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“We all know he wants her,” I said. “And he wants her bad. What if we miss something and he gets to her?” Just saying those words churned my gut because they came from a place of fear. The dread I’d lose the one good thing that’d happened to me in too long.
“Over my dead body,” Apollo growled. It was a funny statement coming from a god who couldn’t die. But maybe that was the point he was trying to make.
“He wants to take her out for good.”
“He won’t get his hands on her soul,” Apollo pointed out. “He just can’t, not with Zeus’s magic in her veins.”
“I hope you’re right. But she’s the last fighting Lowe. The others in her family line don’t even know who they are anymore. And if she’s dead—wherever her soul may go—she’ll be out of X’s way. That’s ultimately what the son of a bitch is after. So what’s his intention with her gone? Devour as many innocents as possible? Rule over Earth? Grow so powerful, we wouldn’t be able to stand in his way?”
Apollo nodded without answering. We both knew I was right. But we had to stop this from happening. Without Elyse, X would run rampant in the streets, killing for fun, consuming souls because he felt like it. Because he was part of Hades, we couldn’t do anything about him directly.
It was a gigantic loophole Zeus should have worked out before he decided it would be fun to fuck with Hades.
But I guess we didn’t always see the shit we caused before it was too late. I’d learned that years ago when I’d still been fucking around and impregnating women left and right. Not that I regretted the sex, but the kids were all demigods who strived to be like me. That was a disaster in and of itself; I didn’t even want to think about.
Let’s just say I was a hell of a role model.
“If we don’t find X, Catina might die but Elyse will be safe,” Apollo mused.
I saw where he was going with this. And he was right. The flipside was that if we found Catina, X might kill Elyse and the world would end. But if he took the human out, what stopped him coming for Elyse again and again?
“We can’t stop looking now,” I began. “She’s already taken a massive knock to her self-esteem because she couldn’t stop X from taking the human.”
“That’s what X wanted,” Apollo growled, the bridge of his nose creasing.
Of course, he was right there. It was exactly what he’d wanted. When you intended to throw someone off their game, you hit them where it hurt. It was what Hera did to Zeus when she’d tried to eliminate Heracles so long ago. That plan blew up in her face, and somehow the family feud had died down a little, but that was how you played dirty.
And X was playing filthy as fuck.
“We have to keep her safe, then,” Apollo said after we stood together in silence for a while, staring into the cloudy sky. “Getting Catina back, doing what we can, isn’t negotiable. We have to make sure X doesn’t succeed in whatever he’s trying to do. But by Zeus, the asshole is making life difficult for us.”
Hell, he was, but it was okay. This meant there was going to be a fight, and goddamn, I loved a good battle. I itched for combat.
“We just have to find X,” Apollo interrupted my thoughts. “If we don’t find him, this whole thing is pointless, and we’ll seem pathetic because we couldn’t figure it out.”
That was true, too. We’d look like idiots if we couldn’t find him. Three gods unable to find Death.
The water in the lake started to bubble.
“What’s happening over there?” I asked, pointing to the middle of the lake.
He glanced over his shoulder and frowned. Both of us stared at the spot. Darker clouds crowded overhead, and the water turned as black as ink, spreading outward like tentacles.
“It’s X,” I snarled.
Apollo opened his mouth to answer, but he didn’t get the chance. X appeared before Apollo could say anything and floated across the water in his black form, a dark fog lingering behind him as if he wore it as a cape. No sign of Catina.
I tensed, curling my hands into fists, ready for a fight. Though, why the fuck would X come to us?
Apollo mirrored my posture, and we glared at the monster. My armor appeared as my power flared and Apollo was suddenly surrounded by light as if he were glowing. We were going to take X down here and now. Finish this messed-up shit once and for all.
When he reached us, X smiled, revealing his yellowing teeth under thin lips. God, he was an ugly motherfucker. His teeth were sharp and dripping, as if he salivated for food. His eyes were filled with what I could only call hellfire. But he didn’t scare me. I thrummed with energy, buzzing to charge.
“Look at you two. Pathetic,” he growled, his voice half-human, half-grunting like a wild animal. But he sounded almost bored.
“Bring it on, asshole,” Apollo bit out.
X laughed, the sound grating over my nerves. I was over his shit.
