Hound of Hades: The Short Stories: Hound of Hades, #11

By Z.J. Cannon and Zoe Cannon

Read three short stories from the world of the Hound of Hades series!

 

Gods and Heroes: Bastian's mom has always told  him he's destined for greatness. He knows better. Her stories of gods and heroes are just that, and he's too old for fairy tales. He doesn't know a visitor is about to prove the stories true.

 

The Other Lissa: As a Guardian of Hades, Lissa has faced down angry spirits, hostile armies, and the gods themselves. Now it's time for her to confront her oldest enemy—the person she was before Hades chose her.

 

Lethe: Nina likes her tea mild and her shoes sensible. She may be a spy for Hades, but the most excitement she ever sees is when she files the wrong paperwork as part of her secretarial cover. And that's just fine with her. She doesn't let herself think about the time before she was Nina—when she was the volatile and unstable Kate, broken from a mission gone wrong. But one day, the phone rings. It's for Kate…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Z.J. Cannon
• Release date: May 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201855970

Book preview

Hound of Hades: The Short Stories

Z.J. Cannon

© 2022 Z.J. Cannon

http://www.zjcannon.com

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Gods and Heroes

This story takes place before the start of the Hound of Hades series. It contains spoilers for Memory Game (Hound of Hades #2).

When Bastian was little, his mom used to take him to the playground at the end of the street every Saturday. He would slide down the twisty plastic slide over and over, savoring the brief weightless feeling. He would clamber to the top of the jungle gym and sit looking down on the rest of the world. But mostly, he would lose himself in his imagination, acting out stories of gods and heroes.

His mom would sit on the worn wooden bench and read one of her thick books. She wasn’t in school like people thought she was—he knew that because every week, a different parent would stop by the bench and compliment her for working toward her degree with a young child, and she would have to correct them. It would be another few years before he learned why she wasn’t in school. Back then, all he knew was the explanation she gave every week with a slightly strained smile: she was just interested in everything.

When he was finally too tired to climb the jungle gym even one more time, he would sit next to her and read over her shoulder, even though he usually only recognized half the words. She would wrap an arm around him, completing the circuit. There were times he envied kids with big loud families, but when he was cuddled up with his mom on the bench, he knew the two of them were enough.

When it got dark, they would get dinner out. In retrospect, the treats had been laughably cheap—greasy pizza or fast food burgers. But he hadn’t known that then. All he knew was that he never got to eat restaurant food except on Saturdays. Wedged into the booth of the crowded pizza parlor, her face bathed in the neon glow from the sign outside, his mom would tell him stories about his father. And he would hang on her every word, because he could almost never get her to talk about his father at any other time.

Then she would move on to telling him about himself. On the good days, the ones when he had skipped off the playground overflowing with stories of his imagined adventures, she would tell him about how he was just like like one of the great heroes from the stories she read to him at night. Like Hercules, whose twelve labors he could recite before he knew how to read. He would grow up to do great things too, she promised him.

And on the other days… the days when he had spent all day trying to bring other kids into his games, only to be turned away… or worse, when the other boys from the neighborhood had taken enough of an interest in him to leave him bruised and sullen… on those days, his mom would place a gentle hand on his shoulder and remind him, You’re not like them. You’re special.

Once he was old enough to go to school and read the stories for himself, he learned that to most people, the old stories of gods and heroes were just that: stories. He learned that he couldn’t go around saying his father was a god without people assuming he was playing a game, or outright laughing at him, or—for a certain breed of adult—clucking over his head about how sad it was to watch kids try to cope with growing up without a father. But by then, his mom had told him about his heritage often enough that the idea was rooted deep in his head. He stopped talking about it with other people, but he didn’t stop believing.

Not for a long time, at least.

He learned other things as he got older. He learned that being too smart got you noticed, and not in a good way. He learned how to give the answers teachers expected, without making them mad by showing them up. And he learned all the places around the neighborhood where he could hide, when he needed to get out of their cramped one-room apartment but didn’t want to draw the attention of the neighborhood boys, who didn’t like him any better now than they had in those younger days on the playground.

Which was why he was back on that playground now, even though, at twelve years old, he had outgrown the place years ago. He had squeezed himself onto the small platform at the top of the slide, with his legs folded awkwardly under him. He kept his head ducked to keep from hitting the roof—he had grown this past year, enough that people kept asking him when he was going to start playing football. He had learned that I don’t like football, I like books wasn’t an acceptable answer, but he hadn’t found a better one yet.

The air was cold enough that he could see his breath. After two hours out here, his fingers had gone numb enough to make him grudgingly admit his mom had been right about his needing gloves. But gloves made it harder to turn the pages, so he wasn’t going to go back home for them. It was bad enough that he would have to head back in another hour or so, once the sun went down the rest of the way and he lost the last of the light.

Being in that apartment was harder than usual these days. His new football player’s body seemed to take up more than its share of space. But worse than the lack of room was getting an up-close view of his mom’s life all the time. Watching her use up all her time and energy and patience waiting tables at Gloria’s Diner, because it was the only place that would let her arrange her schedule around the times she needed to be home with him. Seeing her study things she would never use because she couldn’t afford to go back to school. Listening to her tell stories about her past, and gods and heroes from another age, because