by Carmen Kern
“Sirs.” Jethro eased his hand away from his weapon. The merchant struggled to roll over, but Jethro stomped his size-fourteen foot on his chest. “You. Stay.”
Nick groaned out his one last full breath, then lay silent as Jethro flashed him a warning look.
The holographic Thanatos moved slowly around his brother and stood in front of him. “I know you didn’t find Hades. I would have received word if you had.” Thanatos unfurled his wings, the feathers made of darkest night, the tips burnished bronze. “There is something else…someone else tampering with my story boards. Magically.”
“Who would have that power?” Jethro asked.
“Very few. But the muse Kay Te has been linked to Hades in the past.” Thanatos folded his wings against his back, exposing Phobetor once again. “We suspect she has eyes in our world.”
Jethro ripped a Velcro strap open on his vest and held up the colorful lock. “You said we should report anything that seems out of place…I didn’t think this looked like your work, sir.”
“Flames. Well, it’s confirmed,” Phobetor said. “Damn pastels.”
Thanatos appeared to reach for the lock, his hand hovering over the top. “This could be a good thing.” The god looked into Jethro’s eyes. “Follow the colors. Follow the damn rainbow if you have to, because Hades is most likely at the end of it.”
A hound cried out in the distance.
“Yes, sir,” said Jethro, glancing down the center path, into the bowels of the marketplace.
“Sarge!” one of his officers shouted. “Found something.” The officer pointed his pistol down the side alley before tearing around the corner, following the howling hound.
Thanatos dropped his hand. “Go,” he commanded before the hologram vanished.
Jethro stomped once more on Nick’s fleshy stomach and ran out from behind the merchant’s table and into the center street, pushing and shoving through the crowd until he broke into the opening at the mouth of the alley. He sprinted to catch up with his officer and the baying hound. “Shut him up,” he yelled.
“Beenden!” the soldier shouted. Maximus eased out of a loud bay, drifting off into a whining chomp, and then sat silent.
Two officers had pulled a manhole cover off to the side of the sewage hole. Pink and gold paint decorated the cover, accenting the word “Necromourn” etched into the metal.
“Is anyone down there yet?” Jethro asked.
“Waiting for you, boss,” said the youngest of the squad. His eyes were huge, distorted. Comically cute.
Jethro never knew what or whom he was getting for recruits. Whatever Thanatos was inclined to draw on any given day was what he got. But he found that it didn’t matter what they looked like, as long as they did their job, even if their job was to be erased. If he had to guess, this youngster’s story line wouldn’t last the night.
Jethro nodded to the officers standing next to the manhole cover. “You two check out the tunnels. Head north.” He pointed at two more officers. “You two head down the sewers at the corner of Turk and Viper Street. Go South.” He turned to the hound and its handler. “I want the hounds up here searching. All of them. If Hades is down there, he’s going to have to come up eventually. Maybe he already has.”
The officers hustled to obey the commands.
The young officer strapped on his headlamp and started down the manhole.
Before he disappeared, Jethro said to him, “Good luck.” He didn’t believe in such things, but maybe the kid did. Times like this, he wished he believed in something, anything. But not the gods. He’d had his fill of them. “Damn you to Tartarus, Hades. Why’d you have to come here?” Jethro mumbled.
The sergeant followed the hound and its handler through the alley and into narrower, darker streets while the others took to the sewers. All of them searching for the god of the Underworld.
SIX
Rad, the djinn prince, walked the path of moonlight. He was alone in the world found between wakefulness and sleep.
The whisperings of minds and souls, the prayers and curses of the sleeping beings in multiple worlds tugged at the tail of his navy button-up shirt. They rustled against his fitted trouser legs. They were little more than dust mites blown about with the stirring of the djinn’s wing-tipped boots. He followed the familiar trail that fear and heartache had left him. The bits and pieces, the crumbs of nightmares crunching beneath his feet. Long ago, when he was a younger djinn learning the ways of dream walking, he thought of the human fairytale “Hansel and Gretel.” Of the breadcrumb trail the boy left behind so they could find their way back home. But to get home, they—he, had to first face the big bad.
Not much had changed in the decades he had walked this trail. His footsteps crushed monster’s tentacles, ditched snapping bloody jaws, slid over muddy earth made slick from blood and on and on, long as the path to the other worlds ran.
Multiple round spheres hung from an endless, starless sky, their faces turning a deeper shade of dusk the farther his feet took him. It was the fourth world, the smaller, darker world that called to him.
Several of his own kind, distant cousins—ghouls—padded beside him, stalking him through the vapors and the horrors, feeding off the grotesque shrapnel of nightmares, following a prince among djinns, their eyes gleaming a sickly yellow in the dark. The stench of rotten vegetables and old flesh clung to them.
Rad cursed his sensitive nose. “Be gone, vile ones!” His voice was gravelly, hollowed out.
They gurgled and smacked their leathery lips, tiny teeth snapping while they scooped up the chewy bits of waking screams and night terrors.
Rad strode past the first world and the staircase leading upward to its dark base. On he went. The stink of rot gradually faded, along with the slurping noise of hungry ghouls.
He was alone in this place of perpetual dusk. He didn’t mind the purple; it was the color of his life blood. Pausing at the bottom of a narrow staircase to the fourth sphere, he looked up at the broken railings and missing treads. Time wasn’t kind to this world. Rad could tell by the state of disrepair and the layers of dirt settled into the pores of the aged concrete that few djinns traveled this path.
It took both no time and forever for him to reach the top. He stood looking down into the darkness beneath him.
There was a belief that to enter dreams, one must find the door and open it up into the next place. But in truth, it was more like a stepping through a waterfall.
He slipped through moonlight and into the tight caverns built beneath the city of Necromourn. “You can’t hide from me, Black Cape.” Rad’s eyes and skin lit the way, down dark tunnel to dark tunnel. The hound’s tooth clutched in his hand hummed and jerked at the end of the chain like a wolf with a scent. Which, Rad supposed, was exactly what it was. He followed the dream thread through rock walls and steel pipe, riding the surf of nightmares until he stood over a hunched and caped monstrosity of a man, snoring wildly, his eyes partially open.
“I told you,” Rad whispered, drinking in the man’s haunting dreams. He entered his mind, slipping through cracks until he settled in behind memory and sight.
A chain rattled beside him. Hades. Laid out on bales of hay. One arm extended out and shackled to a beast, its flanks heaving, wheezing, or maybe it was laughing. Layers of dried gore and blood were thick on the three-tusked beast. Open wounds gaped where its fur had molted. It snorted. A spray of fine black liquid flew from its three nostrils.
The stink of rotted flesh was stronger than that of the ghouls Rad had left behind. The djinn dug through the files of the man’s memory to a time earlier in the day, when he’d crouched beside Hades and pulled back a thin blanket to expose the bulk of field bandages secured over the god’s chest. Blood and pus stained the strips of cloth and loosed an overwhelming stink of rancid flesh. Gorge had risen in the man’s throat. Rad let the memory trail to nothing.
“And here I thought it was monster smelling up the joint. What did
they do to you, Hades?” Rad whispered from the gray matter of the man’s mind.
But no one answered.
Two days earlier, the Bounty Hunter had come back from his rounds in the outlying camps. Most of them were shanty towns built up from the discarded scenes of Thanatos’s earlier works. Partially developed buildings with exposed steel girders; plumbing pipes, half drawn and going nowhere; live electrical wires hanging down from bombed-out ceilings; war-gutted architecture that became home to many of the forgotten characters of stories gone past. These were the places the Bounty Hunter found both client and prey.
This trip was exceptionally long, hot, and unrewarding. A meager coil of copper wire and a stuffed eagle’s head was all he had to show for his trouble. When he neared the borders of Necromourn, he unrolled the large cape he’d clipped to the top of his pack and covered himself with it. Only the whites of his eyes showed. He’d learned early on to hide his comings and goings to the city. That meant avoiding the drones and cameras that watched the paths most traveled, to and from the city.
The Bounty Hunter knew how to stay under Thanatos’s radar for most of that time. He had been created for a story line in one of the death god’s first comic books, and then, having served his purpose, was forgotten. Like most of the citizens of Necromourn, he was left to make his own way. To survive however he could. And so he did.
And now, his biggest catch had fallen in his lap.
The Bounty Hunter had skirted the merchant road, picking his way through groves of brambles and deadwood trees holding out their weary limbs to the gray skies. It was near the foot of the rock cliff that he found the god of the Underworld. Hades was unrecognizable—thick hair matted like that of a wild stallion, his skin burned the color of dirty pennies and pulled taut over bone and muscle. His jacket and jeans were ripped and worn out. Blood and other fluids had soaked through his thin dark T-shirt. It stuck to his skin as the Bounty Hunter tore it away to look at the wound. The sheer size, the bulk of the wounded man had given him pause while he checked for broken bones and opened wounds.
“I’ve not seen the likes of you in this place,” the man said. “Not ugly enough to be one of the death god’s creations.” He patted down the man’s jacket pockets and found a cigarette, perfectly formed and in one piece. He looked closer, turning it in his hand, until the end flared orange, lit as if from a secret flame.
The Bounty Hunter sat back on his heels, a slow, evil grin splitting his face. “Only one man I know gots such a thing. A gift fit for a god.”
He sat for a moment, thinking. Planning. The cigarette glowed in his fingers. The Bounty Hunter mumbled, gestured to the rock wall and back to the wounded god beside him. With a grunt, he stood up, bounced his pack into place on his back, and continued to the hidden mouth of the sewage tunnels. It took him the good part of an hour to store his pack and return to Hades’s body dragging a rickety sled made from a rusted car hood. Two small boxes perched on top of the sheet of metal. One with first-aid supplies, the other with a jug of water and a bottle of whiskey. Not the expensive stuff. This one wasn’t for drinking.
Working quickly, the Bounty Hunter cleaned the festering wound on Hades’s chest and set his leg in a makeshift splint, using the branches from a nearby tree. Darkness gave way to another gray morning. The Bounty Hunter secured Hades to the hood with a rope and returned to the safety of his tunnels. He took his time once he reached the dark caverns, dragging and resting when he needed to. Scheming and counting the treasures he would soon have while his muscles burned from the dead weight of the god of the Underworld.
By the time they made it back to his cave, they were both panting—one from searing pain, the other from exertion. The Bounty Hunter rested and sipped from another bottle of whiskey—this one was for drinking. The low moans from the god’s lips sounded as rich as coins clinking against each other in a cloth bag. The man squatted down beside Hades and closed his eyes, delighting in the pitiful sound.
It wasn’t until he changed the god’s bandages that he noticed the chain and the charms that had slipped around to the back of Hades’s neck. The Bounty Hunter jerked the chain free and fingered the large silver tooth. It lay heavy in his palm. “May be worth a twenty-piece by the weight of it,” he said. He tucked the necklace into the pouch hanging from his belt. The man peeled away the hastily placed bandage from Hades’s chest and shone his head lamp down to get a better look. The skin around the edges of the wound had turned an angry red. Green pus oozed from the festering wound, the foul stench of old cabbage and shit pouring off the god’s body. The Bounty Hunter gagged. He crawled to the side and vomited up the small bowl of lizard stew he’d had the day before. It took him another hour to cleanse the wound, cut away some of the infected flesh, and bandage the wound up again. This time with great care.
He stood, the beam of his head lamp aimed in the god’s eyes. “Looks like yous my retirement fund, cuz.” He toed Hades’s shoulder. “Now all you gots to do is live. You hear me?”
The Bounty Hunter disappeared into a small tunnel and whistled a shrill two notes into the darkness. Something stirred. A texture of sounds, claws scraping, wet footsteps dragging across the ground, bone crunching beneath a mighty weight. A flattened snout poked out from the darkness. Thin strands of drool hung from a fanged maw. The beast slowly showed himself, one grotesque inch at a time.
“Bring the chains. We gots a guest of honor.”
A bellow, a roar, or growl of hunger exploded from the depths of the beast’s throat.
“Hells bells, just get the chains. He dies, you can have ’im.” The Bounty Hunter turned his back on his only friend. “Until then, he’s mine.”
The monstrous form receded back into the shadows, snorting and bellowing as it left to gather the chains they used for torture. A pair of metal cuffs hung off the end of an old wooden workbench. It snatched up the shackles with an almost human hand. A reminder that before he was a beast, he was a man, and the Hunter’s partner. They were beat cops together, taking down bad guys, taking bribes, but for good reasons, or so they told themselves and each other. There was no reward for starring in a long-lasting and popular series. They were a real money maker, Thanatos told them. Instead, the god had orchestrated a finale that would rip apart both of their lives.
Even as they worked a job north of the Badlands, Thanatos had tortured the Bounty Hunter’s partner in the final scene and turned him into a sewer beast for a new series. The once beat cop was now a freakshow beast who devoured the flesh and bones of the dead tossed into his domain. And the Bounty Hunter was made to disappear like many other characters who roamed the streets of Necromourn.
Chains rattled and dragged along the ground as the beast returned with the pair of shackles.
The Bounty Hunter gathered his hunting knife and a small coin pouch from the drawer of an old metal filing cabinet. “I’m going above to the market. Be back with food for us both.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Keep ’im chained.” He shoved a light sweater into a sack and drew the strings together at the top. “This one’s our ticket outta here.” He straightened, studying the mangy face of his friend, his eyes slipping down to the clawed limb holding an iron chain.
The weeping yellow eyes of the beast stared back at him, watching the door while the Bounty Hunter left the cave, even until there were no more footsteps. Only then did the beast stoop down and attach itself to Hades. The beast slumped into the shadows beside the god, three sets of pointy ears laid back, pinned against its heads. It waited in the dark. For death and food.
The air was dank and close. Something in the texture of the darkness had changed. Hades swam through it, ascending through layer after layer, black giving way to gray and then white, until he heard the dripping of water somewhere close, a heaving breath coming from even closer. He thought he was in a coffin until a light breeze brushed across his face. He opened his eyes. No other part of him seemed capable of moving. There was only the rise and fall of his eyelids.<
br />
He knew he was laid out on a bed of some sort, that the bed was in a cave, and that he wasn’t alone. It should feel like home, but it didn’t. A deep cold clutched its icy fingers around his bones, threatening to shatter him from the inside out. His body cried out for the endlessly burning fires of the Underworld. He was farther from the earth’s core than he’d ever been. His body told him so.
His thoughts of home were broken by the scurrying of tiny feet somewhere behind him. They came closer. Hades looked to the side. A large lump of a beast lay sprawled beside him. He thought he’d dreamed the abomination, but there it was, its rasping breath keeping a strange, eerie rhythm. It slept.
Something skittered from the darkness at the edge of Hades’s vision. Another furred creature, this one with matte black fur, crept up beside his head. The small animal reared onto his back haunches, his tiny hands clasped over his chest. He hopped closer, twitching his purple whiskers. Long tufts of purple fur crowned the tips of each ear, and if a rodent could smile, this one did. His large eyes shone.
Hades closed his eyes once more and whispered “Kay Te” before falling into a fitful sleep.
Beside him, the beast smacked its lips in the throes of a dream where a grand feast of dead creatures lay on a table before him. It dined well in nightmares, but its belly was never filled. It would wake with an evil hunger.
And while the two slept, a small ferret, recently equipped with diamond-blade teeth, went to work gnawing at the iron chain stretched between them. His tiny jaw sawed back and forth while water dripped down the cave walls and dreams were dreamed.
SEVEN
In the penthouse of Corvus Tower, the piercing screech of the original email “dial-up” sound pulsed through Thanatos’s speakers. He’d thought the sound clip amusing at first, but now, it grated on him like the laughter of children. It was on his to-do list to change the alert to something a little more soothing, like the sound of humans taking their last breath, the final rattle in their lungs before seeing his face.