His dream changed again. He and Will were descending the stairs to the Underworld, as they’d done months ago on their quest to Tartarus.
Will stopped and frowned. “I’m having déjà vu. Weren’t we just here?”
This time, Nico could grasp the edges of the dream. Nausea washed over him as he tried to reconcile the different layers of reality.
“Ugh,” he muttered under his breath. “I want to wake up.”
“Wake up from what?” Will asked.
“I’m in the middle of a dream.”
“You meanwe’rein a dream, right? Because I could swear this stretch of steps keeps repeating itself.”
“That too,” Nico said, his head throbbing. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, everything matters.” Will grabbed Nico’s wrist so tightly it hurt. “You can’t ignore what you’ve done, Nico.”
Suddenly, the underground passageway turned darker.Muchdarker.
Nico focused on his boyfriend’s face…but it was now hidden behind a golden mask, a grotesque, leering caricature of Will Solace.
Nico lurched away. His foot missed a step. He tumbled backward, spinning in the void while Will’s malevolent laughter echoed in his ears.
Nico awoke abruptly.
Fear was cuddled against his face, its hedgehog-like spines digging into his cheek.
He sat up, his mind still swimming through the images from his dreams. He wanted to believe the nightmares had been caused by the Puff, but he suspected that wasn’t true. Fear had found him, snuggled up to him, because it had sensed Nico needed him. It seemed to be sending him a message:This is my emotion you are feeling. Recognize it. Embrace it. I will help.
The cacodemons were more complex than Nico had given them credit for. He should talk to Hazel….
That’s when reality came crashing back over him.
Hazel was gone.
He sat bolt upright, frightening his Puff so badly that it leaped off the bed.
“Sorry,” he told it, rubbing the spine marks on his face.
Fear bounded away and joined its siblings, who were all curled up on the next bunk over. Will wasn’t there. Nico was alone in the guest barracks, with no memory of how he’d gotten there. He was glad the Romans were used to hard work, because they seemed to be spending a lot of their time dragging his unconscious body back to bed.
Hazel…He closed his eyes and tried once more to sense her life force.
He remembered the vacancy he’d felt when Jason died—like a piece of the universe had been hacked away with a dull knife. This didn’t feel the same. Instead of emptiness, there was a distant pain, deep and aching, and it had a shape.
Don’t believe it, she had said.
Nico tried to hold on to that glimmer of hope. Shemustbe alive. Otherwise, he would fall apart, and too many people still needed him—Will, Frank, and the other mythics.
But he also worried. Was he being delusional? Was his hope overriding his instincts as a child of Hades?
Nico’s stomach grumbled. One thing about being alive: his body didn’t care how sad he was. It wanted food.
He headed to the bathroom to freshen up and change clothes. He grabbed his bomber jacket but froze when he found a four-inch gash on the left sleeve. The black leather had been ripped open—maybe by a nail on Suzanne’s club, or by a falling stalactite. Nico had no memory of it happening. The inner wool lining sprouted from the tear like dandelion fuzz.
White-hot hatred surged through him—for Pirithous and his court, for all the misery they’d caused. A ripped sleeve was nothing compared to losing Hazel, of course. But this jacket had been with him through so many adventures. It had come out unscathed every time. Until now. It seemed like a bad omen.
Nico fought back tears.
