Brimstone Kiss: Phantom Queen Book 10 - A Temple Verse Series (The Phantom Queen Diaries)

by Shayne Silvers

  “I am, but—”

  “Because you would be more than welcome to stay! Garmr and I would love it, if you could. We get lonely, and the spirits never say anything new after a while.”

  “No, I’m sorry, but I do have to leave. I was just tryin’ to decide where to go next, that’s all. And ye should know I’m not likely to run into Fenrir, no matter what I decide. I have a feelin’ your brother won’t be stickin’ around much longer. Not once the Valkyries come and Odin finds out where he’s been.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot.” Hel hung her head again, her dark hair falling over her face like a shroud. “Odin is such a jerk! He’s always sticking his eye where it does not belong. I wish my brother would just eat him, already. It would serve him right.”

  For a second, I considered countering with the fact that Odin’s death would mean a full unleashing of all things Ragnarök—and was therefore bad—but then thought better of it; the end of times probably appealed a hell of a lot more to her than it would to me.

  Pun intended.

  “I wouldn’t worry about Odin right now,” I said, instead. “Fenrir has managed to stay a step ahead of him so far. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  With your father’s help, I added, mentally.

  “I am sure you are right!” Hel agreed, grinning so widely that the frozen half of her face seemed almost alive. “Well, you should keep the biscuits, anyway. As a gift from me to you. Maybe they will prove useful to you, one day.”

  “I...alright, if ye say so.” I tied the pouch to my hip, securing it alongside the chest containing the heart of a jötunn whom Loki had once tricked, vaguely aware of the odd sense of symmetry involved. “I appreciate it, Hel.”

  “I do hope you can come back and visit sometime. This place can be so boring, you have no idea.”

  “Maybe one day,” I replied, refusing to be baited into a commitment to return; I’d given my fair share of those in the past and had learned to regret it. “Tell Garmr I said goodbye once he’s...back to normal.”

  “I will! But remember, your friend made a deal. Do not be long saying goodbye, or Garmr will have to come back and collect you, himself. And you would not like that.” Hel giggled and danced away, her cloak trailing behind her like some noxious cloud, leaving Mabel and me to stand alone by the gates.

  “You’re going to go after Ryan, aren’t you?”

  “That is why I came,” I admitted, trying not to show how exhausted I felt by the prospect. “Besides, what sort of friend would I be if I left him down there to rot for eternity when I knew I could save him?”

  “Except you don’t know that,” Mable shot back. “You don’t even know if jumping into the river will work, or what the water might do to you if it does.”

  Both were valid points.

  “And what’s it matter to ye, anyway?”

  “It doesn’t,” she snapped. “You do what you want.”

  “Hopin’ to tag along, is that it?”

  “Of course not! The last time I chased after Ryan, this happened.” Mabel flashed me, exposing the battered body beneath like one might reveal a grisly crime scene photo. “Besides, he never cared about me. I saw how he looked at that nymph, Calypso. He was ready to throw it all away, after all his talk of finding justice for what was done to our people, and for what? For her. For her! But not me. Why not me?”

  “Have ye considered it’s because you’re a psychotic bitch?”

  “You know,” Mabel replied, snatching her cloak closed once more, “I used to hate you because I thought you meant something to Ryan. That you were special to him. I looked at you and saw an obstacle standing in my way. Now I realize you’re nothing but a fool. Ryan would never have come down here to save you, you have to know that. Which means you’re the one obsessed with him. The one who won’t let him go. Your problem is that you can’t get it through your thick head that Ryan doesn’t give a shit about you.”

  “Ye may be right,” I admitted. “But, when it comes right down to it, this isn’t about Ryan, anymore. It’s about me. It’s about walkin’ out of here knowin’ I tried everythin’ I could to bring him back...or why bother walkin’ out at all? If ye can’t be there for your loved ones when they need ye the most, then what’s the point of bein’ alive to begin with?”

  “You seriously believe that?”

  “I do.”

  “You do realize that’s not the way life works, right?”

  “Look, I never expected ye to understand.”

  “Well, I think you’re insane for trying,” Mabel replied, though her tone suggested the opposite. “Ryan sealed his fate a long time ago. We all did. If he rots, that’s because he made his choice.”

  “And ye? What are ye plannin’ to do?”

  “I’m going to show the dog where we got in, and then I’m going back to Fae.”

  “Plannin’ to look up the Winter Queen and beg for sanctuary?” I asked, reminded of Mabel’s previous associations with the Faeling royal, which included a plot to abduct me at the Winter Queen’s behest. “See if fate will give ye a second chance?”

  “Don’t be stupid. The Winter Queen would want to put me to work, to use me the way she uses everyone else. And that’s never going to happen. I won’t let anyone take advantage of me, ever again. No one.”

  I noted the heat in Mabel’s gaze—the determined thrust of her chin—with interest. Perhaps she would indeed make it out of Helheim and return to Fae. Something told me not to discount the possibility, no matter how remote; the scum of the earth have always been the best survivors.

  “Ye know, in another afterlife,” I mused, “we might have been friends. Assumin’ ye had no reason to hate me and I didn’t despise everythin’ ye stand for. Oh, and all those times ye tried murder me, let’s not forget that.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d say that’s for the best,” Mabel declared as she shuffled off in the direction of Garmr’s glow, nestled into her cloak. “Not all of us want to be saved.”

  41

  Staring down at the churning waters of the Gjoll, its currents roaring louder in my ears than any river I’d ever heard, I had to wonder how much of what I’d told Mabel was true. In the moment, I’d meant every word. But that’s the funny thing about moments—they come and go. Was I really prepared to risk my life to save Ryan knowing how slim the odds actually were of succeeding? The answer, of course, was yes. Whether I’d failed him along the way or not, this was it—the last shot either of us would have at redemption.

  But that didn’t mean I had a death wish.

  Mabel had been right about that part; this trial by river had “bad investment” written all over it. Unfortunately, it was also the only game in town. All signs pointed to Ryan having done what I was preparing to do now, which meant my chances of ending up where he had were astronomically better than what they would be if I tried to find some other, potentially safer, way. Not that I had that kind of time; I could feel Circe’s potion wearing off with every passing moment, not unlike those first few hours of the flu when your body twinges and aches for no reason. Basically, if I was going to go after Ryan, that meant it was literally now, or never.

  I closed my eyes, wishing I’d thought to ask Freya the sign for “wet suit,” and cannonballed off the bank before I could second guess myself.

  The water was absolutely fucking freezing. Like Jack Dawson going blue while floating on his quarter of Rose’s massive door freezing. I came up for air planning to shriek but couldn’t; my lungs had shriveled up to wrinkly, three-day-old party balloons. Instead, I got swept up by an undercurrent that yanked me beneath the seething waters so violently I must have looked like a Jaws victim. I tried to fight it, to kick back up to the surface, but there was no use.

  The Gjoll had me.

  Once I was fully submerged, however, the bone-aching chill began to dissipate, replaced by a warmth that spread from my chest to the rest of my limbs in a slow, pleasurable crawl. I found I didn’t need air—not so long as this thawing heat remaine
d. All I needed was to stay right where I was, and everything would sort itself out.

  That’s when the voices started.

  At first, all I could hear was the faint rush of water overhead, like a fan left on in the other room. But then, in the slightest of increments, that dim buzz coalesced into words, then phrases.

  Home.

  Love.

  Join us, and be free.

  Eventually, they became something else altogether, something far more complex: emotions. I floated, pulled along in the river’s wake, and felt things I couldn’t describe in mere words. Fleeting, raw feelings so powerful that they produced random flashes of insight into bitter memories I had either forgotten or repressed. The jab of self-condemnation as I cradled Jimmy’s limp body, for example, or how I’d lashed out when he pulled away from me afterwards—even the ache of watching him leave for good. These were followed by numerous instances in which I’d avoided Dez out of selfishness or spite, chased by the heart-wrenching moment I saw what she had done to my room, the day I came back from Fae, to make it feel more like home.

  And then, of course, there was Ryan.

  Guilt washed over me as I pictured the Faeling’s face on the day he left Boston, the day he found out his father had died. Why hadn’t I reached for him, comforted him the way a true friend would have? My aversion to touch, I reminded myself, coupled with my insane desire to keep everyone at arm’s length. The same reason I’d been so dismissive of him when we met again in Fae, so eager to forge a new path and leave the old me behind even at the expense of a steadfast friend. Even then, I’d seen the pain lurking behind his eyes, the rage he kept bottled up inside, but I’d considered him too weak to be a threat. And I’d been wrong. But then, rather than try to help him, to walk him away from the edge of the precipice, I pushed him over it—worried more about my well-being than his.

  For what felt like hours but could only have been seconds, a barrage of similarly haunting memories came and went, each saddling me with a deluge of emotional baggage until it felt appropriate that I end up sinking to the bottom of the river, that I be swallowed up by forces outside my control. The weight of my regrets were like chains, dragging me down link by link, forged by all the choices I should have made but hadn’t, all the people I could have saved but didn’t. Such, I thought to myself as I sunk deeper and deeper, was life.

  Perhaps death would be better.

  Of course, there was only one way to know for sure.

  42

  I sat cross-legged on a marble floor staring at a painting propped up against a pile of discarded memorabilia, fascinated by its expression of vibrant color. The painting depicted a dark vase brimming with bright yellow poppy flowers, hemmed on one side by three scarlet blooms. Not extraordinary as subjects went, but all the more impressive for being so eye-catching. I reached out, brushing my fingers along the canvas, and tried to imagine what hand had produced such evocative, masterful strokes.

  “Oh, you found another one.”

  I didn’t have to look over my shoulder to know who spoke; the man with the blue skin was always on the lookout for beautiful things among the detritus that flooded into the city. Which was how he claimed to have found me. At the time I was wandering among the outskirts, addled the way so many of us are when we first arrive, unable to remember much of anything—especially about myself. Later, when I’d asked him why he was scouring the outskirts in the first place, he admitted he had no idea. Only that he’d felt the urge to go there that day. Back then, it had seemed strange, even improbable.

  Now, I understood exactly what he meant; I woke every day with odd compulsions, drawn to this or that part of the city. More often than not, those impulses led to jaw-dropping finds like this one.

  “You should bring that back with you, this time,” the man insisted. “If you don’t, you know what will happen.”

  It would get swallowed up again, I thought to myself. Lost for all eternity, or at least until someone else uncovered it. I hunched forward, tucked the painting into a recess provided between a photo album and a gym bag, and clambered awkwardly to my feet, the armor I’d been wearing upon arrival clinking and clanking with every little movement.

  “Why must you always do that?”

  The man’s voice was chiding but unsurprisingly tinged with amusement. This was the game he and I so often played, after all—him tempting me to collect what I found for posterity’s sake, and me, refusing to be tempted. Not because I found fault in his desire to hoard beauty, but because I thought beauty ought to be sought after, that it should be earned. It was a philosophical difference of opinion, I supposed, and one we kept coming back to despite the fact that neither of us even knew our own names.

  “Let’s go home, Blue.”

  I reached for the man’s hand and clasped it in my own, only dimly aware of the glove that separated his flesh from mine. That was another topic of conversation which occurred often between us: why I’d never tried on anything else in all the time I’d been here. Unfortunately, that I couldn’t explain as easily; the thought of removing my armor simply never crossed my mind. It felt as much a part of me as my arms and legs.

  “Say, Red,” the man began as we started meandering in the general direction of the makeshift shacks we called home, “let’s take a detour on our way back. There’s something I’d like you to see.”

  I shrugged in tacit agreement, not daring to get my hopes up; Blue had shown me many things, but very few had appealed as much to me as they had to him. Lately, I was beginning to think he did it to impress me, or perhaps to show how highly he regarded my eye for treasures. Either way, though, it wasn’t like we were pressed for time.

  We walked in silence the rest of the way, passing the occasional person going about his or her business without so much as a hello. Not out of rudeness, but simply because that’s how it was, here. Words were understood by all to be inadequate things—a form of intimacy rife with pitfalls. And so it was best, by far, to remain silent.

  Unless you were Blue, of course.

  “Come on, it’s just over that hill and up those stairs,” he urged. “You won’t believe the view from the top, or what I found.”

  My companion’s excitement, as it so often did when he got like this, soon proved infectious. I began to walk faster, marching up the hill with him at my side, dodging the occasional landslide of debris as leftover junk fell from the rivers that swirled across the sky. Fortunately, the downpour here was less intense than most, mainly unmatched socks and the occasional wallet. There were some parts of the city where you could only survive by finding shelter from the hail of car keys and cell phones and other such misplaced objects—a fact which I’d had to learn the hard way.

  The stairs were larger and thicker than they needed to be, extending high enough into the sky that by the time we reached the top step, I was winded and ready to lie down. Blue, of course, was not; between his odd skin tone and his boundless energy, I suspected the two of us were not of the same species. Not that it mattered.

  “It’s only a little further, I swear. Come on, once we hop over, you can rest.”

  I set my hands on my hips, ignored the faint stitch in my side, and straightened, seeing immediately what had drawn him back to this place; from this height, the stairway offered a nearly unobstructed view of the entire city. There were the great mounds and their raging storms to the east, our tenements to the west. To the south lay the endless outskirts. The vista directly in front of us, however, was obstructed by what appeared to be some sort of mausoleum which seemed to have been connected to the stairs, once upon a time. Now, a vast chasm separated the two.

  “You won’t even be able to wrap your head around what’s inside there, seriously,” Blue insisted, measuring the distance with his hands as though it mattered to him. “So, do you want me to throw you, or catch you? It’s your call.”

  I eyed the gap, apprehensively. We’d already discovered I could jump nearly as far as Blue could, but I’d never tried fro
m this high up before.

  “Throw me,” I replied. “But try not to overdo it. I barely survived last time.”

  “You got it.”

  Blue took hold of my waist with both hands and launched me into the air in one smooth, regularly practiced movement. My landing, however, was not as graceful; I rolled as I hit the ground but still managed to jar my shoulder and lose feeling temporarily in both my legs. Thankfully, Blue was beside me a second later, half-escorting, half-carrying me through the gaping doorway of the mausoleum.

  “It’s dark,” I noted, unable to see my hand in front of my face, let alone whatever fantastical sight Blue had intended.

  “Yeah, I covered the hole in the roof before I left. Didn’t want anything disturbing this place except us. Are you good to stand on your own? Alright, good. Stay here, and I’ll take care of it. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  When the light finally spilled into the cavernous room, my eyes had already adjusted, forcing me to look away rather than stare. And yet, despite only having the briefest glimpse of the mausoleum’s contents, I had to admit Blue was right to have insisted I come here.

  “Aren’t they something?”

  No, I thought, they were incredible.

  Lining the circumference of the room were a cache of weapons unlike any I’d ever seen or heard of. Swords and shields, spears and axes, even pistols and the occasional rifle...you name it, and this place had it. But it was the jaw-dropping quality of the weapons which astounded me; each tool of war had obviously been meticulously crafted to the point that even the least ostentatious among them would have been worth a veritable fortune.

  Blue settled in beside me with a manic grin splashed across his face, practically radiating with pride. I couldn’t fault him for it, though; he’d stumbled across a true treasure trove in a city overflowing with trash—not exactly an easy feat.

  “They’re beautiful,” I admitted.