Enraptured

Chapter 23

Gryphon came awake with a start. The foul energy he felt in the air pulled him from the brink of unconsciousness where he’d been hovering for…he didn’t know how long.

The snakes came back to squirm through his mind. He tried to push up, to get away, but couldn’t. They were eating him, biting his skin, injecting their venom deep into his veins. Gods, the pain. There was so much pain. There was…

His mind stopped its frantic spin cycle. And he realized in a daze there were no snakes. Just the lingering memory of their striking, biting, slithering away only to strike again. Of spiders crawling over his flesh. Of vultures tearing at his muscles. Of monsters he couldn’t name ripping his limbs from his body as if he were a rag doll. And burning. There’d been burning. He could smell the charred flesh as if it were happening now. But over it all, floating in every single memory, there was Atalanta. What she’d made him do. What she and Krónos had done when…

Agony churned inside him. Melded with shame and a sickness he couldn’t ignore. He needed to run. He had to get away. He—

“Skata.”

The voice, a voice he recognized, brought him back around. He turned his head and saw the profile of his brother’s face. Orpheus’s strong nose, the solid cheekbones, the square jaw covered in what had to be three or four days’ worth of stubble.

“O?” he whispered. Panic rushed in. No, no, no. His brother couldn’t be here. Not in the Underworld. No one could be here. No one—

“The vial?” a voice just past Orpheus whispered. A female voice.

Gryphon realized he was sitting on the ground. He looked up past Orpheus but couldn’t see more than watery shapes, one haloed in gold.

“They’re immortal, remember?” Orpheus muttered.

“What about your spells?” the female whispered.

“They’d be as useful as your singing against these two,” Orpheus said. “Skata, we get all the way back to the human realm and this is where it ends?”

Growls echoed somewhere close. Growls Gryphon recognized as hellhounds waiting to feast.

“Don’t do anything foolish,” Orpheus warned.

“Define foolish,” the female snapped. “Because right now all options are on the table.”

“You’ve caused me quite a bit of trouble, hero.” Hades’s voice rang out in a humorous tone somewhere close. “You find the Orb, you lose the Orb to my treacherous wife, you find the Orb again, then lose it to a scheming warlock.” Hades chuckled. “You are all sorts of heroic, now aren’t you?”

The Orb.

Gryphon’s mind locked on those two words, and all of it, every detail of how he’d ended up in the Underworld, flooded his memory.

Orpheus didn’t answer, just clenched his jaw and glared at the god.

“The soul of a hero is valuable,” Hades said, obviously realizing he wasn’t getting a reaction out of O. “But some things are worth more than a simple soul. For the Orb, you and your band of marauders can be on your way.”

Don’t believe him. Panic lanced its way up Gryphon’s chest. No matter what he’d been through, it would be a million times worse for so many more if Hades got his hands on that Orb.

“Ignore him,” the female next to Orpheus whispered.

Yes, listen to her! Gryphon shouted, scrambling to his feet. Only when he reached for Orpheus’s arm, his hand passed right through skin and bone and muscle.

Gryphon’s eyes grew wide. Lifting his hand, he realized he could look through it to the rock walls of whatever cave they were in. At his back, Hades laughed.

“Oh, to go from corporeal to ethereal. Must be a bitch.” His voice hardened. “Now the Orb. The wife and I grow tired of this drama.”

Persephone sighed.

Orpheus shot Gryphon a pitied expression, then his hand slid to his chest. To the outline of something beneath his shirt

“Orpheus, don’t,” the female warned again.

“I’m not letting him send you both back to the Underworld,” Orpheus muttered.

“If you give him that, the whole world will become the Underworld,” she countered. “Don’t do it.”

“Skyla…”

There was agony in the word. And emotion. An emotion Gryphon had never heard from his brother. Promise and pain and a future that would never be.

Gryphon looked down at his hands. His shaking, ghostly hands. His soul was in the human realm. He was free. He didn’t have a body, but his soul…that’s where the power had always come from. The power he’d gotten from his forefather and rarely used because it was unpredictable.

But unpredictable was better than nonexistent.

Before he could change his mind, he closed his eyes and focused in on that power. It would render him immobile, but what did it matter? He was a ghost here. Power flickered through his limbs, condensed in his chest, and shot up his spine. His eyes flew open and he zeroed in on Hades and Persephone, whom he could now see standing on cement steps ahead, smug expressions on their chiseled, perfect, immortal faces.

Someone gasped. A voice cursed—Hades’s voice. And then as Gryphon continued to channel his power, all sound ceased.

His legs gave out. He crumpled to the ground. Or maybe he floated. Gryphon wasn’t sure. The only thing he knew was that he felt like a deflated beach ball. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, but he could hear.

“What the hell just happened?” the female beside Orpheus gasped.

“Gryphon, you super-fucking-smart sonofabitch,” Orpheus exclaimed in an excited voice. “Help me get him up, Skyla.”

Air whooshed over his back.

“He’s a ghost!” she cried. “How the hell are we going to…?”

Weight pressed down on him. Fuzzy weight. A blanket. They were draping the blanket over him.

“Ah, good thinking, daemon,” the female exclaimed. “Gives him solid mass.”

Gryphon felt himself being hoisted into Orpheus’s arms.

“We don’t have much time,” Orpheus said, jostling Gryphon as he raced up the stairs. “They won’t be immobile for long.”

“How did he do that?” Skyla asked, her voice breathless.

“His one gift,” Orpheus answered, his own words breathless as he moved. “He gets it from Perseus. I can flash in any realm, even through solid walls, but his power is better. He can’t turn things to stone like the legendary Medusa, but when he taps into the energy Perseus got from the monster, he can freeze things.”

“For how long?” Skyla asked.

“Long enough for us to get outside.”

“And then what?” she asked.

“Then we run like hell.”

A crashing sound echoed. Voices hollered. Growls erupted far below.

Hurry. Hurry. Hurry…

“Orpheus!”

The last voice Gryphon recognized. Not because it had come from the female, or from the gods he’d just pissed off, but because it had come from his kin.

Theron. The leader of the Argonauts.

Sunlight burst over Gryphon’s face. Warmth penetrated his soul. Orpheus was running, shaking him inside the blanket.

They drew to an abrupt stop, then Orpheus laid him against something cool.

Grass. He’d laid him in grass. “Stay here, Gryph. I’ll be right back.”

Gryphon’s vision came and went. He focused long enough to look across the rolling field of brown toward a cave surrounded by olive and cypress trees. A cave they must have just run out of. The Argonauts were all there, blades drawn for battle: Theron, Zander, Titus, Cerek, and Phin. The only one missing was Demetrius.

Demetrius…The last time Gryphon had seen the guardian had been in that field outside the colony. After they’d rescued Isadora. When they’d been overrun by daemons. Just after he’d been hit with the warlock’s energy that had sent his soul to the Underworld.

A female also stood with them. Dressed in knee-high boots, slim black pants and a tight-fitting top, her bowstring drawn back, arrow ready to release.

“Orpheus?” Theron called.

“I’m on it!” Orpheus called. He held out his hands and began chanting in that witch language of his. The ground rumbled. Hellhounds broke through the cave opening and charged. A blur of black slithered off to the right. While the Argonauts fought the beasts back, Orpheus continued chanting. Through the darkness Hades appeared, walking toward them in a swirl of smoke, with murder shining in his soulless eyes.

Orpheus’s chanting grew stronger and something glowed red against the skin under his shirt. The ground rumbled again as if a great earthquake was building. Then the entire mountain came down, rocks and boulders and tree limbs crashing in to destroy the cave.

Teeth gnashed, a bloodcurdling howl echoed through the air. Gryphon watched as the Argonauts decimated the five or so hellhounds that had come through before the mountain had collapsed. The Argonauts and the female with the bow.

The battle was over in seconds. In the aftermath, shaking began, but this wasn’t from the ground. It came from within. Gryphon could only curl into himself and the blanket. Voices drew close as he ducked his head. Voices of his warrior kin. Kin he couldn’t face.

“Take him and go,” Theron said. “Get him to D and that warlock, then get him the hell home.”

“Hades will figure out a way through,” Orpheus said, his arms sliding under the blanket to lift Gryphon off the ground. “He’ll be pissed and he’ll be coming.”

“We’ll distract until you’re gone. Then we’ll get gone ourselves.”

“How did you know where and when we’d come out?” the female asked.

“The queen,” Titus answered. “She and her sisters used their Horae powers to see what Hades had planned.”

The ground shook again. And Theron added louder, “Get gone, already!

“On foot?” the female—Skyla?—asked somewhere close.

“No,” Orpheus answered. “This time you’re both otherworldly. At least for now. Hold on to me. We’re flashing out of this one.”

Before Gryphon could wonder what sort of “otherworldly” she was, he felt himself flying. Flying across time and space and away from the Underworld and all its horrors. But not away from the darkness that now lived inside him. And not away from the voice he heard cackling faintly on the wind.

Atalanta’s voice.

Now we are both free. But don’t forget you are mine, doulas. Forever, you are now linked to me…

Orpheus hollered as they flashed to the abandoned homestead they’d found in the hills outside Psychro. Rock walls gave way to a thatched roof. Weeds and cacti overtook what used to be a yard.

The door jerked open just as they reached it and Demetrius’s towering body filled the frame, his dark eyes darting to the blanket Orpheus had draped over Gryphon so he could carry him. “You got him?”

“Yeah. Where’s the warlock?”

“In here.” Demetrius led them to the back of the shack into what looked like a bedroom. An iron bed frame void of mattress sat against the wall, but the warlock—in Gryphon’s body—was bound and gagged on the opposite side of the room, leaning against the wall, his eyes growing wide as Orpheus and Skyla stepped in after Demetrius.

The warlock struggled in his bonds, yelled beneath the gag. Fear shone in his too-blue eyes. Eyes that didn’t belong to Gryphon.

“How do we do this?” Demetrius asked.

“I don’t know,” Orpheus answered. “Skyla?”

“This is outside the realm of my expertise, boys, but I think if you put his soul anywhere near his body, it’ll know what to do.”

That sounded like as good a plan as any. Orpheus tugged the blanket from Gryphon’s back then laid him on the dirt-strewn stone floor, opening the blanket so his ethereal body came into view.

None of them spoke as they waited for something to happen. The only sound in the room was the warlock screaming beneath his gag and struggling with whatever strength he had left to break free of the chain holding his arms secured to the wall above his head.

At first, nothing happened. And then slowly Gryphon’s soul began to slink across the floor, floating really, toward his body.

The warlock’s eyes grew even wider. And he screamed so loud Orpheus was sure all Crete could hear him.

Very few moments stuck with Orpheus on a gut level, but that one did. Watching his brother’s soul slide inside his body. Hearing the strangled scream of protest from the warlock. Seeing the warlock’s ethereal spirit as it was forced out. The image of the warlock appeared in the air, his true form—old, wrinkled, with gnarled hands and fingers and the same glowing blue eyes. The fear-filled eyes surveyed the room, then exploded in the warlock’s head. Then his ghostly body was swamped by a dark mist that dragged him down through howls of agony into the cracks in the stone floor until he was gone for good.

In the silence that followed, Skyla’s shot a look at Orpheus. “Okay, that was wicked.”

“Fucking wicked,” Demetrius muttered. “Remind me not to piss off Hades.”

“Too late,” Orpheus told him. “We already pissed him off.”

He knelt by his brother, ran his hand over Gryphon’s cheek. Needed some kind of confirmation his brother’s soul was in there. Gryphon lay slumped against the wall at an odd angle, his eyes still tightly shut. “Gryph, man, can you hear me?”

Gryphon stirred. With his hands still bound above, his body twisted from side to side as if struggling to wake up. Then in a flutter of movement his eyes opened. Those same light blue eyes Orpheus had seen on his brother’s face for over a hundred and fifty years stared up at him. “Or-Orpheus?”

Relief and something else, something he couldn’t define, seeped into Orpheus’s chest. “Thank you, Dimiourgos,” he whispered. He reached for Gryphon’s hands. “Hold on and we’ll unhook you.”

Gryphon looked up at his hands, bound above, then to Skyla and Demetrius, and finally back to Orpheus.

Heart still in his throat, Orpheus helped Demetrius unhook the metal cuff from his wrists. He rubbed at the red marks on Gryphon’s skin. “It’s over now. We’re gonna get you home to Argolea where you can forget this ever happened.”

In a flurry of movement Gryphon’s arms came up, knocking Orpheus’s hands away. He grasped the front of Orpheus’s shirt with a death grip and tugged his brother’s face close. Terror filled his wild eyes. “No. Not Argolea. Don’t take me Argolea. Anywhere but there. I can’t…” His body began to shake. His voice cracked. “Can’t…can’t go there. Not after…Don’t make me go there…”

Heartache tore at Orpheus’s chest. He grabbed Gryphon’s forearms, the ones covered in the Argonaut markings, as they were supposed to be. “No one will make you do anything. You’re safe now. I promise.”

“No, no, no, you don’t understand.” Sobs overtook him. “She’s out there. She’s always out there.” He let go of Orpheus’s shirt, dropped back to the filthy floor, and rolled to his side, curling into himself.

Frantic to do something, Orpheus rubbed his hands against his thighs and whispered, “Who?”

Gryphon’s body shook, a soul-deep tremble. And one word escaped his lips. “Atalanta.”

Disbelief shot to Orpheus’s chest, followed by a moment of clarity that whispered Yes.

He and Demetrius had trapped her in the Fields of Asphodel after they’d rescued Isadora from her lair. It was more than possible she would have recognized Gryphon for who and what he was down there.

Utter and complete helplessness consumed him as Gryphon’s gut-wrenching sobs tore through the quiet.

Unsure what to say, what to do to help, he looked to Skyla. The pity and horror awash on her face said she was as lost as he was. Turning to Demetrius on his other side, Orpheus saw the guardian’s clenched jaw and the mixture of fury and disgust etched into his features.

“The colony,” Demetrius said in a hoarse voice. Then stronger, “We take him to the colony. There are healers there who can help him.”

“Not Argolean healers,” Orpheus countered.

“So we get Callia and bring her to the colony too.”

Yeah, Callia. That was a good idea. Callia was the queen’s personal healer and Isadora’s sister as well. With her Horae powers, she’d be the one to help Gryphon through this.

Orpheus looked back down at his brother. Watched as Skyla draped the blanket over Gryphon’s shoulders and ran her fingers through his hair, humming again, trying to soothe him. But when she looked up and her heartsick eyes met Orpheus’s, he knew she was thinking the same thing he was.

Shame. Nothing could reduce a warrior to a quaking puddle of tears except shame.

Dear gods, what happened to him down there?

Sickness brewed in Orpheus’s stomach as he swiped a hand across his forehead, tried to refocus. He’d worry about all of that later. Right now they had to get Gryphon away from this place. “He can’t flash. Not in his physical state, not on earth. And I can’t put him on a commercial flight when he’s…like this.”

“We’ll charter a plane then,” Demetrius said in a determined voice. “Isadora has human cash reserves set aside for emergencies. This qualifies.”

Orpheus nodded even as a lump the size of a boulder settled in his throat. Yeah, this qualified all right. He’d thought getting Gryphon out of the Underworld would be the hardest obstacle they’d have to overcome. He hadn’t considered what would happen after.

Hand shaking, he reached out to brush Gryphon’s leg. A reassuring pat, for both of them. “It’s gonna be okay, Gryph. Everything’s going to be okay.”

But Gryphon didn’t answer. Only flinched out of Orpheus’s touch as if he’d been burned. Then buried his head in his arms and wept harder.