Her grin widened as he took control of the kiss and rolled her to her back.
She was trouble. The kind of trouble he needed. And she wasn’t about to let him forget it.
The click of nails against stone would normally send Hades into a rage, but today the interruption did nothing to diminish his good mood.
“Orcus,” he called, knowing the four-foot-tall gnomelike troll was dragging his lame leg behind him as he hobbled toward Hades on the cliff overlooking his realm. “Come and see this. It’s my favorite part. When a soul experiences its punishment for the very first time.”
Orcus’s pointy ears twitched as he stopped next to Hades and looked down at the blackened ground a hundred feet below.
A soul was tied to a stake, trembling and staring wide-eyed at one of Hades’s henchmen holding a bow at his shoulder. The henchman drew the bowstring back and released a flaming arrow that flew through the air and struck the soul in its thigh. The soul shrieked. As the soul frantically tried to wiggle and put out the flames quickly spreading across its body, the henchman ignited the tip of another arrow, lined it up and released, striking the soul this time in the shoulder.
Flaming arrow after flaming arrow struck the soul in different places, prolonging its misery. Finally, it burst into flames, and a gut-wrenching howl echoed beneath the swirling red sky.
“Was it someone we knew, My Lord?”
“Just another of my brother’s useless whores.” Hades smirked, envisioning the King of the Gods being told one of his precious Sirens had been killed.
Zeus’d know the female would be sent to the Underworld. That she’d be sentenced to an eternity of life, torture, and death for the crimes she’d committed in the name of Zeus-the-Almighty. To be repeated daily until Hades sucked every bit of energy from her soul. It wasn’t how Hades would have chosen to regenerate his powers, but after his brothers had taken the best parts of the cosmos and left him the Underworld, it was how he’d learned to survive.
No, not just survive… thrive. With every soul that came to him, with every secret those souls revealed, he grew stronger while his bothers stayed the same. And one day—when he had what he was looking for—they, the whole of Olympus, would all bow to him.
Feeling better than he had in days, he turned for the cave opening in the blackened rock mountain that led to his tunnels. “Where’s my wife? I’ve a taste for her at the moment.”
The click of Orcus’s nails echoed at Hades’s back as the troll followed. “I believe My Lord’s queen was heading to the gardens when I left the castle.”
Hades would never understand his wife’s obsession with growing things. The soil of the Underworld was not meant to spawn life, and she knew that.
He frowned in the torchlight as the tunnel angled downward, slowing his steps on the dark rocks so Orcus wouldn’t fall too far behind. The troll’s lame leg was a pain in Hades’s ass. He’d a mind to cut it off himself, but the creature was too useful to lose. “Why did you bother coming all the way up here, anyway? I told you I’d be back in a few minutes.”
“I know, My Lord. But I-I received a message I thought you might want to hear right away.”
“A message from whom?” Hades rounded a corner into a room with three doorways. He headed for the archway to his right that led back to his castle.
“From Pandora, My Lord. Via one of my cousins.”
Hades’s drew to a stop and turned to look down at the pathetic creature hobbling toward him.
Orcus’s cousins were the kobaloi—gnome-dwarves who dwelt in the mountains of the human realm. They were useful to Hades when needed, so he generally left them alone. Pandora, however, was another matter. He steered clear of her because of her box. As far as Hades was concerned, the female was a conniving slut who just wouldn’t die.
And he had Zeus to thank for her as well.
Hades’s good mood slowly slid to the wayside. “Dare I ask what the first bitch wants now?”
Orcus stopped in front of Hades, his ears twitching as he looked up. “A-an alliance, My Lord.”
“And just why would I ally myself with the biggest cunt in the cosmos? She’s proven herself to be untrustworthy. Besides which, she has nothing I want.”
“She…” Orcus tapped the long nails of his fingers together. “She says she’s joined forces with some creatures that might interest you.”
Hades’s gaze narrowed on the troll. “What creatures?”
“Satyrs. Specifically, satyrs who were once in the service of the Prince of Darkness.”
A raging storm swirled inside the god-king of the Underworld at the mention of his only offspring. The one he’d been searching for ever since those good for nothing Fates had released him from their realm.
Advancing on the troll, he growled, “Where is my son?”
“I… I do not know, My Lord.” Orcus scrambled back until he hit the rock wall. “I swear. Sh-She didn’t say. P-Pandora’s message only mentioned the satyrs. But wherever the satyrs are, the Prince of Darkness is not far away.”
No, he wouldn’t be. The satyrs knew Zagreus was always searching for his nymph, and their obsession with nymphs was legendary. They tracked him to hunt their prey.
Hades narrowed his eyes on the troll. “What else?”
“My Lord?”
“There’s something more you’re not telling me. I know your mind, Orcus. Spit it out.”
“I…” Orcus glanced warily around the rock room lit only by torchlight. “Th-there was one more thing.” He looked up at Hades. “One thing that might be of use to us.”
“And that is…?”
“She said she’s captured an Argonaut.”
Excitement churned inside Hades. He wanted to see those meddling Argonauts ground to dust almost as much as his fucking brothers. “Which one?”
“Why, the most valuable one, My Lord. The one they call Maximus.”
Chapter Sixteen
As Zagreus watched Talisa climb the steadily rising path ahead, he cursed himself for not being tougher.
He should have insisted she return to her realm. He should have forced her to go back. Instead, because he was such a fucking pushover, he was staring at her firm ass swaying in the tight black pants she’d worn the first time he’d met her in that club, drooling over a body he never should have touched but clearly couldn’t get enough of.
She tossed her silky dark hair over her shoulder and carefully maneuvered around broken limbs and jagged rocks on the path that wound through the mountains high above the castle.
The air was thinner up here, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She was too busy taking in the surroundings—the tall fir and pine trees, the thick underbrush, and to their right and far below, the river running out of the mountains which widened to the lake before narrowing at the falls past the castle.
The lake formed a natural valley, carved out long ago by glaciers, but the path turned away from the lake, through a gap in the soaring rocks that led deeper into the mountain.
He watched her tense as the light dimmed, as they moved between the rocks and the trees thinned out, leaving gnarled trunks and limbs void of leaves. Knew she recognized the narrow canyon for what it was—a dangerous place to be ambushed. But because they were still within the boundary of Ehrendia, he wasn’t worried that would happen. He was hoping she’d notice something else, though. Something he’d decided to share with her even though he knew he shouldn’t.