Not Your Average Hot Guy

by Gwenda Bond

  A mystery I’ll have plenty of time to fathom. Mother’s abode isn’t exactly next door.

  “Is Lucifer always like that?” Callie asks.

  “Rather,” is Porsoth’s diplomatic reply.

  Sometimes he’s far more awful, I add silently.

  “What about…”

  I can feel her eyes burning into the back of my head. “I’m right here,” I say.

  “Yes, him too, rather,” Porsoth says. And then adds, “Sorry, Prince. I overstep.”

  “It’s okay. Callie has this effect on people.”

  “Me? Look in the mirror.”

  We reach the end of the corridor and a legion of skull-pale, bat-winged, long-clawed demonic troops is marching toward us. That was fast. But when you can issue telepathic commands, there’s no need for a delay. Father must have called them to report for duty before we left Earth. Along with keeping Rofocale back, it’s confirmation that he’s taking the threat of Armageddon seriously.

  He has no faith in me.

  “Stay close,” I say, finding Callie’s hand with mine to ensure she does. I keep her tucked into my right side, away from the demon soldiers, who reek of sulfur and ash. They leer at Callie as they pass by and I’m grateful there are no grotesque catcalls, only silent salivation.

  Even the worst among leerers salute me as they continue to eyeball Callie like exactly what she is: a prized soul in a very bad place. To her credit, Callie keeps her expression neutral and waits patiently.

  At last, the gauntlet passes and we start to walk again. An exit to Father’s palace looms before us in moments, drawbridge already lowered. I see the guards there call a halt to the next batch of soldiers heading into the Keep. We get priority.

  “What do you think?” I pause to ask, squinting back over my shoulder in the direction of the troops. Porsoth senses it’s a question for him.

  “Word is traveling. It always goes fast in Hell,” Porsoth says. “They don’t seem particularly excited about the end days. Very interested in her, which means word of her is also moving quickly.”

  I noted that too, and I don’t care for it.

  “I’m right here,” Callie says. “You can use my name.”

  Chanting from the charred plains outside reaches us, the rhythmic clash of shields and swords clinking in a pre-battle symphony. Along with shrieking howls that would curdle any decent human’s or angel’s blood.

  “That will be the Howling Demons,” I inform Callie.

  “They do sound excited,” Porsoth says.

  “Stick close to me as we go out,” I tell her.

  “Got it,” she says, lifting our still-linked hands. “You don’t need to keep saying it. Trust me, I’m not in a hurry to go traipsing around the underworld solo with half of a powerful religious artifact.”

  I lightly squeeze her hand in mine.

  We hit the drawbridge constructed of yellowed bones, and the Howling Demons are an impressive sight to pair with the sound of their arrival. Bloodred armor molded like scales covers their entire bodies. They weave and chant and screech and manage to still look terrifying doing it instead of silly.

  Callie’s mouth has fallen open.

  “Make that: if you leave me alone out here, I’ll kill you,” she says.

  “We won’t,” Porsoth puts in. “I swear it to you.”

  She’s gotten to him too. That was fast.

  “Speaking of, we’ve got a decision to make.” I raise my voice to be heard over the chanting troops. They’re still a few dozen yards out. “We can’t go instantly, so we’ll have to trek. There’s north and the Cocytus or east to the Phlegethon—”

  “No, north is out,” Porsoth says. “And east. Not fit for a living human of this caliber.”

  “The rivers are real?” Callie asks.

  “Very. South is out too, no Acheron or Lethe,” I say. “She doesn’t like subterranean passages, so that leaves…”

  “West and the Styx,” Porsoth says. “Do you think she can make it across?”

  I meet Callie’s eyes. “How do you feel about dragons?”

  She blinks, taken aback. But, “Love ’em,” she says.

  I bet she hopes we’re joking.

  Porsoth and I trade shrugs. We don’t have much choice.

  “The Styx it is,” I say. “It’s the closest route to Mother’s anyway.”

  The Howling Demons get close enough to spot Callie and begin bowing and jeering.

  “It’s her, the girl bringing our damnation!” one calls.

  “Good sport, human!”

  “Torture you soon!”

  Callie stands motionless for a moment, then lifts her hand and raises her middle finger.

  The Howling Demons wail louder in delight and outrage and she doesn’t so much as flinch as she lowers her hand and looks expectantly at me.

  “Lead on to the Styx,” she says.

  I hesitate to think it, but I may be falling in love with her.

  * * *

  The plains around us are a smoking wreck, the pitiable cries of the damned languishing here a constant chorus. Callie’s triumphant departure got stepped on by the endless willingness of the Howling to keep earning their name. I presume they entered the Keep, but maybe they’re still out there chanting. We eventually outdistanced their raucous farewell.

  “What did these people do? Is it like in Dante, all one type of sin to a place?” Callie asks.

  She means the wailing, moaning souls that surround us. We’re no longer holding hands, but she stays close to my side anyway. The other advantage of this route is the comparatively gentler scenery.

  “Not necessarily. They’ve done different things,” I say. “Dante was what you’d call an oversimplifier.”

  “And a bit of a pompous ass,” Porsoth says. “We made him do some time as a donkey. He didn’t enjoy it. He really had no reason to complain—we eventually turned him back.”

  “But these people,” Callie returns to her question, “what did they do?”

  I consider. There are detailed responses I could give for each and every one of them. The pale shade of a man who stole from a widow in medieval France. The woman who took her next-door neighbor’s child and raised him as her own in ’70s SoCal. And a host of far greater and lesser sins.

  But the truth is … “They were human. That’s the real answer.”

  Callie stares off into the moaning distance. “But that’s not what they’re being punished for.”

  “Isn’t it?” I ask.

  Porsoth has gone quiet, but he lets out something like a hoot. “If you’d been this thoughtful with your studies, who knows what you’d have accomplished by now?”

  “Do they deserve it though?” Callie is stuck on this. “I need to believe they do.”

  I wish I could say yes, but I’ve lied to her enough.

  “I don’t know.” I’ve never confronted this, but it’s also true. Maybe it’s even the real reason I haven’t secured any souls. And now I’m about to take the one beside me, knowing it’ll be luck and Father’s caprice if I’m able to keep her from crying out in pain like the people on these suffering plains.

  “It’s a corrupt system,” I say finally.

  “I get that,” she says. “But it has to be for the ultimate good, doesn’t it? All of this?”

  Callie, trying to find a way to make sense of Hell’s existence. She should’ve been born here, not me.

  “A corrupt system for a corrupt world.” Porsoth sounds resigned. “I admit, I’m no longer sure which world makes more sense, that of humans or ours, the divine and infernal. It’s why I truly left my old life to educate our next generation. I needed something to hope for.”

  I’m rocked back on my heels. I’m Porsoth’s hope for a better future? I don’t know whether to laugh at him or myself or the futility of everything.

  “What a disappointment I must be,” is what I manage to say. Suddenly, I don’t feel like laughing at all.

  “My hope is still right here,” Por
soth taps his wing across his chest.

  I swallow hard over a lump in my throat that feels the size of a stone fist.

  “What do I need to know about the Styx?” Callie asks, presumably picking up on the heaviness in the air. The subject change is well timed.

  “Nothing we can tell you will prepare you,” Porsoth says.

  Callie frowns. “That’s spectacularly unhelpful.”

  “He’s being literal,” I say. “It’s not like the stories. To cross the Styx, it’s not the same cost for the ferry every time. She will demand a toll and you’ll have to pay it.” I am worried about this part, but it’s the least deadly option to travel to Lilith’s within the time we have.

  “That’s just great. But I’m already in Hell, so why do I have to pay a toll anyway?”

  “Because you’re seeking to travel freely within it. At some point, everyone who enters must pay a toll of one kind or another.”

  “Got it.” Callie accepts this. “Then tell me about Lilith. Your mother. Did you grow up with her?”

  I’ve been waiting for this. I recall Callie’s tidy home, packed with love and trinkets and photographs. How cozy it is. I want to sweep a hand out around us at the smoking rubble and remind her that this is where I grew up. Mother is Mother and I’m important to her as a chess piece with Father.

  “Lilith is interesting,” Porsoth says. “A human who became an immortal. The terror of those who cross her, but not without a human heart for those she loves.”

  “It’s just that she keeps the human heart in a jar and shows it to them,” I say.

  Porsoth clucks, but doesn’t argue.

  “You didn’t live with her?” Callie asks.

  “Father sent me to stay with her when he was angry with me,” I say. “I spent two years with her once when I was six.”

  “He must have visited?” Callie asks, surprised.

  “When he was ready for me to return to the Keep, he sent a messenger.” I pick up the new quality in her silence. I can’t bear to look at her to confirm it. “Do not dare pity me, the prince of Hell.”

  Callie is quiet for a moment, then. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Privileged punk.”

  I absorb it and snort a laugh. Porsoth laughs too, but I know none of us are amused by anything except how clever Callie has been to take the moment and remove its sting. Her soul sings to me like the beat of my own heart and I want it to be mine.

  Something I’ve never felt before.

  Maybe Father was right. I just needed the temptation of a truly evil act to realize my full potential. He’ll be so proud.

  “Not much farther now,” I say. “Let’s hope Styx is in a good mood.”

  “It happened once,” Porsoth says thoughtfully. “In one of the years we got all those Roman soldiers in. She took a fancy to them.”

  Callie stops and gazes up at the blackening sky. “You’re saying this Styx is a person who hasn’t been in a good mood for three thousand years? And she gets to decide my toll?”

  Porsoth and I nod.

  “Just checking to make sure I had that right,” Callie says and walks on.

  “Hey.” I stop her with the word. “You can do this.”

  She smiles and my breath vanishes. “You do know that in mythology the goddess named Styx was Nike’s mother, don’t you? Did you basically quote a Nike ad at me as an inside joke?”

  “That’s ‘just do it,’” Porsoth says. When Callie gives him a look, he says, “We keep up with the times.”

  “My version is way better than a shoes slogan,” I say. I had no idea about Styx’s daughter Nike. “It has you in it.”

  Callie peers up at the sky again as if waiting for it to fall. She hefts her messenger bag with its precious cargo—I offered to carry it, but she said no. I didn’t argue.

  She takes another step and says, “I guess we’ll see.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CALLIE

  There’s a point at which the mind is confronted with so many unreal things that are undeniably real you just start to roll with it. This is my theory on why I’m still walking upright, putting one foot in front of the other on ash-coated ground while surrounded by damned souls, in the company of the prince of Hell and a scholarly, morally conflicted demonic owl-pig-humanoid I’m fast becoming buddies with. Why I can manage philosophical conversations about the reasons this twisted reality exists.

  One thing I’m figuring out is that I’m not sure I believe any of this makes sense—and that doesn’t matter.

  It’s real anyway. I have to deal with the prospect of spending eternity here. Of being one of these damned souls.

  Mag—who I’m still mad at for falling for my brother and not telling me, but who I miss like a limb and wish was here so I could ask them what I’m doing, what I should do—is going to want to kill me. But they’ll have to line up after my mother. That’s only in the best-case scenario.

  So.

  One foot in front of the other, on toward the Styx and her mystery toll.

  Even though I have no clue whether it’ll be useful or not, I review everything I remember about the Styx. Originally the name of a Titan’s daughter who also ruled the river, like I told Luke, with four kids including Nike. The Styx was the river that the Greek gods used to swear oaths on. Sometimes it was poison and sometimes it gave powers. It was the river Achilles got dipped in, except for the heel his mother held him by (and can you blame her for not thinking a vulnerable heel would get him? Just wear shoes). In stories, it’s often the border between our world and the underworld. Which doesn’t seem to be how it works, at least not now.

  But it’s the border to cross to where I have to go, apparently, because of MaHGA (Make Hell Great Again), Lucifer’s new travel rule. In most myths, the ferryman is Charon and takes a coin that people leave on the tongues of the dead as payment for the crossing. If only.

  The first sign of water is a rivulet black as an oil slick but without any of the rainbows in its gleam. Dull-as-death water. Then, there are more, puddles and streaks. Slowly, they grow into black streams that it’s hard to avoid stepping in.

  “Careful,” Luke says, grabbing my arm when I almost blunder into a wide furrow filling with more water.

  “How?” I ask, troubled.

  Ahead, what moments before appeared as marsh is crisscrossed with streams rushing toward the shores of a tumbling, flowing broad body of dark water. I can’t even be thankful the cries of the damned are quieter. That the smoke stinging my nostrils is fainter.

  “Call a bridge to the bank, Prince,” Porsoth says. “It will hold for you and we will follow.”

  “Yes, that’ll work.” Luke hesitates. “Porsoth…”

  “I’ll be right by her side,” he responds.

  I’m touched.

  Luke looks at me. “You’ve got this. I mean it.”

  He’s dreaming, but I nod. I like that he seems to believe in me.

  He faces the river and extends his hand. The stream in front of him parts and the mud-gray earth rises up until a bridge made of bones extends forward all the way to the bank of the Styx. It hits me again: I’m in Hell. With its hot prince.

  Luke steps onto the bridge and it holds. Porsoth extends his wing to me, and I grip it as gently as I can manage through my absolute terror of being swallowed by the black water. This is where the rolling with it kicks in.

  Porsoth and I step with caution after Luke. As predicted, the bridge supports us.

  I wish for Luke to walk faster, certain the bones will shatter under my feet at any moment. But that’s not his style. He saunters along, only pausing to check for us over his shoulder once or twice. His leather jacket makes him seem like he’s shooting some strange video for Hell’s favorite band.

  The bridge widens as we near the banks, so we can stand beside one another. The churning black water is entirely opaque this close up, nearly viscous. The sound of its flow is like the devil’s laughter. Otherwise, there’s silence.

  Nothing happens.
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  “Mother Styx,” Luke says, at last, and there’s a respectful solemnity to it, “I have one who requires passage.”

  The water burbles and I keep watching, expecting it to part like the earth did before, for the Styx to rise up in some form or another. But she comes from above.

  The shadow of wings widens as the river falls over us. I gape as the gleaming black-scaled dragon alights on the tumble of river water as if it’s solid rock. Her body and wings are sleek, a pterosaur stretched to Godzilla size. She stares down at us, her vaguely reptilian, vaguely human face giving no hint of her reaction to our arrival.

  They weren’t exaggerating about the dragon thing. My throat dries up. I struggle to calm my breath.

  This is happening.

  Deal. With. It. Callie.

  “Porsoth the merciless,” the giant reptile says, her voice like a scrape to my eardrums, “who has lowered you this way?”

  Porsoth’s head ticks down with what must be shame.

  “It can’t have been this human,” Styx continues. “Tell me and I shall slay them, for I can imagine no greater tragedy.”

  I shouldn’t push my luck, but I open my mouth just as Luke catches my eye and shakes his head.

  “Leave him be,” Luke says. “He’s a loyal servant of the king.”

  “The king,” Styx spits. The water bubbles and rolls on either side of her, but stays steady under her talons. “Princeling, never forget that your father was a twinkle in the eye above when I was old and tired. Is it he who has done this?”

  “Be that as it may,” Luke says, “we stand in his kingdom and we seek passage to my mother’s house.”

  “Ah.” Styx uncoils her neck and dips it lower to examine me.

  I don’t shrink away, but I want to. Oh, I want to. I swallow, on the off chance I have to say something.

  Styx goes on. “But you do not need my passage, the human does.”

  “Yes.” Luke’s answer is clipped. “What’s to be the toll?”

  There’s a rumble from deep in the dragon’s throat that I take to be a sign of her consideration.