Page 93 of The Court of the Dead
But this time he felt nothing.
Please not her, he prayed.Please not again.
Darkness swirled at the edge of his consciousness. He wanted to pass out, to give in to it, but Will was there, holding him up. Nico pulled back just enough to study Will’s face. He looked so angelic in that moment, his eyes pleading and concerned.
“Wait.” Will sniffled, then rummaged in the pockets of his cargo pants. He produced a chocolate chip cookie. “Eat.”
Nico wanted to refuse. How could he think of food? But his body had its own ideas. He wolfed down the cookie in three bites.
“What happened?” Yazan’s voice was filled with dread. “Where’s Hazel?”
Nico’s and Will’s faces must have told him all he needed to know. Yazan’s expression hardened.
“Deion, use the tessera,” ordered Will. “Call Frank.Now.”
If Deion said anything else, Nico didn’t hear it. He collapsed against Will and sank back into a bottomless void.
His dreams fluctuated.
First, he was stuck in that room again, with someone knocking at the door, but this time the space was brighter than Will’s energy—brighter than the sun itself. He kept his eyes shut. Still the glow burned through his eyelids, searing his retinas. He heard the door open. That was a first. But he couldn’t bring himself to look.
He sensed her approach—a shift in the light, a coolness in the air. She drifted toward him. Her fingers caressed his face as lightly as the whiskers of a cat.
“Brother,” she said, “why did you leave me?”
“I’m right here, Hazel!”
The light made it impossible to look. He wanted to reach out, to take her hand, but his arms remained frozen at his sides.
“I can’t find you!” She sounded farther away now. And her voice was no longer Hazel’s.
It had been months since he’d last heard his big sister speak, when his father had granted him a final chance to say good-bye to her.
“Bianca!” he cried. “Help me. Tell me what to do!”
“You were supposed to helpme,” she said.
Somehow the voice became both Hazel’s and Bianca’s—a blend of their gentle tones. Nico tried to distinguish Hazel’s slight Southern lilt from Bianca’s softer consonants, a remnant of her Venetian accent, but he couldn’t. He realized it didn’t matter. His sisters shared one voice and one fate. He had failed them both.
Next, he found himself lounging in a grassy field on a warm afternoon. Cherry trees swayed overhead, their branches heavy with white-and-pink blooms. A few feet away, an expanse of water shimmered in the sunlight. The opposite shore was so far away it might have been a lake or a bay, but Nico recognized where he was—the Potomac River, the park where his mother had taken them in Washington, DC, during those first few weeks in America, before the fire that destroyed their lives.
A picnic basket sat between him and Bianca. She was reading her well-worn copy ofAnne of Green Gablesfor the millionth time. As usual, she wore wide-legged trousers and a polo shirt, the way she preferred to dress whenever she was out of school. Her feet were bare, of course.
Their mother knelt beside the wicker basket, rummaging for something inside. The older version of Nico, the one who was dreaming, wanted to focus on her, to memorize the details of her face that had faded over the decades. She was wearing a blue gingham dress, and her dark hair was tied back in a bow. She hummed an Italian tune, maybe “Vivere”—“To Live”—because even Nico’s dreams had a dark sense of irony.
Her face, however, was hazy on the edge of his vision. The younger Nico, the boy in the dream, was mostly ignoring her as he shuffled through his Mythomagic deck. Finally he found the card he’d been searching for: Hades. He held it up and studied it in the light.
“Nico, did you remember to pack the fresh mozzarella?” his mother asked.
Younger Nico didn’t answer. He was too busy staring at the dark-robed figure on his card. The god reclined on an onyx throne. An iron helmet rested on his knee. His face was half-drowned in shadow, but he seemed to be peering sternly out at Nico, as if askingWhy do you come before me?
Nico wondered what life would be like if all the gods and monsters were real. Would it be as exciting as Mythomagic made it seem?
“Nico!” His mother cursed in Italian. “Che cosa stai faccendo? You packed your figurines?”
She pulled a Mythomagic statuette from the picnic basket. Nico saw that she had pricked her finger on one of its sharp points as she was searching for the mozzarella.
Nico had never seen this game piece before, but he knew exactly what it was: Hazel in her final moments, just before the two-pronged spear touched her and reduced her to ashes. The miniature Hazel held her spatha up high, and now a drop of Maria di Angelo’s blood glistened on its point.
