He nodded and I extended my hand.
“If this adheres me to another god, I’m done,” I declared as he grabbed his giant blade that had been in some sort of sheath—had Thanatos given him that?—and held it over my palm.
“Be careful, you could take off my whole hand with that thing!”
“Look, a bird!” Cronus shouted behind me.
I spun and pain sliced across my palm.
“Ow! You tricked me.” I turned back to look at him incredulously.
He re-sheathed his sword as I stared at the small pool of blood in my palm. Way more than a fucking drop.
“Sorry, it was better that way.”
Placing his palm behind mine, he pressed it to the muddy wall.
“You better have some disinfectant in your pocket. This is how people get a staph infection—”
“Shh,” he hissed.
A low hum had sounded just beyond the wall and no doubt my face was doing a wide-eyed shocked thing. The wall was vibrating against my hand. This felt oddly similar to what I remembered from my drunken portal opening the night I released Cronus.
Because I now knew that portals and gods were real and there was no going back from that. The vibrating turned into a roar and I yanked my hand back just in time to see the mud crumble and fall to our feet, leaving a golden shimmering door in its wake.
I gasped, but then my shock quickly faded.
There were ornate carvings all around the edge, but in the center was engraved four words. They were not in English though.
“What does it say?” I asked him, hesitantly leaning closer.
He was surprisingly quiet.
“If you can’t read it, that’s okay,” I replied. Maybe it wasn’t a language he could read either.
Finally he cleared his throat. “It says,Cronus is a dick.Roughly translated.”
I snorted, clearing my throat. “Uh, so what did you do to piss off Zeus?”
My giant god was glaring at the words.
“I tried to keep his ego in check.”
He growled when suddenly a whistling sound sailed past my ear. Cronus threw his arms out, a shockwave of power bursting from his palms.
Some kind of metal projectiles had shot from the walls beside us, but Cronus had thwarted them.
“We need to hurry,” he grunted, picking up my bloody hand and using it to grasp the golden door handle. A burning pain shot through my palm and up my wrist.
“OW!” I yanked my hand back, but not before things started clicking and opening and hissing.
Cronus looked back at me. “Are you hurt?” He looked confused. Like how could something so small hurt me?
Half human, asshole.
I just nodded.
Reaching into his waist belt, he pulled his massive blade again. Then he reached out and grabbed a chunk of my hair, slicing the bottom two inches off.
