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Focus, Will, he told himself.Keep moving.
He was sweating profusely by the time he saw the end of the tunnel: a ragged circle of dull, reddish light maybe fifty metres ahead.
‘Screech-Bling, is that it?’ Will asked. ‘Are we close?’
‘We are,’ the trog said. ‘But once we emerge from the passage, there will be one more obstacle to deal with. Stay close, and you’d better turn off your magical orb, Will Solace.’
Will obeyed, then stowed the globe.
Nico kissed the back of his neck. ‘I’m proud of you,’ he whispered. ‘I know this is hard.’
A warmth spread across Will’s cheeks. He wasn’t sure he wasdoing a good job. He felt guilty for being irritated with Nico earlier, but Nico’s little gesture of affection made him want to try harder.
He clasped Nico’s hand in his, and the two of them headed into the reddish unknown.
Nico was worried.
When they emerged into the arid, smoky air of the Underworld, Will came to a stop, his hands on his hips, his breathing uneven. Will looked … Well, it felt strange thinking that Will was paler than usual. Nico usually cornered the market on having a ghostly pallor. But Willhadlost some of his colour. Was this what he looked like without exposure to sunlight?
It wasn’t just that detail, though. Will had been a little loopy and forgetful in the tunnel, and Nico believed that what everyone had been concerned about was starting to happen. Deep in the Underworld, a child of Apollo would be affected more than anyone else. And they hadn’t even made it to Tartarus yet!
‘Take a moment to catch your breath,’ Nico told him.
Will rubbed at his eyes, as if willing them to adjust faster to the light. ‘I’m glad to be out of that tunnel,’ he said. ‘Where to next?’
Nico pushed down his fears because there was nothing he could do about them at the moment except care for Will. Even that role reversal was starting to grate on him, mostly because he wasn’t usedto it. Will always ran around camp (or any battlefield, really) doing whatever he could to assist those in need. Now, though, Nico had to step up and assist Will, and it was a lot harder than he’d expected.
That didn’t stop him from trying, though. ‘First, sit and rest,’ he said. ‘I want you to drink a little nectar.’
Will didn’t argue. He plopped down on a boulder and lay back before partaking of the nectar Nico offered him.
‘Guess I’m more tired than I thought,’ he said.
‘It was a long journey,’ said Screech-Bling, but Nico could tell the trog was also concerned about Will. ‘We will give you some time,’ he continued. ‘Come,Hiss-Majesty. We shall hunt for lizards.’
The troglodytes darted off in an impossible blur, leaving Nico and Will alone on a low ridge overlooking the broken hills of Erebos. They had somehow navigated under the Styx and across the borders of the land of the dead, coming up deep inside Hades’s territory, in an area Nico was pretty sure he’d never visited.
‘What is it like?’ Will asked.
Nico followed his gaze to Hades’s shadowy palace, its obsidian fortifications still dominating the landscape even at this distance. Above the turrets, dark shapes swirled – perhaps the Furies, or skeletal pegasi from Hades’s stables. Nico felt a pang of longing. He was so close to his Underworld home – to safety and comfort – but it was the one place he couldn’t go right now.
‘Father modelled his palace after Olympus,’ he said, his hand on Will’s shoulder. ‘He felt so left out by the other gods, he basically made a mirror image of their headquarters. It’s very different, though. I don’t know if this will make sense, but it’s … less pretentious?’
Will tilted his head. ‘I’m not sure I get that, but I like the idea of it.’
‘I think it’s because it’s just forhim. So there’s this genuineness to everything. He may have copied Olympus, but he put his own spin on it.’
Will gazed at the distant towers. ‘But you didn’t spend much time there growing up, did you? I’m not sure I could.’
No, Nico thought.You couldn’t.
‘Bianca and I travelled all over with our mother. Hades visited us, though. So, no, I didn’t grow up in his palace, but he was in my life.’
‘Wow,’ said Will. ‘I didn’t even know about my heritage until I was ten, and I didn’t meet Apollo for years after that.’
‘He didn’t reveal himself after you got attacked by pigeons?’
Will scowled. ‘They were Stymphalian birds!’
