by Jenn Stark
“Oh, come on, stop worrying,” Nikki chided, picking her foot up and dropping it again. “You’re officially locked in the No-Fun zone. That has to be worse than Hell.”
She was trying to cheer me up, I knew, stepping gingerly around the great open wound that she no doubt could sense in my mind but couldn’t understand. I appreciated that, but she was beating a dead…
I stopped. “The victory card,” I said, glaring at the waters before us. I lifted my foot, and the far edge of the rock receded once more, dropped it and it flowed back into place.
Nikki had pivoted, watching the far bank as well. “Victory Card. Right. I’m not feeling super victorious here, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Look back while I look forward, what do you see?”
Nikki glanced behind her. Everything’s where it’s supposed to be.”
“Right.” I squinted forward as well and kept my knee bent, my foot dangling in the air. “And I see the other side of the channel, not farther than a seven-foot jump from this ledge.”
“Mmkay.” Nikki turned as well then, and we both saw the far edge recede toward the distant cavern walls. “Not gonna lie, this is beginning to creep me out.”
“Right,” I said. “But think of the Victory Card again. There are two main figures on the face of the Six of Wands. One is the youth on the horse, the other is the horse itself. The youth is looking ahead, the horse backwards or at least off to the side. If we’re both looking fully at either side of the River Styx, maybe it won’t change. Maybe I can jump, as long as you stay focused on your side.”
“Well, that’s great, but how’re you going to jump back?”
I frowned. “I guess maybe I won’t. The Styx is an entry point to Hell, right? And I still have to find Armaeus. He’s down here, maybe somewhere nearby. So, I go forward and track him down, and you go back home.”
Her lips tightened into a frown. “I guess. But it makes sense. You’ve got to get over water, one of us looks forward, the other back to where we came from, and then money will fall out of the sky. I get that right?”
I smiled. “Close enough.”
We positioned ourselves on either side of the abutment, Nikki at the base, me at the tip. With her behind me, the two of us touching, the far edge seemed closer now. “Ready?” I asked.
“Looks good from where I stand,” Nikki said. “Go ahead and—”
Before I could lose my nerve, I leapt across the narrow channel. As I landed on the other side, however, there was a mighty crack in the stone behind me.
“Whoa!” Nikki dropped into a crouch, her arms flung wide. “Goddammit, whoa!” She hunkered down on a small island of stone. Exactly as we’d seen in our vision, it had broken off from the cavern floor and was floating in the water—the far-wider body of water now. Nikki was about ten feet from my edge of the Styx, and twenty off the far bank. And, she was starting to spin.
“This is not cool,” she growled as the waters of the River Styx grew choppy and her spinning took on greater speed. The river started churning around her, and the stone platform wobbled, rising and falling with it as the water’s fury started to increase. “I’m going to need to make a jump for it.”
“No!” I said, my mind scrabbling. “The Six of Swords, Nikki, the Six of Swords! It has a woman on a boat crossing a river—that’s you, that’s you!”
“No shit. Except I’m not actually crossing anything. Bless it!” Nikki dropped to one knee, her hands scrabbling for purchase on the rock as it lifted, then crashed down again.
I ran along the banks of the river, back and forth, trying to keep pace with her. “Okay, okay! So we need a Six of Pents, something from the sky, an overlord, alms, the poor, something abundant, something due—”
“A little help here, please!” Nikki yelped as she dipped into the water, the spray washing up on her. “Ouch! That’s hot!”
“Something due! A debt! A debt of Sixes—the Syx!” I fairly screamed from my side of the river. Nikki whirled around as the rock platform spun her, but I could see understanding flash across her face. “A loan due from the Syx!” I shouted again, but she was already nodding. Not a week earlier, we’d worked out an unexpected arrangement with the Syx, a highly unusual group of demons led by the massive seven-foot-tall Warrick, and they now owed us large. Owed us their eternal lives and their earthly freedom, in fact, which they would repay with six wishes granted, whenever, however, whatever we wanted.
Time to cash one of those in.
“Warrick!” Nikki bellowed, as the Styx rolled higher.
In a rush, the scene on the other edge of the cavern snapped and shuddered. Then there was a new figure standing there, a man as tall as Nikki and more, his body inked with an entire tapestry of tattoos that stretched from the edge of his corded neck to the low-slung curve of his loose shorts. He was shirtless and sweating, his feet in oversized running shoes, and he roared with indignation.
“Who dares summon— Woman!”
I reared back as the full wrath of Warrick’s rage fixed on Nikki spinning in the middle of the River Styx. His face was a mask of emotion—fury, shock, and endless crushing need. Without another word, he bounded forward and dropped to his knees, shoving his hands into the water, then yanking them out again, pulling his massive arms back toward his body as he regained his feet.
The water reacted instantly. A huge wave crested and hurled Nikki toward Warrick, the rock platform she was sprawled over spinning away from her. The ledge sailed high overhead before it crashed fully into a stalactite, knocking the thing off the ceiling and back into the shadows.
Nikki, for her part, landed squarely on Warrick’s body, her limbs flailing as he caught her easily, barely staggering under her weight. As he roared again, the water surged up in furious response, a monster denied its food. Nikki twisted in Warrick’s grasp as the River Styx gathered force and changed direction…toward me.
The entire rage of water cascaded back over on itself, and the river immediately jumped its banks and raced my way. It wasn’t water anymore, however, but molten fire, etching its way into the rock and leaping toward me hungrily, the heat of it a living wall of flames.
“Holy shit—” Nikki howled. “Sara, Run!”
She didn’t have to tell me twice.
Chapter Sixteen
I ran as fast as I could into the next cavern, my body convulsing with shock and fear and a sudden, numbing coldness.
Ice. I was surrounded by ice—I slid at least twenty feet forward, sprawling to my knees, my hands out to stop my progress but useless on the slick, frozen surface. The fire lit up the cavern around me, and suddenly I realized I was no longer encased in rock, but actual rooms again—small rooms with curving walls and windows and wooden trim and tables bolted into the floor—all of it frozen in ice.
Rapidly thawing ice, I realized, as the fire blasted in behind me, an unstoppable force assaulting a not quite unmovable object. It roared into the space, and sudden overloud cracks reverberated through the air. Huge chunks of ice crashed to the deck, revealing more petrified timber above.
A ship, I realized suddenly. I was in the bowels of a ship. The entry had been the cracked-open hull, and as I smacked into the far side of the room, I remembered the story the dark mages had told us, that the compass had sunk to the bottom of the ocean along with an entire ship of lost souls. Scrambling upright, I slid on the rapidly mounting slush and heard the infernal creak overhead of a thousand pounds of water suddenly weighing on the ship’s hull. I scrabbled around for anything familiar: a hold, a cabin, a bedchamber, a safe. Anything that might hold the compass that the dark mages wanted me to find.
There was nothing there but fire, and eventually the ice melted enough to open a hole in what would have been the ceiling, except this ship was on her side. I crawled through it and burst out onto the open decking of the boat. Water poured down the open timbers, rope sprawling out over what had been the deck and was now a steep slope. At the tip of the deck I saw the ship’s
helm, still icebound as water coursed around it. In the center of the ship’s wheel was an ebony case.
Frozen solid.
A sudden rush of superheated water blew me across the deck and I flung myself to the side, climbing up the knotted rope until I caught the edge of a shattered beam—a mast of some sort, broken almost in two. I jammed my hands around it and held tight as another surge of water came roaring from the hold, lapping over the ship’s railing before dropping off in an apparent eternal downpour—a downpour that had nothing to do with the thawing ice all around me. This water was separate, and there was a lot of it. I squinted up and saw it flowing down from the ceiling—crashing over the rocks all around the ship before continuing down.
My eyes wide, I realized that this ship sat frozen at the edge of an enormous waterfall. Something had stopped its slide originally, but now it teetered, its aching beams buffeted by the raging current, everything melting, everything shifting, as heat billowed up from the center of the boat and snaked along the newly exposed beams.
I dropped down to the rope-draped floor again, clawing along the slope and nearly missing the wheel altogether as the boat canted with a sudden, queasy lurch. At the last moment, I lunged out and latched on to the wheel, still mercifully stuck in a thin layer of ice, and punched my hand into the hole that held the ebony case. The ancient fittings gave, and the box flew out the other side, hanging drunkenly by a leather strap until I wrenched it free.
I stood, prize in hand, as a roar from behind caught me up again. A tsunami of water geysered through the hole in the floor, spitting out over the deck. It swept me up like I was a rag doll and threw me into the sky, directly into the torrential waterfall. I sucked in my breath and curled into a tight ball, preparing myself for impact—
A sudden, unfamiliar sound thumped above me. A moment later, I was caught up in the grip of enormous muscled arms and pulled tight to a chest heaving with exertion. Another thump, and I realized—wings! That sound was Warrick’s wings!
I tried not to struggle, but I was smashed up against the demon’s chest, my lungs crushed in his grip. This close, the tattoos decorating the demon’s hard pecs seemed to be living things, and their eyes stared out at me with reproach as I was hauled through the blasting water with one—two—three strong surges of Warrick’s wings. Then we cleared the torrent, and I could almost see the far edge of the cavern. The far, mercifully dry edge.
“That’s two,” Warrick growled in my ear. “I will get our woman home safely. You are on your own.”
Then he tossed me.
I landed on a hard surface—more stone. Not surprising, since Hell seemed to be comprised mainly of an endless cave system that would have driven dwarves insane. This particular spit of rock, however, at least seemed to be fairly hospitable. There were no churning waters of death, for one thing. Or windows opening out onto my worst nightmares or my most harrowing regrets. I was beginning to very much appreciate walls without windows.
With a groan, I flopped over on my stomach and started moving again, happy to realize I was relatively ambulatory, if you didn’t mind all the crawling. Warrick had disappeared back the way he’d come, and I smiled weakly, imagining the conversation between him and Nikki. The demon had a possessive streak a mile wide, and the pathologically independent Nikki didn’t seem to know what to do with him other than egg him on. Picturing Warrick hauling her out of Hell and back to Prague helped distract me from my own pain, and by the time I reached the doorway to the next passage, I could pull myself up. I was one massive bruise, but hey, details. I wouldn’t be wearing a swimsuit anytime soon. I’d heal.
Darkness permeated the corridor, but that didn’t stop me from rotating the ebony box with my fingers as I walked. It was a little thing, barely the size of my fist, and as I aimlessly walked through the cavern, angling right, then left, then right again, I wondered at the dark mages’ interest in it. At least it had been real, not some endless goose chase they’d sent me on to trap me down here. I’d been a little worried about that, and it did my heart good to know that the dark practitioners of Vegas were maybe-possibly trustworthy.
I considered the object again, though I couldn’t see much of it in the gloom. A compass designed to find magic. In a place like Hell, I’d think the thing would exhaust itself with endless spinning. The thought made me smile despite my own fatigue. My fingers caught against the catch on the box, a simple hook affair, no locks or additional wards required. Simple, straightforward, easy. How…refreshing. How…nice.
How completely unlike Hell.
I weighed the possibilities as I weighed the box in my hand. Would there be wards set on the device? I would’ve set a few, but I’d found that all too often, Connecteds tended to rely on man-made restraints for the most arcane of items, and arcane restraints for the most mundane. Which was why I slipped the catch of the compass box almost idly as I rounded another corner, before realizing that I’d made it into some sort of actual room.
I squinted in the gloom. The darkness of this subterranean chamber system was almost absolute, yet the very rocks seemed to give off a dim glow, casting everything in a haze of midnight blue. After my eyes adjusted to this new and different gloom, it was almost enough to see by. But that didn’t help me understand where I was. The room was too big to get a fix on any sort of dimensions, but there were definitely things in here. Magical things. I could sense them.
I eyed the box. “Are you working after all, little guy?” I muttered. “Did you get me here?”
With the catch already off the box, it was no difficult feat to convince myself to lift the lid and peer inside. After all, it was a compass, and I needed to get myself out of this place, eventually. I had to get to Armaeus, in fact, and if ever there was a wellspring of crazy magic…
I nudged back the lid.
The light that spilled forth from the box was muted, barely a glow, but I’d grown so used to the darkness that it was as if someone had opened up police high beams directly onto the backs of my eyeballs. Retinas screaming, I threw my arm across my face and backed away—though I was carrying the source of my pain, the box. Nevertheless, I was reassured when I bounced up against something solid. Drawing in a deep breath, I lowered my arm and peeled my eyes open again, shielding them from the box’s glare.
The light emanated from a chunk of rock whittled into a slender plumb-bob device that was quivering on its side, pointing directly at me. If it was searching for magic and finding me, that wasn’t exactly going to help me, but I had to give the little guy credit for trying. The plumb-bob rested on a thin disk of some kind of pressed metal, perfectly flat and grooved with concentric circles. The design was super basic, something I could have gotten online in about thirty seconds, but the box had the weight of ancients attached to it. I’d need to analyze it and probably carbon date it before I truly knew how old it was, something else for Kreios to get his avaricious mitts on. Time enough to do that when I got out of here.
The low “hmmph” that accompanied my thoughts filled the room with quiet vibrations, the first sound of any sort I’d heard since leaving the rush of the flooding Styx.
Then I realized—I wasn’t the one who’d made the sound.
The wall shifted behind me.
I jerked forward, shielding the light as I pivoted around, noting the shifting stack of two thick rows of rock. Then the rows unfolded, and I stepped back several more paces. Rock wasn’t supposed to unfold. I’d checked.
I swept the compass light to the right as another portion of the creature twisted. Its head, to be exact.
Slowly, it turned to look at me, and all the blood drained out of my face.
I was staring at…a Minotaur.
With a scream made more harrowing for all that it was silent, I turned and fled without even knowing where to go. The Minotaur’s roar provided all the motivation I needed. It was mad, it was hungry, and I was lunch.
As I ran, I held the compass out in front of me, alternately cursing and praising the light
that allowed me to see where I was going—despite the fact that the Minotaur creature thing could see me too. I raced forward by the direction of the tiny device, angling left or right or left again by its dictates alone. My sight was useless in this place, but as long as the compass kept pinging, I had some hope of getting out of here in one piece.
All the while, I heard the pounding of the Minotaur’s feet as it surged after me. It wasn’t fast, but it could cover a lot of ground, as big as it was. I was distinctly put out over its size, in fact. The thing was immense, probably three times my height and twice my width, and that simply was unacceptable. Minotaurs were supposed to be people sized. A man with a bull hat on, little more. Next thing you knew, someone was going to shove a dog-sized unicorn at me and completely destroy all my dreams.
I gasped an attempt at laughter as I ran, unwilling and almost unable to slow down. The moment I’d gotten out of the center of the Minotaur’s den, the compass had pinged its location solidly, pointing me in…if not the right direction, then any direction that was not the Minotaur. That was good enough for me. The maze, and I realized it was a maze at length, the walls hewn smoothly and with definite purpose—seemed to be angling slightly up, but that was the sole indication I had that I was heading in the right direction.
Finally, there was a light up ahead that wasn’t generated by the compass. I redoubled my speed as the creature behind me neared. I had no kibble, I had no stick, I had no reason to think it would react the way a dog would, but I longed for anything to cause a distraction to the beast and send it running the wrong way.
That didn’t happen. I rounded the corner and almost cried out with joy at the wide door I saw before me. I didn’t care that this was Hell, I didn’t care that I’d been damaged by every illusion I’d stumbled into. I cared only that I was running from a freaking jumbo-sized Greek Minotaur—anything up ahead had to be better than that.
I burst into another wide room, and I swung around, then around again.