Chapter Five
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I flew to Henry’s side, too afraid to touch him, but too frightened to turn away, either. Desperately I searched all three brothers for any sign that they were still alive, but I saw nothing. No rise and fall of the chest, no telltale flutter of a pulse in their necks—except those were mortal ways of judging if someone was still living. Henry and his brothers weren’t mortal and never had been.

And finally, finally I saw Henry’s eyes crack open. Unlike Calliope, he seemed to focus directly on me, but whether or not he could really see me, I couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t seen me the first time. Then again, he’d been in the middle of a fight then, too.

“It’s okay,” I whispered as I tried to take his hand, but my fingers slipped through his. “Everything will be all right. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you, I promise.”

He sighed inaudibly and closed his eyes, and something inside of me flickered. Had he heard me after all? I reached out to stroke his cheek, stopping a fraction of an inch above his skin. At least this way I could pretend I was touching him.

“Father,” called Calliope from behind me, and I tore myself away from Henry to watch her. “Are you prepared to subdue the others?”

A low rumble echoed through the cavern, no language I could understand, and the smaller rocks on the ground skidded a few inches away from the gate.

“Pardon me,” said Calliope, sarcasm dripping from her sugary voice. “I thought I’d woken the most powerful being in the universe. My mistake.”

In the time it took to blink, a tendril of fog slipped between the bars and lashed toward her. Calliope fell backward, and it narrowly missed, though I suspected that had nothing to do with her ability to defend herself.

“Stop!” she cried, panicked, and satisfaction surged through me. “You need me and you know it.”

The rumbling continued, and Calliope scrambled to her feet, every trace of dignity gone. “You do,” she said, and the uncertainty in her voice was glorious. “No one else is trying to free you, and without me, you’ll be trapped for the rest of eternity by that stupid gate. So you can either do things my way, or you can stay right where you are. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Of course it mattered to her, and Cronus must have known it as well, because his rumblings sounded suspiciously like laughter. Another tendril of fog crept toward Calliope until it was only inches away from her smooth skin. Trembling, she stood her ground as Cronus caressed her cheek.

As quickly as he’d appeared, the fog vanished. Calliope paled, and for a moment I almost felt bad for her. Then I remembered Henry and his brothers tied up in a cave a few feet away, and any drop of sympathy I’d ever had for her evaporated.

Pogo’s warm tongue against my ear brought me crashing back into reality. The rocks melted away, replaced by the red walls of the bedroom, and my stomach turned inside out as the full impact of my vision hit me.

“Mom!” I shrieked, kicking off my blankets and rolling off the bed. I landed with a thud on my hands and knees, and every inch of my body screamed in protest, but I forced myself to stand. Pogo trotted after me, his ears alert, and every step felt like knives as I ran out the door, nearly tripping on the hem of my silver dress.

I was halfway to the throne room when I rounded a corner and smacked into her, and for the second time in as many minutes, I sprawled on the ground.

“Kate?” My mother knelt beside me, her hands hovering as if she wasn’t sure it was safe to touch me.

“I’m fine,” I gasped. “Mom, Henry and the others—Calliope, she has them, and Cronus—”

“What about him?” My mother paled. “Did you see something?”

I nodded. Everything she’d told me about the Titans ran through my mind, making me dizzy. “Calliope has them, and I think—” My voice caught in my throat, and no matter how hard I blinked, I couldn’t stop my eyes from watering.

This was really it. They couldn’t defeat Calliope and Cronus on their own, and it was only a matter of time before Calliope killed Henry. It was a miracle he was still alive in the first place.

In a low, frantic voice, I relayed the details of my vision, my words stumbling and knotting together, making it that much more difficult to speak. “Mom,” I finally said in a small voice, desperate for her to do something to fix this. When I’d been a child, I’d been sure she could do the impossible. Now I was positive she could, but somewhere deep inside of me in a part I didn’t want to admit existed, I knew there was nothing she could do to make this mess go away. “She’s going to let Cronus kill them.”

Her face grew hard, and for one awful moment I saw the power behind my mother’s kind eyes and rosy cheeks. “Sofia,” she called in a voice that rattled me from the inside out.

Sofia was by her side in a second, and like my mother, every trace of gentleness was gone as waves of power radiated from them both. On her own, my mother was a force of nature. With Sofia standing beside her, I was sure they could rip the world to shreds.

“Come, sister,” said my mother. She looked at me, and for a moment a drop of humanity returned to her face. “Take care of yourself, sweetheart,” she said, touching my cheek. I shivered. “And put on a sweater. I’ll return to you as soon as I can.”

With that, she and Sofia joined hands, and like Henry and his brothers had sped off into the vast Underworld, so did my mother and her sister, the only two left who knew how to defeat Cronus.

Feeling hollow and more alone than I ever had before, I pressed my lips together and dragged myself back to my room to change, wondering how much of my family I would lose before this was all said and done.

* * *

The throne room seemed empty without Henry and the rest of his siblings. What was left of the council sat in a circle beside the platform, the chairs collected from all around the palace. I sat on a hard stool that reminded me of the one I’d endured six months ago, when the council had made its decision about whether I would become one of them. At least that one had been padded.

No one touched the two thrones. One was supposed to be mine, but the ceremony hadn’t finished, and even if it had, I didn’t want to be up there without Henry. I wasn’t ready to rule alone—I wasn’t even sure I was ready to rule by his side. With him and the others now gone, I didn’t want to think about what that would do to the natural order of things around the Underworld. Were souls stuck in limbo until Henry returned? What if he never came back?

No. I wasn’t going to think like that. There had to be a way for this to work out—something Calliope wanted more than revenge.

A sick feeling crept over me. She did want something more than revenge. She wanted Henry—and she wanted me dead.

That wasn’t an option yet. Even if I marched up to her and offered her my neck, there was no guarantee it would end things. Cronus was more powerful than I could possibly imagine, and from my vision it was clear that no matter how in control Calliope pretended to be, she wasn’t. She wasn’t the one who was going to decide when this was over.

“What do we do now?”

My voice echoed in the dead silence of the throne room. It’d been nearly ten minutes and no one had said a word, and I could no longer take sitting there while Henry and my mother were in danger.

“What do you mean?” said Ella, who shared a wide armchair with Theo. The two of them were wrapped together as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I envied them. They still had each other.

“I mean, how do we help them?” I said. “If Mom and Sofia can’t free them, if they—” If they got captured, too. “What are we supposed to do?”

Ella and Theo exchanged looks, and next to them, Irene sighed. “There is no helping them, not when Cronus and Calliope have them.”

I blinked. That was it? “There has to be something we can do.” I looked around the circle for support, but no one met my eye. Not even James. “We can’t leave them there. How is that even an option?”

“Because anything else would be suicide,” said Dylan with a sneer. “While you were getting your beauty sleep, the rest of us went over every feasible plan. With Diana and Sofia, our options were limited. Without them, we have no choice but to wait until Calliope makes her next move. We can’t face her head-on, not if you want there to be any of us left to fight Cronus when he finds a way to escape.”

When, not if. “There has to be something we can do.”

“They knew that this was a possibility,” said Irene. “They knew our powers are limited in this realm, and they took that chance and left us anyway.”

The note of hurt in her voice surprised me. Did they think my mother and Sofia had abandoned them?

“Besides,” added Theo, “there’s still a chance they’ll succeed.”

“And if they don’t?” I said. As much as I wanted to grasp on to the hope that my mother would come back safely without the rest of the council’s intervention, if three of the six couldn’t withstand Calliope and Cronus, I didn’t see how it was possible that only two would.

“Then it’s only a matter of time before Cronus escapes,” said Dylan. “Once he does, he’ll tear the world apart, destroy humanity, and if we’re lucky, kill us quickly.”

The temperature in the throne room seemed to drop twenty degrees. “And none of you are willing to do anything about it?” I said, stunned. “You’re just going to sit back and let it happen, even though he’ll kill you anyway?”

“No,” said Ella sharply, and she glared at Dylan. “If we stay out of it, he might leave us alone.”

“So you’d rather lose the only hope you have of defeating Cronus and saving billions of lives, so long as there’s a chance you’ll be allowed to live?” I said. “Is this a joke?”

No one answered. Of course it wasn’t a joke. They were all serious, and I didn’t know what to say to that. These weren’t the people I’d met and gotten to know in Eden. They were cowards, and the idea that the most powerful beings on the planet could let humanity die—it didn’t make sense. They were supposed to protect them, not sit back and let Cronus kill everyone.

I balled my hands into fists. “You tested me for six months to make sure I was good enough to be one of you—moral enough and strong enough and selfless enough. And now you can’t even help save your own family?”

A small part of me understood that it must have been terrifying to face death when they’d lived for eons thinking they never would. Or at the very least, when they faded, it would be peaceful and without any pain. Death was part of being human, and I hadn’t forgotten what that felt like yet. They’d never had the chance to learn. But that wasn’t an excuse.

“Just because you had to be good enough to be one of us doesn’t mean the rest of us are.” Ava glared at Dylan as well, and he seemed to shrink under the intensity of it. “We’ve never exactly been upstanding, you know. We’re just good at acting holier than thou when it suits our needs. And some of us are better actors than others.”

I stood, and the screech of my stool against the floor gave me goose bumps. “I don’t care what you do. I’m going to find them. You can stay here and sit on your asses all day, or you can help. It doesn’t matter to me. But I would rather be torn to shreds than live with the guilt of knowing that I could have done something and didn’t.”

I didn’t want to die, and in a perfect world, no one would have to. This wasn’t a perfect world though, and they weren’t perfect beings. I wasn’t exactly making the smartest move either, storming off without a plan or an inkling of which direction to go in, but it was better than sitting around and driving myself crazy waiting for something that might never happen.

I turned on my heel and started down the aisle, ignoring the pain in my leg. I took three steps, but the sound of Irene’s voice echoed through the hall.

“Wait.”

I stopped and faced them again, my arms crossed tightly. “I’m not going to let any of you talk me out of it. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want any of you to either, but sitting around here waiting for Cronus to turn us into barbeque won’t do anything to help that.”

“We weren’t going to stop you,” said Dylan, and Ava shot him a look. His eyes narrowed, and he squared his shoulders, but at least he didn’t say anything else.

Irene cleared her throat. “What my dear brother meant to say is that while we are ineffective in the Underworld, there are things we could do aboveground.”

“Like what?” I said warily, wondering if it included finding a spot to hide.

“Create a trap,” said Nicholas, the large blond who had acted as my bodyguard in Eden. He rarely spoke, and I had to glance around the circle before I realized who was talking. “There are only so many exits Cronus can use if Henry—” He paused, and I knew what he meant to say. If Henry didn’t survive. “If Henry isn’t able to keep him in the Underworld,” he amended. “He might tip his hand early on and show us the route he intends to take. We could create a trap for him, something to hold him until we have a plan.”

“He’ll have to open the gate first if he wants to reach the surface,” said Dylan. “I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”

I looked at James for an explanation, but he was too busy staring at his hands. “What do you mean?” I said. “Isn’t he already through?”

The other gods looked at me as if I’d asked why one plus one equals two, and my cheeks burned under their stares.

“Cronus is still behind the gate,” said Irene. “While he’s awake, he can reach corners of the Underworld most of us don’t even know exist. Which is why the others kept him asleep all this time. But what you saw earlier was only a very small part of him, and if he were to fully escape, the damage would be catastrophic.”

All of the blood drained from my face. “That—that was only a piece?”

“Like a pinkie,” said Dylan, wiggling his finger for emphasis. “Do you get it now, why none of us wants to fight him?”

I did, and my mouth went dry. “That doesn’t change anything.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Irene. “We will all work together to create a trap as soon as we discover the nearest possible exit point.”

“You can,” said Dylan with a scowl. “I want nothing to do with this. I love a good fight, but this is slaughter.”

“Oh, you’ll help,” said Irene. “Even if I have to drag you there by the ears.”

“And how do you think you’ll manage that?” said Dylan.

Her eyes glinted. “Do you really want to find out?”

His expression hardened, and I could practically see the smoke pouring out of his ears. “Whatever. At least it isn’t as stupid as aimlessly wandering around the Underworld.”

“Yes, I know it’s stupid, thanks,” I snapped. “I’m still going to try, and you acting like an ass isn’t going to stop me.”

I started toward the exit again, and this time no one spoke up. The farther away I got from them, the more light-headed I became. I might never see any of them again. By the time I found Cronus’s prison, it could be too late—and that was if I ever found it to begin with. Everyone I knew could die, and I might spend eternity wandering the Underworld searching for something that no longer existed.

As soon as I’d made it into the antechamber, I sank onto the bench and put my head between my knees. This couldn’t be happening. The world was going to end unless someone uncovered a miracle, and it wasn’t going to be me. Dylan was right—I wasn’t even sure where I was going, let alone what I was going to do when I got there. But what were my other options? Stay with the remaining members of the council and wait to be killed? I’d be useless setting up a trap. I couldn’t even control my visions, let alone any power I might have.

I couldn’t do nothing and let everyone else handle the battle. Maybe it wasn’t entirely my fault, but I’d certainly helped push Calliope past her breaking point, and I wasn’t in the habit of letting others clean up my messes while I stood around and watched. We had no prayer of winning without the six siblings, and since no one else was going after them, that left me.

Would this have happened if I’d shown Calliope a little more compassion, if I hadn’t kept her from seeing Henry for the rest of her existence? Would she still have done this?

Playing what-if was pointless. If one of the other girls had succeeded, Calliope would’ve done the same thing. There was nothing I could have possibly done to make Calliope like me, not when she hated me from the beginning. Whatever role I played in pushing her over the edge, she was the one who made the decision to do this.

Even though I knew that, I couldn’t help but feel guilty.

I heard footsteps approaching from the hall, and a moment later the door opened and shut. I didn’t look up. If it was James coming to tell me I was making a mistake, or Ava insisting I couldn’t give up my life for this, I didn’t care. I was doing this whether they liked it or not.

Someone sat down beside me, and the gentle hand on my back was unmistakably Ava’s. “Are you okay?” she said softly, and I straightened, keeping my eyes squeezed shut in an attempt to keep the light-headedness at bay.

“Yeah, I’m peachy,” I muttered. Her hand stilled, and I sighed. “I’m sorry, it’s just—”

“It’s just that you learned there’s a pretty good chance the world is going to end, and you need a moment to think,” said Ava, and I nodded. She seemed to be taking it better now, but she’d been with the council before I’d gotten there. She’d had more time to absorb it.

“What would have happened if things had been different?” I said. “If I hadn’t passed the test—”

“She still would’ve done it.”

I opened my eyes. James leaned against the wall, his hands shoved in his pockets and his hair a mess. It was a weight off my shoulders to hear him voicing the same thoughts I was trying to convince myself were true, and I gave him a small smile.

He didn’t smile back. “Calliope’s been planning this for a long time, and once she woke Cronus, nothing was going to stop her. She wants you dead. She wants us all dead. She stopped thinking rationally long before you were born, and no amount of blaming yourself is going to change that.”

My heart sank. So that was it then—eventually I’d have to hand myself over to her regardless of how this turned out. If the council was right, if Calliope and Cronus really were unstoppable, if we were all going to die anyway—

I didn’t want to. Every fiber of my being fought against it, and I felt woozy all over again, knowing what she would do to me. But what if that was the only solution? What if that was the only way to convince Calliope to help subdue Cronus again? If she’d really fought with the others in the war against the Titans, then the part of her that cared enough to risk her own existence for humanity had to be in there somewhere. And no matter how upset and humiliated she was, maybe having my head on a platter would be enough for her to change her mind.

Last resort, I thought. Only as a last resort.

If it did come to that and giving up my own life meant this nightmare could end—I wanted to be selfish and live, but I couldn’t stand back and watch everyone else be slaughtered because of me. I wasn’t sure which option was more selfish, but when it might have been within my power to end this, I wouldn’t ignore that, as badly as I wanted to forget it was even a possibility.

Either way, I had to find her first. “How do I get there?” I said. “To the place where Calliope and Cronus are. I know you don’t want me to go, but—”

“You’ll go even if I don’t tell you,” said James. “I don’t know where it is—honest. No one does. The elder gods can find it, but they made sure I couldn’t, and the location was kept secret from the others for obvious reasons. The only other person who knew where it was—” He stopped.

“Who?” I said. “Please, James, I don’t care what I have to do. I’ll wander through the whole Underworld if that’s what it takes.”

“I know you will,” he said with a tight smile. “That’s what I love about you. But, Kate, you have to understand—”

“What I understand is that if someone doesn’t try to stop them, Calliope and Cronus are going to rip the world apart, and everyone’s going to die,” I said. “I don’t care what I have to do. I’ll do it.”

James sighed. “The only other person who knows where the gate is—” He paused. “It’s Persephone.”