Hades Legacy (Hades Series #3)

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

I didn't see Eric for almost an entire month after that fateful night in the rain.

For the first week, I convinced myself that it was my fault; mainly because I avoided The Orphanage like it was Tartarus, refusing to accompany Jasmine whenever she visited and inventing excuses every time she asked me why I wasn't going that became more colourful and elaborate as time went on. After two weeks, the university Jasmine and the other supers 'attended' returned from it's seasonal break, but I quickly found that my desire to return with them had dried up almost as much as my desire to go to the Orphanage had, and the only days where Jasmine or Alex succeeded in dragging me to the university with them, Eric never showed up.

That's when I realised that he was avoiding me. And that really, really irked me.

Call me petty, but I felt my reasons for avoiding him to begin with were justified. He had broken my trust, by going out of his way to befriend me with the sole purpose of sending me back to the Underworld without giving me a proper chance. He had judged me incredibly harshly before he even got to know me; not even on his visual perception of me, but on a prophecy. And after everything we had been through, after all the things I thought he had done because he genuinely liked me, that really stung.

But what exactly were his reasons for avoiding me? How could he justify avoiding me when I had done nothing wrong?

Ah, but that's a lie. A sly little voice in my head would always speak up at that point. You did do something wrong; you refused to give him a chance to explain himself, just like he did with you. What if there was more to the story? What if in refusing to give him a chance to explain himself, you've ruined any chance you had with him? What if he tried to talk to you that first week, but gave up because you avoided him so obviously?

What if, what if, what if. There were already an overwhelming amount of what if's swirling around in my head in regards to the prophecy; what if the prophecy was wrong, what if the person who's blackmailing me is trying to scare me into causing the civil war, what if, after everything I've done so far to prevent it, I go ahead and cause the civil war anyway. My fall-out with Eric added so many more that it felt like my mind was an insurmountable whirlpool, growing larger and larger and deadlier and deadlier the closer my nineteenth birthday drew.

And I was absolutely petrified that the moment that whirlpool consumed me, I would snap and cause the civil war after all.

To add insult to injury, I lost Jasmine somewhere along the line too. She'd deny it until she was blue in the face, but her constant disappearances and somewhat blase attitude towards the whole situation told a whole difference story. There was obviously somewhere she preferred to be instead of with me and my ever-present cloud of doom, and to be honest, a part of me didn't blame her. It just hurt that I managed to, in a way, lose the two people closest to me in the space of two weeks, and that hurt did nothing to dissuade the feeling of paralyzing dread that had set up permanent residence in the pit of my stomach.

But amongst all of that, there were two blessings in disguise that quickly became the silver linings to the whole situation. The first was that my blackmailer suddenly stopped texting me altogether; there were no intimidating messages, no creepy promises of imminent doom, and no further threats towards the lives of Jasmine or any of my friends. It terrified me at first, the complete silence, and I was convinced that I would wake up one day to find they had killed everyone I'd come to care about, or somehow managed to catalyse the civil war and pin the blame on me. But as time wore on and my phone stayed silent, I slowly began to regain the hope that they had finally given up on torturing me. So, instead, I refused to let myself focus on my blackmailer and their uncharacteristic silence, and re-directed all my attention to trying to find a solution to my whole prophecy problem before it was too late; something I hadn't been able to do the entire time I'd been up on the surface.