Page 50 of Blood of Olympus

Fear.

“I had a nightmare,” she finally offered, her voice little more than a rasping breath. The jaggedness of it had my arms squeezing a little tighter around her. “At least, I thought it was a nightmare… But Caelus… it was so real,” she whispered. “So visceral. So unlike anything I’ve dreamt before.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head, then inhaled deeply. “But I think I need to.”

“I’m here.”

It was nothing more than two simple words, but it was all I could offer her — the reassurance that she was not alone and never would be again.

“I dreamed that I was some woman… a stranger with bronze skin… and a tattoo of a siren on her arm — my arm.” She shivered involuntarily before continuing, “I burned, Caelus. She burned.”

“Do you know what happened?” I asked again.

“This woman — her people — they were from a coastal village. And before you ask, no, I don’t know where. Ephemeron, somewhere would be my best guess.”

“Mortals, then.”

“Mmm.”

She twisted in my arms to meet my gaze. I flinched at the sight of her bloodshot eyes and her reddened skin — as though she really had burned.

“Nyssa—”

“They were attacked, Caelus. Something — or someone — razed an entire village,” she whispered, horrified. “Every man, woman, and child…”

“It was just a dream, Nyss.”

Her eyes dropped to her fidgeting hands. She rubbed at her forearm like she could scour away the nightmare itself. “Then explain this,” she said quietly, lifting her arm to my face. While it bore the eerily pink skin of a fresh burn, it also held a trace of something else. I dragged her closer, my eyes squinting to make out a shape I knew hadn’t been there before.

The very faint outline… of a siren tail.

No fucking way.

Way, Golden. Her shattered green irises pierced mine, imploring me to offer some perfectly sane reason as to why that image was now etched into her skin.

But I couldn’t.

She sighed deeply, exhausted and defeated. “That’s not all…”

“Dare I ask?”

Swallowed roughly, she continued, “I — that is, the woman I was… wearing? That sounds all kinds of wrong…” She took a steadying breath and tried again. “Whomever’s last moments I just shared, etched a message in the sand as she died.”

“What message?”

But before Nyssa could respond, we were interrupted by a loud crash ricocheting up the stairwell. Both our heads snapped around to the bathroom door, neither willing to move, neither willing to make a sound.

Who would dare barge into the queen’s residence, deep in the heart of the Underworld, in the middle of the night?

A better question to ask, godling, is who could safely make their way past Sir Bruce? Lykos questioned from the first floor. He’d taken to sleeping in front of the living room’s enormous hearth as of late.

“Sir Bruce?” I bit my bottom lip, stifling an inopportune laugh.

Lykos didn’t deign to respond with words, merely an aggrieved grumble.

Your mate calls them that so often… apparently it stuck.