The door crashed open behind him. Skyla leaped onto the patio, spotted the hellhound, and froze. “Orpheus! Behind you.”
At Orpheus’s back, another growl echoed. He looked that way to see another hound, its eyes glowing as red as death. Skyla and Maelea stepped backward toward him as two more hounds joined the fray, followed by the bleeding and pissed hound with Skyla’s arrow sticking out of its shoulder.
“If you’re thinking about shifting so we have a chance here,” Skyla muttered, “I wouldn’t object.”
Orpheus couldn’t agree more. Though the fact the Siren had flipped from trying to stop him to trying to help him wasn’t lost on him. He tuned in to his inner daemon, felt his eyes morph to glowing green and the power of the daemon ripple through his limbs. In a rush he released the hold he kept on his dark side and unleashed control.
Nothing happened.
“Um…” Skyla raised her bow, pulled the arrow back as she cast him a frantic look. “Now would be a good time.”
He focused deeper on the daemon’s strength rumbling right beneath the surface. Pictured it consuming him as it had done so many times before.
Only again, nothing happened.
“Sonofabitch,” he hissed.
Skyla’s eyes darted from hellhound to hellhound. “Orpheus?”
Panic closed in. He could feel its strength, damn it. Why wasn’t it working?
He reached for the knife he kept strapped to his hip. “I don’t think that’s gonna work this time.”
“What?”
The hound directly in front of them chuckled.
It chuckled. Holy hell.
“Damn it,” Skyla muttered. “This is not good.”
“No shit,” Orpheus tossed back. Damn it, what the fuck was going on?
Maelea’s entire body shook as she backed into Orpheus. But this time she didn’t seem to mind being close to him. “What—what do we do?”
Five bloodthirsty hellhounds against him, Skyla, and the quivering Ghoul Girl. He was a fierce fighter who knew a little magic. Even without his daemon, he and the Siren could probably survive these odds if they worked together, but not Ghoul Girl. They’d lose her in a heartbeat.
And he wasn’t about to lose her. Not when she was the key to everything.
He thought of the lake behind them, a good hundred yards down the sloping grass. “You got a boat?”
Maelea swallowed hard. “Y-yes. A power boat. It’s stored in the boathouse.”
“You thinking about making a run for it?” Skyla asked in a low voice, her bow poised to shoot.
The injured hound growled low in its throat.
“Thinking about it,” Orpheus muttered as the monsters slowly moved forward, forcing them back several steps and onto the grass.
He glanced behind him, toward the boathouse. They’d never make it. Even injured, those hounds could run like the wind.
“You have something Hades wants,” the hound to the left growled in a voice that was half man, half beast.
Oh, fucking fantastic. It could speak.
Orpheus reached into his pocket and pulled out the earth element. The one Queen Isadora had found and given to him months ago. Just before he’d left Argolea to find that warlock.
The monsters drew to a stop.
Skyla darted a look at the glittering quarter-sized diamond in his palm. The one stamped with the symbol of the Titans. “What the hell?”
All five beasts stared with rapt attention at the element he held. At the element that fit in one of the four chambers of the Orb of Krónos. Though the element held a special kind of power Orpheus had yet to tap, it wouldn’t be fully useful until all the elements were joined with the Orb. Then the powers would combine and the bearer of the Orb would be stronger than Hades. Stronger, even, than Zeus.
And the monsters in front of him knew that.
Orpheus closed his fingers over the element and squeezed, harnessing the Medean powers bequeathed by his mother. He hadn’t played with the element much since Isadora had given it to him, and he had no idea what to expect, but he wasn’t against harnessing every shred of magic from it if he could.
But nothing happened, aside from the element growing warm in his fist.
The lead hound moved forward and growled. “We’ll take that from you now, Argonaut.”
The word Argonaut echoed in Orpheus’s head. And he thought of his brother, Gryphon, confined to the Underworld because of that damn warlock. Of the moment Gryphon’s Argonaut markings had appeared on Orpheus’s skin. Of the real Argonauts, who didn’t give a shit about him or what had happened to his brother.
His anger harnessed a flash of power. Medean magic shot down his arm and erupted through the earth element in his hand.
The ground shook in a violent blast of energy that knocked Orpheus back two feet. A hellhound shot forward with a snarl and a snap of its jaws. Maelea screamed. Skyla shouted something he couldn’t make out. The other hounds howled in unison. And a roar that sounded like Hades himself rushing up from the center of the earth echoed everywhere.
Chapter 7