by Nicole Thorn
Everything around us looked gray, except the sky, which had a kind of washed out blue color to it. Some of the landscape had a dull red accent to it, but nothing else had much color. It felt like the place where the dead would go before finding their final resting place. The kind of place that would keep them from wanting to linger. Not that it stopped all the dead. Some of them liked to suffer, some of them like to live with their misery.
“Why do you think Hermes sent us here?” I asked Callie. “Did you get anything from him?” I tapped my temple.
She shook her head, then frowned. “Everything is kind of muffled down here, actually. Like someone stuffed socks in my ears.”
She stopped so that she could pull on her earlobes, like that would dislodge whatever sound she couldn’t hear. “I can only hear Hades clearly. Persephone is topside already. She went early this year, to help my friends. So, everything is weirdly quiet down here. I don’t like it. My head is too quiet.”
I could see her starting to panic, so I touched her arm, getting her attention. Wide eyes stared at me, shaken. “It’ll be fine. We’ll get back home before the day is out, and everything will be all right.”
Callie kept pulling on her ears.
I took her hands away from them. She took a deep breath. “I’m just . . . not used to the quiet, I guess. It feels like someone unplugged me.”
“What is Hades saying?”
She focused for a second. Then she started to talk in a deeper voice, with an Australian accent. “Damn kids. Damn Hermes. Always messing around where he shouldn’t. Damn it.”
So, he knew that we had ended up in his domain. Which meant that he would probably get us sent home as quickly as possible. I breathed out, took Callie’s hand again, and said, “There, you see. Hades wouldn’t let anything happen to us.”
“You don’t know that,” Callie said. “I mean, he likes his son, but for the most part, he isn’t too keen on letting strangers into his realm. Especially after what happened with Hermes and the golden fleece.”
I stopped. “What?”
“That’s one of the things my friends had to deal with.”
“Who are these friends of yours?” I asked, frowning. “You’ve mentioned them several times.”
Callie beamed, her face lighting up with so much happiness that it looked wrong with the bleak landscape around us. I couldn’t help but starting to smile back at her, as if she had control over my face. I tried to fight it, then realized that probably made me look constipated, and just smiled. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice the affect she had on me, because then I’d have to explain myself, and it would turn into this entire thing, and I didn’t—
I cut the thoughts off forcefully.
“My friends,” she said. “I told you they’re the seers.”
“Yes, but what about the others?”
“Oh, they’re demigods, like you. One, Zander, is a son of Aphrodite. Though he’s not as bad as the others. He’s arrogant and handsome like all of her other sons, but he doesn’t use it to his advantage.”
I frowned. “Handsome? I bet I could take him.”
I realized what I said a second too late, and then tried to recover. “Not that I would want to fight him or anything.”
“Of course not,” Callie said, shaking her head. “Anyway, then there’s Kizzy and Verin. They’re parents are Demeter and Hades.”
“What else do you know about them.”
“Not much,” Callie said, shrugging. “They don’t talk to me all that often. I know that Kizzy doesn’t like being touched, and Demeter always feels really sad and disappointed when she talks about her. I don’t know why she feels disappointed, because Kizzy is nice. She’s such a good person.”
I frowned at that too. “Has Apollo ever talked about me?” I asked.
“Probably. I’ll go through my sticky notes later. I assume that you aren’t the son that tried to wrestle an alligator naked?”
“Um, no,” I said, trying not to picture some dude, who was my brother, trying to do that. I didn’t even know the guy and I felt shame for being related to him. I shook my head, clearing the thoughts some more.
“I’ll look through my notes, if you want.”
“No,” I said, too fast. “I mean, you don’t have to. Don’t put yourself out. It doesn’t matter what Apollo thinks of me.”
And it didn’t. It didn’t matter what any of the gods thought of their children, because they never acted like their cared before. Sure, Apollo showed up randomly, but that didn’t mean he really cared about me. It just meant that he liked to mess with me when he got the chance. For all I knew, he did this with all of his children.
Why am I even thinking about this? It hardly matters if either of my parents love me.
“We should probably keep walking,” I suggested to Callie, gesturing over my shoulder. “Before something tries to kill us.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” Callie said. “I don’t want to get killed. The last time I almost got killed, Zander had to save me, and it made Jasmine upset. Those are two of my friends. Zander took a car for me. Probably so that Jasmine wouldn’t take the car for me.” She frowned, looking down at the ground.
“Someone tried to hit you with a car?”
“Oh, yes, it was a whole thing with Athena and Arachne. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.”
For some odd reason, I wanted to take the person who almost killed Callie and beat their face against the ground until they became nothing but blood and bone. I shoved that thought away, because it terrified me.
The two of us started walking again. Callie chattered while we moved, telling me more about her friends. She didn’t really know much about them, because they didn’t show up at her doorstep all that often. They would call every now and then, but they wouldn’t put much more effort into their ‘friendship’ than that. It made me angry. I trusted her opinion, that they were decent people and they just didn’t think about spending more time with Callie.
It might’ve been weird, a bunch of adults talking to a teenaged girl. I didn’t know. Either way, I found myself kind of wanting to punch them. Stupid, since I felt certain that they would all pulverize me into dust.
“Do you hear that?” Callie asked. “Is that an outside noise or an inside noise?”
I’d been hearing the people talking for about a half an hour now. Callie, as a human, couldn’t hear it as easily as I could. “Yes,” I said, tugging on her hand to pull her along. “I hear it. Do you want to check it out?” I’d be hoping to avoid it, and people, and gods, and monsters, pretty much since we started walking.
Callie answered by taking the lead and pulling on my hand. I followed behind her, keeping my eyes open for any kind of danger. I worried that something would attack us out of nowhere, and we wouldn’t be able to save ourselves. Callie was a human. She might’ve been the Oracle, but a human nonetheless.
We found people waiting in a line. Something about them felt wrong to me, even from the distance. The people all lined the bank across the river. They stared at us with hollow eyes, but the sheer number of them scared me more than their expressions. I’d never seen so many people moving around, bumping into each other, lining up.
Around us, on this side of the river, people knelt in the dirt, digging holes with their bare hands. They didn’t pay any attention to us, beyond glances. One of the men shoved a woman out of the way when she started trying to clean off something she found in the dirt. When he saw a rock, the man cursed her, threw the rock in her face, and started digging again.
“Hey,” Callie said, stepping forward. I pulled her back, feeling like these people didn’t care what she had to say, and they would hurt her.
We had barely gotten the chance to look at them before a boat crossed our line of sight. I watched as the ferryman pulled to a stop in front of us. Charon looked terrifying, which was exactly what I thought he would look like. He had a thin frame, narrow features that I found hard to look at for longer than a coup
le of seconds. He seemed to encompass darkness, so that it left inky stains on the world around him. He pulled his boat over to the shore, so that it rested on the bank.
I didn’t know how to feel about this. Neither did Callie who squeezed my hand so hard that it felt like my bones had ground together.
Charon removed his hood, and it became much easier to look at him now that he was just darkness personified. “Finally, someone comes to check out the issues we’re having. You call for a bit of maintenance, and then you wait and you wait. You’d think that Hades would’ve gotten on this sooner.”
“Um, what?” I asked.
Callie’s eyes had widened. “Wait until I tell Jasmine about this. She’s got a thing about meeting gods, but she hasn’t met Charon.” She grinned at me, her eyes lighting up.
“Well, I’m sure that she’ll be properly jealous,” I offered.
All around the shore, people started to look over. The man who had thrown the rock got to his feet shakily and made a run for it. Charon casually held his hand out, grabbed the man by the throat, and threw him onto the ground so hard that when the sand settled, he had vanished.
And back to terrifying, I thought.
Charon turned back to us. “You two, on the boat.”
“But we’re not dead,” I said, stupidly.
Charon rolled his eyes. “Oh, you aren’t? I was so confused. Get on the boat.”
Callie touched my arm, and when I leaned down to her, she whispered to me. “You shouldn’t argue with gods or people working for them. It never ends well.”
“I have to argue with them,” I said. “If I don’t, that’s how I end up stealing a limousine with fourteen strippers in the back while Apollo screams obscenities out of the sunroof.”
She stared at me.
My face got hot. “It’s a long story. You know what, never mind, let’s just get on the boat.”
“You’d rather risk your death by getting on the boat than telling an embarrassing story?” Charon asked.
“Shut up,” I said, then fumbled over myself. “I mean, um, yeah. Yeah, I would.”
He laughed while Callie and I got onto the boat. It didn’t hold anyone else at the moment, which didn’t make me feel better. It didn’t make me feel worse, either. We sat silently while Charon pushed the boat off the shore. I noticed his hair for the first time as he started to turn us. Pure white, and it seemed to shimmer in moonlight that didn’t exist. It made him look even gaunter than the black hood did.
“Where are we going?” Callie asked, leaning forward.
“The Meadows,” Charon said.
The Meadows, or Asphodel, or the Meadows of Asphodel (I’d heard people call it all three before), were not somewhere that I wanted to be. They weren’t a place where anyone wanted to be, really. Reserved for people who hadn’t done anything with their life, they weren’t really a punishment. They also weren’t a reward. People went there when they died and just existed, as they had in life. They hadn’t done anything great, they hadn’t done anything terrible, and they existed in this ennui in death.
It sounded horrible, though. Like slow death all over again.
“Can I ask why?”
Charon glanced at us, frowning. “Did no one tell you? Of course not. Hermes would never do anything that didn’t directly benefit him, and telling you something wouldn’t benefit him. No, let’s leave that to the poor schlub that has to ferry people from one side of the river to another.”
Callie’s eyes filled with sympathy. “I’m so sorry. When I see him again, I’ll let him know that you think he’s being annoying.”
Charon looked at her. “I like you.”
“Thank you.”
I eyed him, suspicious.
It didn’t take us long to reach the Meadows. Whenever I heard the word ‘meadow’, I got this image in my head. A clearing surrounded by trees, green grass growing, flowers blooming. It looked like the kind of place that someone would love to nap, in my head, at least.
The Meadows did not match that picture in the least. The trees looked like they would at the end of fall. Most of the leaves had abandoned its branches, leaving a sparse few that clung on for dear life. the trunks looked gray, the barest hint of brown keeping them from losing all their color. The grass was patchy, with vast circles of brown marking the land. It looked all the worse for the fact that more people than I could count had started walking around, stomping the grass into nothing.
Charon stopped the ferry at the edges of the Meadow, and we watched the people milling about, talking quietly to one another. It sounded like most of them talked about sports teams that hadn’t existed in decades, or players that had died years ago. A group of portly men all huddled together, talking about a game from before I was born, like that had been the highlight of their life.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“The same thing they’ve always done,” Charon said. “Not much.”
“Why are we here?” Callie asked, shifting her feet. She touched my hand and I opened it up for her, letting her wrap her fingers around mine. I felt better immediately and hoped that she did as well. Even though it shouldn’t have mattered. Because why would it have mattered?
Charon sighed, shaking his head. “Fucking Hermes. You’re here, because something isn’t right out there.” He gestured to the fields. “Most of these people, as you can see, are content to do nothing for eternity. They will relieve the best moments of their lives for the rest of their existence, and act like that’s enough. It’s the same thing they did when they were alive.”
A gaggle of women walked by, listening to one woman talking about her daughter’s wedding, her eyes lighting up. As they walked off, another of the women started speaking about the time she raised almost a thousand dollars for her school single-handedly. This place seemed worse and worse the longer I stood there.
“However,” Charon continued. He pointed a bony hand toward the back of the Meadow, where a small group of people had huddled together. They had their heads bent in, clearly discussing something they didn’t want anyone else to overhear. “There are some that are no longer content. And that is why you’re here, Callie.”
She blinked. “What about Aster?”
“I have no idea why he’s here,” Charon said, waving his hand. “Maybe they wanted you to have some protection.”
“Thanks, I’ve always wanted to be dismissed by a skeleton,” I said, then wanted to punch myself in the head.
“What was that?”
“I said thanks.”
Charon eyed me, then turned back to Callie. “Some of the souls have gone missing. I think they’re trying to escape Hades altogether, but Hades thinks that they’re trying to find their way to Elysium. I think they wouldn’t be foolish enough to attempt something like that. We’ve had several long arguments about it. Either way, they have gone missing.”
“They’ve escaped?” I said.
Charon frowned, cocking his head to the side. “I don’t feel comfortable saying that, but I suppose it is the best option.”
“Why do you put it like that?” Callie asked, leaning forward and frowning at something that I couldn’t see or hear. Being around her felt odd, because she could certainly see more than I could. I had gotten used to being the person who knew more than everyone else.
“Because they shouldn’t be able to walk out,” Charon said. “There are layers of magic — millennia old magic — that keeps them from getting out. Yet, somehow, they’ve been messing with that magic. They’ve been trying to escape. This has never been a problem before now.”
I frowned, not liking anything that he said. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“Well, if they manage to get out, they’ll throw the underworld into chaos for an unknown amount of time, we won’t be able to control any of the souls, anyone could break in if they get Hermes on their side, they’ll then be able to wreak even more havoc, Hades will be pissed, and the world will probably suffer for it.”
&n
bsp; “You could have just said we’d be screwed,” I grumbled.
“We’d be screwed.”
I tried not to roll my eyes.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Callie asked. “I’m not a god or a demigod. I can’t help you with something as important as this.” I didn’t think I imagined the sad note to her voice, or the way she frowned at the river beneath us. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know how. Plus, Charon kept watching us out of the corner of his eyes, and it made me feel awkward.
Charon opened his mouth, but didn’t get the chance to say anything.
A woman landed on the bank in front of us, massive, leathery wings stretched out behind her. She looked gray, with a hag-like face, fangs, talons, and she was naked. I’d never seen a fury before, but I had little doubt that I stared at one now. One that glared at Charon like she wanted to rip him apart.
The fury stood to her full height and pulled her wings in against her back. As they disappeared, her entire appearance changed. Long, raven hair flowed down her back in waves, pale eyes stared at us with little affection, and clothing appeared on her body. A red dress hugged her curves tightly. It was such a tiny dress, she might as well not have been wearing it at all, not that I’d ever say that to a fury. I didn’t want to die.
She flipped her hair over her shoulder, and eyed Charon. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Showing these two what the problem is,” Charon said.
The fury rolled her eyes. “Have you not been paying attention, old man? Hades didn’t give permission for anyone to come down to the underworld. After what happened with Argus, he’s kind of gun-shy about strangers right now.” She made a sad face, which I didn’t think had the affect she wanted.
“Well, Tisiphone,” Charon said. “I would have heard the message, if someone had bothered delivering it to me.”
They all sounded like children. I leaned toward Callie, and whispered, “If they bicker this much, how is it that the gods get anything done?”
“They don’t, really,” Callie said. “They argue for ten minutes, scream for three hours, then everything just kind of falls on their children.”