He flicked a look at Remo. “If you’re going, hang on to her and don’t let go, or you’ll get separated in the fall.”
Remo stepped beside me and took both my hands in his. We stood like a bride and groom, Merlin as the priest beside us.
“Oh, isn’t this sweet,” Merlin muttered. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who saw the imagery.
I held Remo’s hands, thinking that this could be the last time that I’d get to do this. That I’d hold his hands while he willingly touched me.
I turned my back a little to Merlin, which meant I caught only a glimmer of movement, the flash of gold and silver, the sudden piercing pain in my chest. My heart stuttered, and the Drakaina in me tried to roar forward, tried to shift, but there was nothing to shift, no body left as I went to my knees.
That dirty rotten . . . bastard. He’d tricked me, and this time I knew there was no coming back. The feather stuck out the front of my chest, right through my heart. Monster killing monster, even now.
CHAPTER 15
Voices roared around me as the final breaths slipped from my body.
“It’s the only damn way, you fool, and if you aren’t holding on to her when she takes her last breath, you will be left behind.”
Remo snarled, and then he was holding me, kissing my face. “I am a fool. Alena, I am a fool.”
There were no words left in me. I wanted to lift my hand and touch his face, wanted to say good-bye properly. The other girl, the one he’d lost . . . had he held her as she died? No, that was silly thinking, she’d died in the sun. He’d not seen her, not held her. At least I’d be able to give him this closure.
Merlin bent over me, his face fading in and out of my sight. “Hades can send you back, intact. But that’s the only way. Time to show if you are really a monster with guts or not, Alena. Make me proud to say we’re related.”
I closed my eyes, and the world around me dissolved. I was falling through space, a scream on my lips and then erupting out of me as what felt like tree branches slapped at me as I tumbled through space. I opened my eyes as a skeleton reached out and smacked my face with its bony fingers. I jerked, trying to get away from it, from the weight hanging from my right hand.
“Alena, stop, you’re slipping!”
I twisted in midair to look down at Remo. He stared up at me. “They’re dead, just like us. You don’t have to fear them.”
I shivered, and then we seemed to pick up speed. “Hang on!” he shouted as he disappeared into a black watery abyss that swallowed him whole, and me right after with barely a splash.
I held my breath as the water sucked me down in a big gulp. The liquid squeezed through my mouth, like it was fighting to get into me even while I tried to keep it out. I tugged Remo upward, kicking hard to get to the surface. The foul water that crept between my clamped lips tasted like things I didn’t want to think about for fear I’d gag and open my mouth.
The seconds ticked past as I swam hard for the surface. How far down had we gone? As the need for air grew, the frantic desire to let go of Remo rose with it, so I could use both arms to propel myself upward.
No, I wasn’t going to let him go. Not if I had any say in it, and even if it meant sucking in some nasty, foul water, I would hang on to him. We were dead, right? So the water couldn’t hurt me, not really. I relaxed everything but my hold on Remo and let the water buoy me up. My lungs burned like an oven with an oil fire out of control, and I was a split second from opening my mouth when my head finally broke the surface. I gasped for air, and Remo broke through the black water beside me. He sucked in a big breath.
A few moments passed while we both composed ourselves, and a thought tumbled to the front of my brain. I stared at him. “I thought you didn’t need to breathe?”
He shook his head and slicked back his hair with his free hand, drops of greasy black water trailing down his face. “You and me both.”
Oh, that couldn’t bode well for the underworld if Remo’s powers were no longer the same as before. Was that what Merlin had meant about Remo not coming with me?
What if that applied to me too and I couldn’t shift? I already knew I had, like, zero venom left in me. I reached with my tongue to the roof of my mouth to feel my fangs. Nothing, they weren’t there. “My fangs are gone,” I said.
Remo made a face that told me he was checking. “Mine too.”
Yeah, that was all kinds of bad. What, then, were we just human?
I glanced around, finally taking in what I was looking at and, more importantly, what was looking back at me. We were in the center of a still lake, and we were at least a hundred feet away from the shoreline on either side of us. To the front and back of us, though, I couldn’t see the end of the water. The place made me think of Orpheus once more, of the way he stood on the dock looking out.
Maybe in his madness he’d gone to a place he remembered from the underworld. I shivered.
“Maybe this is the River Styx?” I said more to myself than to Remo, but he answered me anyway.
“It would be moving,” he said.
“Maybe not. I don’t think the rules apply down here,” I said. The River Styx was infamous in Greek mythology. I suspected we were in it, but that didn’t mean it had to follow the same rules as the rivers we knew from the land of the living.
Eyes blinked all around us from the edges of the water. Big, small, narrowed, and wide open, the colors across the spectrum of light. I swirled slowly in the water, taking it all in. The eyes peered from around large stones, from behind twisted and gnarled trees, and some just peered up at us from the ground itself, each blink dusting up the dirt like a tiny windstorm. “Remo, you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Yes. There aren’t any watching us from farther down on the left side. Swim.” He gave me a gentle push in the direction he pointed at with the flick of his chin. I swam, doing my best to keep all the eyes within my vision. Because I had a feeling that if I looked away for even a second, they would rush us. There wasn’t animosity flowing from them, exactly, so much as . . . hunger. “They want to eat us.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.” Remo swam beside me, carefully. As though he didn’t want to make a single splash. Silently I agreed with his tactic. Until something brushed against my leg, the lightest of touches that sent my heart rate into orbit.
“Something is in the water.” I bit the words out, doing my best not to recoil completely for fear of sudden movements drawing more attention.
“I felt it too. Just keep swimming.”
“This isn’t a Disney movie,” I whispered, my mouth hovering over the water’s surface.
He grunted, and I thought it was a laugh. I turned my head, took my eyes off the eyes that followed us from the shoreline, and watched in horror as Remo disappeared under the water, sucked down like Luke Skywalker when the trash-compactor monster grabbed him.
“Remo!” I screamed his name, and all around us a cry went up like a cacophony of shrieking toddlers that couldn’t be consoled. The sound reverberated against my skin and ears, sending shivers through me over and over—maybe I still had some of the Drakaina in me after all—as I spun around and around in a vain attempt to find him. I drew a deep breath and then dove under the murky depths. I forced my eyes open and blinked against the grit that filled the scummy liquid. The view was anything but clear, but I could make out a twisting shape, not unlike my own coils, and within it . . . Remo. I swam forward and tried to shift, knowing that I could take another serpent in my Drakaina form.
Nothing happened. Not a single puff of smoke. I didn’t slow, only swam harder. A coil rammed into me as it swirled around, squeezing Remo. I caught a glimpse of his eyes, saw them flutter shut, the bubbles racing from his mouth. I reached out and grabbed a piece of the snake, digging my hands in. My strength was still with me at least. I tore a hunk of the snake’s flesh off, and the serpent reared around, its face right in mine. It let go of Remo and wrapped around me. As we rolled through the water, we drew
close to Remo, and I managed to push him to the surface. Or at least push him in that direction. The serpent rolled again and tightened its constriction on me, but I felt nothing. No pain. No loss of breath.
It put its head to mine, quite literally nose to nose. Who are you, that you would defy me? That you would resist my call, my coils, and your death?
I mouthed a single word, the bubbles escaping me finally as I stared into the glittering dark eyes. Drakaina.
The snake reared back, and I was released. I swam to the surface, my mouth coated with the foul water. I gagged, unable to get my bearings. A hand grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the shoreline. “Better to deal with a thousand small creatures than that.” Remo’s voice was filled with pain, and I looked at him. He was pale, and I realized I’d been right in my assessment. He was nothing more than a human here in the underworld. Not good, this was not good at all, and there was nothing I could do to change it. Not if I wanted to get us out of here. Our feet finally met resistance, and I slogged ashore, putting a hand behind Remo’s arm and helping him to stand. He leaned heavily on me, but again, I had retained some of my strength, so it wasn’t an issue.
I turned back, and the snake that had grabbed Remo reared up above the water, its mouth partially open, fangs hanging low. “Drakaina, you . . . are alive?”
A voice curled up through me and out my mouth, one that was mine and yet not quite. “She is the Drakaina now, I leave my power with her. She is your queen, and I suggest if you like your skin where it is, you help her.”
I snapped my mouth shut. The big snake bobbed his head once. “As it once was, now it will be again. Are you sure, my queen?”
The voice answered with a soft chuckle. “At first, no, I was not sure. But she has the heart that it takes to hold this much strength. Strike, help her find Hades, the world is at stake.”
Strike, the giant snake, tipped his head and flicked his tongue out. “Again?”
“Always. You know how it is with the damn pantheon.” I cleared my throat, and the Drakaina in me faded.
“Wait!” I yelled, and Remo looked at me like I’d lost my mind. I swallowed hard. “Wait, you . . . you’ve been helping me.” I spoke not to the snake in front of me but the one within me.
The voice of the Drakaina no longer sounded in my ears, but in my mind.
I was. But you do not need me now. You are finding your footing. Trust your instincts, trust the strength of your heart and mind.
“And if I need your help again?” I asked.
I will always be here. But I will sleep now; it has been a long time since I could trust someone with my power without having to hold their hand. Go, do what you came to do: find Hades. Her presence faded. Strike and Remo both watched me. I blew out a breath.
“I don’t understand why I could hear her so clearly here.” I shook my head in confusion.
Strike slid forward out of the water. He was big, but maybe only half my size when I shifted forms. “The underworld crosses barriers that are in place in the land of the living. Just like you would not hear my voice if we went back to the other side.”
I looked up at him. “Why can’t I shift?”
“That is one of the rules here. You are stripped of the most deadly strengths that have been bestowed on you. The shifting, the venom. You cannot use them here. Same with the vampire. Stripped of his abilities and pushed back to being only a human. You retain things you were born with.”
“Well, shit,” Remo breathed. I had to agree with him. Except . . .
“I still have my strength.” I looked up.
“Then it must be something you had before,” Strike said. “You would have had to have been born with it for it to remain.”
I glanced at Remo, and he nodded. “The warlock blood. It obviously runs stronger in you than you realized.”
A blessing rather than a curse this time. “Strike, you can help us get to Hades, then?”
He bobbed his head once. “I can take you partway. When we get to Cerberus, there is nothing I can do there; you must pass him on your own.” He slithered ahead of us, and I got a good look at the patterning on his back. He was colored like an anaconda, shades of black, green, and brown. I hurried to catch up to him, not really wanting to be left behind in the underworld. Remo was right with me and slid a hand into mine. We walked through the underworld, as if we were on some sort of weird date with a large snake as a chaperone. I snorted to myself, and Remo lifted an eyebrow at me. “You cannot find this funny.”
“Weirdest date I’ve ever had,” I said.
Remo barked a laugh, and even Strike shook his head. “You think this is a date?”
“Probably our last one. Might as well make it memorable.” I pushed the words out past the pain that hovered with them. I had a job to do, this was not the time to be moping about my love life or lack thereof.
Strike took us around the edge of the swamp and past a fast-flowing river. “We have to get to the other side.” He flicked his tongue in the direction of the far side of the river.
I looked the water over. There were a lot of logs in the water, so many that I paused. “Could we not hop the logjam?”
“You really think those are logsssss?” Strike hissed the last bit at me. “Everything in here is either going to try and kill you, torture you, or hold you down until something bigger and badder can come along and torture or kill you.”
“Crocodiles?”
“Not exactly,” Strike said. “Throw something at them, then you’ll see.”
I stared out at the water, bent, and picked up a loose stone and threw it out at the logs. The “log” I hit snapped open a mouth that was . . . all mouth. There was no body I could see, just a gaping maw with row upon row of teeth that glittered with water and pieces of flesh. It snapped closed with a crash like thunder, the water rippling around it. There were no eyes, no nose that I could see, just a mouth designed for death. A giant crocodilian mouth that was so well hidden I had no idea how it couldn’t have caught thousands of people. I took a step back from the water. “Maybe in my Drakaina form.”
“Well, of course, but that is why you aren’t allowed to shift. If you want to see Hades, then you have to want it badly enough to actually fight your way through to him. He’s kind of a recluse, you know.” Strike led the way once more, his body slithering easily through the soft dirt and mud.
Beside me, Remo blew out a breath. “I have not feared for my life in a great many years.”
“You’re welcome?” I queried with a half smile, and he shook his head.
“I look forward to getting back to the other side, where I am not weak as a newborn kitten,” he grumbled, and I took his hand once more. If not for the occasional creature we came across, it would have seemed like just a very dark and gothic stroll. Weird but not terrible. Or maybe it was just that I was with Remo. I glanced at him, knowing that was the answer. Damn him, he even made the underworld seem like a place I wanted to be, as long as it was with him.
More than once I looked down at the flower still somehow stuck in my leather jacket. The bud had opened a little, a few of the petals showing a deeper pink within their folds.
We approached a section that was nothing like what we’d seen before. A glimmering gold glow surrounded the bush and trees to our right, and in the center of it, a bridge arced over a patch of rushing white rapids into a meadow.
“What is that place?”
“You can’t go there, not if you want to go back to the land of the living.” Strike slowed and stared into the meadow. “That is the place souls go before they make the final pass.”
“Like limbo,” Remo said.
I stared into the meadow. There was great beauty within it, and a sense of peace flowed out around it, beckoning me.
But all of that was secondary to what I was seeing: a figure I knew as well as I knew my own, one I thought I would never see again. I let go of Remo and was running for the bridge as I screamed for her.
“MOM!”
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She turned, a swirl of skirts around her body as she faced me. It looked like her wedding gown to me. Maybe when you died you got to wear something that brought you joy? A part of me hoped that was the case. Her eyes lit up and she smiled, her whole face aglow with happiness. Happy, she was happy.
Hands and a coil of snake wrapped around me, jerking me to a stop as my foot met the first plank of the bridge.
“Drakaina, you cannot! Your soul will be forced to move on if you cross the bridge,” Strike said.
I cried out, reaching for my mom, wanting to know she was okay. That she was truly happy. She ran toward me, the stalks of long, weaving grass and flowers bending as she passed. “Alena!”
Her voice had never sounded so sweet, and I held my hand out to her. She stopped on her side of the bridge, stretching her hand out to me. “Alena, what happened?”
“Mom,” I whimpered, unable to draw back, straining against both Remo and Strike.
She lowered her hand and slowly nodded. “I see you, my girl. Don’t fret, I’m fine.”
“You were killed; it’s my fault.”
Her smiled slipped, and a tear fell with it. “No, it wasn’t your fault. The Hydra would have sought me out. I saw the writ when I arrived here. My death would have been at her hands in a thousand variations of that day. Even if you had never become a Drakaina, I would have died at her hands. Do you understand? This was not your fault.”
I couldn’t help the sobs that echoed in my chest. “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too. Tell your father, and Tad, that the three of you were my world. Everything I did was to keep you safe. To try and help you find happiness.” She blew me a kiss and stepped back. “Go on, now. You have a job ahead of you. Do not grieve me, Alena. You have a lifetime ahead of you, and it shouldn’t be spent in tears.”
I wiped at my face as she backed away from the edge of the bridge. “Wait!”
“There is nothing more to say, my girl, except this: Be strong. Be brave. Be honest. Love and do not fear your heart.”
I grabbed the flower from my jacket and held it out to her. “Take it, and you can go home. We can be a family again. Please.”
Hisses and Honey (The Venom Trilogy Book 3) Page 17