Page 77 of The Bound Zodiac

Lydia paused at the threshold, just like Tala had. She looked up at Jupiter. “I’ll see you on the other side, Jupe!” Lydia shouted, but Jupiter couldn’t hear her. Jupiter couldn’t hear anything. She was gone, lost in the light, holding the door open with the last shreds of whatever she had left.

Lydia stepped through. The event horizon swallowed her, and she was gone. The ballroom was emptying. The last clusters of civilians were sprinting through, shield teams covering their retreat, bane swarming the crowd. We were almost through. Almost⁠—

A strangled sound cut through the noise. Not a scream. Something worse. Something raw and broken and animal.

Percy…

I turned, and he was running. Not toward the portal. Away from it. Toward something on the floor near the stage, something half-hidden behind an overturned table.

It took me a second to understand what I was looking at. The body was sprawled on its back, expensive suit torn, silk tie still knotted perfectly at the throat. The face was turned toward the ceiling, and the eyes were open, flat, glassy, utterly empty. The throat had been torn out entirely, the wound ragged and deep, dark matter residue still clinging to it, and the blood had pooled beneath him in a glossy, black-red lake that spread across the cracked marble.

Charles Callahan was very, very dead.

Not far from him, maybe ten feet away, lay another body. Ash-blonde hair gone white at the roots. Golden eyes staring at nothing. He was missing both arms, and half of his face was in tatters, staring sightlessly.

Percy was on his knees beside his father’s body. His hands hovered over the ruined throat, trembling, like he couldn’t decide whether to reach for the wound or recoil from it. His mouth was open, but no sound came out. The bond was a howling void, every emotion Percy had ever buried, every ounce of hatred and love and complicated, devastating grief, all of it flooding through the connection at once.

“Percy—” I started, but Aiden was already moving.

He crossed the distance in three long strides, grabbed Percy by the back of his collar, and hauled him to his feet. Percy fought back. I felt the resistance through the bond, the raw, irrational need to stay, to kneel beside the body of the man who’d broken him and built him and destroyed him and loved him in the only way he knew how. But Aiden didn’t let go. He dragged Percy backward, away from the body, away from the blood, toward the portal.

“Percy, look at me.” Aiden’s voice was rough, stripped of every ounce of its usual arrogance. “Look at me, brother. We have to go. Now.”

Percy’s eyes found Aiden’s, and something passed between them, some understanding that went deeper than words, deeper than the bond. Two men who’d spent their entire lives trying to become something their fathers would never let them be.

Percy stopped fighting, his body going slack in Aiden’s grip, and Aiden kept dragging him toward the portal. Eliza materialized from behind a column, her gold gown torn, her blonde hair matted with blood. She was running for her brother. Aiden reached for her, caught her by the upper arm, and spun her toward the portal.

“Eliza, run!”

She stared at him, her mouth working, tears cutting clean lines through the blood on her face. “Dad—Dad is⁠—”

“I know.” Aiden’s voice cracked, just once, and I felt the fracture ripple through the bond. “I know, Eliza. But you have to go before it closes. I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”

He shoved her, and not very gently, both hands on her back, pushing her toward the portal with everything he had. She stumbled, caught herself, and then she was running, sprinting the last few yards, her gold gown billowing behind her, and she leapt through the event horizon without looking back.

“Move!” I shouted as I realized the room was now nearly empty. More bane portals were ripping open, and the only reason they couldn’t reach the portal was because the starlight repelled them. They recoiled away, as if it burned them, creating a writhing wall of black grabbing claws and teeth.

Draco grabbed Percy’s other arm, and together he and Aiden half-carried, half-dragged Percy toward the portal. Eris’s duplicates formed a rear guard, buying us seconds. The portal pulsed. I felt it through the bond that Jupiter’s grip was slipping. The agony was intensifying, and beneath the pain, something was fraying. The threads of the portal were stretching thin, and I could see the violet-green world on the other side flicker, like a signal losing strength.

“Through!” I roared. “Everyone through, now!”

Theo went first, then Jamie with Gretchen on his shoulder. Lucas dove through. Draco shoved Percy ahead of him, and Percy disappeared into the light. Eris’s duplicates collapsed one by one as the real Eris sprinted for the portal, and then he was gone.

It was Aiden, Phoenix and me left.

The fissures in her skin had deepened. Blood and light poured from them in equal measure, dripping downward in slow, glittering arcs that evaporated before they hit the floor. Her dress hung in tatters, the midnight silk shredded to mid-thigh. Her face was tilted upward, eyes open but unseeing, silver irises consumed by the same blinding white that was consuming everything else.

She wasn’t coming down.

“Jupiter!” I screamed, my voice tearing raw in my throat. “Jupiter, come down! We’re going! We’re all going through, but you have to come with us!”

Nothing. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. The bond was screaming, and beneath the pain, I could feel her thoughts spiraling. Fragments of memory, shards of instinct, the deep Ophis knowledge that lived in her blood—all of it was unraveling. She was losing herself in the magic, dissolving into it, and the part of her that was still Jupiter, still the girl who laughed at her own jokes, had a weird ass Twilight merch collection and fished for pixies with marshmallows, that part was drowning.

“She can’t hear us,” Aiden said beside me. I could feel his terror through the bond. “Rowan, she can’t fucking hear us!”

“JUPITER!” I tried again, my throat bleeding, my voice cracking. “Baby, please. Please come down. We’re not leaving without you. Do you hear me? We are NOT leaving without you!”

The portal flickered. The violet-green world on the other side dimmed, brightened, dimmed again, and I felt the threads of it straining. She was losing control. The magic was eating her alive, and if she held it much longer, there wouldn’t be anything left to save.