He brought the cup up to his lips.
Behind him, there was a distinct roar; a familiar grunt, one he had come to know very well. It was the voice of his Roaring Gimlet. He spun around and spotted his cornurus standing outside of a hotel called Eirenos Inn. The Raven must’ve been inside. Cross dropped his cup and sprinted over to the inn.
Before he could reach Gimlet, a squal with a bandage wrapped around its head exited the inn. Cross ducked behind a post on a porch across the road, wondering how such a miserable soul got into paradise. Was it searching for him? It had all its limbs so it wasn’t the one-armed squal, who had most likely burned by now after drinking the poisonous calabash, and he knew for sure he had burned the other two squals back in Xibalbá.
The bandaged squal stalked down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. Gimlet snapped at the squal. It hunkered back and hissed at the cornurus before continuing down the sidewalk. Cross smirked, happy to see Gimlet attacking a squal.
He jerked his head, commanding the draggles to follow him. They crept around the back of Eirenos Inn and snuck inside.
THE RAVEN SAT AT THE TABLE IN HER ROOM, SHARPENING HER DART to the symphony of wagons and carriages rolling outside. Her new partner Forfax had just left the room, and it sounded as if he had gotten into a little skirmish with Gimlet outside.
The rogue squal didn’t talk as much as Cross. Forfax’s demeanor was more like hers—subdued, soft spoken, and introverted, which was the exact opposite of normal squal behavior. That’s why she had somewhat of a soft spot in her heart for Cross. The rotten scoundrel had character. He was an impressive actor, and together they had formed a team greater than any other soul she had ever aligned herself with. None of her old partners ever survived a second con. Cross was the first one she ever had to get rid of personally.
After spending so many months together, she was bound to have grown fond of him in some capacity. When sharing the company of someone for an extended period like she had with him, it’s easy to fall in like with them—unless you’ve become so sick of the person that you’d want to strangle them. But, interestingly, she had never wanted to strangle Cross, even when he opened that foul mouth of his.
He was indignant and loud, but she saw through his bravado and into his charm. All his tough talk was a facade. He hid behind the cocky attitude, to keep everyone else at bay. With all the distrustful spirits that populated the underworld, including her, she didn’t blame him for that behavior. She harbored the exact same suspicious credo. The two of them just had different approaches. Because of that, they complimented each other’s song, and they danced as equals. She would’ve never admitted that to him though. That confession would have caused her to lose the upper hand in their relationship. She’d be the one roaming Sheol for all eternity instead of him.
Every time she began to care for one of the damned she ended up making stupid moves. Not only did ridding herself of him suit her best interest of not becoming a Nothing and remaining alone, but it was the right thing to do for the greater good of the underworld—if there was a such thing. She felt a sense of accomplishment, as if she made up for some past misdeed by preventing spirits from stealing his memories. No soul, not even Cross, deserved to remember.
She nicked her finger on her now sharpened dart and slipped her finger in her mouth, tasting the lifeless waste that was her spirit blood. It was thick and lumpy like spoiled milk and the aftertaste was just as sour.
Outside her window, barbot wings smacked the wind. For a moment, the birds squawked as though they were fleeing the skies due to some impending holocaust, and then all the outside noises halted. The Tribulation wagons and carriages no longer crunched across the cobblestone road. The marching stopped. All was quiet except for a small scuttering outside her door.
Klickety klick went claws on the wood. She knew that sound. Cross’s draggles! If they were outside her door, Cross wasn’t too far behind. That bastard just wouldn’t burn.
She remained still in order to avoid warning her intruders of her presence, listening ever so closely. The soldiers outside resumed their march and the wagons beat at the road again. In haste, she worked to rethread the rope into the dart.
Three draggles burst through the door. She tied the last loop of the rope and sent the dart hurling at the draggles. She struck one down, swung the rope around, and plunged the dart into a second one. The third draggle leapt. She yanked the rope toward it. Black blood exploded from the last draggle’s stomach as the dart impaled it through its back. It, and draggle number two, shriveled to Nothing, but the first draggle survived its injuries. It struggled to lift its knees off the ground and knelt in a pool of its own black blood before joining its companions as a Nothing.
“They were the nicest little critters I ever met in this goddess-forsaken place.”
She spun around to find Cross sitting in the window sill. If only he weren’t there to burn her, she might have smiled at the bastard’s presence. He was the only man who had ever made her want to smile.
She could have burned him right there, but for reasons she couldn’t explain to herself, she gave him time to mourn his lost. He plucked three splinters from his palm, flicked them to the floor, and stared at the three dead draggles as if she weren’t in the room at all. He crossed himself and then aimed the tip of a closed parasol at her as if it were a gun.
It was clearly a woman’s accessory with its pink cloth and flowery stitching, and she knew it must’ve been an object of the dead, but had no idea of its ability. If Cross was carrying it around, it had to have been dangerous.
“I’ve heard that it’s bad luck to open those things inside,” she said.
“I don’t have to open it.” He pointed the parasol at the bed. Lightning struck the pillows. The bed-spread caught fire. “Get rid of Ropey,” he said.
She released her rope dart, and it clunked lifeless to the floor. “You’re already in paradise,” she said. “You don’t need any objects to break in. The River Lethe is right outside.”
“It’s not going anywhere,” he said. “You and I have some business to settle first.”
The sky thundered, the ground rumbled, and the hotel waffled. Cross held the obsidian blade up and peeked an eye through its peephole. “You remember this blade don’t you? You let me keep it in case I decided to fall on it. You’re just full of great ideas.”
He tossed the blade to her. She caught it.
“Wedge the grip into the floor,” he said.
She jammed the skinny handle in between the wood logs that made up the puncheon floor.
“Very good,” he said. “Nice and straight. It has to cut the throat of a buzzard. Now, lie across the table face down.”
She lay across the table, the triangular blades pointed toward her neck.
“That’s it,” he said. “Right over it. Now, I have another system. A little different than yours. I don’t shoot the blade. I shoot the legs off the table.” He crossed himself.
“You cross yourself,” she said, “yet you believe in the Great Goddess.”
“So?”
“You can’t mix religions where they contradict.”
“Religions contradict where the Great Goddess doesn’t,” said Cross. ”There may be many mythologies, but there’s only one Magna Mater. And she’s more than one thing at a time. All things at once. Her wings spread far too wide to fit in your little bird-house.”
“Either way, if the Great Goddess cared about your primitive rituals, you wouldn’t be in the underworld with the damned.”
“If you believe that, then you nothing about her, you stinkin’ buzzard.” He aimed the umbrella in a fit of rage.
A whistle soared through the air outside. Molten rock crashed through the window. The force bowled her over and away from the blade. Her rope dart landed at her side.
The lava ate the floor and created a gap between her and Cross. The entire hotel buckled and whimpered. Cross’s half of the room detached from the rest of the building and he san
k to the bottom floor.
She jammed her top hat on her head, and grabbed her rope dart; it wrapped around her waist. She snatched the obsidian blade from the wedge in the floor and swooped out of the hotel holding onto her top hat as she soured through the air. She mounted Gimlet, galloped down the road, scooped Forfax, and fled Elysium with the rogue squal.
The Raven and Forfax set foot on their second con together in the toneless and grey Asphodel Meadows. She removed her justaucorps because it had become soaked in too much sweat. Red sky didn’t bother her too much, but the heat from the blistering blue sky beat down on her like it did every other soul.
From her hiding spot among the brush, the Raven lay on her stomach, listening to the ceremonial chants taking place yards away. Forfax lay on the altar, while ghost-like spirits prayed over him. The spirits were shadows of thin air called shades. Winged creatures fluttered around the apparitions, attached to the specters symbiotically in a meandering, meaningless existence.
One soul stood out among the shades—a man wearing monk-like robes and appeared to be a spirit of similar ilk to Cross. He glanced her way.
She ducked. The brittle asphodelus ramosus bush split apart and crumbled to dust. The flakes caught in the back of her throat. Her eyes watered as she held the cough back, fearing any noise made on her part would warn the shades of her presence thus ruining the con.
A familiar voice spoke nearby: “Brilliant blue sky today, isn’t it?”
Off to her right side, Cross pointed a pistol at her. Nobody ever snuck up on her once, let alone twice. She was losing the one advantage she always had over her adversaries, or Cross was getting better at besting her.
He nudged the barrel of his revolver into her temple and uncoiled her rope dart from her waist. “Hello, Ropey,” he said once he had the rope dart in his grasp. He laughed and patted Gimlet on the horn. “How’ve you been my friend?”
“You came all this way to find me,” she said, “instead of drinking from the River Lethe?”
“Sometimes you search so hard for something, and when you finally get it, you realize there’s something else that you want even more. Luckily, you weren’t that hard to find.” He ruffled her wings. Feathers fell off and glided onto the ground.
“You’re molting,” he said. “I found a few of your feathers stuck on top of Gimlet’s warm droppings. Now, get up.”
“Let me take care of Forfax.” She nodded over to the altar and the shades.
Cross shook his head.
“No?” she pleaded. She had assumed that the pattern of her partners never surviving a second con had ended with Cross.
But in keeping with a miserable motif, a shade plunged its ghostly fist into the screaming squal’s chest and held its leaky heart high in celebration. The man wearing the monk robes reached into the squal’s bandaged skull and removed the Eye of Providence.
“Sorry, Forfax.” The Raven almost crossed herself.
Cross did it for the both of them. Then he cocked the hammer to his revolver. The click reverberated through her temple and drowned out the cheers of Forfax’s festival.
“You and I are going for a walk.” He roughly bound her arms, legs and molting wings.
“There’s no bounty on my head you know,” she said. “I’m not worth anything to anybody.”
Cross yanked her backwards until their bodies touched. His hot breath grazed her ear.
“You are to me, Raven,” he said. “You’re mine.”
An unbalanced hiss colored his tone. It rattled her. He was always full of rage, but even when he was really livid, she had never heard him sound so delirious.
He snatched her top hat off her head and sat it on his, and then neatly folded up her justaucorps.
“How can you even where wool?” he said, tucking the justaucorps into Gimlet’s saddlebag. “It’s way too hot for that. And it covers up your figure. Makes you look like a man when you’re not really all that bad to look at. Under different circumstances, you and I might’ve been something.”
He scooped her over his shoulder and placed her on the back of Gimlet just as she had courteously done him months ago.
She bobbed up and down uncomfortably on the cornurus until they reached the smoggy kingdom of Hades, where he sat her down in the dirt. A thick combination of smoke and fog buried the kingdom and obscured anything that wasn’t within a few yards of them. The towers of the palace rose above the mist. They were the only visible structures of the kingdom from where they stood.
“I have to get supplies for our little outing,” said Cross. “You stay here. Don’t move.” He tugged on her binds and stroked the cornurus’s horn. “Gimlet, you keep an eye on her. I’ll be back later.”
“You can’t leave me out here like this,” she said. “This is hellhound territory.”
“They’re not so bad. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Gimlet will take good care of you. She’ll make sure you don’t burn in Hades like some shade.”
He tipped her top hat, mockingly, and vanished into the gloom, leaving her sitting out in the open at the mercy of the elements and the carnivorous creatures that often roamed about.
Souls straggled in and out of smog. Some of them looked directly at the Raven, but kept going about their business, disappearing into the mist.
The stench of the Inferno’s bowels traveled the cold wind. It was worse than the odor from Gimlet’s rear-end and was growing stronger every second. The fog receded like drawn curtain, revealing the Inferno.
Above the volcano, within the smoke, a face hovered. It was too uniform to be an optical illusion. It swayed and rippled in the ash cloud, staring up into the northern mountains. The dark clouds in the sky had parted in an oddly specific fashion, leading directly to Mount Mictlan.
She squinted, but whatever was up there was too far for her to see. Molten lava spewed into the sky and engulfed the smoky head. It dissipated.
The ground jolted her up and down on her bottom and shook Gimlet awake. The opening in the clouds sealed back up and the fog rolled back in. That eruption was bigger than the one two sleep periods ago. Minutes later, ash fell softly on her head. She leaned back on Gimlet.
A bottle rolled through the ash. A green hodder wobbled about, pushing the bottle uphill. The bottle rolled back, on top of the hodder burying it in the ash. It burrowed its way out of the ash and shoved the bottle again.
“I could help you,” said the Raven.
The hodder’s rat-like head shot up and darted around, searching through the fog.
“Over here,” she said.
The plump pack rat peered at her squinty-eyed. “You look like you need more help than I do.”
“We can help each other. How about loosening my restraints?”
“Sorry. Tis no business of mine what you have got going there.” The hodder went back to heaving the bottle.
“I can get you objects,” she said.
The hodder halted. Its pointy ears popped up. It swilled from side to side surveying the misty desert around them, scrutinized her binds and landed a cautious eye up on Gimlet. “Objects you say? As in more than one?”
“Thirteen, if you can free me,” said the Raven.
The hodder climbed up on the Raven’s chest and began gnawing on the ropes. Gimlet bowed her head and chomped down on the hodder. The Raven cringed at the crunch of the bones.
Black blood, purple guts and yellowish bodily fluids oozed out of Gimlet’s wide mouth and dripped onto the Raven’s chest. Gimlet’s tongue swiped from one side of her head to the other and she laid her head next to the Raven.
“Thanks for looking out for me,” the Raven said to the beast.
Two black hellhounds crept out of the mist and stalked them from yards away. Gimlet raised her enormous head. The Raven struggled to free herself. The binds were too tight.
The two hounds called into the smog with squeaks. Minutes later, three brown hellhounds joined the two black ones, and at once, the pack of five stormed and flocked around the Ra
ven and Gimlet.
The cornurus swung her spiked tail and bludgeoned a hound. Instantly, it keeled over dead. A hound charged toward the Raven. Gimlet’s tail whooshed over her head and impaled the dog with a smash and short yelp.
The remaining three hounds fell back and chirped to each other like birds in conversation. In a turning of the tables, Gimlet became the aggressor. She swung her tail at them. They ducked and hopped.
One hound grabbed hold of the fat end of Gimlet’s tail. A second hound chomped into her nose and locked down. They held her in position as the fourth hound approached her midsection to disembowel the poor cornurus. It snapped at her midsection, but missed when Gimlet twirled at the last second.
The hound at her nose knocked into the snapping hound. It released its grip on her nose and rolled off. Gimlet lifted the hound that was locked on her tail up and slammed it into the ground. It held on.
She flicked it up again and bashed it into the earth. Its grip seemed to loosen, but it was still attached to her tail like a leech. She flipped the hound into the air and spun under it.
The hound flopped down into the horn on the center of her head, skewered. The final two hounds backed away, chirping to each other. Gimlet advanced toward them with a powerful roar that boomed in the Raven’s chest.
She hadn’t heard the cornurus bellow that strongly since they’d known each other. That was why Cross nicknamed her the Roaring Gimlet. Hounds brown and black trotted off into the smog in retreat.
The Raven leaned her head against the cornurus. “Thanks for looking out for me,” she said. “Truly. I mean it this time.”
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