Page 108 of The Catacomb King
Then something sharp punchedout of his body. It sank into my arm. I screamed and let go of his carapace. I tried to grab on again an instant later, but it was too late. I fell like a stone, frantically thrusting the points of the crown at his body again; at the last second the crown dug in, arresting my fall, but the sudden jolt felt like it had ripped my shoulder out of its socket. I prayed it hadn’t.
A few more minutes, I begged silently, terrified.That’s all I need.
I blinked through the blood of my broken face. I couldn’t see Hades anymore.
But Ididsee what had punched out of the King’s body and stabbed me.
It was a spider leg.
The King was growing more legs. I couldn’t see — he was so big, and I was so close, and my vision was going hazy, I had lost so much blood — but I thought that he now had sixteen of them. Eight human, eight spider. I had never seen a chaosgötter with more than eight legs before.
The King growled furiously and leapt into the air to shake me off. I gasped with terror. I hung on for dear life. For a moment we were both weightless.
He landed on the cavern wall. The impact jarred me to the teeth. He was upside-down, with me hanging a hundred feet above the Lake. From here, the Lake’s liquid surface looked as hard as ice. Even unwounded, I never would have had the strength to hold on like this.
But I didn’t have to hold on. I just had to get the King to let go.
One of his human arms was dangerously close to me, the hand balled into a fist. His whole body was shaking, booming.
He was laughing at me.
Not for long, I thought, half-dead. I grabbed the fist as it swung toward me and sank my teeth into it.
The King howled. He shook and shook his arm but I hung on. I took some small solace from the fact that his human flesh was as soft as mine. I tightened my grip on the crown and wielded it like a clumsy dagger. I wrenched it from his carapace and I drove it into his arm.
He tried to grab at me with another arm, one higher up (or lower down? I was so disoriented). I seized that one, then, and did the same thing, which let me haul myself up a few feet, toward his head. Again, again, sometimes with a spider-leg, working my way all the way up to his head.
Until I was face-to-face with his eight blue eyes.
They were Hades’s eyes.
They were so human.
But there was nothing human in them.
I smashed the crown into them. Points-first.
I prayed that behind those human eyes was a human brain. That the King, like any human, could be killed by stabbing it.
But I would never know, because two things happened at once:
The crown clanged against aninternalcarapace. A skull? It was like hitting steel. My heart stopped.
The King screamed a bloodcurdling scream.
He released his grip on the wall and fell like a stone.
And I fell with him.
I lost my grip on the crown. It stayed embedded in his face.
We both hurtled toward the water. I put my arms up but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Ifeltthe blood whipping out of my face, my arm, snatched by the wild air.
But it didn’t hurt. I was too shocked. I couldn’t believe I had failed so badly.
My mother, still dead.
The King, still alive.
