It’s right behind them.
“Here! Samuel!” Diego’s voice comes from nowhere, and a telescoping spear made of brass appears and tumbles through the air.
Samuel catches it and hurls it at the minotaur, his enhanced strength shooting it like a rocket. It hits the creature in the cheek, and the minotaur roars but doesn’t slow. Samuel goes back to pushing the doors.
The bull lunges for the skeleton holding Amir, and it stumbles but keeps its feet. One after the other, the soldiers take diving leaps for the gate, sliding through on their bellies.
But the minotaur is right there, and the gates aren’t shut.
“Please let this work,” I mutter, then jump into the open space between the doors.
“What in the name of Hades are you doing, Lyra?” Trinica yells after me.
Both axes in my hands, I cross them in front of me, then try not to flinch or move as the minotaur bears down. The thunder of its hooves competes with the pounding of my heart as the other champions yell at me to get out of the way.
“Close the gates!” I yell back. It’s still taking all of them pushing to do it.
Then I brace.
This time, when the minotaur hits, I see it. My axes form an invisible shield in front of me—a lot like the walls to either side of the gates, I’m guessing. The minotaur bounces off it like it rammed into a mountain. I get thrown backward. Samuel catches me, and my momentum sends us both tumbling, my axes flinging out to the sides.
“Ouch,” I groan.
“Watch it!” Amir yells.
I jerk my head off the ground in time to see one of the skeletons still on the minotaur’s side of the gate slam into it as it’s lumbering to its feet. The minotaur throws it off with ease, but that gave the second soldier enough time to get to us. It squeezes through to our side. I guess I was right about getting us all through to close the gates, because suddenly, they slam closed in a rush.
The doors lock a heartbeat before the bull rams the entire gate with a resounding clang.
104
Monsters, Monsters Everywhere
I pitch forward, sucking in air. “Fucking…bloodthirsty…gods,” I mutter at the cracked earth.
“Here,” someone—Dae, I think—says, handing me my axes.
“Thanks.”
The minotaur backs up and tries to run around the gate, only to bounce off whatever invisible barrier is there. With a bellow, it’s back on its feet, running back and forth to either side of the gate, testing the wall it can’t see.
And maybe that’s why I don’t recognize the shaking of the ground for what it is.
Not until a sickly yellow tentacle curls out from the same fissure that the minotaur crawled out of. Only on this side of the gate.
No rest for the wicked, I guess.
I point at the fissure. “Go—”
Together, we take off again, and while I run, I check to my right, watching and waiting.
What in Tartarus did Zeus send us now? A few creatures from history have tentacles, none of them good. Would they do well out of water, though?
I catch a movement and, after staring hard, realize it’s Dae. What in the hells is he doing, sprinting toward the fissure instead of to the gate like we are?
He grips Artemis’ arrow in his hand. His prize from the fifth Labor.
That fool. He’s trying to give us all a better chance. Risking life and limb, he runs straight to the tentacle and jabs the arrow tip into the writhing suckered appendage. A howl of pain that is somewhere between a whistle and a roar blasts out of the crevice, and a hundred tentacles burst from the deep crack, flinging and waving into the dark skies. They squirm as they drop back down to the land, but then, acting as one, they shove, and the creature that leaps from the bowels of the Underworld is what nightmares are made of.
Similar to the minotaur, it has a partially humanlike form, standing upright with two human legs, two arms coming from broad shoulders, and a head atop those shoulders.
That’s where the similarities stop.
Tentacles of all sizes protrude from its body, becoming extra arms, and more slender tentacles form strands of its long hair. Even thicker tentacles sprout from the waist that can apparently act like legs as it slithers its way over the ground.
Its face is also far from human. It is like an octopus, but one with holes gouged through its head where eyes should be and rows of razor-sharp teeth in the maw that I guess is its mouth.
A kraken?
I bark a laugh through heaves of breath as I keep running. Of course, a kraken.
Female, I think, based on her breasts and the form of her body. The kraken is dragging one of the armlike tentacles. That must be the one Dae stabbed with the arrow. It didn’t kill her. It barely slowed her down.
She tips her creepy-ass head to one side, taking in the field, and I think that hole of teeth…smiles.
Shit. “Scatter!” I yell.
