“Mom,” I choked out, my voice cracking. “You can’t leave me. You promised.”
“Whoever said anything about leaving you, sweetheart?” she said, brushing my hair from my eyes. We both knew the truth, though. No matter how many pep talks Walter gave, no matter how often she reassured me that she wasn’t going anywhere, she knew it was a possibility. And this time there would be no miraculous return.
I clutched her hand. “We could stay down here while the others fight. They won’t miss you. And we can come up with another way to help them.”
She gave me a sad smile. “Honey, you know the council needs everyone they can get right now. I have a responsibility to them, and I can’t walk away.”
“What about your responsibility to me?” My cheeks grew warm as my eyes burned with tears. “You promised you’d never leave me again.”
“I’m not. I’m fighting for what I believe in,” she said. “I’ve no intentions of dying today, Kate.”
“But you could.”
“Yes, I could,” she allowed. “As Walter said, Cronus is a formidable enemy, and there’s little we can do to combat him directly. However, you must remember we have thousands upon thousands of years of experience behind us, and we will put every last second of that to good use. I will do everything in my considerable power to make sure I come back to you. To make sure we all do.”
She could promise me the moon, but she was choosing to forget one very important fact: Cronus wasn’t beatable. Considerable power or not, there was nothing in the council’s arsenal that could take him on and win. Together they had a chance, but without Henry, without Calliope, they might as well have surrendered. They’d have a longer life expectancy that way.
There had to be something. The dagger—the weapons scattered around Nicholas’s torture chamber—those were advantages that could be ours, but how?
“Now come,” murmured my mother. “Take us to see your sister.”
I would have delayed if I thought it might work, but if my mother did die today, I couldn’t live with the guilt of denying her last request to see her other daughter. And Persephone deserved the chance to say goodbye, too.
I held my free hand out for James, and he took it without a word. For all the wisecracks that came from that big mouth of his, he knew when to keep it shut, too. If he didn’t make it either...
No. No one would die today. Not my mother, not James, not Henry, no one.
After one last look at the dead surrounding the palace, I closed my eyes. A warm breeze tickled my neck, and when I opened them, we were standing in the middle of a field full of flowers. Not ten feet away stood a cottage covered in vines, and even though we were in the Underworld, the sun—or at least Persephone’s version of the sun—shone brightly down on us.
“Hey!” cried Persephone, and I turned in time to see her blond curls bouncing in the wind. “Get out of there!”
“What—” I started, and then I looked down. We were standing right in the middle of my sister’s tulips. Oops.
My mother chuckled and took a step away from me, and I moved with her, refusing to leave her side. “I’m sorry, darling. Kate’s rather new to this particular method of transportation.”
Persephone stormed toward us, her feet automatically avoiding the patches of flowers as if she knew exactly where every blossom was. After spending a thousand years in this field, she probably did. “That’s no excuse for trampling my tulips,” she grumbled.
“I’m sorry.” Despite the reason we were here, the look on her face made me smirk. Persephone wasn’t my favorite person, not by a long shot, and having the chance to stick it to her was a small victory during an otherwise awful day. “Next time I’ll try to aim for the path.”
“You’d better.” She knelt down next to the flower bed and touched the crushed tulips. “Why are you here? I go centuries without having to deal with guests, and now you decide to visit me twice in a year? Are you really that desperate for marital advice?”
I blinked. “What? No, of course not—”
“If he’s going through one of his spats, just leave him alone and don’t bother him until it’s over,” said Persephone. “He’ll come to you then.”
“That’s not why we’re here,” said my mother, and she knelt beside my sister and touched the tulips. They glowed golden in the sunlight, and slowly they straightened back into perfect condition. “There. All fixed.”
“I didn’t need your help,” muttered Persephone, sitting back on her heels. “What I need is for you people not to step on my flowers in the first place.”
I opened my mouth to tell her exactly where she could shove her flowers, but James beat me to it. “For the love of whatever you hold holy, Persephone, would you please shut up for two seconds and let us talk?”
The three of us stared at him, and he squared his shoulders, clearly doing his best to look respectful and godly. But with his mop of blond hair and ears that stuck out like a caricature, he looked about as godly as Mickey Mouse.
“Fine. What’s going on?” said Persephone, and though the edge remained in her voice, her expression softened.
“Cronus is about to break free from the island,” said my mother. “The battle will begin within the hour, and I hoped you might be willing to look after Kate until it is over.”