Styxx (DH #33) (83 page)

Apollymi hesitated as she realized Bethany was pregnant.

“I did not incarcerate you or hunt your son, Apollymi. You know this. The one time I thought I’d stumbled upon him, I came to you with that information and not the others. I never breathed a word to them against either of you.” Tears choked her. “You know it’s true. I came here today to leave this pantheon forever so that I could have my own baby in peace. Please, do not do to me what I did not do to you.”

Apollymi hesitated. No matter how much she wanted Bet’anya’s blood, she couldn’t kill another innocent baby. Not when she understood how much it hurt to lose one. “Who among the gods is the father?”

“The father’s mortal. Human.”

Human. There was something Apollymi would have never suspected from a goddess she knew hated humans even more than Apollymi did. “His name?”

“Styxx of Didymos.”

Uncontrolled fury consumed her. Of all the mortals,
that
was not the name to give her. Not after she’d seen through her son’s own eyes the life he’d lived and what had been done to him because of Styxx.

Bethany held her breath as she saw Apollymi’s eyes turn from silver to red. “Please, Apollymi … don’t hurt me. My baby’s innocent.”

“So. Was. Mine!” The goddess lunged at her then and ripped Bethany’s son out of her.

Bethany staggered back as unmitigated pain tore through her. Gasping, she stared at her unmoving son in Apollymi’s cruel hand. The very image of his father, he was so tiny and defenseless …

And far too young to survive on his own.

Blinded by tears, she reached to touch him. Just once.

The older goddess blasted her back then everything went completely dark.

*   *   *

S
tyxx stood on
the human side of the River Acheron in the Underworld, watching as Charon took Ryssa and Apollodorus across to their final resting place in the Elysian Fields. Unable to speak as shades, he’d tried his best to get her attention. But she’d refused him even in death.

She wouldn’t even look at him.

Alone now, he wandered along the banks, hoping that his father would soon place an obolos coin in the mouth of his corpse so that he could pay to cross, too. Otherwise, he’d be damned to wander the banks here as a dismal shade, trapped between this world and the human one.

And as long as he was on this side, he wouldn’t be able to drink from the Lethe and forget the pain of having lost Bethany and his son. He wouldn’t be able to take his place with Galen and all the others who’d fought under his banner and died for Didymos.

He glanced back as Charon’s skiff holding Ryssa and Apollodorus vanished into the mists. His father had given them coins. Was it possible that his father had intentionally withheld his as a final punishment?

Surely not even his father would be so cold.

Who are you kidding?
Of course he would. It’d been Styxx’s fault that his sister and nephew had died. Like Acheron, he’d been too drunk and high to help them.

This is the best I deserve.
But what hurt most was the knowledge that Bethany would never join him here. She would go to Anubis when she died. Most likely his son would, too.

So here he would stay, alone, unable to forget them, with the knowledge that even in the end, his father hadn’t cared enough to tend his corpse.

Styxx was so cold his hands shook, but there was no way to warm himself. So he sat down to wait and to hope. But as more time passed and more and more people were ferried across, he had no choice except to accept the fact that he would never cross over.

And he would never forget.

June 25, 9527 BC

Mount Olympus

Thin and small in stature with dark hair and eyes, Hermes flew through the hall of the gods until he stood before his father, Zeus. Hermes wasn’t sure what was going on here, but most of the gods were gathered and lounging about as if the world was not about to end.

They ignored Hermes until he spoke. “You know the saying, don’t kill the messenger? Hold that thought, really, really close to your hearts.”

Zeus scowled at him as he stood up from the chair where he’d been playing chess with Poseidon. Dressed in a flowing white stola and chlamys, Zeus had short blond hair and vividly blue eyes. “What’s going on?”

Hermes gestured toward the wall of windows that looked down onto the human realm. “Have any of you taken a look out at Greece in the last, say, hour or so?”

Sitting at a banquet table with Aphrodite, Athena, and Artemis, Apollo rolled his eyes and waved his hand dismissively at Hermes’s panic. “What? Are they reacting to the fact I cursed the Apollites for murdering my mistress and son? It’s none of
their
business.”

Hermes shook his head in a gesture of sarcastic denial. “I don’t think that bothers them nearly as much as the fact that the island of Atlantis is now gone and the Atlantean goddess Apollymi is cutting a swathe through our country, laying waste to everyone and everything that she comes into contact with.”

The messenger god turned a smug look to Apollo. “And in case you’re curious, she’s headed straight for us, screaming your name. I could be really wrong here, but I’m guessing the goddess of destruction is extremely pissed … at
you
.”

Apollo gaped at that disclosure. Why should Apollymi be gunning for him?

Zeus turned on Apollo. “What have you done?”

Sputtering, Apollo blanched. “I cursed my people, not hers. I didn’t do anything to the Atlanteans, Papa. Unless their blood was mixed with my Apollites, they were unharmed by my curse. This is not
my
fault.”

Suddenly, he had a bad feeling as he faced his twin sister who sat across from him.

Artemis covered her mouth as she realized what pantheon Acheron must have belonged to. While she’d known he’d received god powers on his twenty-first birthday, she’d had no idea where they’d come from.

Terrified of what she and Apollo had unknowingly set into motion, she left the hall while the gods prepared for war, and went to her temple so that she could think through this without their angry shouts in her ears.

“What can I do?” She had absolutely no idea.

Just as Artemis was about to summon her koris to her, the three Fates appeared in her room. As triplets in the height of youthful beauty, their faces were perfect duplicates of each other. But that was the only thing they shared. The eldest, Atropos, had red hair, while Clotho was blond and the youngest, Lachesis, had dark hair. Daughters of the goddess of justice, no one was sure who their father was, but many suspected Zeus.

Not that their father mattered. The one thing every god on Olympus knew was that these three girls were the most powerful of their entire pantheon. Even Zeus didn’t try to circumvent them.

Since the moment of their arrival a decade ago when they’d moved in with their mother, everyone had given them a wide berth. When the three of them held hands and made a statement, it became the law of the universe and no one was immune to it.

No one.

Artemis couldn’t imagine why they’d be here in her temple. They certainly weren’t friends or even friendly. “If you don’t mind, I’m a little busy right now.”

Lachesis grabbed her arm. “Artemis, you must listen to us. We’ve done something terrible.”

That was why the gods lived in fear of them. They were always doing something terrible to someone. “Whatever it is, it’ll wait.”

“No,” Atropos said grimly, “it won’t. Apollymi is coming here to kill
us
. We’re the ones she’s after.”

Stunned by that proclamation, Artemis scowled at them. “What?”

Atropos stepped forward. “You must never breathe a word to anyone what we’re about to tell you. Do you understand? Our mother made us swear to keep it a secret.”

“Keep what secret?”

“Swear to us, Artemis,” Clotho demanded.

“I swear. Now tell me what’s going on.” And most importantly, why it involved
her
.

Atropos swallowed before she spoke in a hushed whisper as if terrified someone outside of the temple might overhear her. “Our father is Archon—the king of the Atlantean gods. He had an affair with our mother, Themis, and we were born of it. As soon as we were born, our mother sent us to Atlantis to live and our father took us in. Apollymi is our stepmother and we unknowingly cursed our half brother when we learned of his coming birth.”

“It was an accident,” Clotho blurted out. “We didn’t mean to curse him.”

Lachesis nodded. “We were just children and didn’t understand our powers yet. We never meant to hurt our brother. We didn’t, we swear!”

Artemis went cold inside. “Acheron? Acheron is your brother?”

Clotho nodded. “Apollymi barely tolerated us while we lived with them. We were a reminder of our father’s infidelity and she hated us for it.”

That didn’t make sense, any more than their fear did. Artemis tried to sort through what they were telling her. “But everyone knows that Archon has never been unfaithful to his wife.”

Lachesis snorted. “That’s a lie the Atlantean gods keep so that Apollymi won’t harm them. You don’t understand just how powerful she is. She can kill us without even blinking. All the gods fear her power. Even Archon, and he’s as faithless as most men, and so here we are.”

“She wants us dead,” Clotho interjected.

Still, Artemis was trying to make sense of it all. However, she was missing some vital pieces. “How exactly did you curse Acheron?”

“We were so stupid,” Atropos said. “When Apollymi began to show her pregnancy, we spoke out of turn and gave Apostolos the power of final fate. We said he’d be the death of us all, and it seems today we are about to see our demise met.”

Artemis was even more confused. “But he’s not the one threatening us. It’s his mother.”

Clotho nodded. “And she will kill all of us for our part in his curse. Including
you
.”

Artemis gaped at them. “Why? I did nothing!”

Atropos scoffed as the young women encircled her. “We know what you’ve done, Artemis. We see everything. You hurt Acheron even more than we did. You turned your back on him while Apollo gutted him on the floor and Apollymi
knows
it. She saw it with her own eyes.”

Fear tore through her. If what they said was correct, there would be no mercy from Apollymi. Truthfully, she didn’t deserve any, but on the other hand, Artemis really didn’t want to die, and definitely not by the means Apollymi would use on her. “What can we do? How do we defeat her?”

Atropos sighed heavily. “
We
can’t. She’s all-powerful. The only one who could check her powers is her son.”

Who was dead.

Great. They were screwed. Couldn’t someone have told her this
before
she’d left Acheron to Apollo? This information was just a little late in coming, and would have been much more beneficial earlier in the day.

“We’re dead,” Artemis breathed as images of herself being gutted by Acheron’s mother went through her head. Apollymi was going to make what Apollo did to Acheron seem kind.

“No.” Clotho shook her arm to get her full attention. “
You
can bring him back from the dead.”

Artemis scowled at the woman. “Are you insane? I can’t bring him back. I don’t have those powers. Only Hades does, and since Acheron’s not Greek, that won’t help us at all.”

Lachesis grabbed her other arm. “Yes,
you
can, Artemis. You’re the only one who has the power.”

“No, I don’t.”

Atropos growled at her. “You drank of Acheron’s blood. You absorbed his powers when you did that.”

Clotho nodded. “He can resurrect the dead, which means you can, too.”

Artemis scowled at them. “Are you sure?”

They nodded in unison.

Even so, Artemis was uncertain. Granted, she’d tasted Acheron’s powers when she drank from him, but that particular one was reserved for only a very select group of gods, and if they failed to bring him back …

It would only get worse from her having tried.

Atropos pushed her sisters aside. “The Atlantean gods used their powers to bind Apollymi with one condition. So long as Apostolos is alive in the human realm, she’s locked in Kalosis.”

“That’s our loophole,” Lachesis said. “We bring him back to the mortal realm, and she’s interred again. Forever.”

“We’ll be safe,” Clotho added. “
All
of us.”

“You will be the savior of the pantheon,” they said in unison, holding hands.

Did she really have a choice? Drawing in a deep breath for courage, Artemis nodded. “What do I have to do?”

“You will have to get him to drink your blood,” Atropos said, as if it would be the easiest thing in the world to accomplish.

“And just how do I do that? In case you didn’t notice, I let him die. I don’t really think he’s going to be happy to see me.”

“With our help, you can do it.”

*   *   *

A
lone, Acheron lay
on a cold stone floor in calm serenity, finally numb to everything from his past and present. He was at peace in a way he’d never been before. The walls of his cave shielded him from the voices of others. Not even the gods were in his head now.

For the first time in his life, he had total silence. And it was wonderful. There was no aching in his body, no grief. Nothing. And he loved this feeling of blissful tranquility.

“Acheron?”

He tensed at Artemis’s voice. Of course the bitch was going to disturb his haven. She could never leave him in peace.

Damn her.

He tried to tell her to go away, but nothing other than a hoarse croak left his lips. Coughing, he tried to clear his throat to speak.

Still no words would come. What was going on? What had taken his voice?

Artemis gave him a tender, concerned look. “We need to talk.”

He shoved her back, but she refused to go.

“Please,” she begged with a look that would have weakened his resolve only a few days ago. But that concern for her was now long gone. He would never forgive her for turning her back on him and letting her brother gut him on the floor. “Just a few words and I’ll leave you. Forever if you wish.”