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They clung to each other as the boat picked up speed. The keel began to turn sideways, and Nico instinctively reached for an oar. Something told him they would have to face this drop head-on.
You’ve killed so many, Nico di Angelo, said the voices.What’s a couple more?
Will groaned. ‘But I’ve killed, too,’ he slurred. ‘So many dead by my hands –’
‘No, you’re a healer!’ If they were on any other river, Nico would have splashed his boyfriend’s face with water, but here that would have been a very bad idea. ‘We’ve been throughthreewars in our lifetime. Of course we’ve had to fight. Of course we’ve lost people. But you’ve done everything you could to save our friends and family.’
‘But I let you kill,’ Will mumbled. ‘I let you do it.’
The comment punched Nico in the gut. Then the voices rushed in, pushing their advantage.So cavalier with life, they chided.You take it away so easily. You distribute death like a badge of pride. Even when you tell your boyfriend you love him, you give him a ring in the shape of a skull.
Nico tried to focus. ‘You – you aren’t responsible for me, Will.’
Will’s eyebrows stitched together in anger. ‘Maybe I am. I let you kill Octavian. I shouldn’t have allowed that. I contributed to his death. I’m amurderer.’
‘That’s the Acheron speaking,’ Nico insisted. ‘You need to ignore it.’
‘You don’t even feel bad about killing him, do you?’
‘I think about it all the time! Now grab the other oar, please – we’re starting to spin!’
Nico’s words were like a crack of lightning in a thunderstorm. They were enough to snap Will out of the trance, and his blue eyes locked onto Nico. ‘The oars –’
‘Grab that one!’ Nico yelled as they slid towards the terrible maw of darkness.
Murderer. Don’t try to fight the truth.
Will took hold of the other oar. ‘What now? We can’t just row over the –’
‘Lock your feet under the thwart,’ Nico ordered, wondering how he knew this to be right. ‘Turn the prow downstream and hold on!’
He’d barely got out the words when their boat slid over the edge of the waterfall. Time seemed to slow, as it does at the top of a roller coaster, as if the universe were teasing them:Should I drop them to their deaths, or not?
‘Ihatethis,’ Nico grumbled.
Then they fell into nothingness.
The first time Nico fell into Tartarus, it had somehow seemed to last a long time and no time at all, as if time had become elastic. But right then, as he and Will plunged through the void, it seemed to take days.
It was hard to talk. Hard to think. Hard to do much of anything except hold on and be terrified. Did either of them fall asleep at their oars? Maybe. Nico’s memory was a patchwork of nightmares and darkness.
At one point he drew his sword – he wasn’t sure why – and held it above him as if he could intimidate the abyss into releasing them. The blade’s dim glow illuminated the boat, enveloping him and Will in a violet halo.
But then the darkness closed back in, its black tendrils swarming the sword like antibodies attacking a virus, and snuffed out the sword’s light.
After that there was nothingness once again: just the free fall and the roar of water, pain and voices.
Will had never experienced darkness like this.
He could feel itinsidehim, as if he were breathing it, consuming it.
And it never ended.
It was not like night. His eyes would have eventually adjusted to that. He could seenothinghere – not the boat, not the waterfall cascading around them, not even Nico beside him on the bench. Only the warmth of Nico’s shoulder pressed against his told him that his boyfriend was still there. Every so often, Will thought Nico might be trying to say something, but it was impossible to be sure in the thunderous roar of the Acheron and the torrent of screams from the tortured souls.
He tried to summon light from within himself … the faint glow that usually came so easily. But here it was impossible. This place seemed to drain him of his willpower.
That thought almost made him laugh. Because it was literal. His ‘Will’ power wasn’t there. It was gone. He just … existed.
