The House of Hades (The Heroes of Olympus #4)(56)

She knelt, trying to ignore the smell. She shuffled to one side, forcing Sciron to adjust his stance, but she imagined that the sea was still at her back. She held that vision in her mind as she shuffled sideways again.

“Just get on with it!” Sciron said.

Hazel suppressed a smile. She’d managed to turn Sciron one hundred and eighty degrees, but he still saw the water in front of him, the rolling countryside at his back.

She started to clean.

Hazel had done plenty of ugly work before. She’d cleaned the unicorn stables at Camp Jupiter. She’d filled and dug latrines for the legion.

This is nothing, she told herself. But it was hard not to retch when she looked at Sciron’s toes.

When the kick came, she flew backward, but she didn’t go far. She landed on her butt in the grass a few yards away.

Sciron stared at her. “But…”

Suddenly the world shifted. The illusion melted, leaving Sciron totally confused. The sea was at his back. He’d only succeeded in kicking Hazel away from the ledge.

He lowered his flintlock. “How—”

“Stand and deliver,” Hazel told him.

Jason swooped out of the sky, right over her head, and body-slammed the bandit over the cliff.

Sciron screamed as he fell, firing his flintlock wildly, but for once hitting nothing. Hazel got to her feet. She reached the cliff’s edge in time to see the turtle lunge and snap Sciron out of the air.

Jason grinned. “Hazel, that was amazing. Seriously…Hazel? Hey, Hazel?”

Hazel collapsed to her knees, suddenly dizzy.

Distantly, she could hear her friends cheering from the ship below. Jason stood over her, but he was moving in slow motion, his outline blurry, his voice nothing but static.

Frost crept across the rocks and grass around her. The mound of riches she’d summoned sank back into the earth. The Mist swirled.

What have I done? she thought in a panic. Something went wrong.

“No, Hazel,” said a deep voice behind her. “You have done well.”

She hardly dared to breathe. She’d only heard that voice once before, but she had replayed it in her mind thousands of times.

She turned and found herself looking up at her father.

He was dressed in Roman style—his dark hair close-cropped, his pale, angular face clean-shaven. His tunic and toga were of black wool, embroidered with threads of gold. The faces of tormented souls shifted in the fabric. The edge of his toga was lined with the crimson of a senator or a praetor, but the stripe rippled like a river of blood. On Pluto’s ring finger was a massive opal, like a chunk of polished frozen Mist.

His wedding ring, Hazel thought. But Pluto had never married Hazel’s mother. Gods did not marry mortals. That ring would signify his marriage to Persephone.

The thought made Hazel so angry, she shook off her dizziness and stood.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

She hoped her tone would hurt him—jab him for all the pain he’d caused her. But a faint smile played across his mouth.

“My daughter,” he said. “I am impressed. You have grown strong.”

No thanks to you, she wanted to say. She didn’t want to take any pleasure in his compliment, but her eyes still prickled.

“I thought you major gods were incapacitated,” she managed. “Your Greek and Roman personalities fighting against one another.”

“We are,” Pluto agreed. “But you invoked me so strongly that you allowed me to appear…if only for a moment.”

“I didn’t invoke you.”

But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. For the first time, willingly, she’d embraced her lineage as a child of Pluto. She’d tried to understand her father’s powers and use them to the fullest.

“When you come to my house in Epirus,” Pluto said, “you must be prepared. The dead will not welcome you. And the sorceress Pasiphaë—”

“Pacify?” Hazel asked. Then she realized that must be the woman’s name.

“She will not be fooled as easily as Sciron.” Pluto’s eyes glittered like volcanic stone. “You succeeded in your first test, but Pasiphaë intends to rebuild her domain, which will endanger all demigods. Unless you stop her at the House of Hades…”

His form flickered. For a moment he was bearded, in Greek robes with a golden laurel wreath in his hair. Around his feet, skeletal hands broke through the earth.

The god gritted his teeth and scowled.

His Roman form stabilized. The skeletal hands dissolved back into the earth.

“We do not have much time.” He looked like a man who’d just been violently ill. “Know that the Doors of Death are at the lowest level of the Necromanteion. You must make Pasiphaë see what she wants to see. You are right. That is the secret to all magic. But it will not be easy when you are in her maze.”

“What do you mean? What maze?”

“You will understand,” he promised. “And, Hazel Levesque…you will not believe me, but I am proud of your strength. Sometimes…sometimes the only way I can care for my children is to keep my distance.”

Hazel bit back an insult. Pluto was just another deadbeat godly dad making weak excuses. But her heart pounded as she replayed his words: I am proud of your strength.

“Go to your friends,” Pluto said. “They will be worried. The journey to Epirus still holds many perils.”