“I don’t want anything,” I tell him.
Don’t do this. Tell me not to kill Diego. Tell me not to put myself through it. Just to survive.
Stubbornness has him prowling closer. “Everyone wants something.”
I back up—not in fear. I can’t stand to have him near me. I don’t want him closer, where he might see the devastation laying waste to my insides. “Not from you,” I say.
There’s only the slightest pause in his steps, and then he keeps coming. “That’s pride speaking, Lyra. Get over it and take something for yourself.”
I slip two fingers in the small, zippered pocket where I keep the pearls he gave me. “Come closer, and I’m gone.”
He jerks up hard at that, fury and a sort of shocked denial whipping across those beautiful features.
And betrayal.
He feels betrayed by me? Fucking gods.
A shadow streaks by overhead, and Hades’ gaze shoots past me. Another lightning flash of emotions lashes out at me from him.
A very different kind.
Fear—metallic, urgent, sharp. It hits so hard that I gasp.
97
In The Wake
“No!” Hades raises one hand, and tendrils of smoke shoot out from him, only to be blown back by the force of four Daemones’ wings.
They land, two on either side of me, and Hades’ fear becomes my own as Zeles and another Daemon take me by the arms.
Hades holds out his hand, and suddenly, his bident is in his fist—onyx and shaped like spears, the two tips immediately light with hellfire.
In the same instant, the jeans and gray T-shirt he was wearing are replaced by armor. Not intricate like all the other gods’ and goddesses’, and not fashioned after ancient warriors of bygone ages. This armor is gunmetal gray and…liquid.
Like his eyes.
Like a living, breathing exoskeleton, it shapes perfectly around him, even coming up over his head so that he looks inhuman. Like a futuristic nightmare of a robot with no features for a face.
“Fuck,” Zeles mutters.
Zeles lets go of me, and another of the Daemones takes his place holding my arm as Zeles steps forward.
“Release her,” Hades commands in a voice that doesn’t boom but makes me shiver all the same.
“No,” Zeles says. Does the Daemon have a death wish? “You agreed—”
Hades throws out a hand, and a blast of fire explodes from his silver, liquid armor–covered palm, only to hit an invisible wall, the flames curling back away from us.
Zeles doesn’t even flinch. “In joining the Crucible, you automatically agreed to the contract, which protects the four of us from all the gods’ and goddesses’ powers.”
Hades hurls his bident so fast, so violently, that it’s across the space before I register what he did. The bident is also stopped by the invisible field. But instead of bouncing off, it penetrates a little before it’s stopped.
Enough that Zeles has to jerk back or take a strike to the chest. “Damn it, Hades, listen to me.”
“Release her.” The King of the Underworld stalks toward us, smoke swirling around him in billows like a volcano getting ready to erupt. “Release her, or I kill you all.”
“No!” I cry out.
Hades jerks to a stop. He doesn’t look at me—I don’t think. It’s hard to tell with the weird liquid armor over his face. But he doesn’t keep coming, either.
“No one else is dying because of me,” I inform him. “Hurt them, and I’ll hate you forever.”
The liquid armor…flinches.
It’s the only way I can describe it. It ripples like I threw a pebble into a still lake.
“They are going to punish you—”
“She will not be harmed,” Zeles tells him.
Hades pauses, and then the armor oozes away from his head, absorbing into the shoulders below so we can see his face as he studies Zeles. “I have your word?”
“Yes. She will be kept in our prison until the final Labor and will be treated well.”
“She can’t even win,” Hades snaps. “Why—”
