Elias stepped forward out of the gloom, his face pale as moonlight. "The Queen?"
"I saw her," I whispered, trembling uncontrolled. "She's... she's wearing Marissa. She’s inside her. She saw me, Kaelen. She knows we're here."
I looked up at the ceiling of the tunnel, feeling the weight of the rock, the weight of the Citadel, and the crushing weight of the divine attention I had just attracted.
Before I could say anything else, to try to explain what had just happened a sound began to echo from down the tunnel. Not chanting. Not screaming.
Laughter. Clear and regal.
And then, the sound of the cavern beginning to collapse.
FOURTEEN
Flynn
The sound of rocks grinding together is usually low, a bass note you feel in the soles of your feet before you hear it. But this? This wasn’t geology shifting. This was the mountain screaming.
And underneath the roar of collapsing stone, weaving through the dust and the dark, was that laughter. Clear. Regal. Absolute.
It sounded like bells made of ice. It sounded like a woman watching a wolf trap snap shut on a leg she had personally guided there.
"Move!" I roared, the word tearing out of my throat, raw and jagged.
I didn't wait for Kaelen to issue orders or for Elias to calculate the structural integrity of the roof. Instinct, that primal, bloody thing that had kept me alive in a cage for a millennium, took the wheel. I grabbed Aria from Thane’s arms. The Bear Prince was strong, the anchor of our world, but he was the slowest out of the four of us. Right now, speed was the only god worth praying to. Not that Hermes would listen.
She was limp in my grip, shivering violently, her eyes blown wide with a terror that smelled sharp and acrid, like vinegarspilled on hot metal. She smelled of the Skal’s brine, of dry-heaving sickness, and beneath it all, the terrifying, sterile scent ofHer.
Ambrosia. The scent of the High Seat. It clung to Aria like she’d been dipped in it.
"Go! Go!" I snarled at the others, shoving Elias toward the back of the tunnel, back toward the Cradle.
The ceiling above us cracked with a sound like a gunshot. A slab of rock the size of a dinner table slammed into the ground where Aria had been standing three seconds ago. Dust exploded outward, choking and thick, tasting of pulverized history and granite.
Kaelen was already moving, his stolen sword illuminating the gloom with dragon fire, slashing at falling debris as if he could parry the mountain itself. Thane brought up the rear, his massive shoulders hunched, using his own body as a shield against the smaller rocks raining down on us.
I ran.
My bare feet slapped against the uneven stone, finding purchase where there shouldn't be any. I cradled Aria against my chest, ignoring the burning ache in my muscles, ignoring the fact that my body felt hollowed out from too much use after only just coming into existence in the mortal realm. I focused on the scent of fresh air, or at least, the stale air of the larger cavern.
"She saw me," Aria whispered into my neck. Her voice was a broken thing, fragile as spun glass. "Flynn, shesawme."
"I know, Little Pup," I gasped, leaping over a fissure that hadn't been there on the way in. "I heard."
"She was inside Marissa," she mumbled, her fingers digging into my shoulders, nails biting skin. "She was justwearingher."
The thought made my stomach roll. I tried to process it as I navigated the collapsing tunnel, dodging falling stalactites.
Hera. The Queen. The Mother of Gods.
She wasn't just watching from a throne on Olympus. She wasn't just peering through the rift. She had boots on the ground.
How?
The question gnawed at me, keeping pace with my heartbeat. Did she ride the lightning down when Aria destroyed the gate? Was the breach in the Sanctorum wide enough to let a goddess slip through unnoticed while we were busy fighting a Sentinel? It seemed impossible. A being of that magnitude entering the mortal realm should have flattened the mountain range just by arriving.
Or, and this was the thought that made my blood run cold, had she always been here?
Marissa. The Healer. The Matron of the Line.
