He did not want to do this.
Briareus sat back, his hands on his thighs, and spoke. “I’m not upset, you know? I understand.”
You don’t, Hades thought, and his jaw tightened. He wanted to explain that he had tried to think of ways out of this, that he had delayed it for as long as possible.
There were a few more beats of silence.
“How shall we proceed?” Briareus asked. “Do you want a knife?”
Hades should have winced, but he remained expressionless as he answered. “No.”
He held out his hand, and Briareus took it. After a moment, shadows began to move beneath the creature’s skin, breaking the surface like vines to wrap around Hades’s own arm. It was the tendrils of the giant’s soul coming out of his body.
He met Hades’s gaze. “You’re a good man, Hades,” he said. “A great god.”
The shadows disappeared into Hades’s skin. If he were to drop his glamour, the giant would see a myriad of fine, black lines marring his body —a tale of the many bargains he’d made with the Fates, among them Briareus himself.
Briareus sat back in his chair and took a breath.
He was dead.
Hades remained for a few moments before he stood, turned, and punched straight through the wall. With his aggression spent, he drained what remained of the wine and left the cottage, only to come face-to-face with Hera.
The goddess looked triumphant, a smile curving her cold face.
“Well done, Hades,” she said. “Your next trial will not have the luxury of time.”
Hades’s anger felt like a storm inside his body.
“Then stop wasting mine,” he said.
Her smile widened. “Await my summons, Lord Hades, and don’t forget what’s at stake.”
Part II
“Do the gods put this ardor in our hearts or does each man’s desire become his god?”
—Virgil, The Aeneid
Chapter XIV
An Uncertain Future
In the immediate aftermath of Briareus’s death, a dull ache formed at the front of Hades’s head. It was only a matter of time before it turned into something far worse. He had known he would not be able to sleep, but all possibilities of rest were now out of the question.
So he headed to Iniquity.
He had only managed to take care of one task, though now that the first of Hera’s labors was complete, a second would soon come. In the meantime, he had to figure out who had kidnapped the Graeae. There was the possibility that Dionysus was lying and he was still in possession of the gray sisters, but Hades doubted it. The God of the Vine had been too stunned, too affronted.
Hades wondered if the abductors of the gray sisters wanted the eye or just Medusa? What hope did they have in using her as a weapon? Who were their targets? There was a horrible dread that came with the unknown, and he hated it.
Once in his office, he found himself pulling the small black box from the inside of his jacket pocket and setting it on the desk in front of him. He stared at it for a long moment, wavering on whether he should use it. When he opened the box, he felt even less confident.
The eye stared back at him as if it knew his intentions.
He did not know exactly how the eye worked. Did it work like a crystal ball? Could he ask it to show him something? Was it sentient?
Hades turned the box on its side and let the eye roll out onto the desk. It was sticky, but it landed pupil up and seemed to glare back at him.
Definitely sentient, he thought. Fuck.
“I’m looking for your…owners,” Hades said. “Can you show me where they are?”
He felt really stupid all of a sudden.
Idiot, he imagined Hecate saying.
He picked up the eye and was deposited onto a crowded street in the pleasure district. There was loud music and wicked laughter as people danced around him in a parade of colorful costumes. He recognized his surroundings, particularly the columns that decorated this square. They were gold, and even from here, he could make out the carnal scenes carved into their surface.
Dionysus was here.
Hades could not yet see him for the crowd, but he could feel his magic rising. It was slightly floral but acidic at the same time and possessed a heaviness unlike anything he had ever felt. To others, he imagined it must feel pleasant, but to Hades, it was cloying. Following the spike in power, those who had been dancing around him began to fuck.
The air was thick with carnality, and those present bent to the weight of it, tangled in passionate revelry, and as they fell, Hades saw Dionysus, sitting in his gold throne before those gold pillars. But it was not the sight of him that made his body go cold and fill with an unnerving heaviness. It was the sight of Persephone perched comfortably on his lap, dressed in matching white, the glamour she seemed so keen to hold on to around him gone.
Sitting there with her elegant white horns on display, her eyes as bright as the spring sky, she looked confident and queenly, and he raged at the heat in her gaze—a passion that should be reserved only for him.
What the actual fuck.
The vision flashed and faded away, and Hades was once again in his office at Iniquity, the eye of the Graeae clutched in his palm. He uncurled his clenched fingers, and the eye fell onto the table, bloodshot.
“What the fuck did you show me?” he demanded.
The eye sat silent, of course, but still seemed to be glaring.
“If there is an ounce of truth to that vision, I will crush you to a pulp,” he threatened.
He had almost done so in the midst of the vision. He could still feel the stickiness of the eye on his palm.
He rolled the eye into its box.
“Useless,” he muttered as he sat back in his chair. Obviously the eye would not help him locate the Graeae. And if it would not help him, it was likely it would not cooperate with Hecate either if the goddess attempted a location spell. With the eye’s power, it was possible it would manipulate the spell anyway and send them on a useless hunt.
The fact was, the eye did not trust them.
Normally, he would make himself the target by feeding information into the market that he was in possession of the eye, to lure whoever had kidnapped the Graeae, but he had no doubt some bold idiot would attempt to hold Persephone for ransom as a result, and he wasn’t willing to take the risk.
He had one other option, and the thought quite literally made him want to vomit. Not to mention he would probably be less helpful than the eye, and he required far too much coddling for a Titan.
Hades let out an aggravated growl and slumped farther into his chair.
“Fucking Helios.”
Approaching the God of the Sun would take some planning, however, given that their last encounter had ended poorly. Hades had stolen every single one of his prized cows and refused to return them, though at least now he had a bargaining chip.
While Hades did not think it was likely that Helios would refuse the return of a cow, he couldn’t be certain. The god was difficult, more of an asshole than Apollo. Hades would have to think of something else to hold over his head.
His thoughts were interrupted, though, by a call from Ilias.
“Yes?” Hades answered, dread already twisting through his body.
“I’ve got news for you, though you will not be happy.”
“Am I ever happy to hear your news?”
“Do you want me to answer that question?”
“The answer is no,” Hades replied. “If you want it to change, perhaps you should bring me better news.”
“Then offer me a different job.”
“And what would I offer? Flower picking for Hecate?”
“That is perhaps more dangerous than your workload,” Ilias replied.
Hades managed a smirk.
“We’ve been tracking Dionysus’s movements as you instructed. He has a few connections in the black market, but he is not trying to build a list of contacts like we thought. He is a contact.”
“Any word on the kind of jobs he’s running?”
Hades guessed he was sending his maenads on assassination missions, but assassins were also good spies.
“He seems to be interested in obtaining information on any and everyone,” Ilias replied.