by Jenna Black
“Let it go, Nikki,” Jamaal advised quietly. “We have to do this.”
Maybe I was stalling just a bit. Diving into a portal to the Underworld in the heat of battle had been a lightning-quick decision on my part, and therefore much easier than walking in now with my eyes wide open.
“All right,” I agreed reluctantly. “Let’s go.”
We all took a quick glance around to make sure there wouldn’t be any witnesses to the impossible thing that was about to happen. Luckily, there aren’t that many people who like walking around cemeteries at night. Even if there had been, they’d have had to be practically breathing down our necks to see the pocket of inky-black darkness that formed and blotted out the sea of headstones as Oscar opened a portal.
I had to fight a sudden urge to take a step or ten back. Even Cyrus seemed affected by the dread that emanated from that portal, his perpetual mask of good-natured humor slipping away. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, I thought, then shook my head violently to clear that thought from my mind.
The Underworld wasn’t Hell, I told myself, but not very convincingly. I was hard-pressed to say exactly what the Underworld was, so it was difficult to be any more convinced of what it wasn’t.
Cyrus shuddered dramatically. “Have a nice trip, kids,” he said. He was trying to regain his usual aura of nonchalance, but he wasn’t fooling anyone.
I took a step toward the portal, still fighting my natural reluctance, but Cyrus held out a hand to stop me.
“First things first,” he said, then held out his hand to Blake, who hadn’t uttered a peep since we set foot in the cemetery.
Blake rolled his eyes and didn’t take Cyrus’s hand. “I’m here. There’s no reason I have to hold your fucking hand.” He crossed his arms over his chest.
Cyrus cocked his head. “So you mean to be difficult about this?”
“You expected something different?” Blake replied, his jaw jutting out stubbornly.
There was a wealth of undertones I didn’t fully understand, and once again I worried about Blake’s safety. We all knew Cyrus wanted him for something other than the pleasure of his company, and if Blake resisted . . .
Cyrus sneaked a glance at my face and chuckled. “Tell Nikki it’s all right for her to go. I think you’ve triggered her mother hen instincts.”
Blake waved me toward the portal. “It’s fine, Nikki. And while I won’t take Cyrus’s hand, you three might want to hold hands. Wouldn’t want Oscar to make the portal go away at an inconvenient moment.”
That won him a particularly withering glare from Oscar, which he totally ignored. Not trusting Oscar as far as I could throw him, I decided to take Blake’s advice and grabbed his hand. The glare shifted to me, but I wasn’t inclined to pay it any more attention than Blake had.
Jamaal took my other hand and led the way into the forbidding darkness of the portal. I followed, wishing like hell I could fight off the waves of dread that kept washing over me.
The Underworld had not magically transformed into a verdant paradise since I last saw it. The portal tossed the three of us out into a gray stone tunnel, the impact jarring enough to send us all to the floor. I lost my grip on Oscar’s hand, but nothing short of the Jaws of Life would pry Jamaal’s fingers loose.
It took a minute to get my breath back, but when I did, I sat up and had a quick look around. There was nothing to see. There was a dim ambient light in the tunnel, with no discernible source, but it was barely enough to reveal our immediate surroundings. Both sides of the tunnel disappeared into total darkness a few yards from where we all sat, and if the tunnel had a ceiling, that, too, was invisible.
The air was stale and unmoving, just hot enough to be uncomfortable.
“So this is the Underworld,” Jamaal said, giving my hand a squeeze. “Charming. I can see why Anderson would like to hang out here.”
I managed a weak smile. “There’s more to it than this.” Not that I had any idea how much more. On my previous trip, I’d seen a tunnel just like this one—maybe even the very same one, for all I knew—and a massive abandoned city. If Anderson was spending his days here, I was sure it would be in a city somewhere. Which would have been more useful knowledge if I had any clue how many cities there were and how to get to them. However, there was no point in being negative about it.
Freeing my hand from Jamaal’s, I rose to my feet and dusted off the seat of my pants. Oscar and Jamaal followed suit.
“Which way?” Oscar asked, looking at me expectantly.
I had no clue. Both sides of the tunnel looked exactly the same, and I felt no strong inclination to turn one way or the other. Not a promising start to our expedition.
I wasn’t even close to trusting Oscar, so I quickly decided I didn’t want him to know I was clueless. He’d made little effort to disguise how unhappy he was that Cyrus had ordered him to come with us, and I imagined it would take little provocation to cause him to run home. Cyrus might not even be mad at him if he left Jamaal and me behind.
“This way,” I said, trying to sound decisive as I took a step to my right. Jamaal slanted me a strange look, and I realized he saw right through my attempt at subterfuge. But that was only because he knew me so well. He’d been on enough hunts with me to know I was never certain, so just the fact that I acted certain meant I had no idea where I was going. Luckily, Oscar didn’t know that.
The tunnel was so monotonously the same that it felt something like being on a treadmill—we walked and walked and walked, and it looked like we hadn’t moved an inch. I kept mentally prodding and poking at my subconscious, hoping to get a feel for whether we were going the right way or not, and I got nothing. As far as I could tell, we were walking aimlessly, with no more guidance than we’d have if I weren’t descended from Artemis.
When the tunnel branched off with one way going straight and one to the left, I decided to keep going straight with no particular instinct guiding me. That sinking feeling inside me kept saying this was a pointless endeavor. If my power wasn’t guiding my footsteps, then I was just wandering through an immense world and hoping I would accidentally bump into Anderson along the way.
There was a part of me that thought I should give up right then and there. Though we had seen nothing even remotely threatening, there was a pervasive feeling of wrongness to this place. A sense that we as living beings didn’t belong here. I could tell Jamaal felt it, too, because he was all nervous and fidgety as we walked. Kind of like he was when he spent too much time in a cemetery.
“Are you doing okay?” I asked him quietly. The dead, flat air seemed to swallow the sound of my voice. I should have considered how Jamaal’s death magic would respond to a place like the Underworld before I agreed to bring him with me. Then again, I didn’t think there was any way I could have persuaded him to stay behind.
Jamaal stuffed his hands into his pants pockets and shrugged. “I’m uncomfortable,” he admitted, “but I’m not anywhere near losing control.”
Oscar just loved hearing that—especially the unspoken “yet”—and he scowled at us. “I’m not staying down here with a death-goddess descendant who’s out of control!” Sweat beaded on his forehead and upper lip. I didn’t know if that was from the heat or just from his nerves. He was as jittery as Jamaal, although he’d been like that from the very beginning.
“He’s not out of control,” I said. “And you’re a death-god descendant yourself, so stop being such a weenie. This place ought to be right up your alley.”
Oscar clenched a fist, and I think he was considering throwing a punch. A quick glance at Jamaal made him change his mind, so he tried to kill me with his laser glare instead.
“This is not right up my fucking alley!” he shouted. His voice should have echoed in this tight space with stone walls and floor, but it didn’t. “This is not up anyone’s alley! Can’t you feel it? We don’t belong here.”
Yes, I could feel it. I would have thought a death-god descendant would feel less out of place, but ap
parently that wasn’t the case. “Maybe we don’t, but you’ve been here before and lived to tell the tale, and so have I, so there’s no reason to panic. Let’s just keep moving.”
I didn’t wait for him to agree, just kept moving forward into the darkness ahead as if unaffected by the dread that permeated the Underworld. Oscar followed, but if footsteps could sound sullen, his did.
“You’d better know where you’re going, bitch!”
The friendly rejoinder was quickly followed by a startled bleat and the sound of flesh slamming into stone. I whirled around and saw that Jamaal had grabbed Oscar around the neck and pinned him to the tunnel wall.
“You watch your fucking mouth or I’m going to teach you some manners!” Jamaal barked, his nose about an inch from Oscar’s.
Oscar was built like a bruiser, but there is nothing as intimidating as Jamaal in a rage. His build was much more aesthetically pleasing, but no less muscular, and he was almost a full head taller than Oscar. He also had a glare that had been honed to a fine edge over years of abuse and decades of bitterness.
Oscar held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, his eyes wide with fright. Personally, I’d have been inclined to let it go, because I didn’t think we needed any more ill will. But I knew from experience that with Jamaal’s temper, it was sometimes best to just stand back and let it run its course.
“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” Jamaal growled, giving Oscar a little shake for emphasis.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Oscar said. He was trying to snarl back just as fiercely, but it’s hard to sound fierce when you’re quaking in your boots.
Jamaal abruptly let go and started down the tunnel. The look Oscar gave his retreating back was not promising, his fear transforming into fury. He didn’t act on that fury, but I knew I’d have to keep a careful eye on him. Add one more problem to my ever-growing list.
FOURTEEN
In the outside world, I was so used to using my phone to check the time that I never wore a watch. I felt sort of silly pulling my phone out while wandering through the Underworld—I’d totally freak out if I got a signal here—but the resolute monotony of the light and the blank features of the tunnel had my sense of time so screwed up that I just had to see what time it was.
I wasn’t entirely shocked that my phone didn’t work at all. The laws of physics as I knew them didn’t seem to apply in the Underworld—or else there would be no light whatsoever—so why should I expect my phone to function? Oscar saw me checking and snorted.
“Nothing with a battery works in the Underworld,” he said. Amazing how he could look so freaked out by the place and still manage such a convincing tone of condescension.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I muttered back.
The unpleasant reality was that though I couldn’t say exactly how long we’d been at it, my aching legs and confused sense of time were sure it had been several hours already. And we had seen nothing but the endless gray tunnel. Occasionally, we came across branches that veered off, but whether driven by intuition or just the fear of getting lost, I kept going straight. I had no sense as to whether we were getting any closer to Anderson or whether my power was working at all.
I thought I was hiding my uncertainty well, and maybe I was, in the beginning. However, as the hours—however many of them there were—passed by one by one, my ability to hide my increasing frustration and decreasing hope weakened.
“You have no idea where you’re going, do you?” Oscar challenged when I once again chose to ignore a branching tunnel.
“My power works strangely,” I informed him. “I’ve learned to trust it, and you’re just going to have to do the same.”
“And maybe you need to learn to quit while you’re ahead,” he said. “This isn’t working, and it’s time for us to get the hell out.”
Jamaal pierced him with one of those patented glares of his. “Are we going to have to have another come-to-Jesus moment?” he growled.
Oscar ignored him and kept talking as if there’d been no interruption. “Every minute we’re here brings him another step closer to the edge,” he said, jerking his thumb at Jamaal. “This place is bad enough for someone who doesn’t have death magic, but he’s going to lose it eventually.”
It was true that Jamaal was getting steadily more agitated. He’d even broken out the clove cigarettes and smoked a couple of them to try to steady his nerves. Not that smoking had ever had as much of a positive effect as he might hope.
“I’m not losing it anytime soon,” Jamaal snapped in return. “Not unless you keep poking at me and pissing me off, that is.”
I made a calming gesture at both men. There was too much at stake for me to back out now, no matter how fragile my hopes had become.
“We’re going to keep going,” I said. I turned to Jamaal. “Do you think it would help if you brought Sita out?”
As fierce as she was, the tiger had helped Jamaal so much in the effort to control his temper . . . but he shook his head.
“It’s not really me who’s being affected by this place,” he said. “It’s the death magic. And Sita is the death magic. I’m not sure letting her out is safe.”
I wasn’t about to argue with him. His temper problems often had to do with fighting to keep the death magic contained, which was why summoning Sita, letting the magic out, had had such a positive effect. But as bad as Jamaal could be when he lost control of his temper, it would be that much worse to be faced with a furious phantom tiger.
“Standing here arguing about it isn’t doing anyone any good,” I said. “Let’s keep moving.”
Oscar made no attempt to hide his disagreement, but I didn’t much care what he wanted. Maybe I was on a fool’s mission, destined to fail, but at least I felt like I was doing something. There was no way I could abide sitting around at home and giving up while the existence of the human race was in danger.
Not long after that, the tunnel finally opened out into a vast cavern within which sat an entire city. I had been hoping to find one, as it seemed the most logical place for Anderson to hang out. Even so, the sight of it raised the hairs on the back of my neck and jolted adrenaline through my system.
The tunnels and the very air we breathed had filled us all with a sense of not belonging, but that was nothing compared to the dread this city inspired.
The city was laid out in a grid pattern, with roughly paved streets and a multitude of stone and marble buildings, some of which looked like simple residences, and some of palatial proportions that suggested they might be temples. The unpleasant gray light of the Underworld was enough to reveal the first few blocks of the city, but the rest of it faded into the distant darkness. There was no sign of life, no sign of movement. No bugs, no scurrying creatures, no green things.
I stood side by side with Jamaal at the opening of the tunnel. I couldn’t have told you which of us initiated the action, but we ended up holding each other’s hands. Both of us had sweaty palms, and Jamaal was holding tight enough that I could feel the thud of his pulse through his fingers. Descendant of a death goddess he might be, but this place felt as wrong to him as it did to me.
“You didn’t do this place justice,” he whispered, staring out at the city and shaking his head.
I didn’t want to let the city cow me, so I answered in full voice instead of giving in to the urge to whisper. “I don’t think this is the same place I was in last time. That city was smaller.”
Jamaal gave me a pointed look, telling me without words that that wasn’t what he’d meant. I knew he was referring to the way the place made you feel rather than to the appearance, but I was afraid acknowledging the dread would make it worse, make it more real. If I were the only one feeling it, then I could at least pretend it was a figment of my imagination.
“Bet Oscar is just loving this,” I muttered under my breath. I looked over my shoulder to see how our reluctant Olympian guide was responding to the city.
It was a good thing I did. If I’d wai
ted even a few seconds longer, he’d have been gone.
“Hey!” I yelled at his retreating back. He was heading toward a patch of blackness that I very much feared was a portal.
Jamaal whirled at the sound of my voice, and before he had time to take stock of what he saw, Sita appeared out of thin air, positioning herself between Oscar and the portal and giving a roar that, unlike the sound of our voices, echoed through the tunnel.
Oscar came to an abrupt halt, windmilling his arms to fight his forward momentum and keep himself from slamming into Sita. She roared again, and the portal disappeared. I supposed it was hard to concentrate on keeping a portal open when you were faced with five hundred pounds of angry tiger.
Oscar held his hands up and to the sides and started slowly backing away. For every step he took back, Sita took one forward, stalking him and snarling.
“I think maybe you should put her away,” I said to Jamaal. “I seriously doubt Oscar will try that again.”
“Um, I didn’t actually summon her,” Jamaal said.
Okay, that was bad. Sita was dangerous enough when Jamaal had her under his control, but if she was acting on her own, this might get very ugly, very fast.
“You should try to put her away anyway,” I urged. Oscar was backpedaling rapidly, and it wouldn’t be long until he was in full-scale retreat and triggered Sita’s instinct to give chase.
“You think?” Jamaal gave me a brief, irritated eye roll, then turned his attention back to Sita. “Sita! Come here!”
She didn’t even look at him, much less obey him. She gave another bone-shaking roar, and that was when Oscar completely lost his nerve. With a yell, he turned around and started running full speed in the only direction that led away from Sita—toward the city.
Jamaal called to Sita again, but again she ignored him, her eyes fixed on her fleeing prey, her body crouched and ready to spring. I entertained a brief hope that things might turn out okay when Oscar blew past Jamaal and me and Sita hadn’t given chase yet. Then I realized she was just playing with him, letting him get a head start so she could have a more entertaining chase.