As quickly as he’d appeared, the fog vanished. Calliope paled, and for a moment I almost felt bad for her. Then I remembered Henry and his brothers tied up in a cave a few feet away, and any drop of sympathy I’d ever had for her evaporated.

Pogo’s warm tongue against my ear brought me crashing back into reality. The rocks melted away, replaced by the red walls of the bedroom, and my stomach turned inside out as the full impact of my vision hit me.

“Mom!” I shrieked, kicking off my blankets and rolling off the bed. I landed with a thud on my hands and knees, and every inch of my body screamed in protest, but I forced myself to stand. Pogo trotted after me, his ears alert, and every step felt like knives as I ran out the door, nearly tripping on the hem of my silver dress.

I was halfway to the throne room when I rounded a corner and smacked into her, and for the second time in as many minutes, I sprawled on the ground.

“Kate?” My mother knelt beside me, her hands hovering as if she wasn’t sure it was safe to touch me.

“I’m fine,” I gasped. “Mom, Henry and the others—Calliope, she has them, and Cronus—”

“What about him?” My mother paled. “Did you see something?”

I nodded. Everything she’d told me about the Titans ran through my mind, making me dizzy. “Calliope has them, and I think—” My voice caught in my throat, and no matter how hard I blinked, I couldn’t stop my eyes from watering.

This was really it. They couldn’t defeat Calliope and Cronus on their own, and it was only a matter of time before Calliope killed Henry. It was a miracle he was 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 can’t leave them there. How is that even an option?”

“Because anything else would be suicide,” said Dylan with a sneer. “While you were getting your beauty sleep, the rest of us went over every feasible plan. With Diana and Sofia, our options were limited. Without them, we have no choice but to wait until Calliope makes her next move. We can’t face her head-on, not if you want there to be any of us left to fight Cronus when he finds a way to escape.”

When, not if. “There has to be something we can do.”

“They knew that this was a possibility,” said Irene. “They knew our powers are limited in this realm, and they took that chance and left us anyway.”

The note of hurt in her voice surprised me. Did they think my mother and Sofia had abandoned them?

“Besides,” added Theo, “there’s still a chance they’ll succeed.”

“And if they don’t?” I said. As much as I wanted to grasp on to the hope that my mother would come back safely without the rest of the council’s intervention, if three of the six couldn’t withstand Calliope and Cronus, I didn’t see how it was possible that only two would.

“Then it’s only a matter of time before Cronus escapes,” said Dylan. “Once he does, he’ll tear the world apart, destroy humanity, and if we’re lucky, kill us quickly.”

The temperature in the throne room seemed to drop twenty degrees. “And none of you are willing to do anything about it?” I said, stunned. “You’re just going to sit back and let it happen, even though he’ll kill you anyway?”

“No,” said Ella sharply, and she glared at Dylan. “If we stay out of it, he might leave us alone.”

“So you’d rather lose the only hope you have of defeating Cronus and saving billions of lives, so long as there’s a chance you’ll be allowed to live?” I said. “Is this a joke?”

No one answered. Of course it wasn’t a joke. They were all serious, and I didn’t know what to say to that. These weren’t the people I’d met and gotten to know in Eden. They were cowards, and the idea that the most powerful beings on the planet could let humanity die—it didn’t make sense. They were supposed to protect them, not sit back and let Cronus kill everyone.

I balled my hands into fists. “You tested me for six months to make sure I was good enough to be one of you—moral enough and strong enough and selfless enough. And now you can’t even help save your own family?”