The House of Hades (Heroes of Olympus Book 4)

could be so callous. She’d never felt sorry for a Titan before, but it didn’t seem right taking a brainwashed immortal and turning him into an unpaid janitor.
    He’s not your friend, she reminded herself.
    She was terrified that Bob would suddenly remember himself. Tartarus was where monsters came to regenerate. What if it healed his memory? If he became Iapetus again … well, Annabeth had seen the way he had dealt with those
empousai.
Annabeth had no weapon. She and Percy were in no condition to fight a Titan.
    She glanced nervously at Bob’s broom handle, wondering how long it would be before that hidden spearhead jutted out and was pointed at her.
    Following Bob through Tartarus was a crazy risk. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of a better plan.
    They picked their way across the ashen wasteland as red lightning flashed overhead in the poisonous clouds. Just another lovely day in the dungeon of creation. Annabeth couldn’t see far in the hazy air, but the longer they walked, the more certain she became that the entire landscape was a downward curve.
    She’d heard conflicting descriptions of Tartarus. It was a bottomless pit. It was a fortress surrounded by brass walls. It was nothing but an endless void.
    One story described it as the inverse of the sky – a huge, hollow, upside-down dome of rock. That seemed the most accurate, though if Tartarus was a dome Annabeth guessed it was like the sky – with no real bottom but made of multiple layers, each one darker and less hospitable than the last.
    And even
that
wasn’t the full, horrible truth …
    They passed a blister in the ground – a writhing, translucent bubble the size of a minivan. Curled inside was the half-formed body of a drakon. Bob speared the blister without a second thought. It burst in a geyser of steaming yellow slime, and the drakon dissolved into nothing.
    Bob kept walking.
    Monsters are zits on the skin of Tartarus, Annabeth thought. She shuddered. Sometimes she wished she didn’t have such a good imagination, because now she was certain they were walking across a living thing. This whole twisted landscape – the dome, pit or whatever you called it – was thebody of the god Tartarus – the most ancient incarnation of evil. Just as Gaia inhabited the surface of the earth, Tartarus inhabited the pit.
    If that god noticed them walking across his skin, like fleas on a dog … Enough. No more thinking.
    ‘Here,’ Bob said.
    They stopped at the top of a ridge. Below them, in a sheltered depression like a moon crater, stood a ring of broken black marble columns surrounding a dark stone altar.
    ‘Hermes’s shrine,’ Bob explained.
    Percy frowned. ‘A Hermes shrine in
Tartarus
?’
    Bob laughed in delight. ‘Yes. It fell from somewhere long ago. Maybe mortal world. Maybe Olympus. Anyway, monsters steer clear. Mostly.’
    ‘How did you know it was here?’ Annabeth asked.
    Bob’s smile faded. He got a vacant look in his eyes. ‘Can’t remember.’
    ‘That’s okay,’ Percy said quickly.
    Annabeth felt like kicking herself. Before Bob became Bob, he had been Iapetus the Titan. Like all his brethren, he’d been imprisoned in Tartarus for aeons. Of
course
he knew his way around. If he remembered this shrine, he might start recalling other details of his old prison and his old life. That would
not
be good.
    They climbed into the crater and entered the circle of columns. Annabeth collapsed on a broken slab of marble, too exhausted to take another step. Percy stood over her protectively, scanning their surroundings. The inky storm front was less than a hundred feet away now, obscuringeverything ahead of them. The crater’s rim blocked their view of the wasteland behind. They’d be well hidden here, but if monsters
did
stumble across them they would have no warning.
    ‘You said someone was chasing us,’ Annabeth said. ‘Who?’
    Bob swept his broom around the base of the altar, occasionally crouching to study the ground as if looking for something. ‘They are following, yes. They know you are here. Giants and Titans. The defeated ones. They know.’
    The defeated ones …
    Annabeth tried to control her fear. How many Titans and giants had she and Percy fought over the years? Each one had seemed like an impossible challenge. If
all
of them were down here in Tartarus, and if they were actively hunting Percy and Annabeth …
    ‘Why are we stopping, then?’ she said. ‘We should keep moving.’
    ‘Soon,’ Bob said.