AURORA
Ares and I ran through the deserted land of Hound Territory toward Medusa’s house, which sat on a single plateau on the terrifying, jagged Syncome Mountains range. Since I could run—and run faster than a normal wolf—now, we made it there in record time, without stumbling upon any fog or any hounds.
We shifted into our human form and walked up the dirt path lined with statues of gods and goddesses. And this time, I could only wonder if these were really just statues or real people who Medusa had turned to stone.
“This place always makes me nervous,” I whispered to Ares, glancing around at the bare mountain that held no signs of life or vegetation. Yet down below, on the opposite side of the mountain, monstrous growls echoed from a dark forest, shielded by thick leaves and greenery.
“We’re almost there, Kitten,” Ares said, the setting sunlight hitting the side of his face.
He looked so stoic, so divine and godlike here.
The memory from earlier still plagued my mind, and I couldn’t seem to shake the thought of being together with Ares in another life. Maybe he hadn’t been Ares, or maybe he really had been. I didn’t know for sure. All that was certain was that I had touched him before, we had been together, and I had loved him.
My lips curled into a smile, warmth spreading through my chest.
Ares and I were meant to be. In every lifetime.
“You gonna keep walking?” Ares asked from behind me. He stood at Medusa’s front door with a smug smirk on his face and his big arms crossed over his chest while watching me completely miss Medusa’s home and continue on the pathway. I was just so lost in my thoughts. “Daydreaming too much about me, Aurora?”
With my cheeks flushing, I narrowed my eyes at him and walked back toward her small centuries-old house built into a jagged peak. Like last time, her dirty white curtains blew outward through her windows.
After knocking without an answer three times, I opened her front door and stepped into the house. “Medusa?” I called, hoping that she was home and maybe just sleeping.
We barged in without her permission, but I was worried about her. I hadn’t heard from her since the hound attack and since the loud boom that had echoed throughout the forest and turned everyone to stone; everyone except her.
No answer.
“Come on,” I said to Ares, holding the door open for him. “We should see if we can figure out where she went off to. If we’re going to the underworld, we need to find her as soon as possible. She had to have left something lying around.”
I drew my fingers across the ancient walls and glanced around her house, desperate to find any trace of her and where she could’ve gone. Had she ever even come back here since that chaotic battle?
Looking through every room, I wanted to find something—an unclean dish, dirty clothes, a note about where she might’ve been all this time. But instead, I found nothing out of the ordinary and nothing to signal she had been back here.
As Ares looked through her bedroom, I walked into the living room and found a journal on her coffee table with a slip of paper pushed between a couple loose pages. After opening it to that page, I sat down on the couch and read through the notebook.
I shouldn’t have, but it was important for me to understand Medusa. Something drew me to her, and I couldn’t really put my finger on it. Not only did I want to get to know her, but I also felt the need to get to know her more than I ever wanted to know anyone.
Maybe it was because she just had so much knowledge about this war and the hounds.
The notebook was filled with useless scribbles and some words in Latin that I both had trouble understanding yet could grasp parts of it, even without any training in the Latin language. The journal dated back to over two hundred years ago during the War of the Lycans, when it was said that werewolves had gone to war with the hounds.
1752 May 2
Dawn is dead. Helios went to the underworld to fight for her honor. He will die down there too, I suppose. I’d warned him not to go. I told him the consequences. I told him Hella is out to destroy the Sanguine Wilds, but that stubborn god hadn’t listened to me. They never do.
Selene has gathered wolves, both warriors and rogues, to fight the hounds when they appear. The army of hounds have disappeared from the Sanguine Wilds for two weeks now, and not one lone hound has been spotted in this forest for weeks. But they’re coming back. I feel it.
We must prepare for a war and for the first goddess to be reborn. If we don’t, this war will never end. We’ll be trapped in this hell forever.
My heart pounded as I read the passage, my Latin getting better with each word. I swallowed hard, afraid to read what was on the next page, but I couldn’t help myself from turning the thick, delicate paper and taking it all in. It made little sense out of context, but Helios and Hella were both mentioned, which gave me some understanding.
1752 May 15
The hounds came flooding into the Sanguine Wilds. Resurrected as a hound, even Dawn came, viciously killing the rogues who had once loved her. I’m afraid the gods won’t survive this. They are weaker by the day.
Two weeks … two weeks since the initial entry, the hounds had attacked again.
My stomach twisted into knots. This sounded exactly like what we were going through now. Two weeks had already passed, just like in her passage, which meant we had two more weeks at the most before the hounds came back to slaughter us.
Was time repeating? Or was the War of the Lycans still happening?
1797 June 8
The warriors have pushed the hounds back into the underworld. Helios came back for the briefest moment with some old warriors, not having aged a day down there. This war is far from over. I’m afraid for the future of humanity.
It had taken the warriors over forty years to push the hounds back into the underworld once they came here. I rested my hand over my bump, my heart racing. I couldn’t let that happen. My girl wasn’t going to be raised in a living hell. We needed to get to the underworld as soon as possible.
1923 January 11
Nobody has come back. Statues have fallen. I fear the worst is yet to come.
And then the passages ended.
I stared down at the journal with wide eyes, my hand over my growing bump. “If we don’t handle this now, we’re all going to die,” I whispered to myself.
We didn’t have much time left, especially if the hounds and gods reacted the same way they had over two centuries ago.
Closing the journal, I pulled out the loose page and glanced at the distinct handwriting and charred page edges. This hadn’t been written by Medusa, but to Medusa by … Helios, the god of the sun.
Medusa,
You were right about everything.
Nyx killed Dawn.
She lured me down to the underworld while I sought revenge. She told me that the rogues and hounds who had loved and lain with Dawn tore her body to pieces. She hoped I’d never found out that she was the real woman who had done it.
But I did.
Gods and ghouls whispered about the day a goddess fell. Nyx had locked Dawn in the torture chambers, where they had chains strong enough to tether any god to the pits of the underworld, and slashed her to pieces while Hella and Erebus, Nyx’s bastard brother, watched.
I should’ve listened to you.
One night, she bound me to those chains and tortured me in front of her brother until I was bleeding and bruised. I couldn’t even use my power to get away. And when Erebus disappeared into their palace, she snuck down into my chamber and helped me escape, so I might be her secret.
When I first descended into the underworld, I played right into Nyx’s hand. She had killed my sister for one sole purpose—for me to live in the underworld with her and become her secret affair at night while her brother forced himself on her during the days.
She lied to me and told me that she was doing this all for me. I put on a show and acted like I trusted her, but since you’d warned me about her evil ways, I have been going over every interaction with her endlessly.
Nyx, goddess of the night, had never been friends with Dawn. She’d used her to get closer to me.
That night, I asked her if she killed my sister. She sweated at the mere question and my intensity, but she had never sweated around me before, no matter how brightly I burned for her. That was how I knew she was lying straight through her teeth.
She pulled me through the palace, unseen, and made a run for the Styx River. It was there that I tried drowning the love of my life, but I am such a weak man. I couldn’t use my entire power down in the underworld.
But I was able to escape her wrath, nearly unscathed.
If anyone desires to come down to the underworld, advise them against it. They do not want to meet the woman I once called my darkness. She is selfish. She is crazy. She is like everyone else in the underworld.
We are barely surviving down here, but we’re fighting for the greater good.
I hope to meet you again one day, and I sincerely apologize for not listening to your advice. You’re the wisest woman that I know, and I believe you can be one to change this world for the better.
Sincerely,
Helios
My hands trembled as I folded the letter and slipped it back into the notebook. No wonder I’d had a bad fucking feeling about Nyx in those memories. She wasn’t a friend at all, but a deceitful liar.
“What’d the journal say?” Ares asked.
I leaped up at the sound of his voice, startled. Ares stood at the doorway, hands on his hips, glancing around the room and analyzing every single piece of ancient text.
“That we need to get to the underworld before the hounds return to the Sanguine Wilds.”
Helios might’ve advised us against it, but I refused to let the hounds get away with this. I wanted payback for the slaughter of Mom’s pack and the death of my brother—both times. These hounds were after me because of the stone, not these other gods. I would not let them fight for me without aiding in any way that I could.
And I certainly wouldn’t let them come back to the Sanguine Wilds and hurt my daughter’s chance at a secure, peaceful upbringing.
There was no exception. We had to go to the underworld, no matter what.
“We have to do this for our baby,” I said, standing up and placing the journal back on the living room table, wanting to take it but knowing that Medusa would find out it was stolen if she ever came back. “We have to do anything for her. She’s not going to grow up in a place like the one in this journal.”
She wasn’t even born yet, but I’d do anything to keep her safe.
Anything.
Though I wished that I could piece those dream memories together to figure out why Nyx and Hella had wanted me dead in the first place. Why kill me when Nyx had a joyous life in the underworld and a lover on earth? What did I have to do with any of this?
Ares moved closer to me, placed his hands on either side of my face, and kissed my forehead, not saying two more words to me. His entire body was rigid against mine, his kiss not as passionate as it had been weeks ago, before Mars died.
But I didn’t say anything to him about it.
He was already in pain.
When he pulled away, I scribbled a note on a blank piece of paper, telling Medusa to come find us as quickly as she could. We had business to discuss and plans to make. We were going to destroy the hounds before they had a chance to destroy us.