Page 129 of The Sun and the Star

He spied a few sets of glowing eyes peeking around the trunk of one of the bony Joshua trees.

Who were they? What did they want? Why hadn’t they attacked?

He glanced down at the dark waters of the river but saw nothing following him.

Nico settled, facing forward, and Will continued to twitch and kick softly in his arms.

The Acheron flowed, and they flowed along with it.

Will woke when Nico started coughing.

Will drifted from his nightmares into consciousness. Nyx orTartarus – he wasn’t sure which, nor did he think it mattered in the end – had sent him images of Nico, furious. ‘You left me behind!’ Nico had spat, and he’d backed Will to the edge of the cliffs that overlooked Erebos, Hades’s palace and the fields of the dead. ‘Now it’syourturn.’

And Nico had shoved him.

Over and over again.

Will had believed he was falling, but it was only once his eyes were open and had adjusted to the yellow-green light that he realized he was no longer dreaming. The feeling of Nico trying to hold in a cough had shaken him awake.

He leaned forward and spun around, and that was when Nico doubled over, coughing hard and deep. Before Will could react, before he could comfort his boyfriend, the gases hithim, too.

Will’s eyes stung, then welled up with tears, blurring the sickly landscape on the banks of the Acheron. His lungs quickly filled with the bitter, thick air, and he started coughing as well. But it didn’t help. No matter how hard he coughed, he couldn’t expel the foulness.

‘Nico,’ he groaned. ‘Where are we?’

Small Bob sat on the bow of the ship and meowed at them.

Nico spat a thick blob of phlegm onto the floor of the boat, and it was tinged with brown. ‘Inside,’ he slurred. ‘We’re inside.’

Will wiped at his eyes and clung to the hull. He peered out into landscape, but everything was coated in a terrible mist, greens and yellows mixed in a sickening cloud. He could see the slick, moist stone ground, but nothing else.

He gazed behind them and thought he saw a pair of glowing eyes, but the mist swallowed up whatever it was.

Inside.

Inside.

Something was too familiar about that. Will crawled forward and lifted Nico’s head, which had drooped to his chest.

‘Insidewhat?’ he choked out. ‘What’s inside, Nico?’

Nico’s eyes rolled in his head before they focused on Will.

He had never seen Nico so scared before.

‘You know,’ Nico breathed out. ‘The mist.’

Will was beset with another bout of horrific coughs, and he fell back, his right shoulder hitting the opposite bench and ringing out with a dull pain.

The acidic air clung to his lungs.

It coated his skin.

Which then began toblister.

The bumps were small at first. His arms were itchy, but as soon as he brought the fingers of his other hand up to scratch, the lumps became prominent. He cried out and bolted up and saw that Nico’s outstretched hand was bubbling with them, too.

It was like …

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