“Where do you think Hades went?” I asked.
Jake shortened his stride to fall into step beside me. The path was wide enough for two. “Maybe he got another message from Zeus and he’s gone off to investigate.”
“Maybe.” Zeus’s messages so far hadn’t been exactly coherent, so it didn’t seem all that likely that he would suddenly be broadcasting anything useful. “It would be nice to get Zeus back. He might know who’s behind this whole thing. But Hades doesn’t seem the type to go haring off on his own without even telling us. He’s too cautious.”
I didn’t want to say “cowardly” because, hey, who was I to judge? But he had been keeping his head down in Berkley’s Bay for years, as if he didn’t want to be involved in whatever games the other gods were playing. It seemed an odd time to pick to suddenly launch himself into the action.
“For all we know, he could be back in the palace by now, ready to chew our arses out for heading off like this without him.” Jake grinned down at me. “If that’s the case, I’ll make sure he knows it was all your idea. I only came along to keep you out of trouble.”
“Thanks for the support.”
“Any time.”
Cerberus was a fair way ahead of us on the track, sniffing around a group of boulders as though he expected to flush out a rabbit or two. Did they have rabbits in the underworld? Dead or alive? He looked up, long pink tongues lolling out of his mouths, then bounded ahead again.
“At least Cerberus seems to be enjoying himself,” I said.
“He’s probably just excited about chasing centaurs again.”
“That makes one of us.”
He glanced down at me, his expression serious again. “I won’t let them hurt you. I’ll be ready for them this time.”
I nodded, reassured in spite of myself. “Hopefully they’ll all go galloping the other way when they see us coming, after our last meeting.”
“If they don’t, they’ll soon wish they had,” he promised.
After that, we saved our breath for the climb. At the top of the pass, I paused, looking back the way we’d come. Elysium spread out behind us like a patchwork quilt, stitched together from greens of many different hues. Lit by a warm golden glow, it lay dreaming in the soft light like a pastoral paradise. All it needed was a few fluffy sheep grazing on the gentle slopes to complete the look.
By contrast, the way before us was bleak. I sighed as I turned to face the path down onto the grey plain. No soft golden light on this side of the hills, only grey, grey, and more grey. Nothing but mists and darkness and stony ground until the hills met the waving grey grasses of the plain. Beyond that, I knew, stretched the even less appealing swamp, where the eels lurked beneath the murky water.
At least this time I’d be prepared for the slimy bastards.
“What do you think that orange light over there is?” I pointed to our right. Way off in the distance, the unrelenting grey gave way to an orange glow, very faint. It was only because we were so high up that we could see it at all. I hadn’t noticed it on the way through the first time, but I’d been too busy holding onto Cerberus and trying not to die to pay attention to the landscape then. I tried to remember what the map had shown in that area, but came up blank.
“The pits of Tartarus, maybe?” Jake squinted into the distance. “Or it could be the Phlegethon. That should be over there somewhere.”
The River of Fire. It would be kind of cool to see that, but I was glad our path led in a different direction. The underworld had proven a little hazardous for sightseeing. Maybe one day, I’d get Hades to give me the grand tour. For now, I’d be happy just to make it back to Hades’ palace in one piece. Thank goodness we had Cerberus with us. I rested one hand on the dog’s big black shoulder. The nearest head turned to me and gave me an enthusiastic slurp of its tongue.
“Good boy,” I said, rubbing his thick fur.
*FIND STICK?* he asked hopefully.
I laughed. “Maybe when we get back.”
“Come on,” Jake said. “It’s not going to get any easier standing on this mountain. Let’s get this over with.”
I cast a last wistful glance back at the green fields of Elysium before turning to face the path into Grey McGreyland. “It looks so crap down there.”
“It probably looks like heaven if you’re a centaur,” he said.
“Let’s not stop to ask any of them.”
“Fine by me. I was thinking we should ride Cerberus again, if he’ll let us, to get through there as fast as possible. I can keep them at bay with fire if I have to, but it would be better to fly through without seeing any of them.”
“They’re probably watching us right now,” I said, nerves making me grumpy.
“You’re a real ray of sunshine today, aren’t you?” He grinned. “It reminds me of when we first met. You used to look at me as though I was something nasty you’d stepped in, and call me ‘Steele’ all the time. Was that because you liked spitting the ‘s’ sound at me?”
“That was because I didn’t like you enough to be on a first-name basis.”
“So when did you decide you did like me?”
“Who says I like you?” But I remembered the first time I’d called him Jake. We’d been outside the pub, after that dramatic car chase with Holly in the back seat giving birth. Jake had been covered in blood and I’d thought Anders was about to kill him. Such things have a way of making you assess your priorities. It had seemed childish, and worse, in that moment, to continue to pretend that I didn’t care for him.
Not that I’d thought about it in that kind of detail while I was living it. I’d opened my mouth to scream a warning, and, “Jake!” had come out. I’d been calling him Jake ever since.
“What’s your middle name?” I asked.
He gave me a suspicious look. “Why?”
“In case I get really pissed at you.”
His blue eyes danced with laughter. “Then you’d sound like my mother, telling me off.”
“That’s the idea. So what is it?”
“Harlan.”
“Jake Harlan Steele?” Interesting. “Harlan steel sounds like a brand of knife.”
“Harlan is a family name. Do you have a middle name?”
Did I? The usual fog greeted me and I sighed. I was almost used to this by now. “If I do, I can’t remember what it is.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
I shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”
“Yes, it is.” His face was serious now, all traces of laughter gone. “It is a big deal, and I promise you we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“After we get through the current disaster.”
“After we get through the current disaster,” he agreed. He held out a hand to me. “Are you ready?”
I took his hand. As always, he was warm to the touch. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
He pulled me after him down the rocky path. “Chin up. It’s just a short gallop through the grass and then we’ll be knee-deep in mud again.”
“Now there’s an enticing prospect.” I let him lead me, glad to let someone else take charge for a change. My left foot was tingling again, and felt heavy and clumsy. I stumbled a couple of times, tripping on nothing. He looked at me sharply but said nothing.
At the bottom of the hill, I called Cerberus over and explained our wish to avoid the centaurs and the need for speed. He grumbled a little at having to make like a horse again, but allowed Jake to boost me up onto his back, then scramble up behind me. I leaned forward and took a handful of fur in each hand. Before us, a sea of grasses waved in the grey light. Nothing but grass and mist in any direction but the one we’d come.
“I’m surprised there’s any grass left after the firestorm you started on the way through.” The grey plain looked unchanged from when we’d first seen it, with no sign of the destruction Jake had wrought.
“Maybe it regenerated. There’s no reason for the rules of the real world to apply here.”
Good point. I took a deep brea
th. Best get this over with.
“Let’s move,” I told the big dog. “No chasing horses this time.”
He whined, but set off at a fast trot. If anything, it was even more uncomfortable than last time, because I had more feeling in my body. My legs were stretched so wide over Cerberus’s broad back that my jeans were in imminent danger of splitting at the seams. I was jostled and bounced as the giant dog lengthened his stride, and the grass swooshed past in a grey blur, whipping at my face and body as we went. I vowed never to take up horse riding.
I wanted to shut my eyes and just endure, but every time I did, I had to jerk my head up again, convinced that the centaurs were only a blink away. Why couldn’t Cerberus be stealthier? He was making enough noise for a whole herd of giant dogs. Surely the centaurs would be on us at any minute?
*Do you smell any horses?* I asked him, when I was so tense with dread I was almost ready to scream. My left foot throbbed in time with my heartbeat.
*YES,* he responded, sounding way too pleased about the fact. *CHASE HORSES?*
*No! No chasing. Let’s stay as far away from them as we can.*
One head turned to regard me, its dark eyes pleading. *SMALL CHASING?*
*Not even a little bit! You can come back and chase them all you like later, but I don’t want to see them again. They hurt me last time.*
He growled, a thunder that vibrated all through my body. *BAD HORSES. EAT THEM.*
*Sure. Eat them all you want—later. For now, just keep running, okay?*
He put on a burst of speed and Jake grabbed at my waist in alarm, nearly sliding off the back.
“Problems?” he asked.
“The centaurs are nearby.” I spoke quietly, straining to hear anything over the thud of Cerberus’s giant feet hitting the ground and the swishing of the grasses as he mowed a path through them. There was no thunder of hooves approaching.
Flames sprang to life on Jake’s arms. He was ready for anything. I crouched lower against Cerberus’s neck, trying to present the smallest possible target. I was more than ready for the grasses to thin and the stinking swamp to appear. I’d jump in and hug the nearest eel if we could just make it through without seeing a single centaur.
Suddenly, Cerberus swerved violently, and Jake went flying, tumbling through the long grasses trailing fire like a blazing comet falling to earth. I barely managed to keep my own grip, perilously close to sliding off Cerberus’s broad back.
“Stop!” I shouted. “We’ve lost Jake!”
We had bigger problems than that. Cerberus swerved again, dodging the centaurs that had popped up from the ground like some kind of infernal gophers. Either Cerberus had managed to disturb a nest of them sleeping or the bastards had been lying in wait for us. My money was on option two.
I clung to Cerberus, my fists knotted in his fur, as his heads snapped left and right at centaurs. Behind us, Jake staggered to his feet, summoning the fire that had been snuffed out by his unexpected landing. He roared, and flame rushed out from him in a great wave of heat and light. Cerberus danced to the side, as did several of the centaurs, but a whole clump of them disintegrated like dust on the wind, caught in the fire.
The survivors stood their ground. A few of them launched spears at Cerberus, which bounced off him as if he were made of rock. One of them struck perilously close to my injured leg, and I jerked it away with a squeak of horror. Unfortunately, that put me terminally off balance, and I slid gracelessly from Cerberus’s back and landed in a heap on the ground, scrambling to avoid being stepped on by those giant feet.
Jake threw a fireball and a whole swathe of grassland went up with a rush. More centaurs disintegrated. Next thing I knew, Jake’s hand, still trailing fire, reached down and hauled me to my feet.
“Are you hurt?” he rasped, not taking his eyes from the centaurs that circled like sharks. At least there were a lot fewer of them than there had been mere moments ago.
“I’m fine.”
Cerberus lunged at a foolhardy pair who’d come closer than was safe to those snapping jaws. I shrank closer to Jake, feeling exposed without the hellhound at my side. Instantly, Jake encircled us with a wall of fire twice as high as the burning grasses. He crouched, hands ready to shoot flames at anything that made it through. Several centaurs decided discretion was the better part of valour and took off at a gallop. With a joyful bark, Cerberus gave chase.
“Cerberus! Come back!” I shouted.
Jake forced his circle of fire wider. The flames licked hungrily at the dry grasses. Little sparks danced in whirling eddies amid the smoke. It was harder to see our enemies through the smoke and flames, but they were still there. I caught glimpses of them now and then, and Jake was kept busy searing spears out of the air.
Then Cerberus reappeared through the flames, and the last of the centaurs gave it up as a bad job. They scattered through the burning grasslands and I heaved a sigh of relief as the sound of their hoof beats receded. The air was thick with smoke, and I coughed.
“Nice work,” I said to Jake when I’d caught my breath again.
He nodded, but didn’t release his flames. I admit, I found the sight of them flickering up and down his arms reassuring. And that was something that I never thought I’d say—but I’d come to appreciate fireshaping in a way I never had before. I was all for its destructive energies being used in the cause of keeping me alive.
“Let’s keep moving,” he said, “in case they come back with a few more friends in tow.”
“Good idea.” I’d seen enough centaurs to last me a lifetime. “How about a ride, Cerberus?”
But the big dog paid me no attention. All his heads were turned away, ears pricked, as if listening to a sound I couldn’t hear.
“Cerberus? What’s up?”
For answer he took off like a bolt of black lightning. I’d never seen him move so fast—never even knew that he could.
“What’s wrong?” I shouted. This was more than his playful chasing of centaurs. “Where are you going?”
*HELP MASTER!* he thundered into my head.
*Wait! We’ll come with you. Don’t leave us here!*
But he didn’t stop, or even break stride. In a moment, he’d disappeared into a swirl of mist and smoke. Shit.
Jake raised an eyebrow. “What’s got into him?”
“Hades must be in trouble. He said he was going to help him.”
Jake looked around at the burning grass, wreathed in smoke, and sighed. “Looks like we’re walking from here.”
8
By the time the grasses thinned and we stumbled out onto the barer land that sloped down toward the swamp, Jake’s fires had died to the barest flicker and he was stumbling almost as much as I was. Without discussing it, we both dropped to the ground at the edge of the swamp, far enough from the grasslands to be out of spear range, and dug through our packs for the last of our food.
“Are you all right?” I asked, watching him lie back with a sigh once he’d finished chewing.
“Just tired. It takes a lot of effort to draw on that much fire.” Cerberus had left us over an hour ago, as far as I could tell with no watch, and the whole time we’d been on tenterhooks, waiting for the centaurs to jump us again. “Modern shapers have gotten soft. Our ancestors in the human-shaper wars could shape for hours without raising a sweat. They’d run rings around me.”
“These are hardly optimal conditions,” I protested, taking offence on his behalf at the implied criticism, even though he was the one making it. “I bet none of your ancestors had to face dead bloody centaurs waving spears in their faces.”
“True. I’m still glad I live in modern times. Mostly, we don’t even have to use our shaping unless we want to.”
I laid back next to him, staring up at the grey “sky” above us, hands clasped behind my head. “That’s because you’ve terrorised the population into bowing down before you, so demonstrations of power aren’t necessary anymore.”
“Really?” He turned his head to regard
me. “And here I was thinking that it was because, in these enlightened times, diplomacy rules rather than brute strength.”
“Ha. Only a shaper would say a thing like that.”
“Do you still hate us that much?”
About to give him another flippant reply, I paused at the wistful note in his voice. “Some more than others. At the moment, you’re top of my list of favourite shapers.”
“Good to know. Who else is on it?”
“Actually, you’re the only one, but I’m open to persuasion.”
I half-expected him to make some risqué comment about “persuading” me, but he must have been truly tired, because he only smiled and let the opportunity slide. I sat up and took a drink from my dwindling water supply, then offered him the bottle. He shook his head and levered himself into a sitting position with a groan that made him sound like an octogenarian. Falling from Cerberus’s back hadn’t done him any favours—even his bruises had bruises now.
He looked out across the misty swamp and sighed. “What are we going to do now? Got any bright ideas?”
“I can keep the eels away from us,” I said. “We’ll still get wet, but we won’t get eaten.”
“I was more thinking about the problem of finding our way through without drowning or getting caught in the mud. Cerberus took such a twisty way I couldn’t find it again if you paid me. We could wander for days in there without finding our way out.”
Shit. I hadn’t considered that, too focused on the danger of the eels to consider more mundane things like directions. There were stretches of deep water and sucking mud that made it impossible to take a straight path through. But the swamp was wide, with poor visibility and no landmarks. Every tussock and miserable dwarf tree looked much the same as the next one. He was right. With no sun or compass to mark direction, we might walk around in circles forever, unable to find the right path. And our water was nearly gone already. We needed a guide and, with Cerberus gone, we didn’t have one.
Rivers of Hell (Shadows of the Immortals Book 3) Page 8