Immortal's Spring (The Chrysomelia Stories)

by Molly Ringle

  “Probably fell off the branch by accident,” she remarked as they continued forward, trying to sound collected after that super-girly shriek. “Clumsy thing.”

  The stream of souls overhead grew thicker, and they drew within sight of the mouth of the Underworld in just half an hour. They paused at the edge of the oak trees, Sophie and Liam staying behind tree trunks as best they could.

  “As soon as we get out past the oak cover,” Sophie said, “the others are going to sense us.”

  “Probably be mad at us,” Liam remarked.

  “Yeah, well. We’re free agents.” Sophie rolled the olive between her fingers in her pocket, planning to eat it as soon as they got down there, then direct Kiri to do whatever needed to be done. She didn’t want to make the sweet dog kill anyone, but…

  Kiri growled again. Sophie looked at her, then peered in the direction the dog was staring. It took her a moment to make out the shape between the dark trees, some twenty feet away. She shone her flashlight at it.

  “Jackal?” Liam said, his voice hushed.

  The brown and black animal growled, then whined and ducked his head, and paced back and forth as if wanting to approach but unsure of his welcome. Larger dogs—no, spirit-world wolves—lingered behind him, melting in and out of the shadows. Sophie ignored them and stared at the animal who had come forward. Recognition washed over her, astounding her. It couldn’t be.

  “Not a jackal. A dog.” Sophie cleared her throat and called, in the Underworld tongue, “Kerberos. Here, boy!”

  The dog’s ears perked up. Kiri looked dubiously at Sophie and then back to the other dog.

  “No way,” Liam said in wonder.

  “We thought Kiri was Kerberos reborn,” Sophie said, reverting to English. “But we never knew for sure. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I know what did happen to Kerberos in the end.”

  “Huh.” Her dad studied the dog. “I think you may be right.” Demeter had known Kerberos too, after all. Had even helped Persephone pull Ares’ spear out of the poor dog once.

  “Kerberos!” Sophie called again, using the Underworld language. “Kerberos, it’s all right. Come here. Good dog.”

  He padded forward a few steps, and his tail began wagging.

  Tears filled her eyes. “Good boy! Good boy, Kerberos. Have you been out here all this time, huh?”

  He whined in longing. Now that he was closer, she could see his fur gleamed with health, even with its occasional mats of pitch and mud. She glanced up to see his wolf packmates slip away and vanish into the forest, apparently uninterested in making friends with humans.

  “Could that be?” her mother asked in wonder. “Could he have survived this long?”

  “Well, Rhea lived all this time, or at least she did up until last fall. And he knows us, look. Sit,” she commanded the dog in the Underworld tongue, just to make sure.

  He sat, gazing at her, and his ears perked up to full height.

  Everyone grinned.

  Sophie knelt and stretched out her hand. “Do you know me, boy? I’m in a different body, but do you know me still?”

  Kerberos walked forward, his tail whipping back and forth. He accelerated as he reached her, and planted his front feet on her knees and licked her face, whimpering like a puppy. Sophie laughed along with everyone else, and squeezed her eyes shut a moment against the warm tongue. Kerberos flipped over on his back, pulling up his paws and baring his belly in complete submission.

  She scratched his tummy. “Yes, you did this the first time I met you. You’re a sweet little spaz.” She had to revert to English for “spaz.” The Underworld tongue didn’t have that exact word.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” her dad said.

  “Adrian and Zoe are going to be so happy to see you,” she told Kerberos, scratching his warm hairy ribs. She smiled mournfully at imagining Adrian’s reaction. Please, Goddess, don’t let Thanatos destroy any of us before we can find each other…

  “Two immortal dogs!” Liam was jumping up and down again. “This is freaking awesome!”

  Kiri was watching Kerberos’ belly-rub with something like patient disdain. “Three, if we get Rosie on board.” Sophie scratched Kiri behind the ears too. “We’ll have a dog army and a ghost army.”

  Kerberos flipped back to his front, but stayed lower than Kiri, and wriggled over to nudge his nose against her paws. She acknowledged his submissive gesture by nuzzling one of his ears. They sniffed each other’s faces, grumbled and snorted, then both looked up at Sophie again.

  “Well.” She rose and gazed toward the mouth of the Underworld. “Guess we’ve got one more dog to carry now.” She looked at Kerberos and switched back to the language he knew. “You want to go find Hades? Should we go help Hades?”

  Kerberos barked in excitement, his dark eyes alert.

  “Then let’s do it.” Liam strode out from beneath the tree cover.

  Sophie and her parents followed, with the two dogs trotting along. At the huge yawning hole that formed the cave entrance, full of the flashing gleams of endlessly arriving souls, they leaned over and looked in, then exchanged frowns.

  “Rope ladder’s gone,” Liam said.

  “Yeah.” Sophie exhaled. “Damn it. They probably took it down so Thanatos couldn’t use it. Makes sense. But what do we do now? We can’t just jump in. And we don’t have spirit horses, even if we wanted to try them.”

  Liam’s gaze flicked up and down their mother’s soul, then their father’s. “But we’ve got a spirit mom and dad.”

  “What does that even…” Sophie got it, and fell quiet in speculation. Then she drew in her breath. “Okay. I’m willing if you are.”

  Sophie took the excess length of the vine wrapped around their father and tied it around her own waist so she was attached to him. Liam did the same with their mother’s vine. Liam picked up Kiri, and Sophie picked up Kerberos.

  “Ugh.” Sophie wrinkled her nose. “You may be immortal, boy, but it’s clear you haven’t had a bath in centuries.”

  Kerberos repaid her by licking her squarely on the nose.

  “Okay,” her dad said. “We’ll take it slow. Ready?”

  Sophie and Liam nodded, and gripped the vines as tight as possible, which was challenging with the dogs in their arms.

  Terry and Isabel stepped into the blackness. Sophie’s feet got pulled off the solid ground; all her weight dragged from the straining coil of the vines, which now seemed desperately thin for such an endeavor. She squealed in terror as gravity and the Underworld’s magic pulled them downward into the dank cave.

  Liam was yelling too: “Mom, slow down, slow down, slow down!”

  “Dad, oh my God!” Sophie shrieked.

  Kerberos grunted and lunged, and she almost dropped him.

  “Hang on,” her dad said. “Almost there.”

  The soles of her shoes hit the rock floor, and she stumbled and rolled, with Kerberos wriggling against her, to a more or less safe landing. She got up and dusted off, and grinned at Liam, who was doing the same. The whole drop had probably taken five seconds, in retrospect.

  “That was awesome,” Liam said. “I’m totally doing that again sometime.”

  “I’m not sure I approve, as your mother,” their mom said.

  A rattle of gunfire echoed through the tunnel from somewhere downstream. They all stared that direction in dread.

  “It’s starting,” Sophie said.

  Liam pulled out his stun gun. His knuckles whitened around it. “Then let’s go help.”

  Sophie took out the olive, popped it in her mouth, and chewed it up. After wincing at the bitter taste and spitting out the pit, she examined the two dogs. Then she addressed them, in dog language (mostly yips and grumbles), “Protect Liam and me, and our friends. We need to go stop the people who shouldn’t be in here.”

  Both dogs’ eyes lit up, and they each woofed in assent—in fact, what Kiri said was, “Finally! You’re talking my language.” And Kerberos said, “I miss my people! I want to
find them and protect them.” They loped ahead into the tunnel.

  Liam was snickering at Sophie’s foray into dog-speak.

  “Oh, sure, laugh,” she told him, in English. “But if you’re not nice, I’m going to tell you what they said about you.”

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Adrian and his allies raced around the river’s bend, leaping over rocks and whipping through slower-moving souls, toward the increasingly loud gunfire and shouts. Soon they were upon them: Krystal and at least forty other people, mostly men, all in bulletproof vests and bristling with a variety of weapons, which they were now using to knock the knives off the hands of his ghost soldiers. They’d disarmed nearly all the souls already, and several of the enemy were breaking through and running forward into the cave, toward Adrian and the rest.

  Zoe extended her hand and must have slammed ahead some kind of spell, because all at once the enemies’ weapons went flying up into the air and landed several meters away.

  “Ha,” Niko said in triumph.

  That only paused the assault for a moment. The enemies bolted around, grabbing weapons back where they could. Adrian leaped on one guy and zapped him with the stun gun, rendering him helpless and quivering on the ground, then pivoted and did the same to another. Tab picked up a man, who screeched in alarm to find a “soul” could touch him, and threw him in the river. Niko and Freya slashed their knives at a few other men, forcing them back and keeping them from recovering their guns. Adrian was pretty sure he saw Freddie Mercury stab a guy.

  But the enemy still had other weapons: soon most of them began tugging out new knives and guns strapped somewhere upon them, and Adrian was disheartened to note a lot of them wore grenades. Apparently the spell had only knocked away the looser gear.

  Zoe, meanwhile, shot off a new spell, which yanked Niko’s and Freya’s bodies through the air toward them. “Ade, catch!” she yelled.

  He reached up just in time to catch Niko’s body, and fell over backward with it. Zoe did the same with Freya’s, then knelt, panting, and examined them both. It chilled him to see how pale and limp they were, how blue their lips had turned…

  “I think it’ll be okay,” Zoe said. “I think this’ll work.”

  “Look out!” Adrian shouted.

  Krystal was racing toward Zoe, raising a knife, her face feral in its menace. Apparently even thinking Zoe was a soul, she was ready to attack.

  Zoe looked up and walloped Krystal with a spell that knocked her backward a few meters. She landed on her arse with a grunt.

  Adrian stood. “Take the glamour off me. I want her to see.”

  “Done,” Zoe said.

  Adrian removed his helmet. He had the pleasure of seeing Krystal’s face change as she stared at him: her fury intensified, then disbelief crept in, along with what he hoped was terror.

  “I warned you the Underworld would claim you soon,” he said. “There’s a nice little solitary cell deep down in the flames, just waiting for you. Want to see it?”

  Her discomfort seemed to vanish. She smirked. “Right. If you’re so powerful, how’d we walk right in here? And what’s about to happen to all your precious magic trees? Huh?”

  The trees were nowhere near here, so Adrian was disinclined to take her threat seriously—that is, until he glanced at Zoe and found her looking around, perturbed.

  “None of these people feel like they’ve got any magic,” she said in the Underworld tongue. “Where’s their sorcerer? Where’s the actual dangerous one?”

  “Let’s get to the trees. Now,” Niko said, in the same language.

  “Go,” Adrian told her. “I’ll deal with Ares here.”

  Zoe nodded, and she and Niko sprinted away.

  Adrian locked eyes with Krystal again, who still sat on the ground, wincing and taking hissing breaths, as if the hard landing had re-injured her hip. Good. He pondered how exactly to handle her: vengeance in the form of a quick death, or relative mercy in the form of getting her thrown in prison for life?

  Angry screams from Tab’s direction made him look aside. She was grappling with one of the biggest soldiers, who had managed to sink a knife into her shoulder. Freya’s soul darted up behind him and stabbed him in the neck. As he howled, Tab head-butted him, then pitched him into the river. She yanked out the knife in her arm and flung it after him.

  Then, most frightening yet, Adrian realized he could sense Sophie. She was near. So was Liam. He looked around wildly, though surely he wouldn’t be able to see her yet. Oh, Goddess, no, what had happened? Were they here as souls, dead, like Niko and Freya?

  That moment of inattention cost him. Pain speared through his throat. Choking, he crashed to his knees and grasped at his neck. He pulled out the knife that had landed there, which Krystal obviously had flung, but he still could barely breathe. Spots were blooming in his vision, and blood welled up into his mouth.

  Before he could recover, her foot shoved against his chest and planted him on the ground. She unhooked and tore aside his bulletproof vest, then picked up a long knife and sank it straight between his ribs, in a slice of white-hot agony, until he felt its point emerge at his back. Now he truly couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t switch realms either; he tried. If only she’d go away, just for a minute…

  “Nuh-uh, you bitch,” Tab said, and pounded toward them.

  But Krystal produced a grenade and held it out over Adrian’s prone body. “You come at me and I drop this.”

  Tab evidently stopped, but retorted, “You have been a serious asshole in every life, you know that?”

  “Whatever. This place—what the hell?” Krystal’s last word became a shriek as something dark, four-legged, and growling shot out of nowhere and knocked her to the ground.

  The grenade went rolling. Adrian desperately lifted partway up on his elbow to watch. Tab yelped, leaped for the grenade, and flung it far away downriver. Then she plugged her ears with her fingers and cringed.

  Nothing exploded, and Freya’s soul told her, smiling, “The pin hadn’t been pulled yet.”

  “Well, for fuck’s sake,” Tab said, and exhaled a long breath.

  Meanwhile, the animal’s snarls and Krystal’s screams were still bouncing off the cave walls, but soon the screams were cut short in a horrible gurgle. Adrian rolled over to see Krystal’s soul rise up, stunned, from her bloodied body. The wolf or dog or whatever it was backed off, slinking, blood dripping from its jaws. Adrian barely glanced at it; he locked gazes instead with Krystal.

  “What’s happening to me?” She was already taking jerky and seemingly unintentional steps toward Tartaros. “Where am I going?”

  Adrian couldn’t talk, what with the knife wounds. Freya answered for him: “Just where he told you you’d go. We’re sorry.” She did even sound sorry. Aphrodite had been fond of Ares in some fashion, after all. Maybe not in this life, but once upon a time.

  “No. Please. I—I’m sorry! Fix me! Please!”

  But of course there was nothing any of them could do. They watched solemnly as the invisible forces drew Krystal’s soul, the once god of war, out of their sight and down to a long solitary confinement.

  Tab walked into Adrian’s line of sight, a stony look on her face as she gazed at Krystal’s body. Then she pulled in a shaky breath, stood up straight, and smiled more warmly across him, at someone he couldn’t see. “Hey, you. What the heck?”

  Adrian tried to look that direction, but his neck still wasn’t fully cooperating. In addition, his lack of breath was starting to make the whole world fuzzy.

  Someone pulled the knife out of his chest and laid a cool hand on his cheek, helping him turn his head.

  Sophie. Alive. Oh, thank the Goddess.

  She smiled tenderly. “Hey.”

  “Wh…” Adrian coughed, spat out blood, and managed a few wheezing breaths. She took his hand, and he held onto it tightly. Finally he got his voice to work. “You shouldn’t be here. What are you doing here?”

  “Saving your butt, apparently.” She nod
ded to the bloodstained dog, who crept forward, sniffed him, and whined. “With Kerberos’ help.”

  “Kerber…” He blinked, clearing his vision, and examined the dog in bewilderment.

  The dog sat and gazed longingly at him. His tail thumped against the ground. Adrian took in the familiar jackal-ish pointed ears, the brown chest and black mask, the spot on one side of his nose. Astounded, he looked at Kiri, who had arrived with Sophie, and was now diligently licking his wounded neck. “What,” he finally said.

  “Right, well…”

  “What happened?” demanded Liam’s voice, not far off.

  Sophie looked up, then gasped, and apparently forgot the topic of the dogs. “No,” she yelped. She and Liam had spotted Freya as a soul, he realized, and likely had also noticed the bodies of Niko and Freya.

  “They have magic,” Freya said. “Of a powerful sort. Now we need to go make sure it isn’t being used against anyone else. Nor against our trees.”

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  As Zoe ran for the orchards, she felt occasional wallops of power through the air: the sorcerer knocking down each of Zoe’s wards as she reached it.

  “Bugger, I’m so stupid, why’d I even bother?” she said to Niko.

  “How was it stupid to set up magic to protect the place? It’s slowing her down, at least.” Niko kept pace with her easily. Souls didn’t usually move fast, but it seemed they could if they wanted to. She still didn’t dare think about the likelihood that he’d stay a soul—that she might fail again.