“So where’s Hades? Why isn’t he back yet?”
“I don’t know. As I said, I didn’t stay long—just long enough to make a couple of phone calls. Then he showed me how to work the elevator and I came back and went to bed.”
“How to work the elevator?” I repeated. They weren’t usually complicated. “Don’t you just press the button?”
“He wanted to guard against humans accidentally finding their way to the underworld. If you press the button nothing happens. The real button’s hidden behind a panel.”
“Smart.” The Lord of the Underworld’s deviousness knew no bounds. I thoroughly approved.
“I thought he’d be back by now, though,” Jake added. He glanced at Syl’s downturned eyes, then added in a bracing tone: “But I’m sure he won’t be long.”
I poured myself a coffee from an exquisite silver pot and took a long sip. Heavenly. Or should that be hellish? It was damn good, anyway. “I hope so.”
Neither of us voiced the obvious—that someone who was posing as a vampire couldn’t be out in daylight. He should be back in his “cellar” down here with us by now. The fact that he wasn’t almost certainly meant something had gone wrong.
Hades kept saying that the gods didn’t regard the passage of time the same way as we mortals did. Maybe he was just working on god-time but, if so, where could he have gone? Syl fiddled with her serviette, winding it round and round her fingers. I wasn’t even sure she was listening to our conversation.
I shared a worried glance with Jake. “Just be patient a little longer,” he said.
I didn’t do patience. Syl couldn’t afford to wait on god-time, so neither could I. If Hades didn’t show up soon, I’d have to take matters into my own hands.
***
I waited all day for Hades to return, hanging around the mansion so I wouldn’t miss him. I don’t know how many times I walked down the corridor past the walnut-panelled elevator, but every time, the same silence greeted me. The single indicator light above the doors never lit up.
My impatient feet led me at last to the library, where I managed to lose myself for a while in a book. In other circumstances, I would have felt as though I’d died and gone to heaven to find myself in such a place. The ceiling, far above, was painted with representations of the gods gazing down from the clouds. Another family snapshot for Hades. I wondered which one of the stunning goddesses depicted was Persephone, his wife. The walls were a bookaholic’s dream. Nothing but books, all the way up. I couldn’t even begin to estimate how many there were. A million? More? More than I could ever hope to read in a lifetime, that was for sure.
Galleries ran around the room at two levels, allowing access to the higher shelves, their railings made of wrought-iron and topped with gold. The spiral staircases at each end of the long room were made of wrought iron, too, crafted into designs of flowers and creeping vines. Armchairs were scattered around the room, ready to welcome the reader, or there were desks for the more studiously inclined. I picked an armchair by one of the tall windows and curled my feet up under me.
Unfortunately, the novel I’d chosen, the adventures of a wisecracking earthshaper on the trail of a pack of rogue werewolves, couldn’t hold my interest for more than a couple of hours. I closed the book, my thoughts drawn to my own werewolf friends, Holly and Joe, and their newborn baby. Joe was a tough-looking guy with a heart of pure marshmallow. He already doted on Cody, his son from his previous marriage; I could just imagine how besotted he’d be with his tiny werewolf daughter. I’d delivered the baby myself, in the back of a stolen car on that wild ride back from Crosston. I hoped Holly had the sense to keep her head down with the fireshapers in town looking for Jake and me. Her face would be on their CCTV footage from the Plaza of the Sun, too. That bastard Anders had used her as bait to force me to do what he wanted. Fortunately, Hades had been there to finish him off.
I sighed. The light outside the windows was fading, and Hades still wasn’t back—I would have heard the chime of the lift from here. Should I go topside myself and find out what was keeping him? But if the town was as full of provosts as Jake had said, I really didn’t want to deliver myself on a gold platter to them. Safer to stay here and wait.
I uncurled from my chair, stretching the kinks out of my muscles. The trouble was, waiting wasn’t my strong suit, as Syl would probably have said. I walked around the room, trailing my fingers across gold-embossed spines, and stopped at the alcove where the elaborate suit of armour stood. It was hard to believe that tatty old baseball cap was the fabled Helm of Darkness. It had once had some kind of logo on the front, but it was so worn I couldn’t tell what it had been. There were sweat stains—at least I hoped it was sweat—on the visor, and the whole thing was such a faded grey it was impossible to tell what colour it had originally been. Blue? Purple? Maybe even dark green.
On the wall behind it—the only part of the walls not covered with shelving—hung a map of the underworld. It was roughly circular in shape, hemmed in by the river Styx, and crisscrossed by branches of the Styx and several other rivers, with Hades’ palace towards the centre. Where would Hephaistos be in all that dark realm? Probably not near Tartarus, where the real bad guys were kept, though there was a river of fire near there that might appeal to a blacksmith. Hades had said he’d set up a special area in Elysium for the dead gods, hadn’t he? But Elysium was a big place, if the map was drawn to scale.
I eyed the baseball cap again and blew out a sigh. Best to be patient a little longer. It was probably good for my personal growth or something.
By the time the night was half over, Hades still wasn’t back and I was done with personal growth. When the great house was quiet, I left my bedroom and ghosted down the stairs to the library again. But this time it wasn’t the books that drew me. Bars of silvery light from the long windows stretched across the carpet. I had to hand it to Hades—his underworld had fake moonlight as well as fake sun. It was just as good as the real thing, but without my link to Syl and her feline night vision, it wasn’t quite enough for me. I switched on a single reading lamp on one of the desks so I wouldn’t bump into the furniture and wake the household.
I stopped in front of the suit of armour in its alcove. For such a priceless object, the lack of obvious security was a little worrying. Nothing had happened to Hades when he removed the cap the other day, but maybe it was magically linked to him, and anyone else who tried to take it would die a horrible death.
That thought did give me pause, but, on the other hand, it was far more likely that Hades was counting on the Helm’s camouflage to keep it safe. A thief who made it this far—and how likely was that, considering this was the god’s own palace in the middle of the underworld?—would overlook the tatty old cap in favour of the humungous horned helmet, which looked a far more likely prospect to be the famed Helm of Darkness.
Well, here goes nothing. I snatched the cap from its perch, my shoulders tensed against a blow that never came. No electric shocks, no collapsing floor to deposit me into a pit. Maybe I watched too many movies. I breathed out a sigh of relief, then nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice spoke behind me.
“Clearly, I’ve spent too much time with you lately.” I spun around. Jake stood with his arms folded across his chest, close enough to punch. Or kiss. Sometimes it was hard deciding which I most wanted to do. I must be losing my touch—I hadn’t even heard him come in. “I knew I’d find you here tonight.”
“What do you mean?” I shoved my hands behind my back, keeping the cap out of sight.
“I’ve been waiting for you.” He gestured at a high-backed armchair that faced away from us. No wonder I hadn’t heard a door open—he’d been here all the time. Sneaky. My admiration for him went up another notch. “I knew you wouldn’t wait for Hades any longer.”
He moved closer, looming over me in the dark room. The single lamp glowed behind him, leaving his face lit only by the silver light coming in the windows, but I could see that he was smiling.
<
br /> “But who knows when he’ll be back?” I asked. “And what if he doesn’t come back at all? The shadow shapers must have caught him, too—why else would he be gone so long? We could be sitting around here on our arses while the world burns.”
“We could,” he agreed. “But if you think that I’m going to let you sneak off in the night by yourself, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“We have to do something, Jake.”
“We do,” he agreed. “But that’s we. Not just you. I can’t have you sneaking around in the dark filching the Helm of Darkness, planning to run off on your own.”
I took a step back. He was very … overwhelming … up so close. The heat coming off his body summoned an answering heat that speared right through me. His smoky scent was in my nostrils and I swayed toward him without meaning to, my hands itching to roam over the hard muscles of his chest. “I wasn’t.”
He laughed. “Stop trying to hide the damn thing behind your back. I saw you take it. You may be a great thief, Lexi, but you’re a terrible liar.”
For answer, I shoved the cap on my head and took three swift, silent steps to one side. Immediately, a large circle of flame sprang up around us. Wow, talk about a blast from the past. He’d pulled the same stunt on me the night he’d caught me snooping in his house. Unfortunately, tonight there were no cats handy to assault him with. I crept closer to the flames, testing them, but they sure felt real. Too hot for anyone but a fireshaper to pass through.
“Hades is going to skin you alive if you damage his library,” I said, grumpy at finding myself caught so easily. It seemed like cheating.
He moved toward the sound of my voice, pulling his circle of flame in, forcing me to move closer to him if I didn’t want to get burned. Although I noticed it wasn’t damaging the carpet at all. But it felt so hot, so real, that I wasn’t inclined to test it.
“That’s big talk from the woman who just stole his Helm of Darkness. If he’s going to skin me for a few old books, what’s he going to do to you?” He grinned, knowing that he’d beaten me.
Fine. I snatched the cap off again before he shrunk his circle so tight I was forced right up against the hard planes of his chest. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing.
Turned out I could have saved myself the trouble, because his arms came around me and gathered me to him anyway. I gulped at the pressure of his body against mine. One muscled thigh thrust itself between my legs, and I forgot all about trying to escape.
“Why didn’t you just ask me for help?” he said gently. “You didn’t have to go sneaking around in the middle of the night.”
“Because there’s only one Helm, Jake.” I tried to focus on what I was saying, instead of what the insistent pressure of his body was doing to my insides. “I can’t take you with me to Newport—they know your face there now. You’d never even make it past the border guards. I have to do this alone.”
He groaned and gave me a little shake. “Will you forget Newport? That’s never going to work.”
“I have to do something, Jake. I’ll go crazy sitting around here any longer.”
“Then let’s go see Hephaistos.”
Hmm. Hades had been going to take us to Hephaistos, but maybe we could find him on our own. Cerberus probably knew the way. Not that journeying through the underworld without the protection of its master would be any less dangerous than going back to Newport.
“The thing is, I seem to have a habit of getting my friends into hot water.” My fingers traced the line of his collarbone and he drew in a sharp breath. “First Holly, then Syl—and you’ve been shot and beaten up and now there’s a warrant out for your arrest. It would probably be safer for everyone else if I handled this one on my own.”
He growled, and I felt the vibration in his chest against the palm of my hand. “You won’t get rid of me that easily.”
I shrugged as if it didn’t much matter, resisting the urge to lay my head and my troubles against his broad chest. “I don’t want you getting hurt again.”
At least he wasn’t laughing at me anymore, but the warmth in his eyes was almost more disturbing for my peace of mind. “You should trust people to make their own calls on that,” he said. “It’s not your job to protect everyone else. That’s not how this friendship thing works.”
I almost asked him how a fireshaper would know, but I managed to bite my tongue at the last minute. Might be a sore point considering all his fireshaper friends were baying for his blood. See? I could be diplomatic—if I tried really, really hard.
“Fine. You can come. Just don’t slow me down.”
His eyebrows rose. “I can come? How gracious of you. And I won’t be slowing anyone down. I think you’ll find I can go all night.”
Men. They just couldn’t help themselves. Abruptly, I shrugged myself out of his arms, before this conversation got totally derailed. Before I found it impossible to keep my hands to myself. “Then let’s go.”
“Now?”
“Why not?” I glanced up at the map of the underworld on the wall, though I already had it memorised. “If we’re quick, we can be there and back before breakfast, and Syl and Apollo will have something to celebrate.”
“It’s still dark outside.”
“So? We’re in the underworld. Beyond the palace grounds, it’s always dark outside.” Besides, I did my best work in the dark. I found it comforting.
“I get the feeling it’s not going to be quite as easy as you make it sound.”
To be honest, I had that same feeling, but there was a time for honesty and there was a time for putting on a brave face and getting on with the job. I was embarking on a journey through the underworld, with only a fireshaper and a giant three-headed dog for company. What could possibly go wrong?
3
Plenty, as it turned out—but at least our journey started well. We left Hades’ mansion, both carrying light packs containing mostly food and water, plus the odd knife in my case. Oh, and the Helm of Darkness. I didn’t know what I might use it for, but I could hardly leave a thing like that just lying around, could I? You never knew when a Baseball Cap of Supreme Sneakiness might come in handy, and it wasn’t helping anyone just hanging around the library.
I called Cerberus to me, and he came crashing out of the wooded area at the back of the palace, red eyes gleaming with hope, carrying half a small tree in his mouths.
“No. No stick,” I said firmly.
His ears drooped as he dropped the “stick”, but his manner perked up once he realised we were going for a walk, and he fell in beside us, trotting along jauntily. According to the map in the library, Elysium was to the northeast of the palace, so we struck out in that general direction. Not that I had a compass, or any idea whether concepts like “North” and “South” even applied when you were in the underworld. I was hoping that my canine companion might be a better guide than my memory of the map which, quite frankly, looked more “artist’s impression” than “serious piece of cartography”.
“Cerberus, can you take us to Hephaistos?”
The nearest head swung to look down at me. Walking next to him made me feel like a midget. He towered over Jake, and was built as solidly as a freight train. I opened a link so I could hear his reply. *HEPHAISTOS?*
His mental voice thundered in my head, as usual. It was a wonder that he could use words at all, I guess, but I wished he had a volume control. There was no recognition in his burning eyes.
“Hephaistos—the god. Hades said he had built a place for him in Elysium.”
*ELYSIUM.* The other two heads turned to regard me, too, and his mental voice developed a weird echo, as if they were speaking in unison. *CHASE HORSES.*
“Uh, sure.” Were there horses in Elysium? I supposed there might be, if the place was full of heroes. Horse racing, feasting, and wenching were probably high on the list of most heroes’ wish lists for the afterlife. “You can chase the horses when we get there. But it’s a big place. Do you know where to find Hephais
tos?”
“The smith,” Jake added. “The crippled god with the hammer.” He glanced at me. “I assume Hades has built him a forge?”
He hadn’t given me any details, but it seemed likely. I shrugged.
*FIRE HAMMER,* Cerberus said. *HAMMER MAN.*
“Yes, Hammer Man. Do you know where he is?”
*THIS WAY.*
Cerberus veered off in what seemed a more northerly direction. Hades’ palace, in its little moonlit bubble, was already fading behind us, and the way ahead was so shrouded in mist it was hard to see where we were going. I stepped up the pace. Following a black dog in a dark place wasn’t ideal. It would be too easy to lose track of him.
*Don’t go too fast,* I warned silently. *Our legs aren’t as long as yours.*
*PUNY HUMANS.* I could have sworn there was a haughty sniff in his tone.
“Do we trust him?” Jake asked in an undertone. “He doesn’t seem the brightest bulb in the box. He could lead us to anyone.”
“I’m not sure we have a choice, if the alternative is finding our way through this.” Sure, the Plains of Asphodel had been a little misty, but I hadn’t expected visibility to be this bad. Already, I wasn’t sure I could find my way back to the palace. Without a compass, I had no hope of reaching Hephaistos without Cerberus’s help.
Jake grimaced at the swirling fog that hemmed us in. “We’d better not lose him, then.”
“We won’t.” That, at least, I felt confident of. “I can always call him back.”
“What if he gets out of earshot?”
“Then I’ll still call, and he’ll hear me.”
Jake considered this for a moment. “So it wasn’t a coincidence, Cerberus turning up in that cellar just in time to save us? You called him?”
“Yes. I called him.” I hadn’t even been sure myself that it would work, but it did. Just as well, or we would all have become permanent residents in the underworld. And much as I loved stomping around in the mist, I’d much rather be back in Berkley’s Bay in the bookshop. That simple life seemed a long way away right now.
Rivers of Hell (Shadows of the Immortals Book 3) Page 3