Page 183 of A Touch of Chaos

“Thatisrude…ass!”

“Calling me an ass isn’t exactlyniceeither,” said Hermes.

“I wouldn’t have called you an ass if you hadn’t said I wasn’t popular. I’m popular. Everyone likes to sleep!”

“No offense, but do you know how much I could accomplish if I didn’t have to sleep?”

“I suppose we’ll find out,” said Hypnos, smiling with malice.

Hades rolled his eyes. “Fuck, they are exhausting,” he muttered.

Persephone’s soft laugh drew his attention. “I don’t know. I think they are kind of cute.”

“Try living with it for an eternity,” he said.

“I hope I do,” she replied.

Hades was surprised by her words, and he instantly felt guilty for his. It had been an insensitive thing to say given not only Apollo’s death but also Tyche’s and Hypnos’s.

“You will,” he said. “You have no choice.”

She smiled at him, though there was no amusement in her eyes.

“You know that is not how Fate works,” she said.

“I know what I will do if anything were to happen to you,” he said. “The promise of that future alone should keep the Fates at bay.”

He knew she was not convinced, and in some ways, he did not blame her. From where they stood right now, it was hard to envision a future.

Suddenly, there was a gleam on the horizon, and Charon’s ferry came into view. From this distance, he could see Apollo standing at the front of the boat, the lantern on the bow swinging from the choppy waters of the Styx.

Hades wondered how the ferryman was handling the deaths of the Divine. In all his years ferrying souls, he had brought one god here, and that had been Pan, Hermes’s son.

The souls cheered, and Persephone left his side to be nearer to the pier, though she was careful not to overtake Artemis, whose feet were barely on the dock. Hades worried she might fall in and be taken to the bottom of the river by the dead, but Apollo knocked her back, rocking Charon’s boat as he launched himself at his sister and pulled her into a tight hug.

Charon docked his boat and came to Hades.

“There are hundreds of souls at the gates,” he said. “What is happening up there?”

“Chaos,” Hades answered. He had no other way to explain it.

He had expected Theseus to plan something during the funeral games but nothing on the scale he had managed today. Theseus had wielded the lightning bolt.

That alone was enough to convince the people of New Greece that his abilities exceeded those of the gods, but then he had murdered Apollo.

In that instant, Theseus had essentially replaced two gods.

And that had only been the start, because once Apollo had fallen and Zeus was revealed, Theseus called to his father, Poseidon, commanding him to make the earth tremble and the seas shift, bringing about a disaster Hades had only just begun to comprehend.

Suddenly, it was not just the gods who were under Theseus’s threat but the whole of New Greece.

“If you do not do something soon, the entire world will reside here within your realm, and then you will have to worry about what Theseus has planned for you.”

“I already do,” said Hades.

His gaze shifted to the souls and gods gathered to welcome Apollo, and he wondered how he had come to care for so many people, but one look at Persephone and he knew—it was her.

She was the thread that bound them, the one who had brought them all together, and now he would do anything to protect them.

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