Page 89 of The Games Gods Play
Just as those images strike, I’m tossed off a steep drop, hollering a screech that could wake the dead. I plummet with the water, battered and confused, with no idea if or when I should brace or what else I’m going to hit on the way down. I plunge, and it feels like the current sucks me even deeper, tossing and turning. When I’m pushed to the surface once more, I suck in a mouthful of air, right in time to be tumbled over again.
I don’t know how long this will last or how deep the river runs. I’m just trying to hang on. It’s got to slow down somewhere, right? I’m definitely not letting myself think about the fact that the River Styx is supposed to be deadly to mortals.
At one point, the current becomes less violent, and I shuck my heavy, waterlogged jeans, which are weighing me down even more than my relic. I’ve hit the walls—or maybe big boulders? Who knows—so many times, I’m pretty sure my head is bleeding.
But the worst part is the exhaustion.
I can’t tell which is more dangerous, the roiling waters or my failing muscles. At this point, instead of fighting, I do the least I can to just keep my head above water, letting my body be thrown around like a broken, sopping rag doll.
I am near to breaking. The closest to giving up and letting the gods take me that I’ve ever been.
It would be so easy to just close my eyes and go. But I can’t. I won’t. I keep swimming, keep sucking in as much air as I can every time I come back up.
I practically pass out from shock when I burst into a new cavern—one where the waters calm quickly and I’m finally able to swim without being tossed or dunked.
I catch my breath in the total darkness, waiting for the next horrible thing to come at me, which is when it occurs to me that I have a way to create light. I draw a finger down my arm, and my animals come to sparkling life. “Don’t leave me,” I tell them. “Just help me see where I’m going.”
I hold up my arm, casting their rainbow glows across the still water so I can get my bearings. It looks like a massive underground lake. The shore is so far away I’m not sure I’ll make it, but I don’t stop, rolling over to float on my back when I feel like I can’t take one more stroke.
When my hands finally brush solid ground underneath the water, I almost sob with the relief that barrels through me so hard I shake. With plodding, scraping, crawling moves—anything I can make my limbs do—I manage to heave myself out of the water and collapse on the shore. Rocks the size of giant beetles dig into my stomach, and I don’t give a shit.
I didn’t die.
All I can hear is my heaving breaths, which gurgle, a little waterlogged, but that’s a problem for later. I don’t know how long it takes, how long I lie here before my body finally slows, catching up with the air I didn’t have for what felt like eons.
“They should put that in the fucking Crucible,” I mutter to myself.
Then laugh. Possibly a tad hysterically.
I pride myself on not giving in to despair. Ever. That would mean Zeus wins, with his curses and fits, and I refuse to let that asshat beat me down. But at this moment, with no one else watching, it’s so tempting to give in to the sensations rolling through me, as if my emotions were left behind in the trauma of the water and just caught up to me, tumbling me over and over for a second time.
I couldn’t name what I’m feeling if I tried. Mostly, I guess, grief. At all my life could have been.
I roll to my back and force my eyes open because if I let myself succumb to the oblivion of exhaustion, who knows what will happen to me. I’m still stuck somewhere in the Underworld and need to find a way out.
What if I’m trapped down here?
I slam my hands over my eyes, pressing my palms down, holding in tears. I am not crying. Not about this. Not when I lived. Not when Hades’ kiss protects me down here. Crying is for sad things only, damn it. And even then, I’d rather not.
“What are you doing, tiny mortal?” a silky, serious voice asks in my head.
I squeal as I jerk my hands away from my face to stare directly up into the three massive, terrifying, precious, beautiful faces of Cerberus.
46
Safe Passage
“Not dying,” I tell Hades’ three-headed monster dog on a groan. “That’s what I’m doing here.”
Thank the Fates for whatever they did to ensure Cerberus met me before I landed here, and not after, no matter what Hades says about the mark on my lips.
“Then you are doing well,” Cer says.
Ber lifts his head to glance around. “How did you get down here?”
My arms are too tired to even lift a hand to point. “I fell into Hades’ waterfall in Olympus.”
Fire and brimstone. That sounds ludicrous even to my ears, and I lived it.
