While the other spirits edged around her circle, tracing fingers over its perimeter, the mer pushed against it with webbed palms. As if a membrane separated them that impeded but did not stop it. Slowly, it pushed through, into the circle.
On the Mortal side of the Veil, she caught sight of Poseidon at last, his signature brighter than most mortals for the amount of Pneuma coursing through his flesh. Wanting to see his face, Pyrrha blinked away the Sight. Behind him, Enodia stood, clearly having guided him as she had promised, and exactly to a spot he could walk through without disturbing the glyphs or even noticing them. Without noticing much of aught, in fact, though his expression revealed a disquiet in him. He sensed the Otherworld bruising the Veil from here, even if he had no idea what the feeling was or what caused the hairs to rise upon his arms.
Of course, he could not resist the lure of a tryst. Of course, he could not bring himself to imagine that, when Enodia told him Pyrrha wanted to see him on the beach at night, she might have had aught in mind for him save the sating of his desires.
While she could not cease incanting, she lowered her voice to a whisper and allowed her peplos to drop free of one shoulder. She needed him to join her in the center of the circle. A sudden thought occurred to her, even as she struggled to concentrate on the incantation and hold his attention. If he saw the chicken blood dribbling off her fingers. Well, damn it. She couldn’t explain that. To keep his attention, she further shrugged free of her peplos, exposing one breast.
When he drew nigh, he reached for her flesh. She placed her hand upon his chest, tracing a quick glyph to which he paid no mind.
“What are you saying?” he asked with his usual haughtiness.
“Nereus,” she answered, then flicked blood off her hand into his face.
Poseidon staggered backward, blinking. “What the fuck?”
“Nereus, Prince of Pontus!” Pyrrha called and allowed her vision to shift back into the Sight.
Across the Veil, the mer launched itself at the victim marked with its glyph. The shark-thing hurtled into Poseidon, who spasmed. Pyrrha could not see his face now, but she could imagine the dawning horror commingling with the pain.
Vaguely, she wondered if that was how slave girls felt the first time he intruded inside them. The spirit wrenched open Poseidon’s mouth and drove a webbed, clawed arm down his throat.
Pyrrha almost gagged herself as Nereus somehow, impossibly, began to climb into Poseidon. The mer wriggled like an eel, and though it should never have fit, slowly—in time with the Titan’s immense convulsions—it dragged itself within his body.
Poseidon pitched over, his convulsions intensifying. His legs snapped together and began to fuse even as scales punched through his flesh. His neck ruptured, gills tearing their way from flaps of skin.
An inarticulate moan drew her gaze outside the circle. Okeanus’s ghost hurled itself against the circle’s edge, drawing a yelp from Pyrrha. Her wards held, but as the shade slammed into them again and again, she had to wonder … could a shade break through with sheer force of will?
Her heel brushed against a stone and she realized she’d begun to back away from the fury on display before her. “Nyx’s bosom,” she cursed.
The ghost’s gaze landed upon her, its eyes glinting red with inhuman rage. It flexed its arms and bent its knees as if promising to rush her the moment she left the circle’s confines. Then Supernal incantations rent the Ether once more, and Okeanus wilted, driven to its knees. It turned toward the source—Enodia approaching, deep in her cants. The sorceress pressed her palm against Okeanus’s forehead.
A heartbeat later, the shade trembled as if the whole of it was liquid and someone had cast a stone into its body. It flailed and writhed, then began to melt into pooling shadows that lashed about it, drawing it into the deeper regions of the Astral Realm, a space Enodia called the Roil. Hard as it was to believe, Pyrrha could have almost sworn actual fear washed over its face in its last moments. Enodia … frightened a ghost? How Pyrrha longed for such power.
When she looked back to the Mortal Realm, the mer that had seized Poseidon had formed up legs once more and regained its feet. It cast aside his garments and, utterly naked, stared at her with opalescent eyes, its expression unreadable.
Only then, looking upon the spirit in its human host, did Pyrrha recognize the shrill scream that had been unfolding for Gaia knew how long. Only then did she look and see Styx, hands on her face, wailing at the horror Pyrrha had unleashed upon her brother.
It was like a dream, when the Telkhines came for her. Two of the mer, walking on legs, clad only in loose clothes wrapped around their waists. They grabbed her and dragged her up the cliff to Thebes, and on, into the acropolis where Tethys surged up from her throne like a cresting wave in a storm-tossed sea.
“How dare you assault my son!” It was, perhaps, Pyrrha’s imagination, but the Titan’s wrath shook the throne room. It dominated the whole of the acropolis, filling up the space of the palace with a turbulent force that drowned out all other sound and thought.
Pulse pounding, Pyrrha found all she could do was stare at her sandals and chance fleeting glimpses at the Lady of Thebes. That someone would have seen what she had done, that it would make it back to Tethys, had not once crossed her mind, fool that she was. Enodia had warned her that her desire to punish Poseidon would come with a cost, but Pyrrha had been so obsessed with vengeance she had assumed the sorceress meant a cost to her soul.
“Every incantation you utter tears at your essence,” Enodia had said in their earliest
