The snakes came back to squirm through his mind. He tried to push up, to get away, but couldn’t. They were eating him, biting his skin, injecting their venom deep into his veins. Gods, the pain. There was so much pain. There was…
His mind stopped its frantic spin cycle. And he realized in a daze there were no snakes. Just the lingering memory of their striking, biting, slithering away only to strike again. Of spiders crawling over his flesh. Of vultures tearing at his muscles. Of monsters he couldn’t name ripping his limbs from his body as if he were a rag doll. And burning. There’d been burning. He could smell the charred flesh as if it were happening now. But over it all, floating in every single memory, there was Atalanta. What she’d made him do. What she and Krónos had done when…
Agony churned inside him. Melded with shame and a sickness he couldn’t ignore. He needed to run. He had to get away. He—
“Skata.”
The voice, a voice he recognized, brought him back around. He turned his head and saw the profile of his brother’s face. Orpheus’s strong nose, the solid cheekbones, the square jaw covered in what had to be three or four days’ worth of stubble.
“O?” he whispered. Panic rushed in. No, no, no. His brother couldn’t be here. Not in the Underworld. No one could be here. No one—
“The vial?” a voice just past Orpheus whispered. A female voice.
Gryphon realized he was sitting on the ground. He looked up past Orpheus but couldn’t see more than watery shapes, one haloed in gold.
“They’re immortal, remember?” Orpheus muttered.
“What about your spells?” the female whispered.
“They’d be as useful as your singing against these two,” Orpheus said. “Skata, we get all the way back to the human realm and this is where it ends?”
Growls echoed somewhere close. Growls Gryphon recognized as hellhounds waiting to feast.
“Don’t do anything foolish,” Orpheus warned.
“Define foolish,” the female snapped. “Because right now all options are on the table.”
“You’ve caused me quite a bit of trouble, hero.” Hades’s voice rang out in a humorous tone somewhere close. “You find the Orb, you lose the Orb to my treacherous wife, you find the Orb again, then lose it to a scheming warlock.” Hades chuckled. “You are all sorts of heroic, now aren’t you?”
The Orb.
Gryphon’s mind locked on those two words, and all of it, every detail of how he’d ended up in the Underworld, flooded his memory.
Orpheus didn’t answer, just clenched his jaw and glared at the god.
“The soul of a hero is valuable,” Hades said, obviously realizing he wasn’t getting a reaction out of O. “But some things are worth more than a simple soul. For the Orb, you and your band of marauders can be on your way.”
Don’t believe him. Panic lanced its way up Gryphon’s chest. No matter what he’d been through, it would be a million times worse for so many more if Hades got his hands on that Orb.
“Ignore him,” the female next to Orpheus whispered.
Yes, listen to her! Gryphon shouted, scrambling to his feet. Only when he reached for Orpheus’s arm, his hand passed right through skin and bone and muscle.
Gryphon’s eyes grew wide. Lifting his hand, he realized he could look through it to the rock walls of whatever cave they were in. At his back, Hades laughed.
“Oh, to go from corporeal to ethereal. Must be a bitch.” His voice hardened. “Now the Orb. The wife and I grow tired of this drama.”
Persephone sighed.
Orpheus shot Gryphon a pitied expression, then his hand slid to his chest. To the outline of something beneath his shirt
“Orpheus, don’t,” the female warned again.
“I’m not letting him send you both back to the Underworld,” Orpheus muttered.
“If you give him that, the whole world will become the Underworld,” she countered. “Don’t do it.”
“Skyla…”
There was agony in the word. And emotion. An emotion Gryphon had never heard from his brother. Promise and pain and a future that would never be.
Gryphon looked down at his hands. His shaking, ghostly hands. His soul was in the human realm. He was free. He didn’t have a body, but his soul…that’s where the power had always come from. The power he’d gotten from his forefather and rarely used because it was unpredictable.
But unpredictable was better than nonexistent.
Before he could change his mind, he closed his eyes and focused in on that power. It would render him immobile, but what did it matter? He was a ghost here. Power flickered through his limbs, condensed in his chest, and shot up his spine. His eyes flew open and he zeroed in on Hades and Persephone, whom he could now see standing on cement steps ahead, smug expressions on their chiseled, perfect, immortal faces.
Someone gasped. A voice cursed—Hades’s voice. And then as Gryphon continued to channel his power, all sound ceased.
His legs gave out. He crumpled to the ground. Or maybe he floated. Gryphon wasn’t sure. The only thing he knew was that he felt like a deflated beach ball. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, but he could hear.
“What the hell just happened?” the female beside Orpheus gasped.
“Gryphon, you super-fucking-smart sonofabitch,” Orpheus exclaimed in an excited voice. “Help me get him up, Skyla.”
Air whooshed over his back.
“He’s a ghost!” she cried. “How the hell are we going to…?”
Weight pressed down on him. Fuzzy weight. A blanket. They were draping the blanket over him.
“Ah, good thinking, daemon,” the female exclaimed. “Gives him solid mass.”
Gryphon felt himself being hoisted into Orpheus’s arms.
“We don’t have much time,” Orpheus said, jostling Gryphon as he raced up the stairs. “They won’t be immobile for long.”
“How did he do that?” Skyla asked, her voice breathless.
“His one gift,” Orpheus answered, his own words breathless as he moved. “He gets it from Perseus. I can flash in any realm, even through solid walls, but his power is better. He can’t turn things to stone like the legendary Medusa, but when he taps into the energy Perseus got from the monster, he can freeze things.”
“For how long?” Skyla asked.
“Long enough for us to get outside.”
“And then what?” she asked.
“Then we run like hell.”
A crashing sound echoed. Voices hollered. Growls erupted far below.
Hurry. Hurry. Hurry…
“Orpheus!”
The last voice Gryphon recognized. Not because it had come from the female, or from the gods he’d just pissed off, but because it had come from his kin.
Theron. The leader of the Argonauts.
Sunlight burst over Gryphon’s face. Warmth penetrated his soul. Orpheus was running, shaking him inside the blanket.
They drew to an abrupt stop, then Orpheus laid him against something cool.
Grass. He’d laid him in grass. “Stay here, Gryph. I’ll be right back.”
Gryphon’s vision came and went. He focused long enough to look across the rolling field of brown toward a cave surrounded by olive and cypress trees. A cave they must have just run out of. The Argonauts were all there, blades drawn for battle: Theron, Zander, Titus, Cerek, and Phin. The only one missing was Demetrius.
Demetrius…The last time Gryphon had seen the guardian had been in that field outside the colony. After they’d rescued Isadora. When they’d been overrun by daemons. Just after he’d been hit with the warlock’s energy that had sent his soul to the Underworld.