Furious

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I recognized the dungeons of the Underworld immediately.

How had I not seen this coming?

Poseidon emerged behind me, still holding onto my arm. Leading the way to the back of the dank prison, Alex stopped above a grate covering. She smiled back at us.

"Well?" Poseidon barked. "Where is it?"

"Down there," Alex pointed to a cell. "It's been here the whole time."

The sea-god thundered to the indicated cell, dragging me along when my left leg could no longer support my weight.

Poseidon flung me to the ground next to the cell. "Retrieve it," he ordered.

"You retrieve it; I don't work for you," I protested.

Torch in hand, Alex landed next to the cell and held the flames over the bars that covered the hole in the floor. The light was not enough to pierce through the darkness; the cell seemed to reach further than the firelight did.

With my dirty, blood-covered hands, I reached out to the bars over the cell. No amount of willpower had been able to stop them from shaking. There was something about fear powerful enough to consume you; there was something even more terrible about anger born of that fear. It was the fear and the helplessness that spurred me on.

Nothing happened. I pulled against the heavy metal and lost. Poseidon's rage filled the room, a tangible beast hovering over us. Alex, whose allegiance I was again unsure of, came to my rescue.

"Try this," she thrust a soaking rag at me—her shirt, torn at the bottom to expose her belly like mine. "The Rive Styx will eat through anything. In the absence of Hades himself, I thought it might be handy."

The water I wrung from the rag dripped onto the metal bars and sizzled. As if heated to a million degrees, the metal dissolved to leave behind only memories of the bars at the mouth of the hole in the ground.

I looked at Alex in amazement but she pointedly looked only in the hole.

Flicking my hand, I dropped a small fireball into the depths.

My fireball burst at the floor of the cell and died, but not before it illuminated a man sitting cross-legged before an urn. "Hey! Watch where you throw those things!" a nasally voice yelled up at me.

The urn in his lap was not unlike those that held cremated loved one's ashes. How oddly fitting that the Nectar be held by a dead man in a dead man's fancy Tupperware. Because when the Olympians finished with him, he would be a dead man.

Poseidon knocked me aside in order to gain a better view of the Nectar's keeper in the blackness of the pit depth. Recognition lit his face at the sound of the prisoner's voice though he did not see the old man.

"Tantalus! He gave the Nectar to you, the thief who thought to make himself immortal when the earth was still young? And we never thought to look here," he spoke under his breath, having the conversation with himself. Poseidon's eternal displeasure faded quickly to be replaced by a look of triumph. "Clever, but not clever enough," he trilled to himself, suddenly giddy with victory as his fingertips.

A pointed glare and a deliberate flick of his wrist encouraged me on with my task. "Bring it to me, Fury."

My leg would prevent me from jumping into the hole to retrieve the urn from the thief; likewise my wings would not be able to carry me out of the narrow cell. I looked at Poseidon to tell him to get the Nectar himself but I didn't have the chance.

Alex dropped down into the cell, folding her wings in close to her body. The cell, while deep, was almost too small for her and the man called Tantalus to share, being only as tall as me in circumference. Scratching sounds screeched up at me as her wings brushed the sides of the cell. Light from the torch illuminated her descent but only so far; I could not see what happened in the darkness beyond the light's reach.