I snort. “I fully intend to haunt you, Griffin, and whomever else I please, but that’ll have to wait until I’m dead.”
A sudden sheen glasses over Kato’s bloodshot eyes. They start to glitter in the torchlight. He doesn’t even blink. “You are dead.”
I look down at myself and then bounce as much as I can with the lyre on my back, shaking out my aching arms. “No, I’m really not.”
His voice lowers, raw in his throat. “Don’t do this to me, Cat. I saw that…thing. I watched you fall. Heard you scream. It went on for—” He chokes on the words, his face contorting. “Then there was nothing. Two days have passed. Atalanta told me. There’s no way you walked away from that. Even you.”
Two days!Well, I did have head trauma, drowning, and gills to deal with. I could hardly jump right up and scale a cliff.
“Now, I either have to find my way out of here and tell Griffin, or die in here with you.” His sunken gaze locks onto mine with a rather desperate spark of hope. “I shouldn’t leave you, right?”
He looks far too keen about the possibility of dying under the mountain, which is a testament to how much he doesn’t want to tell Griffin I’m dead. Which I’m not.
“I know how much you hate to be alone. You should have gone to the Underworld, with your sister. Or to Elysium, with heroes and warriors. I don’t know why you didn’t.” He gives a bitter shake of his head, and the tawny ends of his hair drag through the thick, curling wool of the fleece. “Since you’re still here, we can be realm-walking spirits together. Maybe you won’t have nightmares if you’re with me.”
Tears flood my eyes. That’s one of the nicest, most selfless things anyone’s ever said to me. I want to shake him for it. Maybe punch something. “I do hate being alone, I would never ask you to bury yourself alive for me, and I’m not bloody dead!” I kick the wall of ice so hard it cracks, and a webbed pattern splinters out from where my foot connects.
Kato’s bloodshot eyes shoot wide. He jumps about a mile and then springs to his feet. His posture transforms as he raises himself to his full height. Gone is the defeated man. In his place, a raging bull. He launches himself at the ice, slamming into the sheer wall with the force of the Minotaur. He does it again, then again, bellowing like a lunatic the entire time.
The sound of his huge body crashing into the ice is brutal. I yell and pound my palms against the frozen barrier, but it’s like he doesn’t even hear. He keeps coming. Fissures form, turning the ice jagged and obscuring my view of him. Blood smears the other side, but the wall holds fast.
I race farther down the side of the ice room, suck in a breath, and then exhale my last bit of Dragon’s Breath. There’s barely enough magic to melt the ice—just enough for a Cat-sized hole. I launch myself through it and land in a heap on the rugs, squashed by the lyre. Pushing up on my arms, I look through clumps of tangled hair and see Kato whirl, his blue eyes frantic. Then he’s on me, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me hard against his body.
My heart nearly shatters my ribs. I make a sound frankly not worthy of myself and throw my arms around him, holding on, my ear against his thundering chest. At least a minute goes by before I can talk without embarrassing myself. “You’re not a battering ram, you know.”
“I don’t care.”
“Your arm is bleeding.”
He squeezes me harder. “I don’t care.”
Kato finally steps back from me enough to grip my face in his hands. His fingers are cold. “I thought you were dead.”
“I could tell,” I say, holding on to his thick wrists. “I amsohard to kill. There’s a lake down there. I sank to the bottom and grew gills. Look!” I tilt my head, showing him. “I thought I was going to drown. It was creepy down there. And cold. Thank the Gods for these cloaks. Thank Hades, I mean. He’s turning out to be a fabulous uncle. There were eels. I hate eels. Are the scars ugly?” Vanity crashes through my verbal tidal wave, and I self-consciously touch my neck.
Looking slightly dazed, Kato shakes his head. “You can hardly see them.”
Meant to reassure me, his lie burns through me instead, igniting my Kingmaker Magic. The scars are pretty damn noticeable, it turns out.
“Thanks for warming me up,” I say from between gritted teeth. Sarcasm should be one of my middle names.
“Sorry.” Kato pulls me back in for a gentler embrace. “They’ll fade. Scars always do.” His hands brush the bundle on my back. “What’s this?” he asks.
“The lyre. The one I was supposed to findbeforethe beast.”
“Where was it?”
“At the bottom of the pit.” I angle my head toward the black hole on the other side of the boudoir ice cage.
Turning me around, Kato supports the lyre while I untie the sling. The moment the instrument’s weight is off my back, I groan and stretch my sore muscles.
“I wondered how you got so heavy,” he says.
“Not with spice cakes, although that would have been more fun.”
The line of his mouth stays flat as he turns the lyre over in his hands. He strums a few chords of hauntingly beautiful music, the purity of the sound making my chest ache. “You couldn’t kill the monster?”
“Kill it? It kicked my ass three ways to Olympus, sliced my leg, threw me into a wall, and drove me over a cliff. And that’s the short version.”
