"What the heck was that?" Alex asked. He ripped his arm free of Sabrina's grip. "Do you realize what you just agreed to?"
Sabrina didn't even look at him. When she spoke, her voice was frail. "I didn't have any other choice."
Alex shook his head in disbelief. "He was manipulating us. We could have figured out our way around Cerberus." He glanced over at Peter as if to say, help me out here, would ya?
Peter seemed to be going through his own inner turmoil, and Alex realized he'd be no help.
"Just drop it, Alex. What's done is done. Besides, you aren't the one destined to die some heroic death anytime soon," Sabrina snapped.
Her words felt like a slap to the face. She'd never used that tone with him before.
"I won't let anything happen to you," he said quietly. Too quietly, it seemed, because Sabrina didn't acknowledge him. She kept walking without looking back.
He didn't have much time to contemplate one way or the other. The pull at his soul was getting stronger. So strong it felt like his soul would be ripped right out of his body, leaving a husk of flesh and bones. His heart thudded against his ribcage like it was an osteal xylophone.
White noise flooded Alex's ears. The only things he could hear were his own breathing and the blood rushing through his circulatory system. Somewhere deep inside of him, the sound of an unfamiliar voice juddered his entire existence.
Come to me, it said, somehow moving from one side of his brain to the other in the middle of the sentence. It was like a terrifying 5D audio playing just for him. The sound of it was like knives dragging over rocks. Return what you have stolen.
Alex couldn't think through the overwhelming noise in his head. Go to who? Stolen what?
He must have stopped moving because both Sabrina and Peter turned back to look at him. Their eyes were wide with shock, and both were unnaturally pale. He couldn't figure out why. Could they hear the voice too?
A gentle sensation made the hair on his arms prickle. It felt like someone was running a feather over his skin. Maybe that meant Erebus was there with them. Alex looked down at his arm and saw a tendril of smoky blackness crawling up his arm.
He brought his hands out in front of him and saw that they, too, were crawling with darkness. He shook his hands to get them off. They dispersed into nothing but were just as soon reforming and continuing their spiral around his appendages.
A part of him wondered if he should have been repulsed. But the tendrils felt more like his friends than his enemies. When he looked back up at Peter and Sabrina, he saw tendrils reaching for them from a source that must have been behind him.
Alex wasn't sure who it was, but it was clear they weren't going to hurt him or his friends. He took one step in Sabrina and Peter's direction and-
The world exploded into darkness as soon as his foot touched the ground.
Voices. So. Many. Voices. Alex could now hear screaming, crying, and whispering from men, women, and even children. They surrounded him like he was the one in the middle of the amphitheater getting his face pummeled in by Carter.
Darkness swirled around him like a storm. It whipped his hair and stung his eyes. It felt like he was shadow-traveling without the cold. He saw the blurred outline of a man on his knees from the corner of his eye. Brilliant obsidian-colored wings were outstretched behind him.
Erebus. How was he here? Alex tried running toward him, ready to cut the chains and free his dad.
It felt like he was moving with lead glued to the bottom of his shoes.
That same sickening voice rang in his ears, and the rotten scent of sulfur penetrated his nose. Only you can free him. He recognized the smell from when Edmund killed that daemon. Whoever this was… Alex could tell that they were much, much worse.
Touch the stone! The voice shouted. Pain erupted in Alex's head. It felt like someone had lit a match and was setting his brain on fire.
The dark storm parted enough that he could see a limestone wall in front of him extending hundreds of feet into the air. No, he could do more than see it. He could feel it. It was both familiar and completely, utterly wrong.
Alex struggled to find his voice amongst the noise and the fear constricting his throat. "If I touch that, will you let my dad go?"
The voices in the storm laughed in synchrony at him. They were mocking him for his innocence.
A few seconds passed as if the owner of that horrible rotten smell was contemplating his answer. I will let him go.
The storm parted even more. Alex could still see the man out of the corner of his eye, covered in shackles that glowed a faint red color. He had to save his dad. Then he could fix his own stupid wall, and the quest would be complete.
He walked forward with his hand outstretched. Walking was easier now; the darkness merely puffed around his feet with each step. Every sound in his head amplified the closer he got, like they were all jeering or cheering him on. The pain he felt from it was almost enough to incapacitate him.
Just as he was about to press his index finger to the stone wall, something tackled him to the ground. He felt large claws on either side of his neck and torso. Claws that pinned him to the ground underneath a leathery surface. His head slammed against a rock and sent a new kind of pain through him.
He dared to open his eyes to face his attacker. Standing above him was a three-headed dog the size of a semi. Each of the dog's giant maws was open, revealing cavernous scarlet flesh and pointed teeth gleaming with saliva. There was no sign of the dark storm or the creepy guy talking in his head.
The dog's name popped into Alex's mind, forcing its way through the noise and the fear: Cerberus. Hades' pet that protected the entrance to the Underworld.
He didn't seem like much of a pet to Alex, given his sheer size and the fact that his growling made the ground quake. He snapped his jaws at Alex as a warning to stay down. Not like he was going anywhere, with those massive claws pinning him to the ground. If that wasn't enough, the dog's pungent breath made Alex's eyes swim and his stomach flop. His paw smelled like sweat and ash.
"Cerby, down boy," A frail female voice said from somewhere to Alex's right.
Cerberus whined, and his leftmost head turned to look at whoever it was as if to say, seriously? I was about to have lunch.
"Do you want the ball?" She asked and held up a blue ball the size of a basketball. She shook it in her hand a couple of times before throwing it off to the side with surprising force.
Without another thought toward Alex, Cerberus bounded off in the direction of the ball. Meanwhile, Alex laid flat on the ground with a wicked headache sending pain down the entirety of his body and fear, making him shake like a leaf.
"You control the dark." The stranger said as she wearily approached Alex. "But you are no son of Hades."
She stood over Alex's body like Cerberus just had. While she wasn't nearly his size, her appearance still gave Alex the heebie-jeebies.
Whoever this person was, she wore a shredded burlap sack over her body that hung to the middle of her thighs. She had stringy brown hair that clung to her head in patches. Her cheeks were sunken in, and she had black eyes that nearly vanished into her skull. Even worse, her skin was so thin and transparent that Alex could see her bones and shriveled organs. Every joint in her body was swollen to twice its size, making her knees look like the bouncy ball she'd just thrown for Cerberus.
As he took in her appearance, his stomach growled in hunger. The feeling clawed at him like he hadn't eaten a day in his life. He contemplated eating the dirt on the ground to satiate his appetite. His curiosity over the strange woman thankfully overtook that compulsion.
"Who are you?" Alex asked. His voice was tight and laced with disgust and desperation. Given her disheveled appearance, he didn't think she would have something for him to eat.
The woman, who looked more like a teenage girl based on her size, tilted her head to the side. She studied Alex with her unsettling beady eyes. Alex looked away, and the feeling in his stomach settled a bit.
"Limos," she stated.
"Lie-moss," Alex repeated.
"Why were you trying to help the bad man?" She asked.
Alex carefully sat up and rubbed the back of his head where it connected with the rock. His fingers came back wet, and he knew without looking that they were covered in blood. Not that he wanted to look since the sight of blood made him… well, pass out or scream. "What bad man? I was just trying to free my dad. I think someone has him locked up."
"If the bad man breaks the wall, he will rule everything." Limos's eyes glazed over, and her face scrunched in anger. "You almost let him do it."
Alex shook his head in disbelief. "Look, lady, I don't know what you're talking about."
Pure hatred contorted the woman's face. She lunged for Alex with her misshapen fingers but was knocked off balance by a beam of blue light. She let out a scream that pierced Alex's ears like needles. Gods, he was getting really tired of the headaches.
He quickly jumped to his feet as Sabrina and Peter came into view. Both of them were breathing hard and had a light sheen of sweat coating their skin.
"Who are you?" Sabrina ordered as she unsheathed Egeking and held it in front of her. Her other hand found her stomach. Alex could hear it growling from where he was standing a few feet away.
Peter didn't seem phased as he took in the woman's appearance. In fact, his eyes were still partially glazed over like they had been when the group left the Judgement Pavilion.
Limos hissed like a feral cat. Her body started distorting, and the image of her grew fuzzy. She let out a howl that had Cerberus answering in the distance. "I am the Goddess of Starvation! You will not lie to me, son of shadows!"
"We need to go!" Alex shouted. He turned on his heels and began charging for the giant metal gate that stood between two wall sections.
Cerberus must have seen them take off because his thundering paws were quickly coming in their direction. From behind them, Limos had floated high in the air and was in the process of wailing. Her mouth opened wide, and all Alex could see was the cold, bitter nights at the orphanage when he'd given up his dinner so the younger kids could eat.
His stomach rumbled as he ran. Now isn't the best time to be hungry, dude! he felt like shouting.
The three-headed pet of Hades was quickly closing in on them. The dog's heads snapped in unison, the sound echoing like the crack of a whip. Alex watched in horror as foamy saliva dripped from his wrinkled gums. Meanwhile, Limos had given up the chase. Perhaps spite alone wasn't enough to keep her going.
They were getting closer. Alex could feel the tug of the wall increasing the pressure inside of him. When they burst through the entryway, he felt the pressure pop. He wanted to scream, to drop to his knees and sob at the pain, but he had to keep going.
Peter saw it first. Less than a hundred feet from the other end of the entrance was a very steep drop. He shouted for them to stop but doing so would have meant getting eaten by the angry dog now snapping at their heels.
"We're going to have to jump!" Sabrina said mere seconds before she leaped off the edge of the cliff with the grace of a hawk. Alex followed in a much less graceful manner, with Peter doing the same.
Somehow, Cerberus managed to stay on the cliff without falling to his death. He skidded to a halt with his claws sliding through the ground, sending debris down toward the demigods. He howled, the sound so forlorn that Alex almost felt sorry for him. Almost. But he was now plummeting down toward a chasm-filled ground with pointed stones that would surely impale them.
"Sabrina!" Peter shouted over the wind. "Please tell me you have a plan!"
Sabrina had put Egeking back in its sheath. Her fingers sparked with blue magic that gave Alex a glimmer of hope.
"Trust me!" She yelled back.
It was tough to have trust since they were nearly at the bottom of the cliff. Alex tried his best not to pee his pants at the thought of being made into a demigod-flavored splat on the ground. Unfortunately, that didn't stop him from screaming as they reached fifty feet from the ground, then thirty, then-
They all stopped mid-air. Sabrina's magic crackled around them, filling Alex's mouth with a prickling sensation. Their unexpected halt was so sudden that Alex found himself losing what little was left in his stomach. Well, it had to happen sometime.
They lowered to the ground until they were safely on their feet. Sabrina was grinning like a maniac, while Peter and Alex were both as green as the snake chickens, they ran into earlier. Alex wished they would have kept one to cook it.
Unlike on the other side of the wall, the air down here was a few degrees cooler. It helped dry the sweat that dripped from each of their foreheads.
After a few minutes of gathering their senses, Alex felt exhaustion telling him to nap on the rocky ground. His head was aching with three different kinds of pain, his bones were weary from pushing them to the extreme, and his stomach cramped with hunger so fierce it made him nauseous all over again.
Sabrina looked at him with worry clouding her eyes. "Are you okay? You did some serious stuff back there with those shadows."
Alex frowned. He looked to Peter, who nodded in agreement with Sabrina. The sandy-haired boy seemed to be back in the present with them. "Yeah, it would have been badass. If you hadn't shadow-traveled right to the wall and left us behind."
"Wait," Alex said, hating the bite in his voice. "I didn't shadow-travel anywhere. There was this voice. Whoever it belonged to created this crazy storm that opened right up to the wall. Did you guys not see the person standing behind me with the shadows?"
Sabrina and Peter exchanged another one of their looks that told Alex neither of them believed his story.
"There was nobody behind you, Alex. You had shadows coming out of your back like some kind of darkness-slinging-spider-octopus-man. Your eyes went all dark, and... it was honestly terrifying," Sabrina said slowly. Her eyes dropped from his.
Peter offered him a sympathetic look. "We've all been there. You just need to figure out your powers a little bit more."
Alex didn't know what to say. He couldn't deny that it made sense since the shadows crawling all over him did feel somehow familiar. "So, what about the creepy voice?"
"The bad man," Sabrina said after a three-beat pause. "That must have been who Limos was talking about. Any idea who he is?"
"No, but he gives me seriously bad vibes." Alex sighed. "I'm about to pass out. Let's go find Charon so we can take a break."
X
Happy Tuesday, everyone! I hope you're all doing well this week, whether you have exams or are just ready for the holidays to get here. Please don't forget to give this story a follow or a review if you're enjoying it! Depending on how things go, I will see you guys next week or even potentially earlier.