The Pool of Mnemosyne—I’d heard of that before. My heart began to beat a little faster. Was it possible the Pool could return my own lost memories?
Mireille gave a belch so loud I could have sworn it came from a grown man, followed by a very wet noise. Something spattered on the floor and I turned to find Holly dripping with baby spew. Mireille had thrown up all over her shoulder and down her back. The burp cloth Holly wore on her shoulder hadn’t stood a chance. It was hard to believe that tiny stomach could have held so much fluid.
Holly held the baby out away from the disaster area. Miraculously, none of it had ended up on Mireille herself. “Sorry about your floor. God, I’m a mess. I’ll have to go change.”
“Give her to me,” Apollo said, coming to his feet in a smooth movement. Holly looked surprised but handed the baby over without comment and made her escape. He grinned down at the bright-eyed little bundle in his arms. “Do you feel better now, gorgeous?”
I exchanged a look of amazement with Syl as I went to grab some kitchen paper to wipe the floor. He held the baby expertly in the crook of one arm, patting her in a gentle rhythm with his other hand as he crooned nonsense to her. Mireille gazed up at him serenely, accepting his adoration as her due.
He caught the look I was giving him. “What? I’ve had children before. I know what I’m doing.”
“So I see.” I moved closer, drawn by the baby’s dark eyes. So serious.
“Children are like flowers,” he said, “come to brighten our lives with their joy.”
Like flowers? What, they bloomed for a few days, then went brown and dropped bits of crap everywhere? I opened my mouth to harass him over his choice of imagery when I noticed the melancholy lurking in his eyes. Suddenly, I didn’t want to know what had become of his children. Unless they were gods themselves, they were probably long dead.
Maybe there were some sucky aspects of being a god.
I knelt at his feet to clean the floor. He looked down, then brushed something from my shoulder. “You’ve got some—oh, never mind. It’s a tattoo.”
I was wearing a sleeveless top that showed the tattoo on my shoulder. We hadn’t spent a lot of time together, so he probably hadn’t noticed it before.
He pushed my top out of the way so he could see it properly. “Why the archer?”
“The bow is my favourite weapon.”
“Do you shoot much?”
“She shoots her mouth off all the time,” Syl said.
“No, not recently.” I gave Syl a dirty look. “Haven’t had much chance.”
“You’d get on well with my sister. She loves peppering things with arrows.”
“I bet she’ll be glad to hear you’re free,” Syl said.
A shadow crossed his face. “I’ve been trying to contact her since I got my powers back, but she seems to have disappeared.”
That sounded ominous in the current climate. I hoped she hadn’t fallen victim to the shadow shapers, too. From the look that Syl gave me, she was thinking the same thing. “She’s probably gone into hiding,” she said.
“Probably.” His tone lacked conviction. He traced a finger over the curved line of the tattooed bow on my shoulder. I restrained a shiver—it felt like fire crawling on my skin. “I’ll take you hunting one day, when this is all over.” He bared his gleaming white teeth in another of those fierce grins. It looked odd with the baby in his arms. “One day when we’ve finished hunting down the shadow shapers, that is.”
5
An hour later, I was back in the underworld. Lucas had started some kind of drinking game with a group gathered under the big TV in the pub. It involved a fair bit of yelling, some raucous laughter, and much slamming of glasses down on the table. I had no idea what they were doing, but the commotion kept all eyes firmly on the game, and no one noticed as Apollo and I slipped through the door marked “Private” and down the steps to the vampire’s cellar.
Every time I came through here, I had to smile at the theatricality of Alberto’s set-up: the great swathes of red velvet draped on the walls, the coffin on its dark plinth in the centre of the otherwise empty room. I moved aside the curtain that hid the elevator and Apollo and I stepped in. He ignored the obvious buttons on the panel by the door, instead going straight to the secret panel that hid the real buttons. He pressed the down button and we began our smooth descent into Hell.
The doors slid open on a quiet, carpet-lined hall. Apollo led the way through the silent house, past the paintings of the gods in the massive foyer, out the huge double doors and down the wide steps to the gravel drive. No one saw us, unless there truly were invisible servants lurking around, as I’d always suspected.
Outside, the fake sun of this part of the underworld shone down. It was warm enough for me to be comfortable in my singlet top and jeans, not much different from the sunny spring day we’d left behind. For a few moments, the only sound that broke the silence was the crunch of our footsteps on gravel, and then a deep, excited bark sounded from behind us. I turned to greet the owner of that bark as he galloped around the side of the building.
*BOSSY GIRL BACK!* he roared into my mind with his usual lack of volume control.
“Hey, Cerberus.” Two heads butted against me so hard they nearly knocked me to the ground, and the third administered an exuberant licking to the side of my face. “Did you miss me?”
I really needn’t have asked—it wasn’t like he was greeting Apollo in the same way. In fact, he ignored the sun god completely. Apollo watched, grinning, as I tried to shove the enormous heads away without getting drenched in dog slobber.
*LONELY HERE,* he said, giving me an affectionate nudge before finally allowing me to push him away. He didn’t go far, though. He trotted at my heels as I followed Apollo along a familiar path toward the Plains of Asphodel.
Inevitably, my thoughts turned to Jake. Across that plain, one arrived at the laughing clown gate, and through the gate it was only a hop, skip, and jump to the ferry wharf where we’d first met Styx. The dark waters of her river lapped against the wharf there. If I stood on that wharf, would I catch a glimpse of Jake’s dark head beneath the waves?
Before we even arrived at the plains, Apollo turned off down a side path I hadn’t noticed before, that led in the opposite direction. I hesitated at the turn-off, glancing back in the direction of the wharf.
“Do you really want to give her the satisfaction?” Apollo asked. He had stopped on the path to wait for me.
I didn’t need to ask who he meant. Was I that easy to read? “I just thought maybe I could see him …”
I trailed off. The expression on his face was sympathetic, but he shook his head. “You know she’d never let you, but the fact that you tried would absolutely make her day. Don’t waste your time, Lexi. You’ve got more pride than that.”
I nodded and joined him on the new path. He was right. I’d rather eat a dead rat than do anything that made that bitch Styx happy. Soon, we would free Jake. But first, we had work to do.
We left the artificial daylight of the area around Hades’ palace, and the ever-present mist began to rise, drifting around our feet as we walked. It was dark here, but not pitch-black—only dark enough to add to the underworld’s creepy vibe. Apollo started glowing as we walked, until he was casting quite a serious light.
“Remind me not to take you next time I want to sneak up on someone,” I said.
He snorted. “I can tone it down if you’d rather break your ankle falling into a hole you didn’t see.”
“Speaking of sneaking around—maybe we should go see Hephaistos and retrieve the Helm while we’re here.” Hades’ Helm of Darkness, currently in the rather unimpressive form of a baseball cap, was nevertheless an amazing piece of equipment. Whoever wore it was completely invisible. A thief could hardly ask for a more powerful tool in her arsenal. I had rather reluctantly given it to the cyclops Brontes to allow him to escape the harpies who guarded Tartarus, with instructions to give it to Hephaistos for safekeeping once
he joined his former master. “It could come in very handy if we have to infiltrate another shadow shaper stronghold to rescue Hades.”
“I think it might be safer to leave it here.”
“Why? Is it his avatar?”
Apollo hesitated before answering. “I’m not actually sure. Not all gods’ avatars are as well known as Zeus’s three-pronged lightning bolt, or Poseidon’s trident. Some of us preferred to keep such information a little closer to our chests, even before the danger posed by the shadow shapers became apparent.”
“But you think the Helm is Hades’?” It made sense. It was an artefact of great power, and had long been associated with the Lord of the Underworld.
“Indeed. I’ve long suspected that Athena’s is her owl, and that Hades’ is the Helm, but I don’t know anyone else’s.”
“Not even your sister’s?”
He smiled. “We may be twins, but we aren’t very alike. Artemis’s domain is the night, and she loves to keep others in the dark. My sister is rather suspicious of people.”
“Whereas you’re just the sunny, happy guy that everyone loves?”
“Exactly,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm and giving me a sweet smile. “But anyway, to return to the point, we can’t risk taking the Helm to the overworld. If you get caught with it, then the shadow shapers have Hades and his avatar, and that will be the end of him.”
That touched on my professional pride. “I won’t get caught,” I assured him. “I’d be invisible.”
He gave me an impatient look. Clearly, he didn’t share my confidence. “Nevertheless, I think we must leave it where it is.”
A black building loomed out of the twilight world, long and low, a row of graceful pillars along its front giving it the look of an ancient temple. If it had been sunlit, it would probably have been beautiful, but in the dark it projected a sense of foreboding, and the empty spaces between the pillars gaped like mouths. A heavy gate, also black, stood open, and Apollo passed beneath its arch without a break in his stride. I followed, a little more cautiously, my senses on high alert.
We emerged into a large, open courtyard where three ebony thrones sat on a high dais in the centre. No one was around.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“The Courts of Judgement,” Apollo replied. “The dead come here when the ferry delivers them to the underworld. The judges decide what their fate in the afterlife will be. Most will drift in the Plains of Asphodel, their lives and sins forgotten. Those who have earned a hero’s reward will feast in Elysium, while the very worst will be imprisoned in Tartarus, there to be eternally tortured.”
I shuddered, remembering those red-lit caverns. Not a pleasant place to spend five minutes, let alone eternity.
Apollo let his brightness flare, chasing the shadows from the courtyard, and raised his voice. “Apollo, the sun god, is here to see Thanatos, Lord of Death. Let Thanatos come forth!”
A shadow broke away from the darkness beneath the archways and resolved into the figure of a man. He faded as he approached Apollo’s brightness, and I realised with a shiver that I could see the outline of the building through him. One of the dead, then. “This way, my lord. I will take you to Lord Thanatos.”
The dead servant led us down dark hallways, our footsteps echoing hollowly in the empty stone passages, until we arrived at a set of double doors. Light spilled into the corridor as he held open the right-hand door for us. I took care not to brush against him as I passed.
Inside, the room could not have been more different from the dark and dismal corridors we’d traversed. Coloured lamps burned in every corner of the room, and bright tapestries adorned the walls. A plump young man with a shaven head was seated at a large table, eating from a wide selection of dishes. Enough food was laid out to feed half a dozen diners, but there was only one place set.
He rose as we entered, wiping the back of his mouth on his silken sleeve. “Apollo! What a pleasant surprise. I haven’t see you in an age—will you join me for dinner? Sit down, sit down. For a while there, I thought I was going to meet you in a professional capacity—I’m glad to see you managed to weather all that unpleasantness.”
Apollo took the proffered chair, though he looked uncomfortable at the reminder of his brush with death. “It’s good to see you, Thanatos,” he said, rather stiffly. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“I wish I could say the same for you, but you’re looking a little peaky.”
“A year’s imprisonment can do that.”
“Of course, of course. But what brings you here—and with such a lovely companion?”
His eyes fell on me as I moved toward the table. He was smiling, and seemed perfectly friendly, but a chill passed through me. I had no desire to come to Death’s attention, yet here he was, waiting to shake my hand.
“This is Lexi,” Apollo said, and I took Thanatos’s hand, which was moist and fleshy.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said.
Thanatos threw back his head and roared with laughter, making his double chin wobble. “Of course you aren’t, my dear, but how perfectly delightful of you to say so. Don’t worry,” he added, when he saw my discomfort, “I’m quite used to it by now. I wear this form to try to make people easy in my presence, but still, the mortals can sense what I am. Death makes people uncomfortable, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Now, you sit here, on my other side. There, isn’t that cosy?”
I sank into the chair he indicated as the servant came back with two more place settings. Frankly, I didn’t care how good the food looked or how much Thanatos pressed his hospitality on us. There was no way I was eating from Death’s table—in the underworld, no less. That was just asking for trouble. I served myself a slice of pie, then sneaked it to Cerberus, who was stretched out on the floor at my feet, when Thanatos wasn’t looking.
When the servant had finished and left again on noiseless feet, Apollo said: “We’re here because of ‘all that unpleasantness’, as you put it. Hades has disappeared. Before we go searching, we want to know if he’s dead. I figured you were the best person to ask.”
“Goodness me! Dead? Of course he’s not dead. He’s the Lord of the Underworld.”
“That doesn’t make him bulletproof,” Apollo said with some acerbity. “It’s becoming more and more clear that none of us are as untouchable as we always believed we were.”
“Things must be worse than I thought, topside.”
“They are. But at least Hades is still alive. That’s good news.”
“That must mean that the shadow shapers don’t have his avatar, then,” I said. Because if they did, Hades would have been toast. That probably meant Apollo was right about the Helm, which was a shame. Its power would have been a great help—but it was a relief to know we still had a chance to save Hades.
“Surely it’s possible that he’s just wandered off on his own affairs,” Thanatos said, picking up a lamb chop in his fingers and biting into it with white teeth. Grease shone on his full lips. “Gods are always doing that. We answer to no one. What makes you think that he’s in trouble?”
Apollo filled him in on what we knew of Hades’ disappearance, including my suspicions of Becky and what we knew of her background, which wasn’t much. He also talked about his own captivity and rescue, which took a lot longer. Thanatos became so interested that he stopped eating and leaned forward on his elbows, dabbing at his lips with a napkin as he hung on every word.
“You say some of these shadow shapers died during your rescue, in the collapse of the house afterwards? What were their names?”
Apollo glanced at me.
“One was called Irene,” I said. “I don’t know her last name.”
Thanatos shook his head. “That’s not enough to go on.”
“There was also a man called Mike Newton.”
The god of death nodded in satisfaction. “That, I can work with. Let’s dip into his memories and see what we can find.”
Apollo shot me a triumphant lo
ok, as if to say, see? I told you he could help. A thrill of excitement shot through me. The late, unlamented Newton had been Mrs Emery’s right-hand man. Even though he’d died before Hades had been captured, the chances were good that he’d know enough about the plans and habits of the shadow shapers that his memories would be able to help us. Finally, something was going our way.
Thanatos wiped his mouth again and rose from the table. We followed him from the room and down a dim corridor, to a set of stairs. These wound down several flights before opening into another corridor, even darker than the last. Apollo didn’t do his human light bulb thing, which surprised me. Perhaps that would have offended Thanatos; I wasn’t up on the ins and outs of godly manners. I linked to Cerberus to boost my night vision instead.
I was soon glad of it, as the floor became more uneven and the walls lost their straight angles. We had moved into a natural passageway, which began to narrow. Apollo and I had been walking side by side; now we had to go single file. A soft, green light began to grow somewhere ahead of us. I was just beginning to wonder if Cerberus would be able to fit through when the passage widened again and opened out into a large, open space.
It was like a cross between a temple and a cave. Far overhead hung stalactites, like the teeth of some giant monster, but the floor was clear of stalagmites. Instead, most of the vast space was taken up by a pool, and the only sound was the occasional drop of water falling from the tip of a stalactite into the water below. A ring of columns that were clearly not natural formations circled the pool, holding up the roof. The whole scene was lit by a green glow that emanated from the pool itself, casting jagged shadows among the stalactites above.
I stared into the softly glowing water, watching as ripples spread from a tiny drop falling from overhead. The pool’s surface moved in small rhythmic waves, far beyond what could be expected from the impact of one small drop, but I could see no fish beneath the surface, or anything else that might explain the disturbance.
Hidden Goddess (Shadows of the Immortals Book 4) Page 5