Death's Touch | Jason Grace

Thirty-nine

Cary remembered when she had been very little, her mother had taken her to the dentist to get a tooth pulled. It was the first and only time Cary had ever gotten laughing gas. She felt like she was being slowly knocked out as she went quickly limp in her mom's arms. When the laughing gas wore off, she'd been sick for three days.

This felt like a massive dose of laughing gas.

Part of her knew she was still in the cavern. Pasiphaë stood only a few feet in front of them. Clytius waited silently at the Doors of Death.

But layers of Mist enfolded Cary, twisting her sense of reality. She took one step forward and bumped into a wall that shouldn't have been there.

Leo pressed his hands against the stone. "What the heck? Where are we?"

A corridor stretched out to their left and right. Torches guttered in iron sconces. The air smelled of mildew, as in an old tomb. On Hazel's shoulder, Gale barked angrily, digging her claws into Hazel's collarbone.

"Yes, I know," Hazel muttered to the weasel. "It's an illusion."

Leo pounded on the wall. "Pretty solid illusion."

Pasiphaë laughed. Her voice sounded watery and far away. "Is it an illusion, Hazel Levesque, or something more? Don't you see what I have created?"

Cary felt so off-balance she could barely stand, much less think straight.

Random thoughts glinted in her mind, like spirits coming to the surface at her call: Daedalus. The Minotaur locked away. Die slowly in my new domain.

"The Labyrinth," Hazel said. "She's remaking the Labyrinth."

"What now?" Leo had been tapping the wall with a ball-peen hammer, but he turned and frowned at her. "I thought the Labyrinth collapsed during that battle at Camp Half-Blood – like, it was connected to Daedalus's life force or something, and then he died."

Pasiphaë's voice clucked disapprovingly. "Ah, but I am still alive. You credit Daedalus with all the maze's secrets? I breathed magical life into his Labyrinth. Daedalus was nothing compared to me – the immortal sorceress, daughter of Helios, sister of Circe! Now the Labyrinth will be my domain."

"It's an illusion," Cary insisted. "We just have to break through it."

Even as she said it, the walls seemed to grow more solid, the smell of mildew more intense.

"Too late, too late," Pasiphaë crooned. "The maze is already awake. It will spread under the skin of the earth once more while your mortal world is leveled. You demigods... you heroes... will wander its corridors, dying slowly of thirst and fear and misery. Or perhaps, if I am feeling merciful, you will die quickly, in great pain!"

Holes opened in the floor beneath Hazel's feet. She grabbed Leo and Cary and pushed them aside as a row of spikes shot upward, impaling the ceiling.

"Run!" she yelled.
Pasiphaë's laughter echoed down the corridor. "Where are you going, young sorceress? Running from an illusion?"

Hazel didn't answer. She was too busy trying to stay alive. Behind them, row after row of spikes shot towards the ceiling with a persistent thunk, thunk, thunk.

She pulled Leo and Cary down a side corridor, leaped over a trip wire, then stumbled to a halt in front of a pit twenty feet across.
"How deep is that?" Leo gasped for breath. His pant leg was ripped where one of the spikes had
grazed him.

"Eight minutes now," said the voice of Pasiphaë. "I'd love to see you survive, truly. That would prove you worthy sacrifices to Gaea in Athens. But then, of course, we wouldn't need your friends in the elevator."