Cal rubbed her shoulder. “I guess you just focus on who you want to see the illusion and sort of imagine it?”
She nodded and frowned, her head lowering as tense seconds trickled past.
Just as Keras thought nothing was going to happen and he had been wrong, an image built around him, a beautiful concert hall with rows of empty red velvet seats.
It lasted barely thirty seconds before it fragmented.
Marinda released her breath and sagged forwards. “Did it work?”
Her tropical eyes lifted to him.
Keras nodded.
Mentally cursed.
He should have considered all the angles when Cal had cut the furie down, should have remembered what had happened at the gate in Olympus earlier, but he had been too swept up in the thought that it was over and he could return home to build a life for himself again, one where Enyo would be at his side.
A low growl came from his father’s direction.
“My love?” Persephone cooed and leaned over him, feathering her fingers across his brow.
He frowned and leaned away from her touch, and then sagged into the pillows and accepted it when she pouted at him.
Her ruby hair spilled across the pillow beside his head as she fussed over him. “How do you feel?”
His scarlet eyes and the power that pressed down on Keras told him that his father felt angry.
“Well enough,” he said, his voice strong.
Too strong.
His father was pushing himself for some reason.
It dawned on Keras when he spoke again.
“The blade. My blood.” Hades struggled to sit up as Persephone kept trying to drag him back down again, said things about him resting that he ignored. “They will open a gate with it.”
“Wait. What?” Ares barked.
Keras’s thoughts exactly.
Cassandra said, “Like you did for me?”
And Keras wanted to growl all over again. He should have thought of that too. When Cassandra had broken free of Marek during a teleport, she’d had a showdown with their father and had been sent back to Daimon through the New York gate.
“Lie down,” Persephone muttered, clawing at Hades’s good shoulder, eventually getting her way. When his father was settled on his back again, resting as she wanted, she looked at Keras and then his brothers. “Your father has the power to open a gate at will. It was how the realms were connected long ago, before he built the new gates and bound them to all of you.”
Something finally clicked.
This had been the enemy’s plan all along.
They had always intended to lure Hades into a false sense of security, making him believe he had won and making him lower his guard so they could get close enough to deal not only a potentially fatal blow to him, but get their hands on his blood.
Blood that would make the remaining furie on the enemy side incredibly powerful.
She would easily be able to open a gate.
“We have to be ready to move… now. We have to find them.” Keras looked at each of his brother’s in turn.
All of them nodded as their faces set in hard lines.
“Wait,” Hades said. “I will be able to feel it when they open a gate.”
Keras didn’t want to wait. He needed to do something. He needed to be out there hunting for the traitors and the furie, and he wasn’t alone. Crimson ringed Esher’s blue eyes, revealing his brother’s thoughts trod the same path as his.
“Trust in Thanatos and Nyx.” His father’s scarlet eyes were as serious as he had ever seen them as his gaze darted to him and locked with them.
Keras wasn’t sure he could.
Eris and her siblings were related to them, and for all he knew, their determination to participate in the coming battle could all be a ruse devised by Apate. He wanted to believe they were loyal to his father, but it was difficult.
“You will not get a choice.” Persephone caressed Hades’s arm as she looked at Keras. “Thanatos and Nyx will want to be involved. They will want to punish Eris and the others. This is an affront to them too.”
He thought about what Thanatos had said to Nyx.
Eris had ruled Nyx’s realm for a century while she had been absent, and had been angry when that power had been stripped from her when Hades had forgiven Nyx and allowed her to return.
“When I sense the gate, we will move.” Hades sat up again.
“Oh no you will not,” Persephone snapped, fear washing across her features as she gripped his shoulder. “You are staying here. For all we know, they want you on the battlefield again so they can have another chance to kill you. If they kill you—”
She cut herself off, her words ending on a choked sob.
Hades looked as if he would relent, but then his face hardened, his red eyes brightening as he turned his cheek to her. “I will need my armour, and my bident.”
Keras was getting him neither of those things. His mother was right. They couldn’t risk Hades leaving the palace, not when he was weak. He could understand his father’s need to fight, to kill the ones who had done this to him, but he couldn’t allow it.
Somehow, they needed to convince Hades to stay in his palace, protected by his guards, even if the enemy attacked.
But how was Keras meant to make his father do something he didn’t want to do?
Hades was more stubborn than the worst of him and his brothers, and liable to do the opposite of something if he felt he was being ordered around by them, or his wife.
Keras glanced at his brothers. All of them wore thoughtful looks, were clearly trying to figure out how to stop their father from leaving the palace just as he was.
Ares’s expression gained a pained edge.
One that had Keras wanting to take a step towards him to offer him comfort even when he wasn’t sure what was wrong.
Ares’s broad shoulders shifted as he drew down a deep breath and released it, resolve filling his dark eyes as they settled on Hades and then pain flickering in their depths as he looked at Megan.
“I need to go with my brothers,” he said, a tremble in his deep voice that relayed how much that decision hurt him, and how much strain it placed on him.
“Wait.” Megan whirled to face him, fear brightening her dark eyes. “Wait. No. You said you wouldn’t.”
Her hands shifted to her stomach and she clutched it as her eyebrows furrowed.
“You said you’d stay with me… safe with me.”
Ares sucked down another breath. “I know, but I have to be out there. They need me.”
“I need you.” She lunged for his arm, gripped it so hard her knuckles turned white. “I don’t want to be alone here.”
Ares swept his fingers under her chin and lifted it, smiled shakily down into her eyes as his brow furrowed. “You won’t be alone. The guards will be here. Mother will be here.”
Megan grew frantic, her voice rising in pitch as she rubbed her belly. “Guards? Are they strong enough to defend this palace? They’re not you, Ares. They’re not gods, and I don’t know if they can fight. I haven’t seen them fight. I’ve seen them stand around.”
She made a valid point, but she didn’t have to worry, the palace guards were highly trained and they were strong.
But something told Keras that Ares had been banking on her panicking like this.
“Calm yourself, my love,” Persephone murmured, as gentle as a summer’s breeze, but her words were lost on Megan.