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“Yes.” I jerked my head in her direction.
“I wanted to go to find you,” Edmund said from inside our hug. “Viktor stopped us. He made the woman—ah, what’s her name again?”
“Thalia,” I said hollowly.
“Her. She placed a spell on the house so we couldn’t leave it.”
I swallowed thickly. “I know.” My shoulders slumped when he released me. “She’s dead.”
His eyebrows flicked up. “Oh?”
Maddox looked me up and down. “You look dreadful.”
Dora pressed her hands against my cheeks, tilting my face up. “You’re ever so pale. You need food. Quick, get inside. You can tell us all that happened there.”
Maddox patted my back as we walked inside, then smiled. “Good to have you back.”
I wanted to smile back, but I couldn’t bring myself to force it. “Thanks.”
Edmund grabbed a box of cookies in the kitchen as I walked to the table. He shook them in my direction, but I still felt nauseated. “Where’s Viktor?” he asked, and my stomach knotted.
“I don’t know.” I sighed, deflated. “He could be anywhere.” I didn’t want to tell them what I’d seen in those moments after he killed Lucius. How through his grief-stricken tears, he’d looked at me with a hatred I’d never seen on his face. I wouldn’t tell a single soul how he’d never seemed as dangerous as right before he fled, and now I did not know what he would do. This was Leda all over again, and Aziel was right. She was dead because of me. I had become his new Freya.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ihadn’t left my bed since what had happened, but life went on. I stared at the rain-stricken window in my room, my mind reeling over every detail of the days with Freya, filling more with vile as I replayed Thalia’s death. As it weighed so heavily on my conscience, I couldn’t move.
Aziel’s words continued to float back, even in my layers of dreams, which grew darker with each passing day. Maddox knocked on the door, bringing me tea and cookies on a tray for breakfast, a new tradition since I’d come back looking like death and covered in blood.
He placed the tray on the nightstand. “Still feeling sorry for yourself?”
“Go away, Maddox.”
He glimmered a smile. “I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me he was a god. Do you know what this means?”
“I don’t care.” I pulled the covers over my head. They’d forgiven me for stealing the keys, especially after finding out Freya had lied about it all and that we had been guarding the freedoms of three innocent gods.
“You should.” He sat, pulling my covers back again. He and Edmund had spent every evening researching since we got back a week ago. Looking for what? I didn’t know, but something I’d said had struck a chord with them.
“There’s a way for them to kill Lucius for good.”
I sat upright. “He’s already dead.”
“No, he would have simply been sent back to the underworld.”
My heart palpated. “What?”
“They need to kill him in the underworld. Not in this realm.”
“Are you certain?”
He shook his hand. “Seventy-thirty.”
I slumped again. “It doesn’t really help anything, seeing as Raiden is gone.”
“It’s still weird to call him that.”
I shrugged. “Maddox, no offense, but I really just want to be alone.”
