The lightning bolt slammed into Alkoune, and the Nymph convulsed for a heartbeat before her charred flesh ruptured. The sickly-sweet scent of it drove Pandora’s stomach to heaving, and she retched even as Alkoune’s corpse collapsed in a smoldering heap.
Another hand yanked Pandora upward while she retched, Prometheus heaving her forward.
Chaos erupted like a volcano, the spilling of blood. There, to one side, Ares had begun hacking into Pleiad guards with abandon, his strength and speed unmatchable. The Olympian kicked off pillars with such grace as to seem to actually fly about the courtyard, cutting down screaming prey whether they fought back or no. More bolts of lightning crashed around the citadel, and Pandora didn’t want to even imagine their victims.
Men and Titans dashed one way and another, and the stench of blood was almost overpowering. Fires leapt about the courtyard, catching bushes and trees, igniting tapestries, and immolating the corpses of the fallen.
Prometheus grabbed Pandora’s hand and ducked into a lounge, pulling her behind him to take a back door out into the fish pool courtyard.
Releasing Pandora, the Titan raced to intercept Kelaino, who was actually running toward the chaos. Flames engulfed her hands, swirling about them like writhing serpents.
Stepping out of the shadows, Zeus’s witch Hekate interposed herself between Prometheus and his niece, and Kelaino drew up short. “I do not want to hurt you … but I will if I must,” Hekate warned Prometheus. “I have orders to bring every last one of them to the king.”
Even from where she stood, quivering, Pandora could see the tension tightening Prometheus’s shoulders, and beyond Hekate, Kelaino raising her hands in what might have been a fighting posture.
“You do not want to fight me,” Hekate warned Prometheus.
“You do not want to become this,” Prometheus snapped back, waving his hand at the chaos engulfing the palace.
Ignoring him, Hekate spun. A coiling tendril of mist lanced from her outstretched fingers and caught up Kelaino, driving the Nymph to her knees.
Kelaino growled and thrust her arms forward. A half dozen arcing parabolas of flame raced across the courtyard, incinerating aught they passed as they converged upon Hekate. The witch raised her arms in front of herself and a shroud of icy mist sent the flaming tendrils hissing into vapor, even as they scorched away Hekate’s veil.
“Stop this!” Prometheus bellowed.
But the Nymph and the Titan paid him no heed. Kelaino reached toward the blaze raging nearby, and more fire leapt toward her hand in sheets of flame that began to twist about her in a vortex. An ever-expanding maelstrom.
“You come into my home and bring death and chaos!” Kelaino spat.
To Pandora’s utter shock, Hekate fell back, hands calling up wafts of mist and barriers of ice over and over in a seemingly vain attempt to forestall the Pleiad’s wrath. A Nymph was overpowering a full-fledged Titan. What was she even seeing? She had heard each of the Pleiades had a gift, but this was, this was … beyond belief. The conflagration overcoming the palace bent to her will, an inferno closing in upon Hekate, and the goddess seemed poised to fall as flames licked at her from all sides.
And then another blinding flash coursed through the sky, a bolt of lightning crashing down into Kelaino.
“No!” Prometheus shrieked.
Kelaino convulsed, all her flames abruptly sputtering out, washed away in Hekate’s freezing vapors. The Pleiad dropped, flesh charred, steam rising from her corpse.
Growling, Prometheus roughly snatched up Pandora’s wrist again and dragged her away, dashing through the courtyard.
Prometheus guided her quickly out through the gates—it seemed none of Zeus’s people had had time to seal them yet—across the bridges, rushing through the moonlit city and down toward the harbor district. They skipped around it, however, toward the south of the city.
While his grip on her wrist had become gentle with the immediate danger having passed, Prometheus had still said naught the whole way, lost in his thoughts—and grief no doubt—and Pandora had not dared intrude into either. But now …
“Where are we going?” she ventured.
Finally, he paused, looking at her with those sapphire eyes. “The Cove of Poseidon.”
“The mer embassy?” Poseidon’s son, Triton, served as emissary to Atlantis, and a small segment of his palace lay above water for human visitors. “Why? What could they possibly offer us?”
Prometheus glanced behind them—checking for pursuit?—then resumed ushering her forward. They passed south of the city, to the Cove. A paved path led the way to a beach encircled by jagged black rocks. Tied to a short stone pier, they found three small boats. The Titan took one and guided it out with practiced ease, toward a stone platform rising from the waves.
Upon the platform rose up a peristyle-ringed palace that resembled a temple, complete with oceanic-themed pediments depicting sea horses and fish, and crowning sculptures of mermaids and mermen.
As their boat drew up along the platform, a mermaid abruptly splashed up beside them. Pandora yelped, covering her mouth with her hand. The creature had Atlantid dark hair and complexion, though gills flexed beneath the strands of her wet hair, and scales poked out from beneath the skin of her neck and face.
The mermaid snared a line from the boat and tied it to the platform.
“Thetis,” Prometheus said.
“The ship’s ready,” the mermaid answered.
Pandora’s mind whirred, not least because she’d never seen a mer this close before. Close enough to reach out and touch, had she been so bold. Given that these creatures were essentially undersea gods, she thought better of it. So, Prometheus had arranged with these mer to have a ship waiting for him. He’d paid or bribed or traded with them, or at least with Thetis, to have an escape prepared. He’d known or suspected Zeus would turn to violence here.
What did that mean? Had he done enough to forestall that violence? Certainly she’d heard him try to warn Kelaino, but the worst had
