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I wouldn’t accept that. Surely they all had been here so long they had given up. Cole would fightback. He would fight to survive. He would fight for us.
Even though he chose this, an insidious voice whispered.
As I journeyed deeper, I finally stopped trying to help people. It was taking too much time without any success, and my entire body was in pain. The momentary drowning spiked at random when I’d hear a cry that almost sounded familiar as I waded through the pits or caught sight of a particularly awful scene. But that wasn’t the only memory coming back to me.
Thoughts teased at the edge of my consciousness as I continued. Maybe I was simply delirious. They were different from my own, older, out of context, but they fit in. Words, strings of phrases, then images.
I paused mid-step as one slammed into me.
I was in an orchard at night. Moonlight bathed the ground, and a figure emerged from a shadow behind the tree. He had long onyx hair and a black swath of cloth covering him.
“You’ve come again, Hades,” my voice said.
“As if I were capable of staying away,” Cole replied.
It wasn’t as if I was fully there, not like the scene in the lava. Instead, it was like these memories had always belonged to me, a birthright that played in my mind as I reclaimed them.
That was not the last of them.
They came without context, flitting into place as I stumbled through miles of savagery. They were a balm for the wounds I now carried. But they were a poison too. I’d had so little of Cole. This other me had more of him.
And even as I learned her reasons, I couldn’t help but wonder how she had managed to curse Hades… curseColeto such a miserable existence.
A hiss of snakestook me from my thoughts.
Suddenly I found myself face-to-face with the creature that had nearly killed me.
Medusa.
I did not turn to stone.
In fact, it may have been impossible for her to turn anyone to stone. Where her petrifying eyes had once been were now two empty sockets, the hollows oozing blood. Her body was naked, a mess of green scale and gray skin. Her hair of snakes was a mess, a few, weak skinny ones moving about while thicker strands ended in stumps.
“A living soul.”
I started. She was the first to acknowledge me. Theswas drawn out into a hiss. Her voice was far more serpentine than it had been before, as if torture had stripped her of the civilized veneer.
“I know this soul—”
Her words bit off with a howl of pain. One of the snakes had tentatively wormed its way up and immediately sparked into flames.
“We… we met. You turned me to stone.”
“That hardly narrows it down for—” A snake spontaneously exploded. “—For me.”
“It was right before Cole killed you.” My words were nearly a snarl, for the pain the memory ignited, the way Cole had frantically carried me to Hecate, but I immediately felt bad. He had killed her to avenge me, and she had been here ever since. Even she didn’t deserve this.
“Ah, yes. The second coming of the soul.” This time, she ground her teeth to avoid crying out when the next snake was destroyed. Even as the third one wilted, a new one grew half as thick as my pinky finger. “In my defense, I could hardly have harmed the old you.”
“You knew me before?”
Even as I said it, new memories flickered through, as if I was looking at them in a stream. I had met the gorgon before—ages and ages before. In fact, I had been the one to insist we keep her in the dungeon instead of ending her existence entirely.
“Every living soul d–did.” Another snake gone, mid-word.
“Let me help you,” I said. “Then you can give me answers.”
Medusa roared with laughter, even as it was punctuated by cries as her snakes suffered and hissed in pain. “The only help you could give me would be ending my existence, and you alone cannot take on the very fabric of our universe.”
