“Why didn’t you tell me you were…”
“Different?” Adonis finished for me. “Would it have mattered so much? Does it matter now?”
“You’re perfect.”
At that, Adonis threw his head back and laughed. “Um no, that would be a gross miscalculation on your part. Don’t worry about what I am. Plus, aren’t we taught never to worry about anything? But to trust in Him who gives us strength?”
I grabbed his hand and sighed. “Says a son of the Most High.” I shrugged. “It’s always easier to believe in your flesh and blood.”
“Which is why it’s imperative that when your time comes, you believe in what you cannot see, not in what you see in front of you, Athena.”
A loud screeching interrupted our conversation. The mountain bellowed again, and a large door that looked a lot like something Atlas would have built, considering it was decorated with the images of planets, emerged from the ground.
“Let me guess.” I put my hands on my hips. “We go down?”
“Hey, where’d you get this one? She’s really smart,” Icarus joked. I glared at him, totally not ready to forgive him for his lapse in judgment.
“They can’t help it.” Adonis patted my back, urging me forward. “They are more bad than good. They’ll always try to pull the Darkness, no matter how much they may like the messenger.”
“That’s actually true,” Seth chimed in, then grinned. “Sorry about the threatening, Athena. Can’t say it won’t happen again. In fact, I can say with absolute certainty that I’m probably going to try to kill you again in like ten minutes.”
I nodded. “Good to know. I’ll be sure to stab you right in the heart.”
“He doesn’t have one,” Icarus pointed out. “But I guarantee, if he did, it would be yours.”
“Before I killed you, naturally.” Seth pointed to the stairs. “After you.”
Darkness greeted me. Of course, I would be the one to have to go first.
“Don’t worry,” Seth piped up behind me. “I won’t kill you when it’s dark. That would hardly be fair.”
“And you’re all about being fair. Oh wait, last time you attacked me, you paralyzed me. Thanks, by the way.”
“Don’t mention it.” His voice echoed in the stairwell. A hand grasped my side. I flinched, but Adonis murmured in my ear, so I knew it was him. This was a good call, considering I had my hand on my favorite dagger, ready to remove the hand from his arm in minutes, now that I’d had fair warning from Seth. I wasn’t going to take any chances.
“So…” Icarus lit a torch and moved to the front. “We travel down for a few hours until we get into the Circle.”
“Circle?” I repeated.
Seth moved to the front next to Icarus. “Yes, the Circle. I guess the best way to explain it is Mt. Olympus.”
“Wait, we’re in Olympus?”
“Technically we’re in Denali.” Icarus grinned. “But you didn’t really think all those stories about Mt. Olympus were fake, did you? It exists. It’s just not in the sky.”
“No, it’s thousands of feet below the earth,” Adonis said next to me.
I gulped as my feet took each stair one at a time. “Sounds a lot like Hell to me.”
Seth laughed behind me. “Wisdom becomes you, Thena. And you aren’t very far off.”
“Mt. Olympus is Hell?” I could feel my mind trying to make the calculations. If Mt. Olympus, or where the Titans resided with every other dark force, was Hell, that meant we were actually going right into…
“Level your breathing,” Adonis whispered near my ear.
“We’re traveling directly into the Abyss.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Wisdom told me to stop making my guesses out loud, but I couldn’t help it. Why wasn’t Adonis freaking out? Why were Seth and Icarus so calm?
“But they’ve been freed from the Abyss. So why are they still down here? I guess I don’t understand.”
“Freedom is in the eye of the beholder.” Seth laughed in front of me. “What is freedom, anyway? I mean, yes, the Watchers are technically free of the chains of the Abyss. The blackness has been lifted by Azazeel.”
I flinched at hearing my father’s name. But I was unwilling to allow a simple identity to upset me. I continued climbing down. The closer we got, the hotter it became. It didn’t really bother me; it was just irritating, and unfortunately fit with every stereotypical idea of Hell I’d ever heard.
“So, freedom.” I repeated what Seth had just mentioned. “What do you mean? They are free but not really free?”
“Someone needs to free them.”
“Not it,” I murmured.
Adonis laughed next to me.
Seth let out a loud sigh. “Don’t worry. It would be an impossible task, even for you, Thena. Only one can free them.”
“Who is that?”
“The one who put them there.”
I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. “Raphael?”