Page 18 of Edge of Stars

Unusual.

In that one word, I recognize my mistake.

This isn’t an unusual turn of things.

It’s a magical one.

Orchestrated by the only person who’s now rising from the crowd.

The crowd.

Only now do I realize why everyone’s as quiet as sleeping zombies.

Because they are.

How else can I describe what’s happening? Or…what’s happened? I don’t know how to qualify that, even as I struggle to measure the intention of the female who rises from her pew to greet me. The goddess who walks but seems to glide. Who curves a smile at me like Mother Theresa and Lucrezia Borgia in the same three seconds. Who folds her hands across her middle with the calling of a queen but the intention of a demon.

Hands that now feel like they’re buried in my stomach.

I stop, almost doubling over from the first blow. The next. The one after that. The sensation is more than our strong little Sprout taking some jabs at my ribs. I’m as positive as I am discomfited about that.

But comfort isn’t a word I have a right to in this moment.

Not with the complete stillness that’s taken over the room. The nearly supernatural silence. A quiescence I long to be waking myself up from. A dream that looks too eerie and feels too real.

But I know better.

This isn’t a convenient little vision.

I’ve known this reality before. I’ve seen it. Maximus too. We witnessed it a little over a month ago, in the main room of Rerek Horne’s Malibu villa. The seconds before the chaos demon turned his zombied-out partygoers into fully frozen statues, clearing the way for Hades to sweep in and grab me. His simple pretext of an innocent dance was the jumping point of my abduction into the middle of hell…

“Well, shit.”

Maximus’s snarl brings a welcome shot of ferocity to the air—but only for the two seconds before I recognize the thick underlines of the sounds. His dread is a raw and awful reveal, not just because of the current I feel from every pore of his spirit. It’s the stuff creeping into, and curling throughout, my own.

I let go of him to grab my chest, certain I’m about to endure the same fate as that hideous night at Rerek’s. Positive I’m about to look up and see the demon himself, smirking through his trademark rock-star saunter, just like he did before delivering me to Hades…and straight down into hell…

But that’s before my stare locks on to Rerek himself.

He’s in the fifth-row pew on my side of the chapel, with huge eyes fixed and unblinking at the ceiling. His long neck is seized in a permanent moment of strain. I almost gasp again, assuming he’s been killed, but the frantic pumps of his chest confirm a different truth. He’s alive but locked down, paralyzed in one position…

Just like everyone else.

Po, Zeus, and all the attending demons included.

They’re all immobile. Helplessly, petrifyingly so.

The description is more accurate than I want to admit but have to accept. Everyone in here, except for Maximus and me, is a frozen victim of the spell now…

“Even…Hades.”

In my peripheral, I catch Maximus’s confused startle to my stunned whisper. I look up, confronting the laser intensity of the rings in his dark cobalts, before blurting, “This time, she’s even caught Hades.”

My husband barely has a second to tighten his frown before Hecate smacks the air with a laugh that hits like a nun’s etiquette ruler.

“Come now, sweet one. Please.” She strolls forward by a few more steps. “The cretin has gotten more wily over the years, I’ll give you that, but there are still a few places his power can’t crawl.” Her grand gesture around the church only enhances the daunting effect of her strict black attire, despite the frothy layers of her long skirt and the shoulder cut-outs that bracket her high neckline. “It also means he doesn’t get to take credit for my handiwork.”

“Oh…no.” I squeeze my fingers tighter around Maximus’s long digits. Even tug him into a subtle step backward. Until now, I kept hoping I was wrong. Yearning for some other drastic explanation for this insane scene. Some logical kind of human science to verify the why for the freeze frame across the whole room…