This time, Cyane held her eyes open. Rhadamanthys stepped back and vanished like vapor. She pushed herself up on her elbows to search for him, but he too was now gone.
The third man settled into the same spot the previous two had.
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice cracking as he smiled kindly down at her. “What’s happening?”
“Cyane, you have made your way to the Judges of the Dead. Not an easy feat for one still alive. My name is Minos, and I find you unfit to join either Aeacus or Rhadamanthys in deliverance to the afterlife.” He offered her his hand. “Take my hand.”
“I’m still alive?” she blubbered. “Why? If I’m still alive?”
“Would you prefer to stay in this vestibule with three old men forever?”
He eased his hand closer.
Cyane stared at it, at Minos. She was in Hell, Hades, Tartarus. Or she was so drugged that she was envisioning all of this. She rose up further until she was in a sitting position. She turned her face back to the Greek warrior who was still furiously tense in a statuesque pose.
The old men called him Cerberus.
Isn’t Cerberus a three-headed monster?
But two men vanished into thin air.
She shook her head. It didn’t matter. She was alive—with her head still firmly attached. She looked back at Minos and took his hand. He helped her to her feet.
“If I’m not dead…” The words tasted weird leaving her mouth. “What happens now?”
“I will take you above where others, those better fit, can decide your fate.”
“And him?” Cyane nodded in the direction of the Greek warrior. “He said I committed a crime.”
Minos hummed with mirth and slowly led her away from the pool, towards a stairway that materialized from the dark. His arm went around her shoulders, lessening her shivers.
“You have, in his eyes, but now you are here. You have escaped his domain, and so he cannot do anything more to you...unless you try to leave.”
All she wanted to dowasleave. “I need to get to Sicily.”
“First you need to rest and remove Styx’s blood from your flesh. Only the dead are immune to her power.”
Cyane glanced down at her drenched clothes and discovered black and red rivulets sluicing down her arms and legs.
What am I thinking? This is all insanity.But she couldn’t deny the shock that the black and red water filled her with. She touched her fingers to her forearm and wiped the water away, her belly sinking into an abyss. A scream lodged in her throat.
Minos hummed again, stealing her scream, cleansing the growing terror from her mind.
He drew her up the stairs, and Cyane let him. But after a few more steps, she glanced back to find the cavern and the pool far, far away.
Her feet stilled.
This really can’t be happening.
Her eyes settled on the Greek warrior who was a dozen or so steps below her.
He’s still here?Why was he following her?
For some reason, she felt attached to him now.He saved my life and pulled me from the water.With everything else churning her brain, even considering that the warrior had also tried to kill her, she wanted to confront him again and demand answers.
He’d seen how she’d arrived. Maybe he’d know how to leave?
Cyane removed herself out from Minos’s arm and fully turned around, taking several steps down the stairs towards the warrior. He tensed as she moved closer, but as she lowered her foot down onto another step, Minos’s arm snaked around her chest and stopped her. His humming continued.
