by Skyler Andra
He gave me a wry smile and nodded. “So now please tell me who you are.” I liked his patient, friendlier tone. “Tell me why the touch of the dead didn’t destroy you. Tell me what manner of thing you are.”
This guy made me laugh. What manner of thing I was. “Okay, um… my name’s Autumn Rankin. I’m a florist. I work over at Pearl’s, and I delivered the baseball rose display to Mr. Parsons’ funeral. I didn’t think Mr. Parsons was going to hurt me though.”
Impatience colored Hades’ expression with the tightening of his face. “The dead don’t decide who they hurt. They are not meant to mingle with the living, which is why I needed to send him to his place in the afterlife as soon as I could. The amount of damage he could have done to his family might have been deadly.”
“He wouldn’t have hurt his family!” I objected, perplexingly protective of Mr. Parsons. He’d been so nice about the flowers I had done up for him, so appreciative that I had taken him to see his family, but suddenly I wondered if that was all.
Hades shook his head. “The dead don’t understand. That is why it is forbidden. He might have touched them and–” He snapped his fingers and I expected Alan Parsons to materialize in front of us for judgment over breaking the rules.
For a moment, I noticed how very strong Hades’ hands looked. Pale and calloused, something about them made me shift a little in the booth.
“But he hugged me,” I said distractedly.
“I know,” Hades replied. “And that’s why I want to know what you are. I thought all of the daughters of the night sky were long dead. You’re not a psychopomp, or at least not one I recognize. You’re also not a particularly clever revenant, though I had speculated.”
“Whatever I am, I look too good to be a zombie,” I suggested, and he smiled at that, though perhaps a little unwillingly.
“I like the way you look,” he mused off-handedly. While that incredible bit of information was sinking in, he continued with, “You are not any of those things. Where did you come from? How did you come to be?”
He claimed to be a Greek God. Why couldn’t he tell me?
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I informed, eating another mozzarella stick. “I was born here. Dad hightailed it to Australia when I was eight, and Mom died from breast cancer when I was seventeen. I work with flowers. I plant anything I can get my hands on. My apartment balcony is overflowing with them. I hike and mountain bike ride sometimes. The dead have never bothered me.”
Hades snorted a little at that. “No, corpses have never bothered you. If you had had some kind of encounter with the actual dead themselves, you would already have plenty of problems.”
“Yeah, if I treated them like you did I could see why,” I shot back.
He narrowed his eyes at me, assessing me again with a sweeping gaze as if trying to see if he could take me apart to examine my components. Well, after Dad left and Mom died, plenty of therapists tried the same, so I doubted that he was going to have better luck no matter how nice his suit was or how pretty his cheekbones.
“I am literally the Lord of the Dead,” he said finally. “I treat the souls as they should be treated. Fairly and with respect, but delivering justice to those if they inflicted pain on others.”
I probably should have just kept on stuffing fried cheese in my face. There were a million smarter things to do than mouthing off to someone I was beginning to suspect was the real deal—the king of all the deadlands—Hades. But I did precisely none of them.
“I don’t think they would say the same thing,” I countered, earning more than a few nervous looks from the other patrons. “Mr. Parsons was suffering.”
“Alan Parsons was a dead man,” Hades growled. “He should not have wanted anything. The dead do not want. They no longer care about what happens on Earth upon passing.”
A couple sitting at the booth opposite us gave me weirded-out glances. Okay. Time to dial back the dead talk unless I wanted to encourage more strange looks.
I stared at him—he who was so convinced that he was right, and suddenly remembered everyone who had ever told me that people on food stamps shouldn’t get to buy candy or chips or anything that might make the grinding circumstances related to being on food stamps just a little bit easier. I remembered them from when I’d had to use government assistance myself. But when things had gotten better, I’d started manning the line at my local food pantry.
“Are you dead?” I demanded, whispering the last word for fear of more crazy glances.
The question caused him to draw back a little as he stared at me in confusion.
“What kind of question…?”
“Answer the question!” I jabbed a mozzarella stick at him. “You’re pale, but more goth or computer geek than dead man, so tell me. Are you dead?”
Not taking my eyes off Hades, I registered the couple opposite us slide out of their seats and hurry outside, leaving behind their half-eaten meals.
Oops! If Hades was who he claimed to be, and he had access to the Earth’s well… wealth, their meal was on him. And so was mine.
He shook his head. “Neither. Yet this only means we have no idea, none at all, what the dead want. Because we’re not dead. You can apparently hear them, at least if poor Mr. Parsons is any indication, and so can I. If you care about what the dead want, maybe you should ask them yourself.”
I leapt out of my seat, glowering down at him with my hands flat on the table. I was hyper aware of even more eyes landing on me, making me blush a little before I slumped back into the booth. To console myself, I stuffed some more fried cheese sticks in my mouth, thinking that maybe it might have been better if I’d eaten my food and simply moved on.
He looked at me for what felt like a long time with a thankfully, less harsh expression. Besides asking me what or who I was, the Lord of the Dead wasn’t demanding anything from me—he wasn’t telling me what I should want or what I needed to do.
Again, as a wonder of wonders, he smiled a little. One corner of his mouth lifted up enough to give me the impression of a dark room with thick velvet drapes opening to let in the sunlight.
“You go to funerals often, do you not?” he pressed. “You commerce with the dead.”
Err, no. “Um, I work at a flower shop. I have commerce with people who need flowers for funerals, so yes, I guess?”
“Have you noticed anything strange going on lately? Anything out of the ordinary?” Hades’ question took a turn I should have expected after everything.
I didn’t know what he was on about, but I answered with honesty. “Calhoun Family Funeral Home is on the verge of splitting up because Tommy Calhoun slept with his brother’s wife. That’s the weirdest thing going on in the local industry as far as I know.”
Hades looked slightly distracted at that. “Why was that?”
“Because everyone thought that Tommy was going to go become a priest.”
“Ah. That was actually not what I was thinking of at all.”
I grinned, and as an experiment, slid my platter to the middle of the table between us, testing to see if the fried delights might tempt him.
“Well, you know.” I smiled. “Play dumb games, get dumb prizes. Maybe you should stop fishing and tell me what I need to know so I can answer your questions more precisely.”
His blazing eyes spoke of his chagrin, and he shot me a slightly defensive look. “It has been a long time since I troubled myself with human agents. I have forgotten how utterly ridiculous and how focused on petty details you can be.”
Ouch. Arrogant much? Luckily, I didn’t offend easily. I was a look-on-the-bright-side kind of girl. I even felt a flower pun coming on that I could use to brighten his world a little.
“Comes with being human,” I said, unrepentant. “Tell me what’s happening. Then I can let you know if I can help.”
“You have a very inflated idea of yourself for a human.”
Again, ouch. “And yet you’re still here, talking with me at Mama Tickey’s.”
Hades shook his head. There was a slight confusion in his gaze. “I don’t even know why I am speaking with you about all of this.”
“I guess I just have one of those faces,” I suggested guilelessly.
Distracted, he picked up a mozzarella stick and ate it in two bites before eating another. After popping them, he looked at me in surprise.
“Good?” I asked, proud with myself that I’d tempted a god to eat at Mama Tickey’s. This would go down in history as one of my finest achievements.
“I do not want to answer that for fear of what you might say.” He stood up, offering me his hand. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“The Underworld.”
A tempting offer—hard to say no to. Imagine all the conversation starters from now on. Oh hey, Autumn, what have you been up to? Oh, nothing much, dropped in on the Underworld the other day. The conversation swiftly followed by dropped drinks and smashed glass.
“Why?” I put down my current stick, perplexed.
“I have a problem that you might be able to solve,” he answered.
“Why me?” I leaned back in my chair, but ate the last mozzarella stick just in case he zapped us away and I missed out. “Who’s to say I’m not dead and you’re trying to convince me to go to the afterlife?”
“I assure you,” he said with a hint of amusement in his voice, “you are very much alive. Now come.”
I wanted to explain my choice to go as some kind of compulsion due to the magic in his black eyes that made me stand up and follow him. That would have read a lot better than Local Florist Falls in with Death God Cult Leader and Follows Him to Oz. But there was no magic, no force, or compulsion. Entirely of my own free will and likely without the common sense that God had given a fruit bat, I stood up from the booth and gave him my hand.
A ghost of a smile traced his lips as the ground start to shift underneath me. It triggered some kind of pure human panic in me because the ground began to spin as the world warped.
What came out of my mouth, however, was not a protest against it, but from mostly having worked in food service for four years in high school. “Wait, the bill!” I shouted, “We didn’t pay!”
“I did not order anything,” Hades initially dismissed, but then sighed. As the world moved in an out, he let a gold coin clink on the table.
Then we were gone.
Chapter 6
Autumn
When the world stopped spinning, I groaned, my palms flat against something icy and hard (unfortunately not Hades’ muscled chest). What? A girl could dream! I didn’t meet tall, dark, and brooding gods every day, did I?
I waited a few moments for my head to clear and my vision to stop whirling. A long hall full of very nice black and white tiles stretched out in front of me. The tiles were cool under my cheek, and the thought of staying there for a little while seemed really nice. At least until my head stopped aching.
Then I remembered what had happened at Mama Tickey’s and shot up into a sitting position. Wherever I found myself reminded me a lot of my grade-school trip to the courthouse building downtown. I remember being in awe of the enormously tall arched ceilings held up by graceful columns, each one beautiful but cold, sparking a sense of incredible loneliness inside me. Given it belonged to Hades, I thought that the place might have felt dead, but that wasn’t right at all. Dead didn’t necessarily need to be still and dull. You only have to go to a Buddhist or a Mexican Catholic funeral to know that. No, this was just lonely and silent. I mean, I half expected wails of pain from tortured souls or something because of how strict Hades came across.
Needs a few plants, I thought aimlessly, admiring the ceiling. That’d probably help… wait. Does he get any light here?
I caught sight of vines weaving around columns after a quick glance around. The leaves had already fallen, and there was an onset of creeper brown as if a frost had killed the plant.
“If you are acclimated to my house, you do not need to continue lazing on the floor,” Hades said from behind me.
“I wasn’t lazing, I was just…” I rubbed my forehead while turning around, climbing halfway to my feet. “Oh. Wow.”
Whatever he was the lord of, it was apparently the king of the quick change. Back in the world, he looked, well, not subtle in a suit too expensive to be anywhere near appropriate for his surroundings. Here, wherever here was, there wasn’t a need to pretend any longer, so he could be what he was.
In his own home, Hades wore a long robe draped artfully off of his shoulder, the fabric pure white and edged with a deep, deep black. Pinned with a golden brooch studded with small red rubies, the entire thing did more to emphasize his muscular form than hide it. I found my eyes tracing his bare arms, and the broadness of his hips and shoulders before I landed on his slightly smug expression.
Ugh.
At Mama Tickey’s, I told him there wasn’t anything wrong with telling people how good they looked; but Hades didn’t need to be told he looked good. He knew he looked fine—more than fine!—especially like this, and I wasn’t going to give a prodigious ego another boost.
To my surprise, Hades offered me his hand, helping me to rise the rest of the way. That sensation hit again, the one of warmth, falling, and pleasure, but fainter this time. If he felt it at all, he didn’t let on.
“Welcome to my home,” he said, inclining his head graciously. “Come. We can speak in my study.”
While he started to walk, I hung back. It had been ages since sixth-grade Greek mythology, but I still remembered a few things about it. Specifically about him kidnapping some poor, helpless goddess and spiriting her to the Underworld and forcing her to marry him.
“So, um, are you married?” I asked. “Is there going to be a super-pissed off goddess of the springtime who doesn’t want me spending time with her husband?” Again, fishing. But this time it was purely for clarity, not out of interest. I swear.
Hades stopped in his tracks but didn’t turn around, becoming as still as the statues in the recesses of the walls.
Oh no, I broke him, I thought for a moment.
Eventually, he turned only his head to me. I couldn’t read his entire expression, but what I saw was as calm as a deep pond. Of course, I had gone fishing—real fishing, with a line and all—enough times to know that deep ponds held monster catfish, so that was less comforting than it might have been.
“I am not married,” he answered, short and sharp, implying things like vicious divorce, or all my things were set on fire, or maybe she ran off to leave me for a Lithuanian bodybuilder. It told me that he obviously wasn’t happy with the outcome, but I probably wasn’t going to be smited (smiten? smote?) by some jealous goddess.
“All right,” I said, content to leave that one as it was.
In my wandering behind him, I discovered Hades’ palace to be one of the biggest and oldest museums I had ever been in. The architecture was perfect: every statue in its niche, every artifact in its display case—it all spoke of class and wealth.
“Do you like it?” Hades asked as we walked through the halls.
“You already know it’s beautiful,” I retorted.
“But do you like it?” An odd question, but he didn’t turn around when he asked it. I couldn’t imagine a god cared for the opinion of a lowly human. Besides, this place was perfect. Heaven, really. Or what I could see of it. I was sure hellfire and brimstone lurked somewhere, but I didn’t want to see that just yet.
I replied to his back, frowning. “It’s fine.”
“But?”
“Persistent, aren’t you?” I put my hands on my hips. “Okay, so maybe I want to get a sharpie and doodle some mustaches on those statues.”
“Really?” His voice, instead of being shocked or horrified at the idea of vandalism, was amused or perhaps even indulgent.
I stuck my chin up a little in response.
“It’s what happens when anyone sees anything that’s too perfect,” I replied. “Som
etimes, you just want to mess it up a little.”
“Really?”
“You could stand to be messed up a little bit,” I muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing at all.”
“You are terrible at lying,” he said, causing me to make a choked noise that I decided passed as an answer.
To my relief, we arrived at what appeared to be his study, which was a surprisingly cozy space with a desk, shelves upon shelves lined with books across all the walls, and an enormous window that looked out over white fields. Not exactly what I expected the Lord of the Underworld to have in his palace, but hey, what did I know? My Greek mythology was extremely rusty.
“Oh…” I voiced softly, gravitating to the window right away. “What are those?”
Dumb question. Flowers, of course—tall, white, and gorgeous—and they covered the hills outside Hades’ study as thickly as the fur on a cat’s back. As a florist, I should know, but I’d never seen anything like them before. They had a slight splotchy redness to them, and they waved lightly in the wind, incredibly beautiful and tempting to see up close.
“The old word for them is eberium,” he said dismissively. “The happy dead, some of them at least, wander there.”
I squinted, examining the field for any dead spirits. “There are… dead people out there?”
“You can’t see them, but they’re there.”
But I saw Mr. Parsons back at the funeral home… “Can you see them?”
“When they want to be seen. Many of them have been badly hurt by the living and are shy.”
I was still alarmed by the idea of invisible dead people wandering through the flower fields, but something about the matter-of-fact way Hades said that last line made my heart ache. The dead were now beyond hurt despite remembering what it felt like, but the living could still be hurt so badly.
I checked again, and this time I caught wisps floating through the meadows. White apparitions, fading in and out of reality.
“This is my realm,” Hades intoned, almost to himself. “I was… chosen a long time ago for this position. I rule it well, or at least I do no worse than those who came before me, and I like to think that the dead are satisfied. The ones who come here, at least.”