Chapter 9
Iwas frozen. My legs wanted to run, my brain was screaming at me to do something, but somehow I couldn’t move. “Did you say Pandora? As in…?” I hoped I was wrong about my previous thoughts. Maybe this was a totally different, completely non-descript Pandora’s Box. Surely she had more than one box. I mean ... that made sense, right?
His face was a mask of shadows, and he was scaring me a little as he rasped out, “Pandora's Box, container of the nine deadly sins that if opened will end the world.”
I gulped. Well it definitely had opened…
“What do we do?” I gasped, and that seemed to bring him back from wherever he’d gone in his mind.
He focused on me and I flinched at the darkness in his eyes. “The sins tried to manifest in your body but I locked them out. Now, though, they’re going to form their own manifestations, slowly, one by one. And then they’re going to destroy the world.”
Destroy the world?
“The old destroy the world trick,” I said, trying not to faint. “Couldn’t they think of something else this time?”
Cronus glared at me. “Now is not the time for yoursarcasm,Maisey. We have minutes before it’s too late. We need to put them back in the box.”
He started to look around, seemingly for the box.
Oops.
“We can’t,” I said quickly, needing to confess the full magnitude of this shit show. “About the box … it disappeared.”
My hands went to the necklace that was permanently attached to me. “Apparently it prefers to be jewelry.”
Cronus reached out and stroked his fingers across it; the piece heated and vibrated under his touch. Like it … enjoyed it. I was surprised he hadn’t killed me yet, but then I remembered we were bonded and that was only to keep himself alive.
“What part of your body touched the box?” he asked softly, those words threaded with undercurrents of danger.
I gulped. “Uh, my hair.”
Gold burned brightly through his blue irises. “Human, seriously? You may have just ended the world!”
#NotOnMyBuckletList
“There must be something we can do,” I shrieked.
Cronus was looking around the room then, but the grim set of his features told me everything. “Without my brothers and sisters, or the box, the sins are too powerful for me to contain alone.” He muttered a few more phrases, not in English. “The sins should not have been here,” he finally snapped. “They were contained in their own, undetectable chamber deep under the ocean. Far from the Greek gods. Fucking Zeus!”
I swallowed hard, trying to find some moisture in my dry mouth. “Apparently not that undetectable.”
Cronus’ chest rumbled, low growls falling from his lips, and I decided to shut the fuck up. He was not in the mood.
“We need to leave before they finish the first part of their manifestation,” he said, his eyes falling to the necklace again and then to the menacing creatures forming from the blackness. “There’s only one option left to save the world.”
One. One wasn’t many. That wasn’t nearly enough to save the world. I would have felt okay with a hundred options. Even fifty would have been doable. But one. Like … one...
Maybe he just forgot the hundred part. Yep. I was going with that theory.
At this stage, the black swirl closest to me had started to form some real distinct features: a tall man, with burnt orange skin, black hair, and glowing green eyes. His face was handsome and strong. That jaw could probably knock down a brick wall, and his nose was defined and flawless. If he wasn’t some crazy sin ready to break my favorite world, I might have checked him out harder. As it was, I barely had time to see any of the others before Cronus latched on to my arm, dragging me out of the room. We went back the same way we had come, away from the black curtain, and I got the sense that no one could just god their way behind that curtain.
“Move faster,” he said with a huff, and I started to pump my legs as hard as I could.
“Do you know the signs of a collapsed lung?” I wheezed a minute later as we left the entrance.
I really couldn’t breathe. I mean, this was why I didn't run.#NotRocketScience
Thankfully, the moment we were free of the volcano cave of horrors, Cronus snatched me up, and then the almost familiar darkness wrapped around us, and I was yanked out of New Zealand.
