Page 71 of The Catacomb King
“Then stop embarrassing yourself. You should congratulate your people. They just worked their asses off for you.”
That tore Hades’s attention from the water. He stared down at me. My soaking dress, my ruined hair. He wore the expression he had worn when I had stalked through his spider-husk graveyard. When I had turned my back on the sun and walked into his underworld of my own free will.
Then he wrenched his attention back to the crowd of people. He called out, “The goddess says you have done well.”
Everyone cheered.
My skin prickled. “Stop calling me that.”
“I won’t. It’s true. It’s truer now than ever before.”
“I’m not a goddess. I’m a sacrifice.”
“Youarea sacrifice, it’s true. But as we know from our Monarch’s beloved wife, it is possible to be a goddess and a sacrifice both.”
The chaosgötten had all clambered out of the reservoir. The water poured, clear and cold, into the pit. It would be a long, long time until the pit was full, but already it was poolingand puddling. My throat ached just looking at it. After so long without enough water, I was afraid that drinking as much as I wanted to would make me sick.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The chaosgötten were clustered around the lip of the reservoir, jostling each other, but none of them were drinking.
Then Hades said, “They’re waiting for you.”
I opened my mouth to tell Hades he was being stupid.Hecould have the first drink. This whole thing had been his idea. (No, it hadn’t. It had been my idea.) But he was right. The chaosgötten were all watching me.
Elke emerged from the crowd. She came toward me with a gentle, blissful look on her face. She took my hand in her spider-leg. Silently, she drew me to the water.
Could I really drink it? Or would it only bind me to this place?
Then I thought,fuck it.
I cupped my hands under the vicious stream.
And felt as everyone around me froze.
The strangeness of it made me freeze, too. Why was everyone acting so weird? Was I not supposed to drink after all? Had I been tricked?
But before I could turn around, Hades’s hands fastened around my dress and jerked me back. I startled and tried to fight him off, but he had already thrust me behind him. Elke crowded in on one side of me. A mostly humanoid chaosgötter I’d never seen pressed in on the other. Like they were trapping me.
Or.
Or protecting me.
I realized what was happening.
I had already known that I was to be sacrificed in the Lake, but still, my breath caught with fear.
Because through the sliver between Hades’s arm and his torso, I saw the Vizeking approaching. His ruby eyes, his scarlet robes.
And beside him was someone new.
Someone twice Hades’s height and four times as broad. Someone with black skin that seethed and coiled on his body like smoke. Someone with fangs. Someone with blue human eyes — but eight of them. Someone with human arms and legs — but eight of them, too, sprung forth out of an armored thorax.
Someone with a human head of thick, sleek black hair, pulled into a bun at the nape of his neck. Someone who, atop that head, wore an onyx crown.
This was the King of the Primordium. High Lord of the Underworld. He of the bloodline of the Monarch of the Void.
This was Hades’s father.
The King of the Primordium
