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Unfortunately for us, there was a giant skeleton blocking off the path. Its skull had enormous bull horns on either side, and someone had hewn it clean off their body; it sat a few feet away like a discarded trophy.
"Who the fuck is that?"
"My rose!" Kai breathed, noticing I was on my feet. He halted his inked fist mid-air before it could slam into Wynvail’s face, and rushed over to me, clutching my shoulders. "Are you okay? How do you feel? Are you dizzy? How many fingers am I holding up?"
"None," I replied dryly. "You're holding onto me too tight to hold up a single one."
Kai exhaled a harsh sigh, pressing a long kiss to my forehead. "Thank fuck."
"Answer Haley's questions, bastard," Emlyn rumbled at Wynvail, his voice so deep and furious that it shook me back to reality.
We were hemmed in by impossibly high blocks of stone, and Cronus had just ordered his prized pet to kill us.
"Emlyn, come here," I ordered, my voice colder than I planned as I fixed a steely, flat look on Wynvail. He looked a little worse for wear thanks to the fall, his short mahogany hair mussed and smudges of dirt on his cheek and trousers. He was still shirtless. Bastard. "Like Em said. Answer my fucking questions. Where are we, who's the rotted skeleton, and what killed them?"
"That's one extra question," the bastard pointed out, but he rolled his eyes when I only glared, deadly silent and refusing to rise to his quip.
My mates fanned out around me, one scary as fuck archdemon entourage.
"The skeleton is a minotaur.Theminotaur. And Theseus killed him, so no need to worry about him killing us, too. Theseus is long dead."
"Fuck," Emlyn breathed, his grey wings shuddering and face slack.
"Yeah," Winstael agreed, his square jaw clenching. "Your mate's already figured it out," he told me with a glare. "If that's the minotaur, and we're surrounded by impenetrable walls, it can only mean one thing."
Wynvail grinned, a vicious, joyless smile. "We're in the Labyrinth."
PARTII
CAGED
7
"Why would Cronus put us here?" I muttered, not fully recovered from having to dragtheMinotaur's bleached bones out of our path so we could enter the damned Labyrinth.TheLabyrinth, from bedtime stories that gave little kids nightmares.
My dad used to tell me stories of this place, and all the heroes and gods of the old myths. I never thought they were real. Guess I was naïve for a demon. Even angels up in Heaven knew the gods were real; Em explained everything he knew about them as we walked through the barren stone walkways of the Labyrinth. They had statues of the gods up in Heaven and worshipped them like they were amazing.
If the stories were all true, they were far less worthy of awe than the heroes themselves. Zeus fucked his way through anything that moved, Aphrodite started a war because the worldhadto revolve around her, and Ares was a meathead who started fights to show off hisprowessandmight.1
Dionysus sounded like a great guy, though. If you ignored the fact he was mostly worshipped by people with their dicks and tits hanging out.
Still, they werestories.But now we were in the Labyrinth, the stories were starting to feel very real. And here I thought being an angel-demon hybrid was as interesting as things got.
Gods, titans, myths and monsters—all real. And Cronus had decided to dump ushere?In a Labyrinth where the old guard was already dead. Why?
"The Labyrinth has been modified," Wynvail said, casting a tight look my way. Probably because we'd only just stopped interrogating him about the resurrection pearl—which did exactly what it said on the tin, and brought back the dead—and who he wanted to return.
Nobody good, that was for sure. He was a villainous, untrustworthy asshole. Anyone he wanted to bring back was probably evil, too. There was an obvious answer, but I was in full denial about it. If he brought back his father…
No. Not happening. Nope.
"Look, you can see evidence of the changes there," the villainous, untrustworthy asshole himself went on, veering closer to the massive stone block on our left and running his hand over the grey surface. "There's a slight difference in the stone colour. This part here must have been an open passage; the stone's less weathered than the rest. Subtle, but obvious if you're looking for it."
And of course he was looking for it. I gave him a flat look. "Modified how? Other than blocking off the exits?"
"I'm not sure yet," he admitted, unhappy about it. "We should expect—"
"If you say the unexpected, I'm going to stab you in the throat," Kai hissed, glaring daggers at Wynvail.
