Beyond the Ether, a swirling, dark mist stood as a veil between the world of the living and my father’s domain.

Shadow Walking was a precise science; it took control to will oneself to the proper place in the Underworld, then to the desired location in the Above. I tried to direct my body, to push aside the dark mist like a curtain, to reach for the sheltered cove where the Sirena was moored, but another force intervened.

The mist grabbed me, turning into a viscous mass of glittering night. I pulled against it, a swimmer fighting a rip current, but a familiar scent floated on that dark wind—cool mint and deceptively sweet moonflower. I froze. I stopped fighting, knowing the effort was useless.

The darkness faded, replaced by a surge of cold air. Then I was falling. Black marble rushed up to meet me. A resounding crack echoed through the Hall of the Dead as I landed.

Silence replaced the sound for a heartbeat. Then the tittering began—my father’s courtiers. Over their laughs and murmured voices, the click of fine boots sounded.

I rolled over, groaning, to lie on my back. My eyes, bred for this place, quickly adjusted to the gloom as a shadow appeared over me, blocking out the wavering torchlight.

“Aidoneus,” a smooth baritone greeted me. Distaste dripped from every syllable.

My skull pounded, ready to burst like a ripe grape, and it was an effort to keep my eyes open, to squint up to meet his gaze. Silver eyes that shone with their own glow—my eyes—stared uncaring, icy daggers down at me.

“Nice to see you too,” I said, flashing him the most insolent grin I could manage through the pain. “Dad.”

The House of Hades was not known for its hospitality, but my father’s court took care of its own.

I sat on the edge of the bed in a chamber I’d not touched in years as Lampads flitted about the room. Nymphs of the Underworld, they served my father and his court, and they tried to tend to me now.

The Lampad who had been my chambermaid when I was a youth, Drea, knelt before me. She held my leg in her long, spindly white fingers. “Hold still!” she hissed.

After so many years spent in the Above, the presence of the dead—or those who had never lived, in Drea’s case—was unnerving. Drea’s sharp nails dug into my flesh, blue lips pulling back from pointed teeth. “Master’s whelp will listen to Drea or she’ll cut the leg off and have done with it.”

I shuddered. I’d spent enough time around the Lampad to know the threat was one she was capable of carrying out. Offering my apologies, I sat still as her dark head bent to inspect the wound on my thigh.

She clicked her tongue, then called to another of her kind, who was busy dusting a long-neglected armoire in the corner. Her words were Stygian—the language of the Underworld. My own Stygian was rusty, but I understood enough to be alarmed.

“No,” I said, squirming away from her strange hands. “Do not call them here.”

Drea glanced up at me with black, irisless eyes. “And why should Drea not? The Fates are skilled with a needle and thread.”

I shuddered again. I’d met the Fates once—the awful beings in charge of mortals’ lives—and it was enough to supply me with a lifetime of nightmares. My father liked to watch the three, half-rotten sisters work—Clotho, at her spinning, Lachesis as she wove threads into the Tapestry of Life, and, most horrid of all, Atropos and her shears. His fascination was never one I’d understood. I remembered well enough the fever dream I’d awoke from when Aurora healed me. It was an effort to put Atropos from my mind.

“Fine,” Drea barked, accepting a bone needle and gut thread from one of her sisters. “Drea will see to it.” Her black eyes narrowed. “But the whelp will not blame Drea if it scars.”

“No,” I agreed. “The whelp would not dream of blaming Drea.”

A strange, wide-mouthed grin lit her face. Then she went to work.

As Drea stitched, another Lampad brought me wine. I threw it back in a futile effort to numb the pain and remained as still as possible as Drea closed the wound in a long, jagged line.

When she’d finished, I tried to stand. Drea pushed me back onto the bed with one of her long-fingered hands. “Where does he think to go?” she asked in her strange, parchment-brittle voice.

“I’m short on time, Drea. I have a wedding to stop, you see.”

Her dark head turned to the side. “A wedding, he says?” She shrugged her birch-skin shoulders. “Master says the whelp must stay.”

I stood then, brushing off her restraining hand when she tried to push me back down. “If my father wants to keep me here, he’ll have to lock me in Tartarus to do it.”

Drea’s pointy fingers clicked together. “Always in such a hurry, he is. Never listens to Drea.”

I ignored her. I limped across the black marble floor toward the ebony double doors that led to the hall and pulled one bone-handled knob open, meaning to leave. And was forced back as several more Lampads poured across the threshold. One held a stack of linens, another carried bottles of soaps and ointments. Behind them came a long-dead Naiad—a nymph of running waters—her mossy hair draped over skin with the mottled gleam of polished river rock.

Drea pointed a long finger toward the bronze tub that sat to one side of the chamber and the Naiad hurried over. Her hands rose over the tub, revealing webbed fingers. Suddenly, water gathered there, as if pulled from the air. But the sulfurous stench of it told me enough about its source.

“The Styx,” I said, watching the dark water swirl. Black liquid reflected the room’s dim candlelight. It danced across the carved rock of the ceiling.

The Lampads arranged their bottles on the black stone top of the dressing table before Drea shooed them from the room. When we were alone, the force of her strange, inky black eyes fell on me. The birch skin of her forehead wrinkled. “Bathe, he must. The whelp stinks of the Above.”

“Fine,” I said, teeth-gritted. “But I’ll have you know that the Above smells a great deal better than anything down here.” I crossed to the tub. My nose wrinkled at the water’s stench. “Gods . . . Why the Styx?”

“The whelp has been Above too long. The rivers hold power. Drea says the Styx will make him strong.”

Despite myself, I smiled. Drea had taken care of me when I was an angry youth stolen from home. She was still taking care of me now. “Alright, Drea. I’ll do as you say.”

She smiled, pointed teeth white as bone, then scurried from the room.

The rivers of the Underworld each held unique magic—the Acheron for woe, the Cocytus for lamentation, the Lethe for forgetting, the Phlegethon for flames, and the Styx for its binding. Magic, oaths, protection . . . legend told of the Styx binding all.

Once, as myth claimed, a God-Blooded infant was brought to the river Styx. His mother submerged him in this strange, black water, making her son immune to all harm—immune but for the place where her hand had held him as she dipped him in the river.

And so, an arrow brought the first Lord of Myridia low through the unlikeliest of places—the heel.

The Styx was older than the earth and full of strange, unpredictable power. I’d bathed in its water before. It had never given me the supposed protection from harm that the stories told, but, despite its horrid stench, the Styx had always offered me strength.

I submerged my whole body in the bronze tub, staying under the water’s dark surface until my lungs screamed for air. The Styx’s power surrounded me. It fed me, seeping into my pores and refilling that dark place where the drowsing beast that was my magic lived.

I tarried there longer than I should have, luxuriating in the strength that flowed through my limbs. Until now, I’d not realized the true extent of the damage wrought by the spelled irons. Had I been at my full strength, it would have been Varian, not me, who’d found himself in my father’s hall.

As I sat in the tub, surrounded by the furnishings of the life I’d once lived—a life that had dragged on for a century here while little more than a decade passed in the Above—the large ebony doors swung open with barely a creak.

“Drea?”

A purring bedroom chuckle rolled from the darkened doorway. “Guess again, lover.”

My hands tightened around the tub’s rim, every muscle in my body tensing. “Angelia.”

A small, disappointed sigh breezed past her lips as she emerged from the darkness. “Aren’t you happy to see me?” Green, kohl-lined eyes blinked from beneath long, lowered lashes, staring out from features so eerily flawless that they could have been carved from marble. A long red gown clung to a thin waist and rounded hips, flowing behind her in a train that dragged across the dark stone. Its low neckline was cut to below her breastbone, revealing more of her than I cared to see.

“It seems a day for unwanted reunions,” I said.

Her red lips pouted. “So the rumors are true.”

I glanced around, searching for a towel, but it was just out of reach. I glowered up at her. “What rumors?”

She stepped closer, full hips swaying, and perched on the edge of the tub. “They say you’ve replaced me,” she said, reaching to dip a manicured hand into the water.

I grabbed her wrist. “I’m not in the mood for your games. Go.”

“Aidon . . .” she whined. “Manners, my love. Is that how you treat your friends?”

I released her and stood, not caring what she might see. Unfortunately, it was nothing she had not seen before. I grabbed the towel and wrapped it around my waist before moving to the table a few feet away. A white linen shirt and pair of dark leather trousers lay folded on its top. Back turned to her, I hurriedly dressed.

She followed.

My blades had been cleaned and left beside the clothes. Angelia picked up one long, curved dagger and studied it in the candlelight. “The entire Underworld is abuzz with the news,” she said, running a crimson nail across the blade’s edge. “They say you’ve stolen a Korai.”

I finished lacing up the trousers and turned to her. She looked me over, a lazy lover’s smile spreading across her generous mouth. Once, that familiar look would’ve excited me. Now, it turned my stomach.

I plucked the blade from her hand and dropped it on the table with a clatter. “Not yet, I haven’t.”

Her smile turned into a feral grimace before she took a breath, and her features settled back into a mask of beautiful ease. “She must be quite something if you will risk open war to have her.”

I ran a hand through my wet hair, struggling to maintain a grip on my temper. “I don’t have time to feed your vanity right now, Angelia. What do you want?”

She stepped closer until I felt something rare in the Land of the Dead—the heat from her living body. “Don’t you know?”

“Leave. Now.”

We both froze. My father suddenly stood in the center of the room. Always one for drama, he hadn’t bothered to use the door. But my first thought wasn’t for my father or Angelia. It was the image of an amused grin dancing across coral lips. It was the sound of a low, breathing laugh and Aurora’s voice teasing, I see the penchant for dramatic entrances runs in the family.

Angelia’s steaming resentment thickened the air, bringing me back to the situation at hand. All traces of pleasantness left her features. She stood, chin high, her gaze locked with Hades’, disdain simmering in the air between them.

A dangerous grin spread across my father’s youthful face. He stepped further into the room, the darkness pressing in with each of his boot clicks. “I know how much you enjoy your time here, Angelia,” he crooned. “Perhaps I should add another millennium to your sentence?”

Angelia paled. She was a daughter of Zeus, after all—an Olympian. To her kind, the Underworld was, literally and figuratively, the lowest one could fall. “You wouldn’t. My father—”

“Wouldn’t give a damn, darling. Not when you’ve been nothing but a pain in his royal ass. Now,” he said, iron eyes frigid. “Get. Out.”

Angelia’s hands curled over the folds of her gown. She trembled with rage, but she obeyed.

My father stood in silence as he watched her go. When the door slammed behind her, the corner of his mouth lifted in a disgusted grimace. “You never should have involved yourself with that one. Hera sent her here for good reason.”

For once, my father and I agreed. I shrugged. “We bonded over our shared history of family strife. But don’t worry. It’s a mistake I don’t mean to repeat.”

He turned towards me, scowling at the dig. It was like gazing into a mirror. His features were shockingly similar, though my wide mouth and olive skin were my mother’s. His hair was darker, a black so deep it looked blue, and longer, curling where it met his collarbone. But we stood of a height, our leanly muscular build similar. To a human, we might’ve seemed brothers, both in our late twenties, though in truth he was ageless and I’d lived fifty-five years. As time worked Above, anyway.

Still dressed in his gaudy court clothes—an ebony doublet embroidered in silver thread beneath a matching cape he wore draped over one shoulder—he also wore his signature black gloves. Gloves that I had never, not once in my life, seen him remove.

The fashion here was a stark contrast to any living court. Wickedly opulent and infinitely garish, it was as if Hades’ courtiers were all stage-performers, play-acting that they still belonged Above. I’d been too shocked by my sudden arrival, then my head’s meeting with the floor, to take note earlier, but it seemed I’d interrupted some sort of fete.

“What was the occasion?” I asked. “You were throwing quite the party, it seems, before I dropped in.”

He looked away, crossing to pick up the blade I’d taken from Angelia’s hand, one of the pair that he’d gifted me when I joined his court on my sixteenth birthday. I suppose they’d been meant as a birthday gift, but the thought had been lost on me since I’d just been abducted. “You still have them,” he said. “I half-expected them to be at the bottom of the sea.”

My jaw clenched. “Stygian steel is too precious a thing to waste. What was the occasion?” I repeated.

“Time is a funny thing, Aidoneus,” he mused. “How it ebbs and flows differently here than it does Above. And it is so unpredictable. The last hour here was weeks there. But the next hour . . . Who can say? Perhaps time will rush on Above, perhaps only minutes will pass.”

“I’m aware. Which is why I’m leaving. Now.”

“No,” he said, “you’re not.”

A vicious grin spread across Hades' mouth. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing these past weeks?”

I stood silent for a moment, confused. Then anger rushed through me in a great wave. “You thought Varian would kill me. That was a welcome home party?”

He shrugged. “It started as a simple masquerade. Imagine my surprise when an unexpected, and quite pretty, visitor popped in. Then I had to peek up there. See what mischief you were involved in. What a shock it was when I discovered you were courting her.”

The anger melted away, replaced by something cold. “Aurora. You are saying Aurora was here?” I shook my head. “No. You lie. It isn’t possible unless—”

“Unless the Korai is part of my court. That’s how I discovered you, you know. When you came into your power, you began visiting in your dreams.”

“Don’t remind me. But Aurora has nothing to do with the Underworld,” I growled. “Or you.”

His eyes flashed then, dangerous and hard. “Why do you want the Korai?”

“That isn’t your concern.”

He took a step closer until we were nearly nose to nose. Dark power, frigid as the grave, churned through the room. His shadow lengthened behind him, growing taller and far thicker—and more menacing—than the courtly, corporal form before me.

Other shadows joined Hades’. Disembodied voices echoed through the chamber and my every muscle stilled, though my heart lurched. No, a small part of me cried deep within. Not them.

My father looked on, a small, satisfied smile on his face as the three scratching, dry voices spoke in hair-raising dissonance. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos chanted:

Daughter of Dawn, beget by darkest moon.

Daughter born to thwart night’s maddening doom. Rise, promised daughter. Oh! Queen of the Dead. Rise, fair bearer of life’s last golden thread.

The voices faded.

A feverish gleam filled Hades’ eyes, and it chilled me to the bone. “She could be the one, Aidoneus.”

The One. The mate fate had promised him. The female he’d waited countless millennia to find.

The thought of Aurora tied to him, to this cold, cruel, strange place . . . Sour sickness climbed up the back of my throat.

A dark brow cocked over liquid mercury eyes. “You don’t just want her power, do you? You’re truly attracted to her.” He shook his head, a bitter smile gracing full lips. “It’s natural that you would be, I suppose. We are too much the same, you and I, despite how you hate it.”

Aurora was not the prophesied queen. She couldn’t be. And yet, the old guilt was there. My mother had stolen something precious from him, what he had intended to give only to the mate he’d spent countless years waiting for.

I was living proof of that theft.

I glanced at his gloves and, for the first time, I suspected the truth of why he wore them. “She isn’t the one, father,” I said softly. “She is not yours.”

His lips pulled back from his teeth. “She is what, then?” he asked, voice far too calm. “Yours?”

My patience was thinning. With the unnatural way time behaved in the Underworld, even now the Dorians could be marching her from her prison to the altar. “Aurora is her own.”

The darkness grew, swirling around the chamber, threatening a tempest. “I need to see her again to judge her better. You will bring her to me.”

Hoarfrost wrapped around my heart at his words, cracking into something jagged that I couldn’t control. Without thought, I grabbed him by his gaudy tunic, death suddenly present in my every vein.

Hades smiled, cold and deadly. Then he transformed.

His body seemed to absorb the surrounding darkness. He shifted, growing taller and thicker to match the shadow he’d tried to frighten me with moments before. Arms that had been aristocratically sleek were now corded with muscle, destroying the seams of his ridiculous clothing.

The change forced me back a step and I released him.

He looked down at me, eyes like two silver coals of unnatural fire. “You will bring her to me, Aidoneus,” he ordered in the voice that made the beasts in Tartarus tremble in their chains.

I glared back at him, unwavering. “No.”

Power rumbled like distant thunder, shaking the very stone around us, but slowly, he calmed, returning to his favored form. Even his garish costume was restored to pristine condition, though his shadow still loomed, monstrous, behind him. He took a breath, brushed invisible dust from his black cape, then his cold eyes lifted to mine. “No? Fine, then. Tarry here while the world moves on—while she lives on without you.”

He turned to go.

Panic raced through me. Hades never made an idle threat and time was too unpredictable. I couldn’t risk wasting another moment, so I grasped onto the one argument he could not deny. “Then she will be lost to us both,” I called to his back. “You’ll never know if she was the one.”

He paused.

“I know you can’t walk in the Above. All you have are petty tricks that allow you to steal a jealous glance. You have no way to retrieve her without me. And if you don’t release me before dawn reaches Doria, then Ares’ grandson will have taken her to wife. The priestesses will force the mating bond between him.” I explained, hands itching to take the Stygian blades he’d gifted me so long ago and run him through. “Even you can’t break a mating bond,” I said with a dark, hateful laugh, “father.”

He looked at me over his shoulder, silver eyes narrowed and glowing.

Then, without warning, I was falling through darkness and icy, swirling mist. When the world righted itself, still I fell. And landed with a wet, shockingly cold splash.

I kicked, sputtering to the surface of the chill waters, rocked by night-darkened swells. And beyond . . . My heart lifted. Less than a hundred yards away, familiar black sails fluttered in the moonlit breeze.