Hades watched her like a falcon. ‘Every generation my brother chooses a mortal woman to impregnate. He has them drugged and brought to Olympus.’
Every heartbeat was agony, her blood so hot it seared her veins. Zeus had abducted and raped Alea. Another truth she had fought so hard not to believe. Her beautiful sister had been right all along.
‘Please …’ she rasped, barely able to form words. ‘If you know where Arius is … tell me.’
Hades seemed to wrestle within himself, then his gaze grew as sharp as a javelin.
‘The child is gone. Most likely killed.’
Danae barely felt the blow. There were only so many cracks one heart could sustain, and hers had shattered in the Asphodel Meadows.
Hades’ eyes gleamed. ‘Destiny is not set in stone. The fates delight in twisting the future men think they have seen. Hold on to your anger, little Titan. You are not yet ready to face my brother, but after I’m finished, you will be.’
Danae stepped away from him. Her back met something cold and leathery. She turned as a sea of crimson eyes surged towards her, falling into a swarm of hands as a cloth soaked in something pungent and bitter was forced over her mouth.
Danae woke to bone-shattering pain pulsing through her skull. She was lying on something hard and flat, the iron collar cold against her skin. She tried to move her limbs and found herself restrained. Her jaw ached. There was something hard between her teeth; her mouth stretched around it. She probed the invading item with her tongue. It tasted like wood and seemed to be tied around the back of her head. Fighting the nauseating ache across her temples, she prised open her eyes. A domed ceiling of polished black marble loomed above her.
Twisting against her restraints, she took in the rest of the room. Along the majority of the walls were floor-to-ceilingshelves of glass potion bottles, containing liquids in myriad colours. Benches supporting strange metal contraptions with intricate pulley and lever systems were positioned between pots of pale plants she did not recognize. Crystal lights hung over their troughs suspended by chains, and beside these was a black marble plinth, with several slim metallic objects glinting on its surface.
Knives.
Fear rippled through her. She had seen blades like this in Dolos’ healer’s bag; silver slivers, some thinner than her little finger, designed to slice flesh. Her eyes slid up from the assorted knives to the shelving above, and her stomach lurched. There were more glass vessels, much larger than the potion bottles, some as thick as the trunk of an oak. There were creatures suspended within the liquid. Squirrels, goats, rats and some so grotesquely misshapen she couldn’t tell what they had been in life. She was reminded of Polyxo’s hut on Lemnos, yet where the old woman’s workbench had been a chaotic jumble of spices, herbs and dried animal skins, everything in this room was precise and ordered.
At the sound of footsteps, Danae’s head snapped around to see Hades emerge through an archway to her left, the shelving of the library chamber visible behind him. She must be lying on the stone slab she had glimpsed before.
He wore a bloodstained butcher’s apron.
Her heart thudded so fast she barely registered that Hades was speaking as he moved towards the podium of knives.
‘You reeked of desperation when you arrived in my kingdom, consumed with seeking the afterlife just like every mortal that survives the journey to Erebus. I had hoped, given what you are, you would be different.’ His fingers lingered over the blades; then, as though changing his mind,turned away empty-handed. ‘My wife Persephone was like you once. So full of feeling. Utterly incapable of ruling her own heart.’ He pressed a finger into Danae’s breastbone. She tried to scream, but all that came out was a muffled moan through her wooden gag.
‘In the days of old, before my brother ruled Olympus, the Mother’s chosen mortals had to forget their worldly desires, their wants, their dreams, their loves, in order to become Titans.’ Hades traced his finger over Danae’s chest, up her neck and beneath her chin. ‘Zeus may have taken control of the holy mountain, but for all his power, he is still bound by human weakness. To defeat him you must shed your mortality.’
Danae trembled as his fingers tripped over her cracked lips, then traced upwards following the curve of her nose.
‘The human mind is so wonderfully easy to break and reshape. Take the harpies, for example: their bodies – especially those tricksome wings – took months of labour. By the time I came to conditioning their minds, they had almost forgotten themselves and were wonderfully pliable. Charon, on the other hand, took five years to succumb to my methods after I changed his skin.’ Hades’ finger reached her hairline and began tracing invisible pathways across her scalp. ‘I wonder, little Titan, how long you will take?’
His hands stopped moving, and Danae jolted at a twinge above her left ear.
‘Did you know that pain originates not from the wound site, but here in the brain?’ Her wooden gag muffled a shriek as Hades tapped her skull and a bolt of agony seared through her right arm. ‘Like the roots of a tree, you have a network of nerves throughout your body, all signalled from your cranium. All I have to do is send a life-thread to press on justthe right piece of the organ and …’ She lurched as another burst of pain spiked through her left foot.
Hades continued to tap away, a musician strumming a melody of agony from her body. She thrashed like a beached fish, her vision darkening with every bone-cracking whip of pain.
Eventually, Danae’s eyelids fluttered, but before her consciousness fled, the Lord of the Underworld relented. Relief washed through her, dragging her back to the room. She stared at the obsidian marble ceiling through blurred eyes. He could torture her body until she passed out, but he could not reach her mind. She would not let him.
Then Hades’ fingers continued to move, parting her hair like a predator stalking through long grass. ‘But the marvels of the brain do not end there. As darkness is twinned with light, the mirror of pain is pleasure.’
An odd sensation spread through her abdomen, down between her legs. For a moment she didn’t understand what was happening, then she was transported back to a moonlit beach, the touch of Heracles’ hands, his mouth on her skin. A muffled moan, half pleasure, half despair, slipped from her lips.
Not this. Surely Hades did not have the power to drag forth this innermost part of her?
She fought the feeling, tried to fill her mind with something, anything, to quell the ache building inside her. She gripped the guilt of stealing Heracles’ lion hide, the blood of his closest friend staining her hands. She wrapped herself so tightly in shame she could barely breathe, but still the surge came. Silently, she screamed as her treacherous body shuddered against her will.
‘There,’ Hades removed his hands from her head. ‘You see, it’s all just little pulses of energy. All those feelings, allthose desires that weigh you down and keep you tethered to your mortality: just sparks and signals. Ecstasy and agony: none of it is real.’
A lone tear trickled down her temple. She could see it gleaming silver in the light of the crystals glowing about the room. It was strange; she knew she was still bound to the table, yet she saw the scene as though watching from above. Like she had become untethered from her body, spirited away on an unseen breeze.
Perhaps Hades was wrong, she thought. Perhaps oblivion was not what awaited her. Perhaps this is what it was like to die.
