Chapter 45

The snow whipped against him like icy pellets hurling from the sky and the wind blasted in a blistering cold torrent driving deep into his bones. He was suspended in a complete whiteout in the middle of the air, still and steady as is the norm these days, but the blinding white was very different. Usually, he was in the middle of a thunderstorm, not a snowfilled nothingness. And normally the cold didn’t affect him as much.

He shivered uncontrollably as a particularly freezing gust engulfed his body. Goose flesh rose along every inch of his skin and his teeth began to chatter noisily; his lips felt as if they were turning blue. James looked around him, still not able to see anything, and hunched inward to try and raise his core body temperature. Just as he could feel the blood in his veins thicken and chill, a deep, feathery voice surrounded him. It came from everywhere and nowhere all at once, reverberated from his very soul, and yet, its source was completely familiar . . . Hades.