Shattered Gods (Dark Olympus, #10)(67)

“Yes, you were. But you won’t get a chance to touch any of my daughters now.” Demeter smiles grimly. “All your plans are finished. Or they will be.” She shifts, angling her body away from the people starting to press insistently against the line my people have formed. “Goodbye, Circe.”

I feel Antigone tense and have a moment to scream, “Don’t!” before she shoots Demeter. The bullet takes the woman between the eyes. She’s dead before her body hits the ground, taking with her any chance of salvaging this. “Godsdamn it.”

Everything goes still. The mob actually pauses for several beats as if they’re shocked by what just happened. As if, like me, they can hardly believe that a personality as big as Demeter’s could be cut down so quickly, so violently. And then, as one, the people roar. I feel the sound down to my very bones, written in my nerve endings. It was bad before. There’s no surviving what comes next.

One of my people screams as the mob courses over her, more force of nature than individual people. And all that unspeakable rage is pointed directly at me. I was never naive enough to think my death would come easily, not from Zeus and not from whatever finally removed me from this earth. But being torn apart by a mob is a nightmarish scenario by any standard. I can’t stop shaking.

Antigone hauls me to the side of the bridge. “You’re going to have to jump.”

The water. Again. “No.” I clutch at her arms. “Antigone, no. I’ll die.”

“You’ll die if you stay here.” The mob is almost to us. She pulls me into a tight hug that I have no chance to process and grabs my shoulders. “Live, Circe. For all of us.” And then she shoves me over the edge of the bridge.

I fall.





26

Circe




My vision whites out the moment I hit the water. It’s cold, ice injected directly into my veins, frozen blocks of muscle and bones weighing me down even more than my foolishly dramatic dress. By the time I can see again, the surface is gone. Darkness reigns.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to give in. To just…open my mouth and let the water take me. This time, for good. I’ve heard drowning is the most peaceful way to die a violent death. My nightmares would disagree with that statement, but this cold darkness is still preferable to what would have happened to me on the bridge. My bones shattered as I was trampled to death. My limbs torn, my face bludgeoned. A thousand other ways to go from being a person to simply a body.

Antigone. Did she get out? Did the others?

If I die now, it will all be for nothing. All the patience and plotting and sacrifice. The look of betrayal on Hecate’s face, time and time again, as I fail to become the better person she believes I’m capable of being. The knife sliding into Atalanta’s shoulder, the blood and sweat and tears that have been shed by far too many.

If I die now, Zeus wins.

The last thought slams me back into my abused body. I clamp my jaw shut and force my limbs into motion, struggling through the racing water toward the faint light overhead.

I surface to the roaring of the river. I’m near the middle, and I’m so damned cold I can barely tread water as the river whisks me toward the sea. My lungs feel like blocks in my chest, my dress tangling around my frantically kicking feet. The river is moving too quickly. I’m going to drown. There’s no way out of this, no path forward.

I catch a glimpse of figures downstream on the bank to the right of me, but the current spins me around and slams me into a rock before I can see more.

This time, when I go under, I stay under. The dress is too damned heavy, the water too cold, my body too tired. My thoughts become sluggish. Swim. Fight. Swim. Air. My limbs aren’t obeying, though. Instead of climbing back to the surface, I sink down into the darkness, the light diminishing above me in a way that has little to do with depth and everything to do with the spots blooming behind my eyes. I need air. If I could move past the horrific cold permeating every bit of me, I would have drowned by now.

Movement in the shadows, a figure cutting toward me with powerful strokes. A dream. A nightmare. A hallucination of my oxygen-deprived brain. It’s the only explanation for seeing Hecate here, drowning right beside me. Except she’s not drowning. She wraps her arms around me, and then we’re rising, rising, rising.

The first slap of air against my face feels like a blade. Even as what’s left of the logical part of me demands I hold perfectly still and concentrate on keeping my face above water, my hind brain is screaming I’ll lose access to the air if I don’t fight. I tense, hands finding the arm banded across my chest, fingers digging in.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Hecate gasps. “We’re probably going to fucking die even without you struggling, but probably isn’t a guarantee.”

My frozen lips can’t form words. I don’t know how she can. It’s everything I’m capable of in this moment to kick my feet in an attempt to keep us moving, to be a help instead of the stone dragging us both down.

It takes forever. It takes a single second.

I can barely feel my hands and feet as Hecate suddenly releases me and I sink again. My ass hits rocks; we’re in the shallows. All I have to do is sit up and I can keep breathing. I just need to…

Different arms, both familiar and not, gather me up and up and up. I see Atalanta’s face twisted into a fearsome scowl, and then everything goes dark.