Underworld's Daughter

by Molly Ringle

  “Zeus and Hera have political charisma. They’re willing to be seen frequently and worshipped, to live in an absurd palace in the mortal realm, with mortal servants. To get involved in local issues and bestow favors. To throw riches and prizes to the fawning masses. All that rubbish that would make most of us want to fling ourselves off cliffs if we spent all day doing it. In addition, it’s usually from their mouths that the mortals hear the decisions of our little council. So, yes, they come out looking like our royalty. And really, does it matter?”

  “Hm.” She shot him a grudgingly impressed glance. “You’re smarter than you look.”

  “Why, thank you. Such a charmer, you.”

  She grinned. “What are you doing here tonight, in the city?”

  “Following you.”

  “Yes, but what else?”

  He shrugged. “Feasting, whoring, gambling. You know me.”

  “You always say that when I see you out at night.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “Why do you try to make me think the worst of you?”

  “So you can only be pleasantly surprised when I turn out not to be thoroughly awful.”

  “Wise plan.”

  “Well, go on. Show me something,” he requested.

  She took his hand, found a ring on it with a large clear quartz stone, and demonstrated the latest spell she’d been practicing. Soon light began shining within the stone, making it glow like a lamp.

  He whistled in admiration, and splayed his fingers to gaze at the light. “Doesn’t even feel hot.”

  “No. It isn’t fire. It’s only drawing in light from the sky and pooling it in one spot.” She let go of his hand and the light dimmed, but still glowed. “It doesn’t work as well if I’m not touching it, and it goes out when I stop concentrating on it.” She did so, letting the magic drop away. The light in the ring went out. “I need to work on that part.”

  “Nonetheless,” he said, “that’s fabulous. It’s why I come find you whenever I can. I love these tricks of yours.”

  “I still think you could do some of them, if you concentrated.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t concentrate, or couldn’t do the magic?”

  “Either.” He grinned. “Surely your being conceived and raised in the Underworld has a lot to do with your abilities.”

  “Yes, but the rest of you did learn to switch realms, so with a little focus…oh, never mind. Most people would only use magic for the wrong purposes anyway.”

  “I definitely would,” he agreed.

  She smirked and changed the subject. “Aphrodite looked well.” She had been at the meeting at Zeus and Hera’s too; quiet for the most part, but composed and relaxed.

  “Delicious, lovely, nothing new.”

  They drew nearer to the lute player, an old man sitting in a doorway. “Any news of Adonis?” Hekate asked.

  “Well…” Hermes looked aside at the old man, who abruptly stopped playing and jabbed his fingers in an odd gesture at them. Hekate felt the harmless but tense ripple in the air: an attempt at warding off evil. Them? He thought them evil?

  “Messengers of the dead, get back from me!” the old man said in quavering, angry tones.

  Hekate blinked in surprise.

  “Oh, you recognize us, then?” Hermes said, and laughed when the old man jabbed the gesture at them again. “Here, my good fellow.” He pulled the quartz ring off his finger and tossed it underhand to the man’s feet.

  Hekate sent a placating ripple of energy back in his direction, along with a smile, and they walked on.

  Nonetheless, the ring came bouncing past them on the packed ground a moment later. Hermes left it behind. “A gift for the next traveler,” he said.

  “In Zeus and Hera’s own city, people hate us?” she said, perplexed.

  “There’s a mad one in a corner in every city. The preaching lunatics are gaining popularity. It’s the stylish thing to do lately: be pro-mortal and anti-immortal, and generally anti-fun as far as I can tell.”

  She nodded, and considered whether she dared repeat the question that hadn’t been answered yet.

  Fortunately he seemed to read her mind, and returned to the topic himself. “As to Adonis,” he said, “Aphrodite hasn’t gone to see him, but I did last month.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s well. Learning. Exploring. A bit aimless, but he’ll be all right.”

  “I wonder what he’ll be when he returns.” Hekate glanced back in the direction of the old man, whose lute started up again. “And what he’ll return to.”

  Hermes threw his arm around her. “I can tell you he’s prettier than ever. But still not as pretty as you, so don’t worry. My heart remains yours.”

  “I’ll sic my dog on you if that hand gets any lower.”

  “Ah, your threats have improved,” he said, and kept his arm comfortably latched around her shoulders.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Sophie hauled her tired body and heavy backpack up the library stairwell while her mind turned over the two notable pieces of weirdness in her day so far.

  One had been an email from Melissa, her former roommate.

  I want to tell you I’m sorry, officially. They aren’t sentencing me to jail time, but I’m getting court-ordered counseling, and part of the therapy is I need to acknowledge I was reckless with your safety and privacy, and didn’t show you enough respect.

  There’s still a lot I don’t know and would like to know in order to understand everything that happened. So let me know if we could talk, because that would help give me closure.

  The first paragraph was memorized and recited, sounded like; an assignment by her counselor. But the second was surely another bid to get in with the Greek gods. Which was not happening. Sophie answered only with I appreciate the apology. Merry Christmas. And she pushed the emails into the archive folder and resolved never to have further dealings with Melissa.

  In the second piece of weirdness, her mom had called to laud the “stupendous,” “fabulous,” “incredible” memories the pomegranate had released in her mind. She and Sophie compared notes and verified that in the life before this, when Sophie had been a woman named Grete in Germany, Isabel had been her favorite older cousin. But in the life before that, they hadn’t known each other; nor in the one before that. Isabel hadn’t gotten farther back yet, but it did appear that their thread of association hadn’t begun until recently.

  “But that’s so strange,” her mother mused. “You and Adrian go back thousands of years, and you and your dad too, but you and I only a few decades?”

  “I know,” Sophie said, oddly disappointed about it. “But…it’s like Adrian tells me. Our loved ones are still our loved ones, no matter how many lives we shared with them. Maybe we’ll have a thousand awesome future lives together, now that we’re linked.”

  “I’m sure we will.” Isabel, for her part, sounded optimistic rather than poignant. “Oh. And in case you’ve wondered, I’m not seeing Sam anymore. You know. The man I mentioned.”

  “Oh. Right.” The other man, whom her parents’ companionate marriage allowed her to date. Which Sophie tried never to think about.

  “I broke up with him yesterday.” Isabel sighed, though again sounding upbeat on the whole. “Somehow he didn’t fit in anymore. With all this to occupy my mind…I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”

  “No, I get it.” Indeed, Sophie had broken up with Jacob soon after acquiring her pomegranate memories. She could relate. “That’s good. I mean, if you’re good with it.”

  “I am. This is…it’s all wonderful, Sophie. Thank you so much for bringing us into it.”

  Even with Thanatos on the scene? Sophie had wondered wearily, though she didn’t say it. Her parents had already been warned, and had plenty else to deal with in daily life. As did Sophie.

  Case in point: next week was finals.

  On the third floor, she thumped her backpack down beside a compu
ter, and grimly dove into her research.

  Hours later, Sophie rubbed her eyes and considered texting Zoe to see if she had a spell for making term papers write themselves. Stacks of thick, boring books on science in media, her chosen topic, shared the table with her while she took notes in an attempt to pull together a respectable final paper for her communications class. In addition to this project, she had another paper due for her writing class, a statistics final to study for, and a serious bitch of a chemistry final.

  Why? she wondered for probably the thousandth time. Why persist in a bachelor’s degree and a normal career? Wasn’t the spirit realm a much more instructive, and cheaper, place to learn and reside?

  It was. But deadlier, too. And even if she became immortal, maybe she wouldn’t wish to drop out of the living world fully. That still seemed too momentous a step to take, even now that her parents knew about her secret life.

  Where would she and Adrian and the others be without the living world, after all? They wouldn’t have cell phones or the Airstream or its generator, or groceries or Internet service or jeans or sneakers or movies or TV…no, she loved too much of the real world to distance herself from it, and so did Adrian. He constantly talked about how he missed it.

  So at least for now, given she was still a mortal, she had to participate in the world like a normal citizen. That meant writing term papers and taking final exams, even though the rise of Thanatos, in ancient days as well as modern ones, pounded like a sinister drumbeat in her mind.

  It was dinnertime. Hunger twisted her stomach. The bland words of the book in front of her ceased to make sense. She groaned and rested her head in her hands, elbows planted on the book’s pages.

  Quiet footsteps approached on the tiles. Her heart skittered in panic. She shoved her hand into the pocket of her coat to grip the stun gun. The third floor of the library, between the stacks, with no other students in sight, would be a choice location for a cult assassin to kidnap or murder her.

  But the dark-coated, black-haired person who turned the corner at the end of the stacks and approached her was no one to fear. Only the king of the Underworld. She let out her breath, dropped the stun gun back into the pocket, and lifted her face to receive Adrian’s kiss.

  “Hey. Ready to eat?” he said.

  She nodded.

  Outdoors, fog filled the cold air. It was the first week of December, and the sky had been fully dark for at least two hours even though it was only a bit past seven o’ clock. Twinkling lights and wreaths on dorm windows and streetlight posts did lift the gloom a little, when she was near enough to see them in the fog.

  They bought take-out burritos, and ate as they walked toward one of their switching-over spots. Sophie’s mood slowly ascended as her blood sugar rose.

  “They said it might snow,” Adrian said between bites. “I’m excited.”

  “Couldn’t you see snow anytime? Just hop up to the nearest mountain.”

  “Yeah, but for Christmas. Actual snow in December, like in the movies. That’s new for me.”

  “Southern Hemisphere freak.” She smiled, and sank her teeth into another bite of tortilla-wrapped rice, beans, and pico de gallo.

  In the shadow of a maple tree beside the student parking lot, he caught her around the waist in one arm and hauled her into the spirit realm. The fresh air blew around her, the smells of a wild forest taking over the campus smells of food, cars, and trampled grass. But the other realm wasn’t as dark as usual, and she blinked in delight as she realized why. The Airstream, a few paces ahead, wore a string of white holiday lights around its top like a crown, each bulb sending a bright reflected streak up and down the trailer’s shiny exterior.

  “Like it?” The lights sparkled in his hopeful eyes as he glanced at her.

  She laughed. “You really are excited about Christmas.”

  He pushed away a fallen branch with his foot. “Well, I wanted it to feel a bit more like home. For us both.”

  “You and Kiri both?”

  He reproached her with a second glance. “You and me.”

  She knew that. She stepped closer and hugged him with her free arm, cradling the burrito in the other. Their breath formed clouds between them. “It’s pretty. I do like it.”

  The Airstream wasn’t home. Not yet. Creating a new home would take a lot more than a string of lights. It probably required a settled family situation, and a plan regarding what she wanted to do with her life, for starters. But tiny white lights glowing outside the trailer’s windows tonight would improve her world at least a little.

  One morning in winter, a few months after that contentious meeting at Zeus and Hera’s palace, Persephone walked out from the Underworld’s living quarters to find a crowd of souls waiting in the fields. They called and beckoned to her.

  “What is it?” she asked across the river. She hugged her cloak around her, fearing news of another plague or something equally dreadful.

  “Come across,” an old woman said. “Zeus and Hera are here.”

  Persephone looked at the raft, puzzled. It idled on the shore nearest her. If any living visitors had come, and were out in the fields, they likely would have taken the raft across and left it on the opposite side. But perhaps its rope hadn’t been tied tight, and it drifted back.

  Hades and Hekate had gone into the living world today to visit one of the northern Aegean islands. Persephone would have to work this out alone. She stepped aboard and grasped the soaked rope to pull herself across.

  In the fields, she asked the cluster of souls, “Where are they?”

  Zeus and Hera weren’t among those Persephone could trace. The couple had generally dismissed the need to keep close track of the others, and hadn’t performed a blood exchange with anyone. Zeus, of course, could surely track a large number of people, once you counted all his lovers and children, but only the immortal lovers would be able to track him. Hera had never taken any other lovers, as far as Persephone heard.

  “They’re in the deeper caves,” the old woman said. “They couldn’t stay. But they wanted us to tell you they were here.”

  “Why are they visiting the deeper caves?” Persephone asked. Hera and Zeus disliked the Underworld in general, and to her knowledge they had never descended to the caves of punishment. Perhaps they urgently wished to talk to some lately deceased murderer?

  But the souls looked grim. “They had to,” the old woman said. “They couldn’t stay here.”

  The chill spreading deep inside her marked the start of understanding. “They were souls?”

  The woman and the other souls nodded. “They said it was important to tell you. They’ve been killed.”

  The word sank in, and Persephone broke into a sprint toward the back of the cave, hitching up her wool robes above her knees. The distance between the river and the far wall seemed impossibly vast. Alarm spurred her on, a hundred fears and questions swarming her mind. Foremost was the simple and terrifying chant: We can die. If Hera and Zeus could die, she could die. Hades and Hekate could die. Everything would change.

  She was panting and sweating by the time she slipped into the narrow tunnel. She hadn’t brought a torch, and didn’t want to bother weaving a vine and capturing a ghost dog to bring down. So she felt her way down the tunnel alone in the dark, hand upon the rough wall, scraping her ankles on rocks, until the first blue-and-orange flame burst forth deep down to guide her.

  In the entrance chamber to the honeycomb of caves, where the constant fires flickered red, she picked up a vine and lit it in one of the flames. She beseeched in a trembling voice, “Fates that guard these souls, I seek Zeus and Hera, immortals. Former immortals.” She shut her eyes in having to add the “former,” and hoped the cave wouldn’t respond.

  But the whoosh of a flame bursting forth signaled an answer. In dread, she turned and dropped the burning vine, which went out in a curl of smoke. She followed the sinister beacons down the passageways, past soul after tortured soul.

  At last she stood before
her father. He lifted his face from the study of the small flame on the floor, and regarded her with handsome, sad eyes.

  She had never thought of Zeus as her father really, nor had he ever made any move to act like one toward her. But from a distance she had viewed him with the knowledge of her paternity, and noted similarities between herself and him: thick dark hair, full lips, boldness and curiosity. Now grief and sympathy swelled in her chest to see him here, another lowly soul serving his punishment.

  Down the tunnel, five or six cells away, burned another flame, indicating Hera’s location. But Persephone could only speak to one of them at a time, given the separation, and she chose Zeus.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “An uprising.” His voice carried its usual timbre, but with a hollowness behind it. Whether this was from being bodiless or from being distressed, she didn’t know. “Those mortals who preach and rile up the crowds. The ones who chant ‘mortality.’”

  Thanatos. Mortality. She had heard that chilling chant. Someone shouted it after her in a village a few days ago, not far from Zeus and Hera’s palace. “But how?” She reached into the cell to pass her hand uselessly through his arm. “How did they even do it?”

  “We didn’t think they could. That was our downfall. They stormed our house in the middle of the night.” His gaze fell to the flame again. Misery shadowed his dark brows. “We were arrogant. We stood and fought rather than fleeing to the other realm. We thought we could punish them for their insolence. We did kill several, but…they were too many. They caught and held us, and before we knew it, we were pierced through with spears, and couldn’t switch realms. Then we were souls, in the spirit realm, and flying here.”

  Persephone gazed at the little flame too, her breath shallow, clammy sweat prickling her back. “But even stabbed,” she said, “we should survive.”

  “We’ll hear soon what they did. I suppose they ripped us to pieces, too many to come back together. Or burned us. Or both.”

  “I can ask. If you killed some of them, they must be here, and I can ask.”

  “Yes.” Zeus said it without expression, lost in the flame’s pale light. “Forearm yourselves with what you can learn.” He lifted his eyes to her again. “I don’t want them to do the same to you, daughter.”