𝑨𝑺𝑯𝑬𝑺 • 𝑃𝐸𝑅𝐶𝑌 𝐽𝐴𝐶𝐾𝑆𝑂𝑁 ²

THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
—dumb brothers ... again

🗡🗡🗡

—JUDITH felt full. Full and almost overflowing.

Not on food, but on bubbling, festering power. Lethal and swirling energy. She was heavy with it, overwhelmed with it, covered in it, consumed by it, drowning in its darkness. And yet, it made her feel alive — just not in the way she wanted to be. She felt like a weight, a living weight, doomed to contain, restrain, and wield the power that had been thrust upon her so suddenly. Cursed with too much.

  The world was a little off kilter, like she was weighing it down with the sheer amount of intensity that dragged her down. And there was nothing on the other side of the world to even things out.

  She was slipping down and down off the deep end.

  And if there was anyone who would dive into that sea of unknown to save her from no return, it was Percy Jackson.

  But he wasn't there. One moment, he was the light at the end of that dark and endless tunnel, that tethering force pulling her back to mortality where she belonged. And the next moment, he was gone, replaced by the last person she wanted to see. Replaced by the shady onyx eyes that had inadvertently condemned her.

  "Judith?" Nico's voice cracked from above. He was hovering over her, barely holding himself up in a push through his exhaustion. "Can you hear me?"

  Her first answer was a pained grunt as a giant paw pressed against her stomach a second later.

  "Mrs. O'Leary, heel." The boy pushed the hellhound off of Judith. "You're okay. You're actually okay."

  The relief in his voice sounded completely genuine, completely boyish and real, completely Nico. He sounded like the boy she taught to wield a sword, the boy she'd fished from Camp Half-Blood's lake, the boy who accidentally called her Bianca in moments of vulnerability, the Nico that she trusted and who trusted her in return. But she knew better now. This Nico was a scheming liar of a boy who lured her and Percy to his conniving father. This Nico was not who she thought him to be. This was a son of Hades, a dark prince of the underworld.

  Thunder seemed to boom in her chest, the thunder of an oncoming fire storm. And a liquid heat raced underneath her skin like molten lava, bleeding into her every thought, turning them dark and vicious, honing them into blades and pointing their tips at the young boy.

  "You ... " Judith's hands shoved him off her and he landed with a thud to her right. She flew to her feet and stood off across from him, hands pulling out her scimitars with expert timing. One pointed at his chest and the other stretched out in the direction of her half-brothers who had yet to say or do anything at her re-emergence. "How could you do this?"

His heels dug into the blackened sand as he leaned away from the sharpened edge of her blade. "You have to believe me — "

"Believe you? Believe you?!" She snapped at him. "After all this?! You lied and you tricked us. And we're the fools because we trusted you. How long? How long have you been going behind my back about this? Since the beginning?!"

The fury blazed across her skin, lighting up every inch of her, blooming from her chest with unrelenting force and crashing against every barrier she had thrown up to stop it in the past. She could feel it in her bones, in her muscles, and in her voice. And she knew that Nico could, too. He stood up straighter and clenched his hand around his sword defensively.

"Judith, I swear — I swear to you that this wasn't my intention!" He shouted, voice hoarse. "I didn't know!"

  There was a part of her, deep inside, that wanted to bow down to his desperation. It was the part of her that had sworn to protect and watch over him. The part of her that wasn't strong enough to fight the tornado of fury in her veins.