***
Skyla’s feet ached from walking and her back was sore from sleeping on the rocks. But she was a warrior, one who’d been through worse and had endured tougher conditions. The heat was a pain in the ass, but she was thankful for the tank that left her arms bare, and she was thankful too for the moody male at her side. Even if he’d grown quieter and darker with every step they’d taken in Tartarus.
They made it to the top of the plateau, damp with sweat and breathless from the climb. As Skyla passed Orpheus the water bottle, she scanned the horizon.
More souls being tortured in various ways. Some tied to poles, some locked in cages, some out in the open, being set on fire. Even though revulsion roiled through her, she knew she was growing numb to the atrocities. No single one struck her as any more vile than another. Until, that is, she caught sight of the male in the trees a good fifty yards away. The one hanging from chains, suspended from a limb high above. He was naked, while hundreds of thousands of snakes struck at his toes and ankles and legs.
“Holy gods.” She hated snakes. Always had. She couldn’t imagine a worse torture.
Orpheus turned and froze. “Gryphon.”
He pulled the blade from his back and tore off across the field before she could stop him. Before Skyla could remind him about ambushes and traps and what that male they’d encountered had told them back at the Cursed Marshes.
Watch for the unexpected.
Skyla’s heart shot into her throat. Pulling her bow free, she took off after him. And prayed this wasn’t that moment.
Chapter 22
Orpheus skidded to a stop at the edge of the trees. The horror of the scene sucked the air from his lungs. Gryphon dropped his head back between his shoulder blades and howled in pain.
Lift your legs, damn it! Why wouldn’t he lift his legs away from the snakes striking out at him again and again?
“Gryphon!” He called out several times, but Gryphon didn’t respond. The snakes formed a carpet of writhing bodies on the ground beneath him, blocking Orpheus’s path.
“Holy gods.” Skyla drew up beside him, her bow at the ready, her chest rising and falling with her labored breaths. “There could be anyone hiding in these trees.”
“I don’t care what’s in the fucking trees. I care about getting Gryphon down.” He waved the sword over his head. Jumped up and down and hollered to distract the snakes.
Skyla lined up her arrow and fired at the snake coiled to strike at Gryphon’s bare, bloody toes. The arrow sliced right through the snake’s neck, dropping it to the ground. As if they’d just taken notice that something else hunted their prey, the snakes on the edge of the mass turned and hissed in their direction.
Skyla took a step back. Orpheus followed. Three snakes with beady eyes, yellow markings, and heads like cobras wriggled across the ground right for them.
“Um, Orpheus?”
He swung out with his blade, decapitating one, and angled to the second. The third snake shot after Skyla.
“Orpheus!” She lifted her bow, fired. The arrow sailed through the air and sliced into the neck of the charging snake but didn’t slow its pursuit.
There wasn’t time for Orpheus to conjure a spell, wasn’t even time to reach her with his blade and try to help. Some internal voice said, Use the vial.
He dug the vial from his pocket. Inside, the liquid glowed an eerie blue-green. The stranger had told them it was ambrosia. In the human world, ambrosia gifted immortality. If it worked differently down here…
“Here!” He threw the vial to Skyla, then struck out with his blade toward the snake still trying to snack on his flesh.
She caught the glass vial with one hand, twisted the lid. Then she tossed the contents toward the snake, reached for her arrow again, and lined up her shot.
Orpheus decapitated the snake in front of him, turned to help her, but realized he didn’t need to. The glowing liquid hit the snake and immediately stopped its forward momentum. As if it had struck a wall, it jerked back, then a hissing sound echoed and smoke rose up around it. Seconds later nothing but ash littered the ground where the snake had been.
Skyla darted a look his way. “Whoa.”
Whoa was right. But not enough. Orpheus looked back at Gryphon and the thousands of snakes below him. “Give it to me.”
Skyla handed it over. Inside the glass, the blue-green liquid glowed bright, refilled to the top as if she’d never used it.
He ran toward the mass of writhing bodies and in the same motion Skyla had made, flicked the liquid out across the snakes.
Hisses roses up to meld with Gryphon’s cries of pain, followed by the acrid scent of flesh burning and smoke rising up to fill the woods. The snakes, the whole lot of them, were reduced to nothing but smoldering ash.