The gods are real.
All it takes is this one realization, sparked by a short video no one expected to go viral, to turn 21-year-old Angie Nohl and her friends' worlds on their heads.
Their existence now exposed to the masses, Angie and the Greek pant...
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Something gold glittered up at Angie from the floor. She let her eyes follow it, and found Artemis's bow resting in a dusty corner—she must've dropped it, Angie thought, before Poseidon had vanished with her and Esme.
Angie's hands twitched. She wanted to pick it up, to at least try to wield it, to shoot the bolt from the door and run and run and not stop until she found Hades or Hermes and they could all fix this mess. But she turned, glancing at Alex, whose skin was already three shades paler than usual, and she knew she couldn't.
Frustration bubbled up inside of her, bitter in her mouth. The second she laid eyes on Esme again, she was going to destroy her. Whatever kindness she'd once held in her body for her fellow human had certainly left it now.
"It's..." Alex winced, keeling over, pressing his palms into the floor. He looked up at Angie, the discomfort in his face so obvious and so sickening that Angie had to look away. "It's no good. I feel...I feel sick. I don't think he was lying."
"Well, fight it," Conny said, grabbing at Alex's collar. Conny's face was flushed, nearly feverish, his pupils wildly dilated. "Can't you just fight it until we find Hades? Hades will fix this, right?"
"And possibly lose my mind and eat you in the process?" Alex snapped, shoving Conny's hand away from him. "No thanks. I'm not chancing it."
"We don't know where Hades is, or if he's even still in this building," Angie said, her arms stick straight by her sides as she fought to keep her whole body from trembling. "I'm with Alex. Leaving this room right now is too risky."
Conny tossed up his hands. "Well, that's great. I guess we'll just fucking sit here until we come up with a plan, or Alex bites a chunk out of us. Whichever comes first."
Alex made a sickened noise again, his hand over his mouth. "Please don't, Conny."
"I'm just telling it like it is!"
"What if Alex didn't leave?" Vik said.
An unsteady silence settled over the room for a moment, the fog in Angie's head only growing more muddled in the process.
Clio, however, looked excited. "No. He has a point. Poseidon said the affliction would speed up its course if you step out of the room," she said, gesturing at Alex. "He didn't say anything about what would happen if we did."
"The you very much could have been referencing all of us," Angie said, frowning. "It wasn't clear."
"True, it was ambiguous," Vik conceded. "But from what you all have told me about this Poseidon guy, that very much could have been intentional. So we could chance it. We find a way out, three of us leave to find the others, and one stays here with Alex. Once we've found Hades and Hermes, maybe they'll know how to undo the curse."
