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Right now, the only place I belong is in my bed. I trudge up the steps to the third-floor dormitory and bump into Audra heading out the door, freshly showered and smelling of flowers. It isn’t her soap, turns out, but her natural scent. A bonus of strong ursa magic, I guess.
“Nem! Holy shit, did you pull an all-nighter? You know we have four whole days to finish this project, right?”
“What can I say? Inspiration struck.” I give her a wan smile and shrug, then glance past her toward my bed, where it beckonsfrom beneath an arched dormer. “Hey, do you mind covering for me today? I can’t make it to class. Tell Steven I’m working solo for a bit?”
She pats me on the arm. “You got it. I’m sure he’ll understand. I can’t wait to see what you’re working on,” she says brightly, then steps down the stairs.
I head to my bed in a haze and collapse face first onto the pillows without even drawing the curtains.
Chapter 4
Pan
“You fools should know better than to fuck with me!”
Plastering my back to the stygian doors of Tartarus, four Titans bear down on me with fire in their eyes.
Where the fuck is Alcides? Campe? Erebus? Why are the rest of the guards always off on some other task when shit goes down? It isn’t like there are many places to blow off steam in this prison-realm.
I’m going to get blamed for this. Fuck, I’d probably get blamed even if Iwasn’tthe one on guard duty right now.
“I’m warning you!” I bellow again, pushing every ounce of my power into my voice. A voice that would make most prisoners fall to their knees and beg to be hauled back to their cage. Even the Titans ran from it when we battled them before. I was instrumental in trapping them here to begin with. My later sentence to be a guard is still a sore point.
“We know you, little faun,” Hyperion says, sneering down at me. “Your bleating might have frightened us once, but no more. What’s your price to step aside and let us through? We’ve been in that pit long enough.”
“About that. How did you get out? I sure as shit didn’t open the hatch.” It’s technically true, but I admit I wasn’t exactly paying attention when I made rounds on my last shift the day before. Something was tickling my senses from the direction of the mortal realm, making my taint tingle. No one’s escaped fromthis prison in millennia so the place would hold for one more day while I took some much neededmetime.
“Next time don’t spill your seed so close to the edges of a pit,” Coeus says, provoking chuckles from all three of his brothers.
“I wasn’tthatclose.”
Hyperion lifts an eyebrow. “We could smell your musk all the way at the bottom, hear your braying when you came, your snoring while you napped. You’re a fertility god, in case it escaped your notice, Pan. Your spunk is full of life.”
“So what? Your pit is pitch black. Seeds need light and water and earth to grow…” The blood drains from my face when Hyperion’s eyes blaze with light. He smirks. What the fuck was I thinking? This is the same bastard whomadethe fucking sun. And every prisoner in here can take a piss and a shit.
It’s too late to go look, but in my mind’s eye, I can see the product of my interlude of self-reflection the day before. The droplet of semen falling far into their pit, Hyperion’s light coaxing vines to grow from it. Not to brag, but my god-jizz is damn powerful, so no doubt if I went back to look, there’d be a trunk big enough to hold all four Titans as they climbed up and busted out of their cage.
Fuck me.
“You get it,” Hyperion says. “Now, if you want your head to remain attached to your body, step aside.”
I grit my teeth and dig my hooves in, aiming my horns at his chest. “Not on my fucking watch. You’ll have to go through me.”
He heaves a weary sigh and glances at his brothers, then looks at me again.
“It’s your death.”
Chapter 5
Pan
Vesh is going to have my head.
That’s not an uncommon thought for me, but this time it’s a foregone conclusion. Though it hits me in the throbbing murk of half-consciousness that I at least stillhavea head. It’s the part that hurts as if I just locked horns with a freight train and lost. The last thing I remember is the blast of blinding light as all four Titans came at me, then the deafening shatter of the gates of Tartarus as they rammed me through.
I groan at the stabbing pain that shoots through my forehead from two distinct points on my skull. My horns…
Without opening my eyes, I reach up to touch them, only to find empty air where both coiling protrusions should be. My fingers land on circular lumps of knobby bone, slick with blood and shredded skin. Another groan emerges unbidden, followed by a whimper. They’re already regrowing, which accounts for as much of the pain as the ragged wounds left behind. But it took me a century to get them to the majesty they’d achieved before I rammed them into the gut of a titan.
