Free Goddess Interrupted by Aimée Carter Page A

still alive in the first place.
    In a low, frantic voice, I relayed the details of my vision, my words stumbling and knotting together, making it that much more difficult to speak. “Mom,” I finally said in a small voice, desperate for her to do something to fix this. When I’d been a child, I’d been sure she could do the impossible. Now I was positive she could, but somewhere deep inside of me in a part I didn’t want to admit existed, I knew there was nothing she could do to make this mess go away. “She’s going to let Cronus kill them.”
    Her face grew hard, and for one awful moment I saw the power behind my mother’s kind eyes and rosy cheeks. “Sofia,” she called in a voice that rattled me from the inside out.
    Sofia was by her side in a second, and like my mother, every trace of gentleness was gone as waves of power radiated from them both. On her own, my mother was a force of nature. With Sofia standing beside her, I was sure they could rip the world to shreds.
    “Come, sister,” said my mother. She looked at me, and for a moment a drop of humanity returned to her face. “Take care of yourself, sweetheart,” she said, touching my cheek. I shivered. “And put on a sweater. I’ll return to you as soon as I can.”
    With that, she and Sofia joined hands, and like Henry and his brothers had sped off into the vast Underworld, so did my mother and her sister, the only two left who knew how to defeat Cronus.
    Feeling hollow and more alone than I ever had before, I pressed my lips together and dragged myself back to my room to change, wondering how much of my family I would lose before this was all said and done.
    * * *
    The throne room seemed empty without Henry and the rest of his siblings. What was left of the council sat in a circle beside the platform, the chairs collected from all around the palace. I sat on a hard stool that reminded me of the one I’d endured six months ago, when the council had made its decision about whether I would become one of them. At least that one had been padded.
    No one touched the two thrones. One was supposed to be mine, but the ceremony hadn’t finished, and even if it had, I didn’t want to be up there without Henry. I wasn’t ready to rule alone—I wasn’t even sure I was ready to rule by his side. With him and the others now gone, I didn’t want to think about what that would do to the natural order of things around the Underworld. Were souls stuck in limbo until Henry returned? What if he never came back?
    No. I wasn’t going to think like that. There had to be a way for this to work out—something Calliope wanted more than revenge.
    A sick feeling crept over me. She did want something more than revenge. She wanted Henry—and she wanted me dead.
    That wasn’t an option yet. Even if I marched up to her and offered her my neck, there was no guarantee it would end things. Cronus was more powerful than I could possibly imagine, and from my vision it was clear that no matter how in control Calliope pretended to be, she wasn’t. She wasn’t the one who was going to decide when this was over.
    “What do we do now?”
    My voice echoed in the dead silence of the throne room. It’d been nearly ten minutes and no one had said a word, and I could no longer take sitting there while Henry and my mother were in danger.
    “What do you mean?” said Ella, who shared a wide armchair with Theo. The two of them were wrapped together as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I envied them. They still had each other.
    “I mean, how do we help them?” I said. “If Mom and Sofia can’t free them, if they—” If they got captured, too. “What are we supposed to do?”
    Ella and Theo exchanged looks, and next to them, Irene sighed. “There is no helping them, not when Cronus and Calliope have them.”
    I blinked. That was it? “There has to be something we can do.” I looked around the circle for support, but no one met my eye. Not even James. “We