by Sierra Dean
What were these two up to? Gods usually did what they wanted when they wanted. All these subversive machinations weren’t their style.
The goddess regarded Leo before speaking again. “I am Manea. Some know me as Freyja, Kalma, or Anput. I have a hundred names and a hundred faces.” With each new name she spoke, her form shimmered and changed slightly, showing her as her worshippers saw her. She could be horrific and monstrous, or beautiful and wondrous. Every version was equally awe striking, but she returned to the Manea face at the end, as if wearing it was like a favorite dress that she slipped into most comfortably. “I am the goddess of death.”
“Leo Marquette.” He introduced himself to her like it were the most normal thing in the world to be exchanging names with a deity.
Strange how only a day earlier he’d seemed so thrown off kilter by the idea of having a god for a parent, and now he looked perfectly at home among them. Was he faking it, or was his earlier uncertainty the lie?
I’d convinced myself Leo was trustworthy—in spite of his criminal dalliances—and now I felt like an idiot for not heeding my own advice.
Don’t trust anyone.
“Leo, do you know why I’ve brought you here?” Manea idly stroked Hades’s hair, twisting the dark strands like black ribbon around her fingers. She didn’t look homicidal, she looked…bored.
“Tallulah wasn’t forthcoming on the details, but I kind of put two and two together and figured you wanted to kill me.”
Another exchange of thin smiles passed between them.
This was the most peculiar thing, a standard chitchat, only we were in the underworld and the gods had us exactly where they wanted us.
“I want to punish your father,” Manea said matter-of-factly. “He had his pet human steal something from me, and I’m not pleased.” Her glare settled on me, like I’d peed on her carpet. “Since she no longer has the item, I don’t foresee that I’ll be getting it back any time soon. Such a disappointment. I liked it a great deal.”
I thought of what Sido had told me about who the skull belonged to. It must have been one of Seth’s other children, long, long ago. “You’re not getting a replacement from him.” I put my hand protectively on Leo’s arm, even though he was beyond needing my assistance. I couldn’t keep the growl of warning out of my voice no matter how calm I tried to stay.
“It can’t be replaced.” Manea sneered at me. “That’s what it means for something to be irreplaceable, Rain Chaser.”
“I didn’t steal it, either, by the way.”
She waved a hand at me, the boredom returning to her features. “Prescott told me you would blame this on him. Told me all about your little gambit and how you turned the idol into a prize to be won. But here’s the thing about that: it wasn’t his to bet. And so you stole it from me.”
“Maybe it was yours once, but it wasn’t yours to start with.” I glanced at Leo out of the corner of my eye, debating if I wanted to reveal what I knew. “And I think it’s back where it belongs now.”
“Seth took something that was mine.”
“He took back something that was his. Someone. And killing someone else he cares about isn’t going to make you guys even.”
“Even. You say this like it’s a game. Like I care for human things.”
Frustration bubbled inside me. “You want a skull? Look around. Take your pick. This is garbage. Leo hasn’t done anything to you, and he didn’t know Seth was his father until a day ago. You think Seth cares about you? You think killing Leo is how you make Seth feel your loss? Wrong.”
So much for my suggestion that Leo not talk back. A fine example I was setting.
“I don’t expect you to understand it, human.”
“I’m not trying to understand it. The only reason I’m here is for him. To protect him.” I pointed at Leo, moving to stand slightly in front of him so he wasn’t in the line of fire. What fire, don’t ask me, I was running on instinct and adrenaline.
“Mortal life is fleeting. His time is short. What does it matter if I end it sooner? All he has is a brief series of years. Years. What is that to me? No one will remember him once he’s gone.”
“Agree to disagree,” Leo interjected.
“Your opinion isn’t necessary here.” Manea didn’t bother to look at him this time. “You will live or die as I see fit, and mere words won’t sway me in my decision.”
Something clicked in my head, but I couldn’t have said what it was. I just decided to roll with it. “What would sway you?”
“What?” Manea went rigid, releasing Hades’s hair and dropping her hands to her sides.
Hades, who had thankfully not said anything since bidding us to come forward, looked at me curiously and kicked his legs out in front of him like he was eagerly awaiting my response. I followed the line of his boots down to the floor and noticed the platform the throne was on for the first time.
It was breathing.
A hand moved next to his foot, clawing out towards me, its nails cracked and bloody. Hades stomped down on it, and the hand withdrew. The platform went still, and I swallowed hard. Whatever was holding up his throne was still alive.
“I-I asked what would compel you to change your mind about killing Leo. And me. Without getting your skull back.” The idol was gone, and judging by what Sido had disclosed to me about it, the temple wouldn’t relinquish it any time soon, no matter the situation.
There had to be another way.
“I want what’s mine,” Manea snarled.
“And I want a vacation in the Bahamas with no fucking rain.”
“I want to date a Victoria’s Secret model,” Leo offered.
“Shhh.”
“What, like only one of us gets to have one-liners? I don’t think so.”
This guy was literally going to be the death of me.
“Insolent fools. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you both right here and now.” She lifted her hand towards me, like she wanted very badly to do it no matter what I said.
“I will do anything in my power to get out of here alive.” My tone was adamant, and I wasn’t bullshitting. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do or sacrifice to get out of the underworld with Leo in tow.
“Anything?” Hades sat up straight in his chair, leaning forward to get a better look at me. My lungs trembled as he spoke.
“Don’t lissssten to her,” Mormo said. “The girl liessss.”
“I’m not lying about wanting to live.” I flipped him off. I didn’t need to pretend to like Mormo, and I sure wasn’t going to act like his opinion mattered here. Hades didn’t respect him. Mormo was nothing more than a boot-licking sycophant. He hadn’t gotten what he wanted from Hecate, so he was trying to swim upstream with the bigger fish.
Manea’s focus had shifted from me to Hades, and she seemed put-off by his sudden interest in the situation. “What are you thinking?” she asked him.
“If the girl likes to bet, I have a wager for her.”
Oh mercy, I didn’t think I was going to like this.
“Yes?” She ran her hands through his hair. Admittedly he had pretty dreamy hair. Too bad the rest of him was so scary I wanted to poop just looking at him for too long.
“The stakes are simple. I win, my ladylove gets both your lives. You win, you are free to go, and the balance is restored. She won’t come for you again until Atropos tells us your time is up. Agreed?”
“This seems like an absolutely terrible plan,” Leo said.
“Better than letting them kill us.” Maybe. “Okay, fine. What’s the bet?”
Hades looked up at Manea, stroking her face and beaming proudly. “It’s very simple. All you have to do is escape.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Escape.
All we had to do in order to live was get out of the underworld.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Leo glanced at me and must have seen a pretty stricken expression because he asked, “Is that bad?”
I nodded slowly.
“Can we do it?” Leo kept staring at me.
Hades chuckled, and the sound vibrated inside me, threatening to turn my guts to jelly. Manea looked absolutely fucking delighted. And why wouldn’t she? I’d just agreed to a bet so insane I might as well have killed Leo myself.
“Escape.” I repeated the word one syllable at a time, hoping it had a secondary meaning I didn’t know.
“It’s been done. Once.”
My head bobbed automatically, and I fought the urge to sit down. This wasn’t a small task, like getting locked in a vault and trying to find a secret key. The underworld was just that, its own world. There were regions and levels and things people had never lived to talk about. How were we supposed to get out when I didn’t know what we were getting out of?
It’s not like there was a visitor map with a big glowing You Are Here and handy signs pointing towards the exits.
“We can do it.” Leo took my arm and started to back away from the throne. I went with him, my feet working on their own without assistance from my brain.
“Escape.” I looked at Manea, and the expression of victory she greeted me with brought me back to my senses.
I don’t know what it was about her condescending, gleeful grin, but it sparked a fire inside me that rivaled the flames outside.
They thought they had us beat before we’d even begun, which just went to show they had no idea who they were dealing with.
I would get out of here, no matter what it took.
And then I’d gladly tell anyone who listened how I was able to cheat death twice in one week.
It wasn’t until ten minutes later, standing outside Hades’s temple, I really got an idea of how mammoth a task it was we’d taken on.
Leo and I stood on the deep, bone-white steps of the temple, and looked out over the expanse of the underworld kingdom.
I’d stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and marveled at the sheer scale of the place, and how small it made bystanders feel in contrast. The Grand Canyon was a fancy ditch compared to the insanity that was the underworld.
Black cave walls rose around us on every side, smoked with charcoal from the constantly burning firestorm overhead. Beneath us, the ground was littered with tens of millions of bones, stacked up on each other the way I imagined a dragon would pile stores of gold coins. A narrow path led away from the temple towards a pass between the black cliffs.
It was the only road out.
Leo shuffled next to me, jamming his hands deep into his pockets and surveying the scene in front of us. The air was eerily still, with nothing even approaching a breeze to lift the heavy weight of the heat off us. I was already sweating, and we’d been outside only a minute or two.
“You know what I was going to do yesterday?” he asked. “Before you showed up in my bedroom?”
“No.” I wouldn’t hazard a guess. I was pretty sure this wasn’t what he had in mind for a fun night out, though.
“I was going to do my laundry. There’s a place a couple blocks from the apartment, next to a coffee shop. The girl who works at the coffee place gives me free refills. I would have washed my shirts and flirted with the coffee girl, and maybe see if there were some loose pockets around the Quarter.”
“Sounds nice.”
He nodded. “What would you be doing if we weren’t here?”
I wanted to shout at him, to shake him and tell him this was serious and we didn’t have time for games of what if. But at the same time there was a soothing sense of rightness in wondering what I’d be doing if I wasn’t trapped in an eternal hellscape with a guy I barely knew.
“If I wasn’t working, I’d be reading a romance novel at a Chinese food restaurant.” I thought about the night in Whitefish when my plans to do just that had been horribly derailed by the arrival of Cade.
Leo glanced at me and smiled lightly. “You’d be banging the bad-luck priest.”
I blushed. “Shut up.”
He elbowed me playfully, and the whole conversation was so absurd I forgot for a brief second what the stakes were. “Don’t worry, kid. If we manage this, he may get lucky yet.”
This only managed to make me blush more furiously, effectively ruining any opportunity I had to deny my blossoming feelings towards Cade. Not that I wanted to tell Leo he was right, but gods help me, if I did manage to get us out of this alive, I was going to defy the no-sex rule of the temple like no tomorrow.
If we got out.
I scanned the endlessly bleak horizon and sucked in a breath through my nose. The underworld smelled of sulfur and ash, with a lingering stink of doom. I coughed, and my hand immediately went to my ribs. Breathing in this much hot, rancid air couldn’t be good for me. I worried the tar holding my wound closed might melt from the heat and leave me unable to continue.
“Let’s just be grateful Cade isn’t here,” I reminded him. “I think we could use all the luck we’ve got right now.”
Bleakly, I made my way down the steps to the ground, small bone fragments crunching below my feet like gravel. Leo followed behind, his heavy boots making a loud grinding noise, each footfall echoing with crunch-pop sounds that were vaguely obscene.
This whole place set my nerves on end.
“So, maybe this isn’t the ideal time to ask this, but…you have a plan, right?” He came up beside me, the road barely wide enough for us to walk abreast.
I didn’t look at him, keeping my gaze locked on the path ahead, expecting something to lunge out at us at any moment. “Sure.”
“Care to share it?” As he spoke, Leo stripped off his button-down shirt, exposing his muscular arms, displayed to great effect by the short-sleeved T-shirt he wore underneath. Dude was so built he could probably crush my skull between his biceps.
“Easy. Like Hades said. We get out.” I made a gesture of walking my fingers.
“I was kind of hoping you’d have something a bit more specific.”
“First we follow this creepy bone road.”
Leo grimaced. “And then?”
I stopped so I could face him directly. “And then we hope really hard that whatever is at the end of the road doesn’t kill us. If it doesn’t, we keep going, and we keep going, and we do that until we get out or we die. End of plan.”
Leo brushed his huge hands through his curly hair, scratching his scalp thoughtfully. For the first time since we’d left the temple he looked genuinely worried. Good. For once his expression matched the bottomless feeling of fear gnawing away at my guts.
“That’s certainly a kind of plan.”
“If it improves at all, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
I started walking again, matching my stride to his, which was still a bit faster than I’d like to go in my current condition. No one here cared about my injury. No one was going to take it easy on me because of it. I was going to have to suck it up.
We walked together in silence, the only sound the crisp grinding of bones underfoot. I was reminded, for some reason, of the day my parents had sat Sunny and me down to explain that we’d be going away from home and never coming back. At the time, being seven years old, I hadn’t appreciated the immensity of what never coming back meant.
Here, in the hellish landscapes of the underworld, I was provided a perfect visual for it. This was what it meant to go away and not return. This was what eternity meant, if eternity was a place.
I thought about my parents, their faces nothing more than fuzzy sketches of what I thought they looked like, as opposed to real memories. They’d explained to me and Sunny that we were chosen and our destinies meant we were on our way to lives with greater meaning and purpose than those of other little girls.
Mostly, we’d been excited that we didn’t have to go to school the next day.
It wasn’t until later, when my mother had taken Sunny away and my father was loading me up to go to Seattle, that I really got a sense of their intention. We were off to start new lives, but those lives would not include each other.
I don’t
know what made me think of Sunny here. This place was everything she wasn’t—dark, foreboding, unwelcoming. Perhaps that was why she came to mind, because I needed to remember there were things out there beyond this, things that were warm and loving and beautiful.
All the things I hoped to see again.
“Would you be mad if I sang?” Leo asked, breaking the silence with an anachronistically cheerful tone.
“Yes.”
“Buzzkill.”
“That’s me, Tallulah Corentine, killer of dreams.” I wanted to ask if he could take this a bit more seriously, but before I could, it occurred to me that maybe he had taken it seriously, and now being playful about it was the only thing keeping him from abandoning hope and giving up.
If that’s what he needed, let the man tell bad jokes. But I’d die before I let him sing.
The road narrowed, and I glanced back behind us, astonished to see how far we’d come while I was busy dwelling on the past. The temple now appeared small and unassuming in the distance. From this vantage it didn’t give away any of the sense of menace that came from being inside it. The piles of bone had dwindled as well, showing patchy bits of brown grass in between femurs and pelvic bones. It was hard to imagine this had ever been a place where grass could grow long enough to dry up and die.
Soon the path was too small for us to walk side by side. I took the lead, wishing with all my might I had any kind of weapon with me. I hated the idea of going into a bottleneck with nothing other than fists and wits to fight my way out.
“You ever feel like you’re walking into a trap?” he asked.
“Far more often than is healthy.”
“How often are you right?”
I couldn’t help but smirk at the question. “When am I ever wrong?”
I shrugged off my jacket, the oppressive heat surrounding us finally getting to be too much to handle. My arms and neck were damp with sweat, and the small hairs at the base of my ponytail were plastered to my skin.
The clouds of flame bubbled overhead like a pot of water coming to a boil. I didn’t give them more than a passing glance, remembering what I’d seen back at the temple. I worried if I stared for too long, trying to see the people trapped inside the fire, I might lose my mind and end up joining them.