The House of Hades (Heroes of Olympus Book 4)

knowing that any moment they would be crushed or bitten to death in a pit of snakes.
    Instead, Hazel imagined a chute in the darkness, just to their left. She twisted in midair and fell towards it. She and Leo hit the chute hard and slid into the cavern, landing right on top of Pasiphaë.
    ‘Ack!’ The sorceress’s head smacked against the floor as Leo sat down hard on her chest.
    For a moment, the three of them and the weasel were a pile of sprawling bodies and flailing limbs. Hazel tried to draw her sword, but Pasiphaë managed to extricate herself first. The sorceress backed away, her hairdo bent sideways like a collapsed cake. Her dress was smeared with grease stains from Leo’s tool belt.
    ‘You
miserable
wretches!’ she howled.
    The maze was gone. A few feet away, Clytius stood with his back to them, watching the Doors of Death. By Hazel’s calculation, they had about thirty seconds until their friends arrived. Hazel felt exhausted from her run through the maze while controlling the Mist, but she needed to pull off one more trick.
    She had successfully made Pasiphaë see what she most desired. Now Hazel had to make the sorceress see what she most feared.
    ‘You must really hate demigods,’ Hazel said, trying to mimic Pasiphaë’s cruel smile. ‘We always get the better of you, don’t we, Pasiphaë?’
    ‘Nonsense!’ screamed Pasiphaë. ‘I will tear you apart! I will –’
    ‘We’re always pulling the rug out from under your feet,’ Hazel sympathized. ‘Your husband betrayed you. Theseuskilled the Minotaur and stole your daughter Ariadne . Now two second-rate failures have turned your own maze against you. But you knew it would come to this, didn’t you? You always fall in the end.’
    ‘I am immortal!’ Pasiphaë wailed. She took a step back, fingering her necklace. ‘You cannot stand against me!’
    ‘You can’t stand at all,’ Hazel countered. ‘Look.’
    She pointed at the feet of the sorceress. A trapdoor opened underneath Pasiphaë. She fell, screaming, into a bottomless pit that didn’t really exist.
    The floor solidified. The sorceress was gone.
    Leo stared at Hazel in amazement. ‘How did you –’
    Just then the elevator dinged. Rather than pushing the UP button, Clytius stepped back from the controls, keeping their friends trapped inside.
    ‘Leo!’ Hazel yelled.
    They were thirty feet away – much too far to reach the elevator – but Leo pulled out a screwdriver and chucked it like a throwing knife. An impossible shot. The screwdriver spun straight past Clytius and slammed into the UP button.
    The Doors of Death opened with a hiss. Black smoke billowed out, and two bodies spilled face-first onto the floor – Percy and Annabeth, limp as corpses.
    Hazel sobbed. ‘Oh, gods …’
    She and Leo started forward, but Clytius raised his hand in an unmistakable gesture –
stop
. He lifted his massive reptilian foot over Percy’s head.
    The giant’s smoky shroud poured over the floor, covering Annabeth and Percy in a pool of dark fog.
    ‘Clytius, you’ve lost,’ Hazel snarled. ‘Let them go, or you’ll end up like Pasiphaë.’
    The giant tilted his head. His diamond eyes gleamed. At his feet, Annabeth lurched like she’d hit a power line. She rolled on her back, black smoke coiling from her mouth.
    ‘
I am not Pasiphaë.
’ Annabeth spoke in a voice that wasn’t hers – the words as deep as a bass guitar. ‘
You have won nothing.
’
    ‘Stop that!’ Even from thirty feet away, Hazel could sense Annabeth’s life force waning, her pulse becoming thready. Whatever Clytius was doing, pulling words from her mouth – it was killing her.
    Clytius nudged Percy’s head with his foot. Percy’s face lolled to one side.
    ‘
Not quite dead.
’ The giant’s words boomed from Percy’s mouth.
‘
A terrible shock to the mortal body, I would imagine, coming back from Tartarus. They’ll be out for a while.
’
    He turned his attention back to Annabeth. More smoke poured from between her lips. ‘
I’ll tie them up and take them to Porphyrion in Athens. Just the sacrifice we need. Unfortunately, that means I have no further use for you two.
’
    ‘Oh, yeah?’ Leo growled. ‘Well, maybe you got the smoke, buddy, but I’ve got the fire.’
    His hands blazed. He shot white-hot columns of flame at the giant, but Clytius’s smoky aura absorbed them on impact. Tendrils of black haze travelled back up the lines of fire, snuffing out the light and heat and covering