The Passion of Hades - Eliza Raine Page 0,50

This place was a damned hell-hole, and once again I was suffering for those bastard gods' entertainment. I needed to get out, before I lost my shit, which would almost definitely result in my death.

This wasn't an intelligence test, I thought bitterly. It was a test of temper.

'Number three. Although I only have two eyes on my head, my tail has a magnificent spread. What am I?'

I snarled in anger. There was nothing in my world that had a spread of eyes on its tail. How was I supposed to find something if I didn't even know what I was looking for?

But I had barely stamped towards the nearest shelf before I paused, my eyes snagging on a carving of what looked like a parrot. I'd seen other birds when I was looking for the last two carvings, and my mind flashed to the feather on Hera's mask at the masquerade ball.

'A peacock,' I exclaimed, and moved as fast as I could through the rising ooze to where I thought I'd seen the bird carvings. Sure enough, after a little hunting, I wrapped my vine around a detailed peacock carving. It was getting easier to control the vine, but harder to subdue the surge of rage that accompanied contact with the awful carvings. I made my way to the holes as fast as I could, but it was like I was wading through quicksand, and any speed was impossible. The sludge was higher than my waist. When I finally dropped the peacock into the third hole there was a click, then the rock morphed slowly into a third handle.

Just one left, I thought, pulling up the handle then balling my fists. One more stinking, rotten, vile carving left to find, and I was out of here.

'Last, but not least,' the Empusa said, and something about her sinister expression made my skin crawl. 'I have the head of a leopard, the middle of a pig, the rear of a flamingo and the tail of a dragon. What am I?'

I stared at her. Surely there was no creature in Olympus that fit that description. Surely. The rear of a flamingo and the tail of a freaking dragon?

'The ugliest damned thing in the world?' I hissed, raking through my brain to come up with an answer. Wasn't a chimera what the Greeks had called a monster made up of other animals? But that was made of an eagle and a lion or something, not flamingos and pigs.

Panic was beginning to prick at my forced calm. I had to answer this right. My life depended on it. I could feel my power under the skin of my hands, humming with need, longing to break free of my fragile control.

Come on, Persy, it's an intelligence test, not a Greek mythology test. There was no way that creature exists, I reasoned. Which meant it had to be a trick question, or a different kind of riddle. The head of a leopard. Did that mean spots? Middle of a pig might mean pink? As were flamingos... A pink spotty thing with a dragon tail?

Another bark of frustration escaped me. Head, middle, rear and tail. Did that equate to start, middle and end? The start of leopard was 'L'. The middle of pig was 'I'. My heart raced as I thought through the riddle. Rear of a flamingo could mean the last letter, which was 'O' and if the tail of a dragon meant the same thing that was an 'N'.

'Lion!' I shouted the word, and this time the smile on the Empusa's face faltered. She hadn't wanted me to work it out.

With renewed vigor I forced my way through the stinking sludge, now almost at my shoulders, looking fervently for anything resembling a lion. Eventually, on a shelf almost too high for me to see, I spotted a carving with what looked like the ring of a mane around it. I sent my vine up towards it, and when the shoot made contact, I swear I could hear an actual lion roaring. All my muscles clenched as the dark, greedy, angry power flooded through me.

Kill her. Kill the vampire bitch.

The words were in my own voice, in my own head, but they didn't belong to me.

Fuck these riddles, these games, kill the demon.

The world whirled around me as darkness burned through my body, black and hot and brutal. I stared dumbly at the lion carving as images of my vines wrapping around the Empusa, dousing her stupid