by Skyler Andra
He cut me off by pulling me into a kiss. It shouldn’t have worked at all, but somehow it did. I hated the kiss-someone-to-shut-them-up trope in movies, but this was like he wanted to explain something to me, and it was the only way he could do it. Rushed and hard, the kiss burned with a degree of longing and need that I could hardly stand. He pulled back first, his hand cupped over my cheek.
“I just… didn’t want you to think for another second that I didn’t care for you,” he murmured, licking his lips. “That I don’t… have feelings for you.”
He looked beyond startled when I put my hand over his mouth, shaking my head.
“That’s all I wanted,” I said firmly. “I don’t need anything else. We’ve known each other for, like, three days at most. That’s all it can be.”
Hades took my hand from his face, kissing my palm before he returned it to me. “That’s what you want?” he asked, something strange in his voice just then.
The problem, of course, was that that was one hell of a question, wasn’t it? Yes was the right answer, but it sure wasn’t the only one. When he asked me what I wanted, I recalled the feeling from the first time we touched—flooded with all kinds of possibilities and needs. Some of them I’m going to say, were natural for a healthy young heterosexual woman who had just had her first and very satisfying sexual encounter with a good-looking guy. Some of the others…
No, I told myself sternly. Do not be one of those people who thinks sex means that you have to move in with them. No. That leads to all sorts of dumb things and terrible divorces.
“It’s what I want,” I told him instead.
For a moment, I wondered if I saw some kind of sorrow in his eyes, but then his expression was perfectly blank again. He reached out to trace a gentle fingertip from my temple to my cheek before curling down to my chin. That one simple gesture took my breath away. I had to swallow hard or I would have leaned into his hand.
He retreated to pull the car back out onto the highway. “Pull out that map,” Hades instructed. “I want to make sure we’re going in the right direction.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” I muttered, wondering if he sat up a little straighter at that.
Probably just my imagination, I thought.
***
We crossed the state line just a little short of two in the morning, and I was just waking up from my nap when Hades existed the highway. This road, if anything, was worse than the road to Ms. Mae’s house. I had to hang onto the door, gritting my teeth to keep them from clacking together.
“You take me to all the best kinds of places,” I told him flatly.
I thought he would ignore me, but he smiled a little, not taking his eyes off of the road. “Oh? Where would you like to go that’s better?”
“Some place really warm,” I said wistfully. “The cold just takes it right out of me. Maybe some place where I can lie out in the sun and watch the ocean. I don’t suppose there’s anything like that in the offering?”
“Not for now, unfortunately,” he mused. “But I will keep it in mind.”
“What might you be keeping it in mind for?” I asked suggestively.
I didn’t get my answer because he turned the car off the road into what looked like a deserted parking lot. An office off to our right looked as if it had seen little use in the past few decades, and a rusty fence that stopped us from driving farther.
“Seriously, the best places,” I muttered as I got out of the car.
Just going north is bringing us closer to winter, I thought, the wind rising up cutting at my face. Hades didn’t look bothered. I bet gods didn’t even feel the cold. After checking the map one last time, he walked to the fence blocking the long road beyond it. Moonlight provided enough light for me to see the white gravel road. A whisper of magic rose beyond the dark trees swaying in the wind.
“It should be just up ahead,” Hades informed, and I nodded, following along behind him with my hands shoved deep into my pockets.
I wondered what poor dead person had found their way to this desolate place.
We’d only been walking for a few minutes when something tugged at the back of my coat, like it had gotten caught on something. Only there was no branch poking out or no wire fence nearby. I yelped and spun around, examining the trail behind us.
Hades turned to me, instantly alert. “What is it?”
I shook my head. “Something grabbed the back of my coat,” I said in confusion. “Like, grabbed a handful of it and pulled me back.”
Hades peered into the darkness with an unaccustomed look of irritation. “I do not see anything.”
“Well, it really happened.” I rubbed my arms.
“I know it did,” he assured, cutting me off with a sharp gesture of his hand. “I just can’t see it.”
See what? The dead person? Were they hiding from him? I frowned at that, but at this point, there was nothing to do but to keep walking behind him because I wasn’t sticking around here to be yanked at by a ghost.
We went another short while before he suddenly spun, reaching for something but coming up empty-handed. He actually glared at the empty path behind us as if he could command whatever it was to come up again just by staring it into submission.
“You felt it too?” I asked, glued to his side, terrified that whatever had grabbed me might do so again. I was more than a little weirded out by now.
“Yes.” He glowered at the area surrounding us. “I didn’t think you imagined it, but now I know for sure.”
He looked more irritable then fearful, so I let it go.
Another twenty-minute walk took us to the edge of an enormous quarry. In that time, there were two other tugs—one to the back of my coat and the second, more alarmingly, to my hand. Oh, God. I felt someone’s hand, small and soft, wrap around mine and give an urgent little pull before letting go. When I turned to ask what the soul thought it was doing, Hades tapped me on the shoulder.
I glanced over a thin ledge that dropped down into a great depression in the earth. Limestone was the big industry in this part of the world, and the crater left behind by the mining glowed white in the night light, giving the air around it a kind of gleam. It was gorgeous in a peculiar kind of way.
“I hope you’ve got some magical way of getting down if we need to,” I muttered to Hades. “I might hike but I’m not built for climbing.”
“I hope we won’t have to,” he replied. “Ah, there they are.”
At first, I had no idea who or what he meant, but when my eyes adjusted, I made out a form seated on the edge of the quarry, so small and quiet that it might have been just another shadow. Then I heard an accompanying sniffling sound.
“Aw, no,” I murmured. “There’s really only one reason to be at a quarry all by yourself late at night, isn’t there?”
“Mostly, yes,” Hades answered, the tone of his voice uneven, which told me he found the entire thing just as uneasy.
Well, he could join the club, but I knew that there was work here to be done.
“Should I take point on this?” I asked, to which he nodded reluctantly.
“You do seem to have… a talent for this that I lack.”
“Years and years of customer service,” I said with a slight smile. “Okay. But be ready to back me up?”
He nodded. “Always.”
The way he said that caused warmth to spread through me, making me a little dizzy and unsure of my footing. That might not have been the most positive thing I could be feeling right before I went to the edge of a sharp drop-off, but I took a deep breath and stepped forward.
“Hey,” I called, stepping up behind the little shadow.
It flinched, huddled in on itself, but now that I was closer I could make out long, lank, dark hair and a black hoodie. Whoever it was, they were all rolled up in a bundle of misery that would never be fixed.
“Go away,” a quietly wretched little voice replied. “I don’t want to talk to anyone. Go away.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t,�
� I said. “Can I come sit next to you?”
A shiver pulsated through the shadowy form. He momentarily hunched into a smaller ball, then straightened back up.
“I don’t care!” came the ungracious answer, but I decided that this was progress.
I gingerly sat down on the lip of the quarry, letting my legs dangle over the edge. Over my shoulder, I caught Hades silently lurking behind me. The tight expression on his face made it clear he didn’t like this situation very much, and honestly, I wasn’t too thrilled. I didn’t hate heights, but the drop was a very long way down.
“Thanks. I was getting tired of standing,” I said more lightly. “How are you holding up?”
“How do you think I’m holding up?” spat the figure, a teenage boy who couldn’t have been much older than fourteen. Small, clearly underfed, and red around the eyes.
“Badly,” I admitted. “Sorry. Dumb question.”
“It was,” he snapped. “I just wanted to get out of the house for a while! Mom and Dad kept fighting, they never stopped, and I got so tired of it, and… and…”
“And you left,” I guessed. “You came here.”
A tiny nod gave me my answer.
“It was an accident,” he said miserably. “I know they said it wasn’t, but it was. I didn’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to be alone…”
My heart wrenched at his heartbroken words. “I’m sorry, hon. Come here.”
He leaned into me immediately, his small frame tucked under my arm as I hugged him as tightly as I knew how. God, he was young. He clung on to me as hard as he could, his face buried against my shoulder. When I looked down at him, he gave me a crooked grin as hollow as I felt when realizing what had happened to him.
“But I’m not gonna be alone anymore,” he declared, and then he threw us both over the edge.
In a brilliant moment of clarity, I realized exactly where I screwed up—thinking about how it was going to feel to get splattered across the rocks and to be sorry for everything I wouldn’t get to do. Following that, I let out a long scream, but no sooner had we tipped over, we stopped. Hades had me, both of his hands gripping my arm as the dead boy still clung to my side, squawking in surprise. The Lord of the Dead cursed under his breath as he hauled me back over the edge with a growl.
“You hung on to him!” Hades chided, because of course I had.
“He still needs to go, right?” I asked shakily.
The boy made an escape attempt, but I wasn’t letting him go anywhere, maintaining a serious death grip on his arm. I dragged him upright, resisted the urge to punt him right over the edge of the cliff, and glared.
“Come on, kid,” I said, vexed. “Work with me. We’re trying to help you.”
He started crying again, and although he might have been faking it, I somehow didn’t think so.
“I was all alone!” he cried. “I’ve been alone for forty years! No one comes here anymore! No one cares!”
His shouts rang in my ears. Forty years. How could Hades not have known this kid was missing from the Underworld for so long? I glanced at him, the question in my gaze, and his eyes were deeply troubled in response. He was hiding something. Things were a lot worse than he had let on.
I pushed that aside to discuss later. For now, the boy needed me, and I finally understood his pain. At first the kid’s mourners must have all come to the quarry, leaving flowers, memorials, prayers—everything that would have kept him company. And then… the years went by. People forgot. People healed. And he never could. They’d left him all alone.
“I’m sorry,” I said with a sigh. “But the attempted homicide of someone who was trying to help you, aside, you need to go.”
“I do?” he asked with a note of surprise in his voice.
“Yep.” I patted him on the shoulders. “Time for the next thing, and this man is going to show you the way.”
The boy looked at Hades nervously, and I didn’t blame him. The Lord of the Underworld’s eyes had never looked darker, never looked more terrifying.
“Randall Willard,” he intoned in a deep, booming voice that reminded me of a powerful wizard, “you will come with me.”
I swore I saw a skull superimposed on his face as he spoke, but I shook it off, putting it down to a vision prompted by the adrenaline of almost dying.
The boy, Randall apparently, looked pale, but he glanced at me.
“It’s all right,” I encouraged. “It will be.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. Go on.”
He took the hand that Hades offered. Poor kid looked half-afraid that the Lord of the Dead would bite it right off of him. That was how I knew he had been telling the truth about being stuck on that ledge for so very long. No one who didn’t desperately want out would have gone anywhere near Hades looking like that.
I had a moment, like the one with Ms. Mae where the world went all soft and fuzzy. I knew by now that it was something to do with the spirits crossing over to the Underworld and moving on, and that gave me a certain kind of comfort.
Wherever Randall went next, at least it wouldn’t be a sad, cold quarry in the middle of nowhere. Maybe now he wouldn’t be alone anymore. When he vanished, the wind whistled over the craggy rocks, making the trees around us rustle.
“Wow,” I said to Hades, “I hope he…”
Whatever I said was lost because in two steps he crossed the space between us, grabbing my wrist and dragging me close to him. I yelped even though there was no pain in it. But I’d never seen Hades look like this before. His eyes were darker than the night around us; his white, sharp teeth were bared.
“What are you doing?” I cried.
“What in the name of the gods were you doing?” he growled. “That was a dead spirit, one that was forty years gone! What you did was dangerous, incredibly dangerous!”
“Did you know that it was dead for forty years?” I demanded.
He scowled at me. “Of course not. If I had known…”
I wanted to know why the Lord of the Dead hadn’t been aware of that crucial fact. It seemed like something he should have known. But now didn’t seem the right time to ask for clarification.
“You would have warned me, right?” I questioned. “And sure, I know now to be careful! I was just doing what worked before. You were happy to let me do it!”
“And I was wrong!” Hades snapped.
He didn’t let go of my wrist as he started walking back to the car, pulling me along with him. I trotted to keep up, feeling as if my heart was going to pop right out of my chest.
“I was wrong,” he growled, almost to himself. “This is no place for you, no place at all.”
Great. He was freaking out again like he’d done in the underworld. Any moment now he was going to teleport me back to my apartment. I’d wake up and realize where I was, then moan at the dizziness in my head.
“Hey!” I butt in. “I thought I was doing a pretty good job. Two out of three isn’t bad!”
“When that one might have heaved you into a quarry to join its haunting? Yes, it is bad!”
“Look, look, I’ll be more careful next time,” I swore. “All right? We’ll figure things out a little better before we visit the next soul.”
He let go of my wrist and pushed me flat against a tree. “You have no idea what I want to do to you right now,” he growled. “You were so damned reckless, and all I can think of right now is teaching you a lesson so that maybe, just maybe, you’ll be a little less careless in the future.”
The implication behind the way he said that, about his strength and what we had done the night before, floated up between us. Maybe I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t. No. I didn’t know if I wanted to whimper or dare him to follow through. Confused by my desires, I shook him off, striding back toward the car. I couldn’t think when he was that close to me, and I desperately needed to be able to do so.
On my way back, something seized the back of my coat, yanking me back, but
this time it didn’t let go.
“Let me go!” I yelled at whatever clung to me.
The temperature dropped a few degrees, and I shivered, taking an icy breath. I turned around. Standing between Hades and me was a young girl with long and tangled hair, her head bowed, her body shaking like a leaf. She was dressed in an old-fashioned dress, her bare feet on the frigid ground; but I doubted from the slightly transparent way she shone that she felt anything.
“I’m sorry, mistress,” she apologized with a strange accent. “I didn’t mean to, but yon boy has been festering for many a year.”
“Oh.” I stepped forward, my hands held outward to show her I wasn’t mad. “And you were trying to keep me from…”
She nodded, not looking up. “I couldn’t. I am very sorry.”
“Hey, it’s fine.” I took another slow step. “I’m probably too stubborn to listen anyway.”
Hades muttered something like probably, but I ignored him, still focused on the girl.
“What’s your name, honey?” I asked.
“Tillie, mistress,” she replied in her childlike voice. “And I am so very sorry, but I must ask you. Please, may I go too?”
“Oh, Tillie, of c–”
“No!” Hades snapped.
I looked up at him, finding him shaking his head.
“She’s not one of mine,” he said. “She’s meant for someone else, some other afterworld.”
How many other underworlds existed? I started to protest, but Tillie’s cries and dried-out tears made my heart ache.
“I was the last one,” she whimpered. “Everyone’s gone, all gone, and it’s been so long. I’m so tired of being here all alone too. Please, please don’t leave me here. I don’t want to turn into that wretched boy.”
I reached out for Hades, taking his hand, making him flinch before meeting my eyes.
“You can’t just leave her,” I whispered. “You wouldn’t, would you?”
His face turned cold and hard. “She was never called to me…”
“She’s calling now,” I pointed out. “Will it end the world?”