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Chapter 18
Hades
I hurled the TV remote across the room, and it tumbled over the wooden floorboards before sliding under the table. Why did humans even bother with television? There was never anything fucking on.
On my feet, I marched into the backyard for fresh air, and to stop the drowning sensation gutting me. I was pissed, shaking, needing to punch my fist through someone’s face. But the problem was me. It was always me.
X’s recent fight with Elyse refused to leave my thoughts. How close she’d come to death… again. Ares had been there to save her. To take her to Heracles.
Not me.
Never me because I shouldn’t care.
Yet I’d gone to check she was all right because I was a bastard who had no clue what to do or how to handle my own emotions.
Pacing across the yard, I heaved each breath, and I loathed myself more than I thought I could, and I’d hated myself often.
X’s power still played on my flesh from his triumph, from the innocents he’d consumed. But deep in my chest, I suddenly felt something new.
Elyse.
I froze in place, my muscles tight.
Her signature energy burned through me, but this wasn’t her fighting. This felt different, and it terrified me. She gave off the same energy new souls emitted when they entered the Underworld to enter the afterlife.
Fuck.
Panic slammed into my chest.
She was dead.
I focused on her power and the Underworld, and in a heartbeat, the overgrown backyard vanished, replaced by darkness.
Several feet away, I found Elyse standing before the entrance of the Elysian Fields, and the dead thing in my chest thumped hard. If she was here, she was on death’s door, a whisper away from leaving behind the mortal world.
I stepped forward to talk sense into her, to tell her to return to the human world, not that she’d listen to me, but she didn’t deserve this ending.
But a figure stepped out in front of her… Her father, and I slipped into the shadows, watching, listening.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, his words rushed, and there was a reason I liked this man. He had his head screwed on right.
Unlike me. I’d spent so long in denial, I’dbecomethe problem. And denial was so damn cruel.
Elyse was the one who’d touched my soul so intensely, she’d scared the hell out of me. She reminded me I had emotions, but also what had happened last time I’d let myself believe I could love. I didn’t want to hurt like that again, feel like I’d been shredded to a thousand pieces with no clue how to put myself back together again.
But I’d done this to Elyse, sat back for so long, unsure of myself. And she’d always come back to my side, each time giving herself to me. And fuck, I’d pushed her away every time. But I wanted her.
Now, she was about to head into the Elysian Fields with her family, and grief expelled through my breaths, through every pore in my body. Only her dad stood in her way.
How had we gotten to this stage? Hell, I knew the answer, and now I hid in the shadows feeling empty like my heart, a slither of nothingness threatening to choke me to death. Except I’d never die but keep suffering for eternity.
I’d been letting myself drift away from life. Everything was too painful, and I couldn’t stay, so I kept running. But Elyse was always on my mind, always in my heart. And now seeing her standing here after X had stabbed her with Ares’s sword, I weakened.
“Please, take me with you,” she pleaded with her dad, and the desperation in her voice broke me.
She wanted to die.
Shit!
