Sweetblood only glared at her and then gestured to Conan Doyle to indicate that the problem was his to solve.
"We’ll help you, Ceri," he said as Eve, Danny, and Gull gathered with the others around the Forge. "We can feed the strength to you, give you whatever you need, but it’s a kind of magick none of us have. The spell must come from your fingers, your lips."
It was difficult to hear above the cracking of the ground and the screaming of the vengeful dead. Ceridwen did not bother to put her reply into words. She looked at Conan Doyle a moment and then reached out a hand to him. He took it, their fingers twining together. Eve had never seen Conan Doyle so pale, the circles beneath his eyes so dark. He looked drained. But when he touched Ceridwen, they both seemed to brighten with the contact, to come alive again.
Ceridwen nodded.
Conan Doyle turned to Gull. "Come, Nigel. You’re needed."
"Good thing we didn’t kill him, then," Eve snarled.
Danny was in a crouch, one hand on the ground to steady himself. He glared up at Eve. "Does this mean we’re getting out of here?"
She didn’t even dare look back down the hill. "Let’s hope."
Ceridwen raised her hands above her head. The air seemed to flow to her fingertips and then down her arms, caressing her, swirling around her, beginning a kind of whirlwind current. Her body shook with the effort and blue light sparked between her fingers. Eve shivered with the icy chill that gathered around her, the temperature dropping rapidly. The Fey sorceress moved her lips in silent supplication to the elements themselves.
Conan Doyle held her hand tightly. Gull took her other hand. Both had once been students of Lorenzo Sanguedolce and now Sweetblood himself stepped behind Ceridwen and — with one hand on the Forge of Hephaestus — placed the other on the sorceress’s back.
Only then did Eve understand what they were doing. She dropped into a crouch beside Danny and grabbed his hand, then reached out and clutched the back of Conan Doyle’s jacket.
Danny was staring past her at the dead gods, at the two ancient Titans that were emerging from the dust of history and myth. He barely acknowledged her touch, his yellow eyes gleaming.
Thunder boomed, shattering the air with such force that Eve winced at the pain in her ears. She glanced up at Ceridwen, but the Fey was deep into the summoning of her spell. The thunder had not been her doing.
Lightning lit up the Netherworld as though sunshine had broken through into the land of the dead. It flashed, accompanied by more thunder, and then came a series of bolts that burned the air and blinded her. Eve turned to search for the source and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust.
Beyond Hades a tower had exploded from the ground, a huge silhouette, a monument. The next bolt of lightning streaked upward from the top of that tower and she saw that it was not some structure at all, but a hand. With lightning searing the sky, erupting from its fingers.
Zeus.
"Doyle! Ceri! Get us out of here now!" Eve cried.
But even as she bellowed those words, they were stolen by the wind that had begun to embrace them all. The traveling wind. It whistled around her ears, grasping at her body, blinding her to her surroundings. It was a storm, summoned by Ceridwen and powered by Conan Doyle, Gull, and their former teacher.
A traveling wind unlike any ever summoned before.
It picked Eve up off of the ground. She tightened her grip on Danny’s hand and tried to see his face. In the midst of the whirlwind she saw only the cruel gleam of his demon’s eyes. Then she was hurtling through the air, propelled by the currents, moving with the storm, wondering where in this realm of death and suffering the traveling wind would take her.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the grip of magick and wind, spun and blinded by the white-gray spell-storm, Conan Doyle held tightly to Ceridwen’s hand. He had traveled with her like this before, during the Twilight Wars, but this was different. There was a dark tint to the winds, a texture to them as though the black soil of the netherworld had been drawn into them and now scoured his flesh like a desert sandstorm. And there was a smell, an unpleasant odor that was carried on the wind. It might have been the Forge of Hephaestus, the stink of brimstone, he knew. But Conan Doyle thought that it was something else, some part of Ceridwen’s magick tainted by the fact that she was drawing on the nature of this place, the elements of the Underworld.
Or perhaps it’s just Gull, and the poison that lingers in his magick, even after all of these years. His curse.
His eyes watered, demanding that he close them, but he refused. Though he only managed to keep them slightly open, Conan Doyle despised surrendering control, even to Ceridwen, and if the situation demanded it, at the very least he wanted to see where he was going. Not that there was much to see. The winds howled, rushing him forward. He gripped Ceridwen’s fingers more tightly.
Then his feet touched stone. The traveling wind subsided too quickly, giving them no chance to halt their momentum, and Conan Doyle stumbled forward, dropping to one knee. Only Ceridwen’s grip on his hand kept him from sprawling across the floor of the cavern. But his love was the only one who alighted gracefully. Danny and Eve struck the ground hard, tumbling painfully but rising uncannily fast.
Gull staggered several steps and then dropped onto his hands and knees, blood dripping from his broken nose. He trembled weakly for a moment before getting ahold of himself.
Conan Doyle glanced around. The traveling wind had brought them as far as it could, within this hellish world. They were at the mouth of the tunnel through which they had entered, perhaps thirty feet wide and forty high. In comparison to the vastness they had seen, it was narrow. It was ordinary. He looked back the way they had come and only then did he see Sweetblood. Conan Doyle had been wrong to think only Ceridwen had managed to alight with any grace. Lorenzo Sanguedolce stood casually in the tunnel beside the massive Forge of Hephaestus. It gave off light and a strange heat that lent a warmth to the body without searing the skin.
Puppets, Conan Doyle thought. We’re all puppets.
He strode to Sweetblood and the mage raised a single eyebrow, regarding him coolly.
"I know the threat this world faces," he told his former mentor. "We would all have aided you. You could simply have asked."
Sanguedolce’s nostrils flared. "It would have gone far more smoothly had the temptress not slain Tisiphone. I might have come and gone with none the wiser. That would have been best. As for your help, I have no need of it. When the time comes to face the DemoGorgon, perhaps you can serve again as you did this past day, as a distraction. As fodder, to buy me time for the real battle."
Conan Doyle was a gentleman, but in his life he had also been a soldier. Yet neither of those facets of his spirit could summon a response to Sweetblood’s appalling arrogance. They were all silent, each of them having heard the exchange. Ceridwen, Gull, and even smartmouthed Danny Ferrick, all stared at Sweetblood in amazement and distaste.
Eve was frozen by her shock for only a moment. Then she launched herself across the cave. "You cocky motherfucker! You’d still be back there being Zeus’s fucking chew toy if it weren’t for Ceridwen. This thing, the DemoGorgon, it’s you the Big Evil is coming for, right? I say we just make you dead, and then it’ll ignore us again."
She sprang at him, murder on her face. Sanguedolce put one hand on the Forge of Hephaestus and simply gestured with the other, and Eve was engulfed in flames. Her scream could have wrung tears from the damned.
Conan Doyle leaped between Sweetblood and Eve, his hands clenched into fists that crackled with swirling golden light.
"That’s enough, Lorenzo. You’ve done far more than enough damage by now."