He needed me for something, and apparently pretty badly, but hell if he wanted me to actually get up and do something about it. The number of ways we could travel between dimensions was extremely limited in the wake of Meg’s nightmare-hellscape extravaganza. Hades apparently had a spiritual aversion to red tape, so the single remaining regulation portal was clean out of the question.
It is not time, he said, his voice filling my head like smoke. Hades was an increasingly claustrophobic presence. The longer he stayed in a room, the darker that room became, as well as suffocatingly warm and confining. He claimed it was one of many adverse effects his manifested form had on the lesser planes of existence, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
Of course, that was bullshit, but I had bigger things to worry about than the Lord of the Underworld fucking with my condo’s feng shui.
Like when was I scheduled to go to the Mountain in the Shadows or whatever the hell he called it?
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
You missed your chance, he said casually. We must wait for another.
“What chance?” I demanded. “You’re a god! What do you mean we’re waiting for another chance? You control the chance factor! Chance is your bitch!”
Meg’s door was open, he said. And then it was closed. You did not act quickly enough to traverse the cosmos. Therefore, we must wait.
“You. Are. A. God. Just open the damn door yourself!”
It is not my door to open.
“Of course it isn’t.”
He was silent for a long time after that, twiddling his thumbs at the top of his staff and making a thin, lungless exhaling sound that might have been a feeble attempt at whistling. I walked around in front of him and crossed my arms, staring into his blank, black sockets with what I hoped was enough irritation to make him move.
“How long do we have to wait?” I demanded, peeved that he chose to appear as a skeleton. For some reason, when he donned that particular getup, it annoyed the fuck out of me. Maybe because it felt like I was having a serious conversation with a Halloween prop.
Not long.
“Not long? By human standards or by immortal-deity-for-whom-time-is-no-fucking-object standards?”
Not long.
I groaned and turned away, putting my hands over my nose and taking a deep breath. I shouldn’t have been here waiting, I should have been at the office with Casey, helping him track down Meg and her surviving allies. I should have been hunting the worthless waste of matter that glamoured me into fucking her right in front of the love of my goddamn life.
I stopped cold. I should have been with Dulcie.
I should have been with her, regardless of anything else. An apology was worth absolutely fucking nothing now, but I should have been doing something, anything, that didn’t feel like cosmic procrastination. Instead, I was avoiding having the worst conversation in the history of speech. Why? Because I was afraid it would end in nothing more than shouting and crying. I was afraid Dulcie hated me for what I’d done. Shit, I hated myself for what I’d done.
And she should hate me, that was the worst part. How do you beg forgiveness for something you yourself could never forgive in another?
I thought about it a couple of times. And honestly? I could probably just leave and let Hades get me when he needed me later. I mean, he had said I’d missed my opportunity to go wherever the hell we were going, right? I could locate Dulcie now and try to do the impossible and make things right, or at least give it my best effort. I owed it to the versions of us that weren’t throttled by forces beyond our control to do something, anything.
But I didn’t. Pacing my living room, I glared daggers into the ceiling and wished on stars I couldn’t see. I wished for someone to take me back in time to stop myself from having sex with Meg. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, it’s a silence you can’t cough out of your throat. It’s slamming to a dead stop, going numb and falling hard off the treadmill into the deep abyss, before losing the ability to pick yourself back up.
I glanced back at Hades. He was still staring at nothing. Waiting. Wasting my damn time!
How are you and Dulcie?
I stiffened. “I beg your fucking pardon?”
How fares your relationship with the young fairy?
I glared at him, my hands curling into fists, my nails digging into my palms hard enough to draw blood. Hanging off the side of the Cliffs of Insanity, no thanks to you.
“Why do you ask?” I demanded.
I thought we were discussing things that were painfully obvious, he started.
“Are you fucking kidding me? You are in my house,” I said, “waiting for some nebulous thing to happen so I can help you save the world, and whatever you’re waiting for is about to fuck my life sideways again! Yet you continue waiting for it in the middle of my goddamn living room! And all I want to know is why the fuck you’re here!”
Answer the question, he persisted.
I paused, I scoffed, and I laughed. “Dulcie and I… After I screwed Meg right in front of her, how do you think we’re doing?” He was right about the “painfully obvious” part. Sighing, I ran my hands across my face and tried to blot out the horrible memory, but it was like trying to cover up the scribbles from a Sharpie with cheap white paint. I shivered every time I thought about it, as if I inhaled liquid nitrogen, but not enough to shatter my lungs.
I wanted to break something. Or set something on fire. I wanted to scream until the inevitable boiling death of the Universe, that it wasn’t my fault. Actually, it was my fault. I’d made a choice even if it wasn’t completely mine to make because Meg had been glamouring the hell out of me. But, even so, I should have been strong enough to withstand her power, her magic. Why the fuck hadn’t I just stopped touching her?
I faced Hades again. “And you could have stopped me.” A glamour would have been easy for a god to override.
It could have been easy. It could have been fine. It could have never happened at all.
I do not bother with such mundane enterprises.
I stepped forward and pushed him. He didn’t move, so I just ended up pushing myself away from him.
It would not have mattered regardless.
“Oh, really? And why’s that?” I said, getting right into his face. He didn’t have eyes, so I looked into the backs of his empty sockets, swirling with sooty darkness. “Emotional well-being isn’t worth cultivating in your fucking slaves as long as they can still walk and fight? Anything that doesn’t totally derail my goddamn destiny is open game?” My lungs heaved in my chest, burning from the inside out, desperately trying to funnel more oxygen into my pounding heart. “You could have helped Dulcie, too. You could have released her from that fucking glamour and saved us the same time you’re so pissed about us wasting. You could have fixed this.”
Hades inclined his head and examined me silently. Dulcie has her own destiny to contend with.
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Dulcie’s destiny should include having me by her side,” I said slowly. It was almost a question. Shouldn’t it?
He scoffed. It was a soft noise, and his skeleton didn’t move with it; for a second, I didn’t even realize he made the sound.
Then he started laughing.
His mirth was quiet and thin, like nails being dragged across rusty metal. I shivered and trembled when the whole room vibrated, creeping into my skin and freezing the marrow in my bones. His shoulders stayed put, but his mouth opened and closed, clicking his jaw while his fingerbones tapped incessantly against his staff.
“What?” I demanded. “What’s so funny?”
He didn’t answer my question. The silence stretched to a long ten seconds—pulling the time like taffy. Sagging in stagnant discomfort, the minutes seemed to pool on the ground until they barely existed anymore.
Then his derisive laughter stopped. The silence shattered the room like shards of glass, the sudden absence of all noise as shocking as something breaking. Slowl
y, slowly, Hades turned to face me.
How very mortal of you, he said, to think this is over.
Then there was an earthquake. Not a big one, just enough to rattle the plates in the cupboards. The building groaned like an old ship around us.
Hades looked up. He didn’t exactly have a face he could express his emotions with, but something about the way he stood changed.
Ah, he said. There it is.
The shaking stopped. He turned to me and I got the distinct impression that he was smiling.
Shall we?
“Shall we, what?”
Hades’ head quirked to the side, like a human rolling his eyes.
Save the world, as you say.
Anger bubbled in my stomach, hot as boiling metal. I sighed sharply. “Fine.”
Fine?
“Fine,” I repeated, “let’s just get this over with.”
Hades peered at me almost curiously.
Do you really believe this is something so simple that it can be ‘gotten over with’?
“You’ve been sitting in my house for an hour and haven’t told me a damn thing so now I’m getting a little cranky,” I answered.
You consider this a chore?
“I’d call it a colossal waste of my time,” I spat back. “While I’m sitting here, babysitting the Master of the Netherworld and promising to eradicate the monster under his bed, people are dying. That’s because I’m not out there helping Casey catch the real monsters! And Dulcie is all alone somewhere, hating me and I’m not doing a damn thing about it.”
Hades bristled. His skeleton leapt to life, licks of red fire coiling around his bones like snakes. Flaring, then vanishing, the rapid flickering was almost like lightning. You are a Guardian of Hades, a child of the Mountains of Shadows, in the lands beyond the rim of the world. You are a creature born of great purpose, you were designed to bear a mighty burden. You will treat your destiny with the deference and respect it demands.
“Deference?” I repeated with a laugh, which burned like acid in my throat. “I’m sorry, you want me to defer to the god I had to convince to help us stop a crazy, dark-magic vampire from carving a bloody, murderous canyon through the heart of America? The guy I had to beg to help us avert the nation-sapping war that broke out in front of you? A war that you were ready to just up and leave because it was a ‘lesser’ problem, and not important enough to catch your eye? Because it didn’t matter?”
You are very shortsighted, he answered. It is a flaw of mortality but one that you seem particularly fond of. Remember that you agreed to help me.
“After you wouldn’t leave me the hell alone about it,” I spat. “And saving people’s lives isn’t shortsighted. Yeah, sure, fine. I’m helping you save the world. But that isn’t a destiny worth seeking, not if it means monsters like Meg take a back seat and good people die because you’ve got something better to do. Sorry if I’m a little cranky, but I am really tired of listening to your apathetic nonsense. So, yeah, let’s get this over with so I can do my goddamn job.”
Suddenly, something in the air changed.
The flames around him gathered into one brilliant, burning light, surrounding him completely, reducing his skeleton and robe to no more than a dark silhouette, and half drowning his voice in its own furious thunder. He took a step towards me, holding the staff in both hands, and the embers flew wildly off him as he walked. His voice was lower now, like a cave echo that’s deeper than the sea, or the growling of an unfathomable monster, or the metallic grating of steel on steel.
The creature that troubles me is a beast of such power that Meg is little more than a nuisance. It is a nightmare beyond all mortal comprehension. I do not have the time to concern myself with anything less. This Meg you find so frightening is a vampire, and yes, a monster, to be sure, but no greater than any other ghastly abomination. You are a blind fool if you think she represents the greatest evil the Universe has to offer. If you dare to believe that preventing an entire dimension from swallowing your world in one gulp is no more than a trivial inconvenience, you are in for a remarkably unpleasant surprise. Yes, the conflict she instigated was lesser, when compared to the cosmic catastrophe that awaits all of us if you continue to hesitate on the grounds of being cranky.
He was right in my face now, his fire scalding my skin and turning everything I saw brilliant red. The air around him smelled like burning hair.
Your undying arrogance astounds me, and it will be the end of you and everything you hold dear.
I blinked. Half glaring, but mostly staring. I was unsure what to say.
He stepped back. The fire went out.
###
Hades vanished and I got back on my motorcycle, glaring through the visor of my helmet as he told me to go left here, right here and so on, down a long, convoluted road to the beach. The ground shook again, but softer this time, and now that I was outside, I also felt something shifting in the air with every tremor—something that was cold and dark, heavy as lead and sharp as icicles.
Left, he said, and I turned off the highway, following a short expressway that curled sideways down to the beach. The only sound was the thrumming of the bike’s engine. I felt the wind and saw the waves, the water slapping lazily against the sand, but they made no noise. I parked, pulled out the key, and the world closed in on me, the silence almost deafening. The ground vibrated beneath me as I walked, like I was standing on the back of a great, sleeping leviathan, wresting itself out of the earth to swallow the sea.
The ocean was night-black, its waves agitated by the frequent earthquakes. The beach itself was empty, and the roads leading down to it were too, strangely enough. It was late, but not so late that it could actually diminish the California traffic, not like this.
“Did you do something?” I asked. The ice I felt in the air easily could have been him, an unseen aura, persuading creatures with or without supernatural senses to give the beach as wide a berth as they could. Like divine caution tape.
No, Hades said.
“Then why’s it so quiet?”
The creatures can sense the opening, he said, and they know better.
I blinked. “Oh.” Well, that’s a fun sentence to hear in the dark.
I walked down to the beach, my footsteps sounding as loud as thunder. The sand crunched and shifted beneath me; wet from a recent rain, it kept caving under my heels.
Hades appeared in a soft wash of black smoke and cold air, standing beside me on the beach. His fingers were wrapped around his staff. The dark wood had a soft glow to it, pulsing like fading neon. We spent three seconds as statues, just staring. If the uncanny quiet bothered Hades, he didn’t reveal it—somehow, I doubt he understood the concept of an awkward silence.
Yes, he said, mostly to himself as he walked towards the water. When I didn’t follow, he stopped and turned to stare at me, the red lights flaring in his sockets. They always looked like embers, sparking and angry, but seemed especially irritated now. This way.
I pressed my lips together and followed.
He stopped when the water was knee-deep, his robes billowing around him, swirling in the surf. The air smelled like salt and sand combined with the smoke of a sleeping city.
“Okay,” I said. “What now?”
Wait.
I groaned. Loudly.
Hades said nothing but stared out over the horizon, the moonlight and streetlamps glinting off his skeleton, making him shine like glass. A soft wind scuttled across the water, wrapping around us, and stinging us with the salt spray. There were no gulls, no stray dogs or cats, no horns honking in the distance. Just the silence, the cold and the immutable.
Hades extended a hand out in front of him, palm up, his fingers twitching, feeling for something invisible. He went stiff when he found it.
Ah, he said. There you are. He turned to me. Don’t move.
Flipping his hand over quickly, like he was slamming a book shut, he made an earsplitting crack.
The ocean reeled in front of u
s, a single violent ripple that began at Hades’ feet and kept going until I couldn’t see the waves it created anymore. The force of it nearly knocked me flat into the water. Then it turned still, and was quiet again.
I blinked. “Okay,” I said. “What was that?”
He ignored me.
Inhale, he said.
I inhaled. The air tasted wrong. Thick and cloying like dead marigolds, stale as cigarette smoke and rust and rotting fruit. I fought the urge to gag.
Hold your breath.
I exhaled quickly. “Why?”
Hold. Your. Breath.
“Hades, fine,” I said, and I held my breath. Fuck, I’m gonna have to start cursing a different god’s name.
He laid a hand on my shoulder, the bones clicking. Three… two… he said.
And then he pushed me.
I expected to land on all fours in the shallows and be able to turn around and ask him what the hell that was all about.
But instead, I went under the water and I never hit the bottom.
###
Thick tendrils of frozen black kelp wrapped around my waist, my arms, and my face, pulling me down and drowning me in the darkness. I opened my eyes but there was nothing to see. As I was dragged deeper, the water surrounding me changed—not becoming warmer or colder but losing all temperature entirely, slowly replaced by air that was thick enough to swim through. The sensation grew more vivid, and I made the mistake of taking a breath, but felt nothing in my lungs, until I started gagging as though I’d inhaled the entire ocean.
It passed quickly. The tendrils released me. The water solidified, turning very cold again. I opened my eyes, and far above me I could see light.
I came up floundering. Splashing and gasping, I tried my damnedest to swim but the water was just so heavy, like liquified lead, clinging to my skin and dragging me down. I blinked the water away and found the shore, a narrow stretch of white sand with nothing but shadows on the horizon.
I hauled myself onto the beach, coughing, and spitting out the dirty water. Hades stood in front of me, impatiently tapping a skeletal foot against the sand.
What Screams May Come Page 3