Page 305 of The Mortal Trials

Ares’s head whips to Hermes, who’s also looking around for the source of the disturbance.

At our backs, the portal activates and a strange hum resonates from the glow.

The telecasters on either side of the arena illuminate and Carina’s face fills the screens. She stares into the camera with wildfire in her eyes.

“Hermes?” Ares growls.

“I…it’s not me,” the messenger god stutters, pressing an innocent hand to his chest. He’s still holding the laurel.

Carina stares into the camera. “My sister, Callalie Ryan, is a gods damned hero.”

Her image distorts and her declaration plays again and again, overlapping like the voices we heard returning from the river in the fourth trial. Until the video suddenly freezes, pausing on the righteous indignation on my sister’s face. But there’s not just anger in her stare. There is also justice, truth, and love.

These were the first words of the editorial she broadcast that day – the one Hermes’s power pushed to the realms despite its content – and they remind me of the ones Ares said were her last: Callalie will kill you.

A hot, arid wind gusts against our backs. August’s eyes meet mine as we turn to see quetzals pouring from the portal. Thousands upon thousands of them. Beneath them, bright green serpents of all sizes slither through, carving sideways paths into the sand as they flood the arena floor.

A small one climbs up my prosthesis, twisting into the metal so that I can’t get him out. It curls around my wrist before I know what’s going on.

Beside me, August curses as one cuffs around his wrist, too.

The tiny snakes harden into stone – to jade – with their mouths snapping at their tails.

The ground shakes as a massive man ducks through the portal, towering over even Ares and Hermes.

He wears a golden disc headdress with long, male quetzal plumes streaming from the back. They sway when he turns his head. My heart thunders as his slitted, serpentine eyes find me. They’re yellow, like Carina’s chair that’s nestled beneath our dining table back home. Just as Abuela described.

I’ve never met this god, but my grandmother introduced me to him in stories when I was only a girl. Tales I thought were just meant for fun and to encourage me to sleep.

But my wise Abuela knew him. She proved it as she described him down to the smallest detail, including the dimples bracketing the fatherly corners of his mouth. The way his beard is trimmed. The iridescent scales set within his copper skin.

On his chest lays a broad collar necklace made of jade and gold. An exact match to mine, only much larger.

“Daughter.” He crouches to meet my eye.

I kneel, grabbing August’s arm and dragging him down to his knee with me. “Quetzalcoatl,” I greet.

The feathered serpent god gives a terrible, fearsome smile. He turns his attention to Ares. “I claim Callalie Ryan as my champion.”

His champion.

Not his mortal. Not the girl he will champion.

The words are a blade held to Ares’s throat.

A golden fucking spear.

The earth trembles again before a second giant emerges from the portal, his face a mixture of life and death. Of mighty flesh and skeletal bone. The Aztec god of death.

His headdress is made from a black-feathered bird and sits on his head like a macabre crown. I finally see something more primal and vivid than Morrigan’s darkness: Mictlantecuhtli’s eyes. They are depthless coals with no beginning and no end. No iris or pupil, but a keenness sharp enough to pierce the veil separating the souls with and without bodies.

August takes my hand.

“Mictlantecuhtli,” I whisper to him. “Lord of the land of the dead.”

Mictlantecuhtli makes a fist. When he opens his fingers, a necklace lays in his palm. A braided leather cord with a jade charm shaped like a skull. He raises the pendant to his lips and blows into it. The sound of a thousand human screams fills the arena.

The quetzals flying overhead shriek in reply.