As soon as he was free from the closet, Callia immediately pulled Max against her and mouthed Thank you over his head. Casey shot her sister a sad smile and turned to enter the closet, but Theron’s hand on her arm stopped her momentum.
“Meli, wait.”
“It’s all right, Theron. Nothing’s going to happen to me up there. I’m the only one who can get a feel for who has been there, so it makes sense I should go up. Besides, this is Demetrius we’re talking about. He’s one of your Argonauts, not the enemy.”
“I’m not so sure anymore,” he said with a scowl.
She squeezed his arm and stared into his eyes. And as she did, the connection they shared flared hot and bright. He might worry about her, he might order everyone around and frustrate her with his secrets sometimes, but she knew everything he did was done out of honor and duty and love. The last saved especially for her.
“I will be right back,” she whispered.
He rested his forehead against hers. “Or I will bring you right back down.”
Her heart warmed at his words and she smiled when he let go and nudged her into the closet.
Darkness closed in around her. The small door Max had found was all the way in the back of the claustrophobic space. As she moved to her knees and reached inside the wall to grasp the rungs of the old wooden ladder, she thought, There’s no way Demetrius could fit in here.
She started to climb, one rung at a time. The only light that flickered into the tunnel came from below, but it wasn’t enough to see even an inch in front of her face. A spray of dust from the rung she grasped hit her face and she coughed several times to clear the debris from her lungs.
“Are you okay?” Theron called up from the bottom.
“Fine.” Cobwebs tickled her cheeks and she swiped at them with her hand, closed her eyes tight, and kept going. She climbed another five feet in the inky darkness before her hand hit something solid above.
“I’ve found something,” she called down to Theron.
“What?”
His voice was muffled. He sounded like he was a mile away, but she knew she hadn’t been climbing that long. Realizing what she was touching was wood, she felt around until she found what she thought was a handle. “I think…I think it’s a door.”
“Does it open?”
She slid her fingers into the loop handle, pulled, but nothing happened. Gritting her teeth, she pushed. A scraping sound echoed and then popped with a force that jerked her shoulder in the socket. Using what little strength she had, she pushed the door up and over. “I’m through!”
Brilliant light flooded her eyes and she slammed them shut to block the glare.
“What do you see?”
“I…Hold on a minute and I’ll tell you.”
Bracing her hands on the floor above, Casey climbed the rest of the way out of the hole and dropped back to sit. Her legs hung down into the dark tunnel below as she rubbed at her eyes and blinked several times to let them adjust to the light.
It took several seconds for her vision to clear, but when it did she realized she was in some kind of lookout room on the top of Demetrius’s building. Square windows covered every inch of wall space in the octagonal room, rose at least twelve feet to form a dome above. A pile of blankets were gathered in the corner of the room, wrinkled as if someone had slept there. Books littered the floor, ones about weaponry and warfare and others with the Titan symbol stamped into the leather fronts. Clothes were stacked in neat orderly piles along the floor of one whole wall and laid carefully in boxes along another. Fresh weapons that looked just like the ones the Argonauts used were stacked in the corner. To her right she spied a large telescope that peered out over the rooftops of the city of Tiyrns. But what made Casey gasp, what tore the air from her lungs and sent dread pooling in her stomach, were the pictures.
Along every glass wall, taped up like snapshots, were dozens and dozens of pictures of Isadora. Close-ups of her face, ones of her dressed in her traditional gowns, talking to the guards, staring out at nothing in the courtyard of the castle, reading a book on the marble steps. Over and over and over, images of her were repeated like a sickening pattern, with her as the constant focus, the obvious obsession of the person who called this room home.
“Oh, my God.” Slowly, Casey pushed up to her feet.
“Meli?” Theron called.
“I’m okay,” she called back, zeroing in on the telescope. “Don’t come up here.”
Throat thick, she crossed the room, rose on her tiptoes, and looked through the eyepiece. She felt Demetrius’s presence in the room as soon as she touched the telescope, but she looked anyway, needing to know…hoping…
The image focused in the telescope and in a rush she realized she was staring into the windows of Isadora’s suite of rooms in the castle. Isadora’s disappearance, her abduction by those witches…it all suddenly made sense. “Oh, no.”
“Holy skata,” Theron breathed behind her.
Casey lurched around to see the horrified expression on Theron’s face as he pulled himself out of the tunnel and stood in the middle of the room. He turned slowly, and as the enormity of what they’d found sank in, the horror quickly faded and was replaced with a murderous look she knew came from the very core of him.
“It doesn’t mean—”
“It does. He’s been planning this for gods only know how fucking long. And we let him.” His hard jaw ticked beneath the smooth skin she loved to run her fingers and lips over. “Touch something, but make it fast. I don’t want you exposed to this vileness any more than you have to be. Just tell me if he’s Atalanta’s son. I don’t want you looking any deeper than that.”
Her heart dropped, and with it the little bit of hope she’d held out for Demetrius’s intentions. And though she couldn’t help thinking that in spite of everything else it didn’t really matter, she wondered what Theron would say when she told him Demetrius was also part witch. “I already did.”
“And?”
She sighed. “And Gryphon was right.”
Demetrius cast the crappy protection circle around the ruins with hands that shook more than he wanted them to.
Disgusted with himself, he stopped, drew in a long breath that did shit to ease the sharp pain in his chest, and stared up at the waning moon splashing sparkling white light over him and the uneven ground. The dim roar of waves crashing against the serene shore far below drew his attention and he stepped out of the circle and crossed over to the edge of the cliff that looked down to the beach below.
From so far above, this island seemed like paradise. The sand, the trees, the blue-green mountains. But when you looked closer you realized what kind of hell it really was. And wasn’t it ironic that the creatures on this island weren’t the real monsters? He was.
As if on cue, something down the hill in the valley behind him shrieked, and a vicious roar rose up as a deafening answer. He turned to look, thought of the Hydra he’d run from earlier. Of that Chimera he’d stumbled across. And wondered if they’d killed each other or if the battle still raged on. Then he wondered if things wouldn’t be better all around if he just went down there and joined them.
“I can tell you how things will end,” a female voice said from the direction of the cliff.
He whipped that way to find himself staring at an elderly female dressed all in white. She wore sunglasses, which seemed ridiculously absurd at this time of night, and seemed to float inches off the ground.
“The king will die,” she said in a strong voice, “the Council will win, the monarchy will be absorbed, and the portals will be opened. And then Atalanta’s daemons will spill into Argolea and destroy not only your realm but what’s left of the Argonauts. Your mother will then turn her full attention to the human realm and devour as much as she can until she achieves total domination. Do you think the havoc her daemons are wreaking on humans now is bad? It will get worse. It will get much, much worse.”