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He was staring at me with open wonderment, as though he didn’t quite know what to make of me. I got the feeling he was waiting for me to answer, so I whispered, “Yes.”
“Why?” The sudden shift in his tone was shocking. He was mad at me.
This was entirely unexpected given the direction our conversation had previously been going. “What do you mean why?” I leaned away from him, the intensity of his outburst catching me off-guard.
“That’s got to be the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of anyone doing. Are you out of your mind?”
I blinked at him. “Probably.” I certainly had felt plenty foolish since this whole thing began.
Leo shook his head and let out an angry growl. “You don’t know me. You’ve known me, what, two days? What have I done in that time to make you think it was worth it to choose my life over your own?”
I laughed. It wasn’t funny, but I found myself laughing uncontrollably. Since I was already leaning away from him, the laughter made me fall sideways, and I landed in the bone pile, a leg bone or something equally pointy jabbing me in the back of the head.
“Oh, Leo. You still don’t get it.” I chuckled, holding my hand against my aching ribs to mitigate some of the pain. “This isn’t my choice. None of this is about me. Seth wants you alive, so that’s all I want. That’s all I’m allowed to want. If you think there’s a single decision I’ve made in the last twenty years where I haven’t thought of him first, you’re kidding yourself.”
Leo fell silent, and when I sat back up, he was glaring sullenly across the river in the direction we’d come from.
“I didn’t ask for this,” he said.
“Neither did I.”
He looked at me again, and after a moment a small smile ticked at the corner of his mouth. Then he was laughing too, a rich, wonderful booming sound that was entirely wrong for the world around us, yet so welcome all at the same time. “What a ridiculous pair of assholes we are for getting ourselves into this mess.”
“I blame your father.” I braced my hands on the ground to push myself up, but the bones shook beneath me, the ones underfoot sliding away. I fell a foot down the hill before Leo caught me by the back of my jacket.
The bones continued to cascade around us, this time much faster. Leo lost his own purchase, and we both shot forward. He hit me, and we rolled halfway down the slope before coming to a stop on an even plane. I landed on top of him, bracing my hands on his chest and accidentally kneeing him in the crotch in my desperate effort to find my footing.
He swore loudly, and the ground itself rumbled a growl in response.
Leo and I both froze.
“Did you—?”
“Yes.” I cut him off before he could complete his sentence. This whole place felt like a sharp descent into madness, but there was no way we’d both imagined that sound.
More bones slid down the hill, running past us like water in a stream. Soon I was up to my knees in feet and spines. Grinning skulls rolled by with open, laughing mouths, mocking us as they tumbled towards the river’s edge.
We can escape this, and you can’t, they seemed to say.
I got hold of Leo and pulled him up before the bones had a chance to bury him. I held his arm tightly, using him as an anchor while the whole hill shifted around us, threatening to swallow us whole at a moment’s notice.
It took me far too long to realize the reason everything was in motion was because something was moving under the heap.
We were standing on something alive, and we’d woken it up.
Chapter Thirty-One
An enormous black form broke through the heap like a whale breaching the ocean’s surface. Bits of human debris rained down, hitting Leo and me as they flooded towards the River Styx.
We skidded a few feet farther but fought against the bone tide, maintaining a safe distance from the blackened edge of the water’s surface.
Still clinging to Leo, I followed his gaze up to the top of the hill where the creature we’d been standing on had finally decided to show its face.
Or faces.
The three heads of Cerberus—and all six of his slick black eyes—stared down at us.
Three slavering mouths pulled back their lips to expose impossibly long and sharp yellowed teeth. When it growled, the sound came from all three throats and shook me to my soul.
