Page 7 of Bonds of Hercules
Augustus was a monster.
So are you.
Poco screeched, black hands wrapping around Augustus’s neck as he climbed up onto his shoulder. Raccoon whiskers quivered, black eyes flashing.
Augustus didn’t move. He just stared at me with leaking, bloody eyes.
With tingling fingers, I rubbed at my chest where the new marriage bond strummed, the one that was supposed to make our powers stronger. The same bond that forged Persephone’s terrifying powers.
Augustus and Kharon were two indominable forces. There was nowhere to run from them, nowhere I could hide where they wouldn’t eventually find me, and even Crete wasn’t safe. I knew it in my bones.
Looking around, I focused onanythingbut the two dark gods bonded to my soul.
Branches clattered in the wind.
My neck prickled because my husbands weren’t the only ones staring.
Achilles and Patro stood beside them, watching me with an intensity that bordered on deranged.
My mentors.
Achilles glared, a cigarette hanging between the grates of his muzzle. Smoke rose around his face, red eyes bright through the hazy tendrils. Hair pulled back tightly withDEATHtattooed across his knuckles, he was a blazing presence in the frigid forest.
Nero, his mammoth shaggy black wolf, sat obediently next to him with a matching scarlet gaze.
Patro smirked haughtily, leaning casually against his lover. Poppae, his sleek jaguar, flicked her tail back and forth, emerald eyes bright.
A strangling pressure squeezed my neck. I touched my throat protectively.
Predators everywhere.
I looked away.
Hermos and Agatha were at the end of the line—two dark creatures with Chthonic blood somewhere in their lineage.
Hermos was an infamous Gorgon. Agatha was an Empusa, a rare type of shape-shifting creature thatatemen.
She inspired me.
Crack.
I screamed as something huge leapt into the clearing.
A woman astride a monstrous black horse scoffed at me, crimson droplets sparkling in the air around her.
Artemis.
Ice-blue eyes peered down an aristocratic nose, the air around her full of fear,literally. Her power surrounded her in a mist of glittering red—it was terror incarnate.
The immense horse pranced in place.
A familiar stocky figure in a black exercise toga stood between the trees.
No.
This can’t be.
Drex shrugged sheepishly as his golden toucan flapped its wings with agitation.
