MARS
I walked alongside Hades and Helios with Aurora in my arms toward Hella’s kingdom. She shifted and stared up at me, tucking away some dark hair behind my ear. It had grown out far too long since I’d been down here, but I didn’t have anyone to cut it. Hell, I hadn’t been taking care of myself at all without her, because my only goal all this time was to see her again.
After running her hands through my overgrown scruff, she sighed softly. “I can walk on my own. You don’t have to hold me. I can be strong. I’ve had to be strong for the past few weeks without you.”
“If what Acesca said is true and you nearly just passed out fighting Hella, I’m not letting you walk around here. You need to get healthier and get your strength back because if Hella comes over here and tries to fight us again, she might kill you.”
My chest tightened. There was no way in hell that I would let that happen. Hella wouldn’t take somebody else away from me. She already had Ares. And I hoped to fucking God that Ares would make it out of there alive. I didn’t know what went on in Hella’s kingdom. I’d made sure to stay away for as long as I could.
But I couldn’t stay away any longer.
Aurora wrapped her arms around my shoulders and rested her head on my chest, staring up at me with her big blue eyes, full of wonder and happiness. But there was something else in them—something dark that I hadn’t really seen before.
She’d lost everything—from me, to Ares, to our daughter, to a family and pack.
“It’s getting dark,” Hades said. “We should stop soon.”
“Yes,” Helios said. “If we don’t stop, the monsters will come out and attack us on our trek to Hella’s kingdom. We need to find a place to hide, to sleep. I’m not sure if all monsters will attack us, especially with Hades being here, but still, the hounds will.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding up the path we’d been walking to the nearest mountain. “I know a place up here, a cave within the mountainside. We can stop there for tonight, and hopefully, everyone will have healed completely by the morning.”
“Stop for tonight?” Aurora asked, worry etched into every inch of her face. “Will Ares survive? I wanted to find him tonight. I don’t want him to be there a second more than he should. What if he’s still in that dream state? Will he ever come out of it?”
“Dream state?” Helios asked.
“Nyx put Ares into a dream state during our fight,” Aurora said. “She had put me into one during a hound fight in the Sanguine Wilds while I was pregnant. She can … control the mind and the things we see.”
Sadness washed over Helios’s face, and he stared at the ground. “Maybe that’s how she made me fall in love with her hundreds of years ago. Maybe she put me in a trance for however long we were together, pretending to be someone she wasn’t.”
Everyone went silent. It wasn’t a secret. We all knew that Helios was one of the reasons that this war had started. He’d loved Nyx, and Nyx was jealous of the affection he showed his sister, Dawn or Aurora. So, Nyx killed Aurora and promised Helios she had nothing to do with it.
But Helios had been broken all those years ago without his sister.
He stayed silent, and then he reached over and gently squeezed Aurora’s shoulder. “I don’t know if I’ve told you since I saw you last, but I’m so fucking glad that you’re back. I will never forgive myself for not seeing who Nyx truly was years before she killed you.”
Aurora frowned and shifted in my arms again, wanting me to let her down, but I refused.
“It’s okay,” she said, though I wasn’t sure if she remembered everything that had happened in her first life. She’d told me that she had visions of what our life was like before we both died and came back to life, but it had been blurry to her. “I just want to know if Ares will come out of the trance eventually. When Nyx trapped me, it was only for a couple moments.”
“Ares couldn’t even feel anything in the dream state,” Acesca—who I’d learned was one of Aurora’s friends and an amazing healer—said. She handed Aurora some herbs from a package. “Eat these. You’re still looking a bit pale from earlier.”
After Aurora ate the herbs, she turned to us. “Do you guys know if Ares will survive?”
We approached the mountainside and started up it, heading toward the cave.
Hades glanced at Helios and then at me. “I don’t know much about her power,” Hades said. “But she was strong enough to kill a god and goddess. If she can do that, then I assume she’s strong enough to … keep Ares like that for a long time.”
Aurora stiffened in my arms, shoved her face back against my chest, and stayed quiet. I could feel her body on the verge of crying, but surprisingly, she held herself together and just whimpered softly to herself. “I want to see him again. I don’t want him to be brain dead.”
“He won’t be,” I said, leading my pack into the cave. “We’ll find him beforehand.”
Though I wasn’t sure if we really would.
Hella and Nyx together were some of the strongest gods in the underworld. We might’ve had Fenris behind us, locked in thick god-resistant silver chains, being dragged along by the chain around his neck. He lay almost lifelessly on the ground with tape around his eyes and nose, deprived of as many senses as possible. But he was only part of the problem.
We needed to separate Nyx and Hella to weaken them.
Someway. Somehow.
“Let’s regroup in the morning,” I announced to my packmates, who had been pleased to see me again. “Rest up and heal as much as you can. Hella’s kingdom is only half a day’s walk away by foot from here.”
Once everyone started preparing to sleep, I brought Aurora to the very back of the cave and sat down with my back against the wall and her still in my arms. Now that I had Aurora, I didn’t plan to let her go.
“I’m so afraid for Ares, but … I love being back in your arms,” she whispered.
“I love that you’re here, Kitten,” I said, admiring her and her strength.
This woman had birthed my child and then given her up to fight for our freedom. Not many people could do that to ensure a better future for their offspring and their people. Only a true leader and alpha could.
“Kitten,” she repeated, her voice soft. “I missed hearing that nickname roll off your lips.”
A low chuckle escaped my lips because I had missed calling her that too. This felt so surreal—that she was down here in the underworld with me. I almost thought that this was a hallucination from Nyx.
“You look exactly the same too,” she said.
“How did you expect me to look?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, gently shrugging. “It’s kinda crazy that there are two of you who look exactly the same in the underworld.”
After a few moments of silence, her smile turned into a frown. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t stay with our daughter. You don’t know how hard it was for me to leave her. She was ripped right from my body, and I …” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I miss her so much. I don’t even know what she looks like.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the drawing that Apollo had given me, and then I set it in her hands. “Why don’t you take this back to start?” I said, wrapping her slender fingers around the edge of the picture. “This is our daughter, Kitten, and no matter what happens, I’ll make sure she knows that you love her.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. “Thank you, Mars,” she whispered, body tensing. “Thank you so much.”