he couldn’t face.

“Take him and go,” Theron said. “Get him to D and that warlock, then get him the hell home.”

“Hades will figure out a way through,” Orpheus said, his arms sliding under the blanket to lift Gryphon off the ground. “He’ll be pissed and he’ll be coming.”

“We’ll distract until you’re gone. Then we’ll get gone ourselves.”

“How did you know where and when we’d come out?” the female asked.

“The queen,” Titus answered. “She and her sisters used their Horae powers to see what Hades had planned.”

The ground shook again. And Theron added louder, “Get gone, already!

“On foot?” the female—Skyla?—asked somewhere close.

“No,” Orpheus answered. “This time you’re both otherworldly. At least for now. Hold on to me. We’re flashing out of this one.”

Before Gryphon could wonder what sort of “otherworldly” she was, he felt himself flying. Flying across time and space and away from the Underworld and all its horrors. But not away from the darkness that now lived inside him. And not away from the voice he heard cackling faintly on the wind.

Atalanta’s voice.

Now
we
are
both
free. But don’t forget you are mine
, doulas.
Forever, you are now linked to me…

***

Orpheus hollered as they flashed to the abandoned homestead they’d found in the hills outside Psychro. Rock walls gave way to a thatched roof. Weeds and cacti overtook what used to be a yard.

The door jerked open just as they reached it and Demetrius’s towering body filled the frame, his dark eyes darting to the blanket Orpheus had draped over Gryphon so he could carry him. “You got him?”

“Yeah. Where’s the warlock?”

“In here.” Demetrius led them to the back of the shack into what looked like a bedroom. An iron bed frame void of mattress sat against the wall, but the warlock—in Gryphon’s body—was bound and gagged on the opposite side of the room, leaning against the wall, his eyes growing wide as Orpheus and Skyla stepped in after Demetrius.

The warlock struggled in his bonds, yelled beneath the gag. Fear shone in his too-blue eyes. Eyes that didn’t belong to Gryphon.

“How do we do this?” Demetrius asked.

“I don’t know,” Orpheus answered. “Skyla?”

“This is outside the realm of my expertise, boys, but I think if you put his soul anywhere near his body, it’ll know what to do.”

That sounded like as good a plan as any. Orpheus tugged the blanket from Gryphon’s back then laid him on the dirt-strewn stone floor, opening the blanket so his ethereal body came into view.

None of them spoke as they waited for something to happen. The only sound in the room was the warlock screaming beneath his gag and struggling with whatever strength he had left to break free of the chain holding his arms secured to the wall above his head.

At first, nothing happened. And then slowly Gryphon’s soul began to slink across the floor, floating really, toward his body.

The warlock’s eyes grew even wider. And he screamed so loud Orpheus was sure all Crete could hear him.

Very few moments stuck with Orpheus on a gut level, but that one did. Watching his brother’s soul slide inside his body. Hearing the strangled scream of protest from the warlock. Seeing the warlock’s ethereal spirit as it was forced out. The image of the warlock appeared in the air, his true form—old, wrinkled, with gnarled hands and fingers and the same glowing blue eyes. The fear-filled eyes surveyed the room, then exploded in the warlock’s head. Then his ghostly body was swamped by a dark mist that dragged him down through howls of agony into the cracks in the stone floor until he was gone for good.

In the silence that followed, Skyla’s shot a look at Orpheus. “Okay, that was wicked.”

“Fucking wicked,” Demetrius muttered. “Remind me not to piss off Hades.”

“Too late,” Orpheus told him. “We already pissed him off.”

He knelt by his brother, ran his hand over Gryphon’s cheek. Needed some kind of confirmation his brother’s soul was in there. Gryphon lay slumped against the wall at an odd angle, his eyes still tightly shut. “Gryph, man, can you hear me?”

Gryphon stirred. With his hands still bound above, his body twisted from side to side as if struggling to wake up. Then in a flutter of movement his eyes opened. Those same light blue eyes Orpheus had seen on his brother’s face for over a hundred and fifty years stared up at him. “Or-Orpheus?”

Relief and something else, something he couldn’t define, seeped into Orpheus’s chest. “Thank you,
Dimiourgos
,” he whispered. He reached for Gryphon’s hands. “Hold on and we’ll unhook you.”

Gryphon looked up at his hands, bound above, then to Skyla and Demetrius, and finally back to Orpheus.

Heart still in his throat, Orpheus helped Demetrius unhook the metal cuff from his wrists. He rubbed at the red marks on Gryphon’s skin. “It’s over now. We’re gonna get you home to Argolea where you can forget this ever happened.”

In a flurry of movement Gryphon’s arms came up, knocking Orpheus’s hands away. He grasped the front of Orpheus’s shirt with a death grip and tugged his brother’s face close. Terror filled his wild eyes. “No. Not Argolea. Don’t take me Argolea. Anywhere but there. I can’t…” His body began to shake. His voice cracked. “Can’t…can’t go there. Not after…Don’t make me go there…”