Page 84 of A Touch of Chaos

“Go!” he commanded.

She glared at him, horrified and angry, but she knew at least one of them had to make it out. One of them needed magic to rescue the other.

“Just hold on…for me,” she said.

Hades offered her a small smile before she turned and hurried up the remaining stairs even as they shook beneath her feet and the ceiling continued to crumble around her. She stumbled and fell, her shins hitting the stone hard. The pain was biting but she kept going, bruising her fingers and breaking her nails as she clawed her way higher and higher, knowing that she had no choice, until finally, when she reached for her magic, it wasthere.

She could have cried.

She teleported and landed on her hands and knees at the top of the labyrinth stairs where she and Ariadne had started their descent as the opening collapsed.

She rose to her feet on shaky legs. She knew she was bleeding from her fall, but she ignored the pain and summoned her magic, intending to lift the rocks, when a sudden heaviness flooded the air. It was electric and raised the hair on her arms.

She turned to see a demigod with glowing eyes and a stream of white-blue lightning surging toward her, the heat of which singed her skin even as she teleported, appearing behind her attacker, but he was already a step ahead and had turned in her direction, casting another bolt. It hit her hard in the chest, throwing her back while boiling her blood.

She landed amid the ruins of Knossos and only had time to register the pain before the demigod appeared in the sky above her and struck her again, this time with a continuous stream of lightning. Her body convulsed beneath the heat, and her senses filled with the smell of burning flesh and the sharp sizzle of electricity.

Beneath the onslaught of his magic, all she could think of was everything she had been through. But it was not just her. It was her friends too. Those she had loved most in the world. Sybil and Harmonia had been tortured, and Zofie had been murdered. The prisoners of the Underworld had torn her realm apart and retraumatized the souls. Zeus had stripped Hermes, Apollo, and Aphrodite of their powers and put a bounty on her head.

And she bore the guilt of murdering her mother.

Through all of it, she had looked forward to one thing, and that was Hades.

He was her light in the window—the glow of hope in the distance despite the deep darkness around her—and just when she had felt his familiar warmth and the safety of his embrace, he had been taken from her again.

Her fury bloomed. She could feel it in her chest, a darkness that unfurled into thorns. She screamed as they burst from her body, cutting through the white-blue light. The lightning ceased as the demigod attempted to flee, but Persephone’s thorns twined around him and through him. As his blood rained down, she yanked him from the sky, and he plummeted to the earth, hitting it in an explosion of dirt and rock.

For a brief moment, Persephone lay there, expecting to feel the pain that inevitably followed her explosivemagic, but she felt nothing save the hard ground at her back. It was then she realized the thorns were gone and she had healed.

She sat up and then rose to her feet, approaching the crater, finding the demigod lying at the bottom. As she looked, he opened his eyes, no longer lit with white light. She extended her hand, and vines grew around him. He struggled as they tightened, and when he began to scream, another clapped down over his mouth.

Persephone turned toward the collapsed entrance of the labyrinth and called to the stones. They were easy to find because they were made from adamant but harder to move because their energy was heavy. It made her body shake from the inside out, but she managed to shift them over the pit, locking eyes with the demigod as she dropped them on him all at once.

She caught movement from the corner of her eye and burst into tears when she saw Hades emerge from the ruins of the stairs. Ariadne was not far behind.

“Hades!”

She ran to him and threw herself into his arms, once more surrounded by his warmth and his scent. She buried her face in the crook of his neck.

“Let’s go,” she said, and Hades’s magic erupted.

They were finally free, and Hades was home.

Part II

“And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward.”

—HOMER,THEILIAD

CHAPTER XVII

HADES

Hades could not describe how it felt to be free of the labyrinth’s hold.

The only thing he had to compare it to was when he’d been thrown up by his father and released from the dark prison of his belly.

But not even this compared, because then, he’d been reborn into battle, and now, he’d been reunited with his queen, and she was all he wanted.

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