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Chapter 24
Poseidon
And just like that, everything was okay again. In fact, it was better than okay—everything happened so fast, but it was as if nothing had gone wrong in the first place. At least, not between the four, five, six of us.
Elyse had just realized her full potential and it was better than anything I could have imagined. I’d known all along she had this power inside her, but it was something else to see her wielding it as if it had always been there. Her energy radiated from her like a wave of light, washing through each of us.
We stood around her and bathed in the beauty she exuded, but it didn’t look as though she was aware of it herself.
Fuck Zeus for taking so long to let her discover her potential. But I understood why he’d done it. It was, after all, a matter of Elyse realizing who she was all by herself. It was why she was so powerful now, because it didn’t come easy.
I looked over at X, still frozen under Zeus’s power, and even if my brother had the ability to stop Death, he wouldn’t, insisting it was our battle, our lesson to learn.
I glanced at Ares, still upset with him for trying to tell Elyse who she was, for jumping in ahead of the plan and nearly sabotaging everything. But maybe it was because of what he did that Zeus came down and tried to stop him, that he instigated his face-to-face meeting with Elyse. Without Ares interfering, it might never have occurred, so maybe things happened for a reason.
Ares stared at me, jutting his chin up in the air as if he were either proud of his actions or challenging me to say something about them. Either way, everything was okay now. I clapped him on the back.
My two brothers stood quite far apart. I doubted Hades had forgiven Zeus for what we’d done to him ages ago. Hades and I were in a better space, but it was because we spent more time together, talked more. I’d try to touch base with Hades again when we were alone, to apologize for what had been done to him.
It was beneath Zeus to do the same, and I doubted he and Hades would ever fix things between them. But that was okay because Hades was on our side now. It had taken him a while, but he’d found his peace. And whether he liked it or not, being on our side meant he was technically on Zeus’s side as well.
Apollo took his rightful place between us gods, with Heracles on the other side of me. I was glad to see Apollo back in action. It was one hell of a loophole that he could be with Elyse because she wasn’t human.
Zeus had planned it that way. Was it because with Apollo in her life, she wouldn’t have realized she needed Hades too? Maybe—my brother could be a real pain in the ass, but he always tended to make things work out in the end.
When I turned to Zeus again, he’d already disappeared. He’d come here to do what we’d prayed for him to do—talk to Elyse—but this wasn’t his fight. It was probably a good thing because with Zeus, things only became more complicated.
“We have business to attend to,” Elyse declared as she stepped toward X, now unleashed from Zeus’s hold. We took a step forward as well, following her as she made her way toward Death, but she moved ahead and we all fell back, watching her with awe, with determination to finish this, to see her accept her role.
She wasn’t the human we’d all gotten to know. She wasn’t even the last of the Lowe bloodline who’d managed to survive and get this far with X. I didn’t know if it was just me, but when I glanced at the other guys, they were staring, too.
The person who walked before us was someone completely different, cloaked in glory and confidence, her skin shimmering a little. She even wore something different than she’d come to the battlefield in.
Her dark hair hung down her back, braided with leather strips in a way that reminded me of ancient Greece. She wore a white tunic of some kind, with leather armor over it. She resembled a warrior, pure and true. She had leather sandals on her feet, and as she held out her hands to the side, palms turned upward, we all watched as weapons formed, created from her power.
In her one hand, she had a metal chain with thick links that hung to the ground, dragging on the concrete. In her other, a crescent ax appeared, with a long shaft and a sharp blade that could take a man’s head off if she only swung it once. She was spectacular. Breathtaking.
“X!” Elyse called and her voice echoed across the city as if she were somewhere in the sky.
And this time, instead of regarding her as a puny mortal who could do nothing, X turned around and paid attention.
“Well, well, what’s this?” He scanned Elyse head to toe. He started shrinking, going back to his normal size. I wondered why he did that, why he thought it would be okay to fight Elyse in his normal size when she was clearly so strong.
Maybe he was underestimating her.
Big mistake.
“This ends now,” she said. They was the same words she’d spoken before, but this time there was power behind them.
X laughed, but his chuckle was different—full of fear. And I understood why—the energy from Elyse’s skin rippled over us, a magic that enveloped us and told us how very strong she’d become. She wasn’t a human, she wasn’t someone with divine powers. She was a goddess, the Goddess of Sanctuary.
And she was going to save the mortals because it was what she’d always been meant to do.
She let out a battle cry and attacked X, chain in one hand and weapon in the other. X sped toward her, a blur of black fog, his eyes red and his sharp teeth showing. And when they clashed, it was with a terrible blow, a boom that rattled the very foundations of the Earth.
My muscles twitched, and I was ready to jump in and help, but we weren’t needed in this battle. Elyse was on a mission that we weren’t a part of—we were merely here for moral support and nothing else. There was no way we could jump in and make a difference. This battle had been building for months, Elyse had faced her own mortality so long, and she deserved to finish this, to end what had started on her turf.
After all, against X and his intentions, our power didn’t mean much, anyway.
