Page 127 of The Court of the Dead
She felt like she was missing something important. If she could only think…
Her eyes came to rest on the covered wagon in front of the museum. She noticed how the minor gods had positioned themselves as far away from the wagon as possible—Laverna on the right-hand side of the plaza, the three di inferi on the left. Even the monsters on Pirithous’s side seemed to avoid looking at that wagon. She thought about the pitch Pirithous had made to the prisoners:It is notyouI want. Turn witnesses for the prosecution…
“You’ve been trading up,” she realized, fixing Pirithous with a disgusted stare. “All these mythics, all these gods who are supposedly on your side…you trapped them, just like you’ve done to us. You released them on the condition that they help you catch even bigger prey. You’ve been working your way up to Hades—using the so-called ‘secret weapon’ you’ve got in that wagon. Whatever it is, you can’t really believe it will be powerful enough to imprison Hades himself.”
On either side of Pirithous, Mary Tudor and Tantalus suddenly looked nervous.
“Pirithous,” said Mary, “tell me she is wrong. I’m tired of life here on the surface.”
“This had better work,” Tantalus agreed. “You promised we would be lords of Erebos. Ineverwant to come back to this world again.”
“Have a little faith, friends,” said Pirithous, his voice tinged with warning.
Hazel turned to Asterion. “As soon as we’re through the barrier, we have to destroy whatever is in that cart. That’s the source of Pirithous’s power.”
Asterion nodded grimly. “I will be happy to. Preferably over Pirithous’s dead body.”
Pirithous stepped back. For the first time, he looked shaken. “You have no idea who you are dealing with. I offered you a second chance. You chose death.”
He raised a hand and called out to his followers, “When the barrier falls, kill them all!”
There was another surge from behind Hazel as the captives shouted and screamed and jostled one another.
Hazel’s throat was so dry she couldn’t even sob. She despised what Pirithous was doing and how he viewed the world. No one here deserved to be imprisoned simply for choosing how they wanted to live.
“Courage!” Asterion shouted to his fellow mythics. “Do not despair!”
And then the whole world shattered.
Hazel felt like she was in a horror movie because of all the screaming around her.
When the Mist broke, an entire school group was exiting the de Young. Once the kids saw two Cyclopes yoked to a wagon, they scattered in all directions with their teachers chasing after. A mom pushing a stroller was politely navigating through a crowd of tourists when she realized the tourists were actually bloodsucking vampires with donkey legs and flaming hair. She shrieked and pushed her stroller from zero to sixty as she fled down the sidewalk. A taxi swerved off the road to avoid a giant scorpion, went airborne, and landed in the plaza wedged between two cypress trees.
Every mortal in sight was behaving similarly. Hazel couldn’t blame them.
The moment the world shattered, a compression wave exploded outward from a point just between Hazel and Pirithous. Zigzagging lines of white smoke like horizontal lightning split Golden Gate Park—breaking trees, buildings, cars, streets, and even the sky into a million jagged puzzle pieces.
It was as if Hazel had been looking through a lens her entire life. She simply hadn’t realized it until the glass fractured and fell from her eyes. When the white lightning faded and the dust settled, everything looked normal again—except sharper, rawer, and somehow uglier. She’d never realized that Laistrygonian giants had so many warts, or that Cyclopes suffered from pink eye, or that Pirithous’s hair was actually a toupee.
What shedidrealize was that the Mist was gone. The curtain separating mortal and godly realities had been ripped away—at least in this one area of San Francisco. For the first time, perhaps ever, regular mortals were seeing exactly what demigods saw: a world full of monsters and magic. Some of the less rattled mortals were filming the scene on their phones as they backed away from the plaza, and Hazel suspected that those images would appear online with no filter.
The implications were…not great.
Hazel could think of only a couple of upsides to this situation. First, the invisible prison barrier had broken along with the Mist. She knew this because she could breathe again—cold, fresh air, rich with oxygen, without the stench of stale mythic breath and body odor. Second, the hundreds of monsters on both sides of the barrier were momentarily just as stunned as the mortals. No one was attacking anyone. At least not yet.
Her relief was short-lived, though. She was about to yell for Asterion to charge the wagon when a different sort of magical storm formed in front of her.
The ground shook from a peal of thunder so loud that even the largest monsters cowered. A black funnel cloud spiraled downward, seething like boiling water in a pot.
“Yes, yes!” cried Pirithous. “Come forth, Pluto! Come see what I have wrought!”
He snapped his fingers impatiently at his nearest minions. “What are you waiting for? Uncover the tarp!”
Kelli stared at him in disbelief, as if thinkingWho, me?Then she grabbed a couple of Laistrygonian giants and led them toward the wagon.
Hazel regained her senses enough to draw her sword. “Asterion!”
Before she could order her troops into battle, another crack of thunder almost knocked her off her feet. The tip of the funnel cloud now hovered only a hundred feet above her. Every cell in her body was charged with panic. A shape descended from the base of the tornado—a smoky human form floating toward them. It was definitelynotPluto.
