AURORA
After that horrible nightmare, I walked next to Ares toward Hades’s kingdom. I had tossed and turned all night, and then I’d needed to awake to stand guard with my pack while the others slept. To say I hadn’t gotten any sleep was an understatement.
Yawning, I wiped my tired eyes and listened to the quiet morning hum in the underworld. Warriors scanned the woods for other hellhounds and hounds who might try to attack us. I continued forward and hoped that we’d get some information on the hounds, Nyx, and maybe even Mars’s whereabouts at Hades’s place.
“There is a castle about a half mile ahead,” Minerva announced. “Let’s hurry.”
I picked up my pace, wanting to get out of these woods as quickly as possible. Sometime during our walk over here, the thick mist had turned to darkness up above—or maybe the trees were just too thick to let any light through.
Those bird ladies who had taken the wolf from me yesterday were perched on high trees, staring down at us. Their beady and narrowed eyes almost sparkled in the darkness that swarmed us from above.
“They’re called harpies.” The same woman from yesterday who had helped heal that wolf stepped toward me while we walked. “I’ve read about them since I was a child, but I didn’t think that they were real. They try to abduct people heading toward Hades’s kingdom.”
“Stay close,” Ares growled to the group of warriors and headed toward the front with Minerva to inform her. “Don’t let those assholes take another.”
“What’s your name?” I asked the young woman.
“I’m Acesca.”
“I’m Aurora.”
“Oh, I know.” She smiled. “I’ve admired you for so long. I can’t believe I’m talking to you.”
Though I didn’t have much to smile for anymore—except Ares—I found myself smiling. All this time, I had been so focused on protecting my pack and the wolves above from the hounds, dealing with my back and the Malavite Stone, I never thought about how I might’ve affected other people.
“What pack are you from?” I asked.
“I’m from Vulcan’s pack.” She wrapped her arms around her body and frowned. “I wasn’t even supposed to be here with you all. Medusa asked me to come to the goodbye get-together yesterday morning to aid you while giving birth.”
My stomach tightened, and I stared at the ground. To help me give birth? Does that mean Medusa had planned for me to give birth during that time? Did she expect it? Maybe she’d foreseen it in a vision or something…
Still, that didn’t explain why Acesca hadn’t been with me while I gave birth. If Medusa had asked her to come to the goodbye ceremony, then why hadn’t she called Acesca into the room while I was giving birth?
Acesca’s gaze dropped to my stomach. “But I see that has already happened.”
“Yeah,” I whispered, refusing to cry over it again, but fuck had I been hormonal lately. “It did.”
As we reached the end of the thick forest, Minerva and Ares suddenly stopped along with the rest of the warriors. I pushed through the crowd to get to the front and stopped dead in my tracks.
Ghostlike creatures, their bodies wispy and almost transparent, wandered around Hades’s kingdom aimlessly. Some of the older creatures had blurry features like feet and hands, their details harder to make out.
Except one.
Arms moving back and forth, he strode forward quickly, heading straight for the doors to the castle. With a body like his, I expected him to be able to walk right through the other ghosts, but he avoided them entirely.
It was almost as if people like this were still solid human beings.
But then, when he reached the top step, he disappeared right through the door without opening it, without transforming his body. He just stepped right through it and disappeared from the outside forever.
I frowned, hoping that Mars wasn’t like this. If he had died, if these people were thoughtless bodies who’d died on Earth … then was that what Mars looked like now?
“Kitten,” Ares said, grabbing my hand and pulling me away from the path of one of the walking ghosts.
While I hoped that Mars wasn’t like the man who had disappeared through the door, I really hoped that he wasn’t like the ones walking around mindlessly. I hoped that he was still waiting for me, that he still had a mind of his own, that he could make his own decisions, and that he would remember me, Ares, and our little girl.
“Come on.” Ares tugged me along and toward the castle. “We need answers now.”
Being careful to avoid the creatures, we walked around them and up the path toward the castle. Before we could knock on the grand obsidian doors, someone pulled them both open and stood before us.
A handsome man, as tall as Ares but much skinnier, cleared his throat and smiled at us. “Ares and Dawn, welcome. We’ve been waiting for your return. In case you don’t remember me, I’m Hades, king of the underworld.”