Her eyes twinkled, and a gleam entered them that I immediately recognized. She didn’t want to find humor in what I’d said, and yet she couldn’t help but like the cut of my jib.
I released the breath I’d been holding and fought not to wilt with relief.
Once upon a time, Calypso had been her mate’s right hand. She’d been Queen of the Dead and had judged over the souls with a firm hand equal to Hades’s own. But she’d also been as passionate and tempestuous as the waters she’d called her own, and she’d loved nothing more than bawdy humor and cutting sass—two traits I happened to have in spades.
But since the curse, her emotional state had been a giant question mark. No one had known whether she was the same person at all or had been altered into something different. More than that, I’d heard no stories of her returning to these dead waters. But here she was now, looking at me with a touch more respect than she had earlier, and Charon wasn’t acting like it was the first time he’d seen her here. Maybe she’d come before, or maybe—like me—Charon remembered our previous life.
From the corner of my eye, I spotted movement. When I checked, I was stunned to note a behemoth of flesh and fur standing just at the bank of the river. It was all black, with three terrifying canine heads, their long muzzles full of sharp teeth and their eyes burning like glowing cinders. The eyes were all trained on Calypso.
She glanced over to see what I was looking at, and when she did, the ghost of the smile I’d pulled from her stretched the corners of her mouth wide.
Turning, she immediately made her way toward the three-headed monstrosity, whose tail was now whacking the ground so hard that it was causing bits of stalactite overhead to crumble and fall into the deadly waters beneath my dinky boat.
Gritting my teeth, I gripped the decrepit boat with knuckles as white as bleached bone and watched what looked an awful lot like a reunion.
Walking upon the water as though she floated on a sheet of glass, Calypso made her way over to the whinging beast. It jumped high in the air, landing on its back paws and causing the ground to tremble.
“Holy balls,” I muttered as my pitiful raft rolled and pitched precariously on the churning waves. My stomach heaved, and I wondered if vomiting in the River Acheron would see me cursed too.
Clearly the mutt had been the source of the booms. One mystery solved.
“Do I know you?” Calypso asked, voice soft and unsure.
The beast was slobbering from all its mouths as its tail thwacked harder and harder at the rocky beach, causing pebbles to fling off into the waters beyond. The way they crackled as they whizzed by my head made them sound like fiery darts.
I sunk down in the boat, not that there was anything to hide behind, but I imagined it was a little safer. It wasn’t really, not at all, but sometimes lying to one’s self helped prevent panic.
The waves of Calypso’s gown moved like a gentle waterfall behind her as she walked. When she reached out a glassy hand to the beast, it lowered all three of its heads.
As Charon had rightly guessed earlier, I did know a little about the gods, and one thing I knew was that anything that guarded Hades’s world wasn’t exactly known for being cute or cuddly.
But the way this beast cried, the sound so broken and pitiful, reminded me of a dog who’d been reunited with its master after many long years apart.
She petted its middle head, and the beast rumbled with approval, rocking the waters beneath our boat and making me clutch at the sides again. I’d temporarily forgotten to be nervous. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
I glanced at Charon, confused and wondering if it had anything to do with me, but he was staring at Calypso like she was the only thing in the world that mattered.
“Cerberus,” she breathed, sounding awed. “I do remember you. You are Cerberus.”
The three-headed guardian gave a gusty, heaving sigh that again rocked the waters beneath our boat.
So that was its name. Another name for him was surely Drooly, since he was generating so much of the clear, viscous stuff that the water levels had very clearly risen because of it. I swallowed hard at the wafting odor of dog drool starting to punch me in the nose. My stomach gave another mighty heave and I groaned.
Calypso turned to stare at me. Hard. As though she weren’t just seeing my shell, but inside the very soul of me.
That made me more nervous than I already had been. I scrabbled for the side of the dinghy and reached it just in time to shame myself. Bits of yesterday’s food floated through the water, and I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Not got your sea legs, have you, lass?” Charon’s tone wasn’t mocking, but definitely teasing. I peeked at him through one eye and curled my upper lip back.
“Don’t mock me, bones. I can lure you too,” I groused and showed him the tip of my flute. Not that I would but… ugh! He could have at least spared me my dignity.
I felt Calypso’s overwhelming presence nearing me, and when I looked up, she was right beside us again. Her eyes were such a piercing blue that they seemed unreal. Her head was cocked and her octopi-like hair was writhing around one trim shoulder.
I wiped at my mouth and sat back with a heavy thud. God, I wanted off this lifeboat of death.
“You are here for the withering ley line. I sense it,” she said.
I nodded, grateful to take my mind off my unsettled stomach. “Yes. Yes, I am,” I said, rubbing my fingers in light circles around my middle. “Do you know how—”
She held up a hand, her features imperious and cold like only glass could be. “I do not care one whit about your journey, but seeing as how you go to speak with Death himself, I command you to pass along my message.”
I frowned. “I…what?” Did water spout seriously just say that to me?
She glowered at me and I didn’t even have the decency to feel shame about name calling her, I didn’t remember Calypso being such a raging she hag before, but she was now.
“Tell him I want my heart back. Now.” She thinned her mouth into a tight slit.
I had no idea what that even meant, but she didn’t give me a second for clarification because between one second and the next she was gone. Vanished back into the waters she called home. Not a ripple or wave marked her passage, as though she’d simply never been at all.
I whirled on Charon. “What just happened?”
He was paddling harder and faster. “Something that has never happened before. Hang on tight, Rayale. We arrive at the King’s throne room soon.”
I stared up at the brooding Death King, trying to reconcile the image of the man with the reality of his godhood. But I didn’t see it.
He sat on his throne of gold-dipped skulls, bare from the waist up, with his long black hair hanging in his face. His swarthy skin was ash-pale as though he’d not seen the sunlight ever, and snow fell in an ever-present gale around him.
His throne room, though, was a thing of god-like craftsmanship. It was all black, but not a black that blotted out color. This black shone with it. Stalactite and stalagmite daggers pierced through the roof and floor and cast a grayish-violet light over everything, making the world at once both spooky and beautifully alluring. Strange plants I’d never seen before had pushed through cracks and crevices in the walls and added a touch of life to our surroundings.
I looked back at Hades and frowned.
Unlike Calypso, who’d looked like the goddess she truly was, Hades looked like a man, a pathetic shell of his former self. My nostrils flared with pity and a tinge of disgust. How could a god let himself lose all hope this way? I was no god, but so long as I had breath left in me, I would fight to the cold, bitter end.
He snorted, shaking his head. “You come seeking entry into my ley line, and yet you scorn me in your head.” His voice rolled like thunder, shaking the black marble floor beneath my feet.
I blinked, shocked and furious with myself that I’d not censored my thoughts. One would think I’d have learned that little trick after my encounter out on Acheron. “
I… I…”
“Apologies are for the weak. I allowed you entry into my throne room because of your bravery in passing the gauntlet, but you have burned through my patience. Be gone—”
“Stop!” I held up my hand as I noticed two guards move toward me, both wearing beaked masks and nothing more. “Wait. Just bloody wait!” I hissed as his eyes flashed with brilliant dots of speckled starlight.
Now I saw the god, and I had to say, he was pretty damned impressive after all.
He glowered, jaw thrusting out.
I shook, because that had been close, too bloody close for comfort.
“You’re right. I had no business thinking it. Only, it’s… it’s… dammit. Argh!” I snapped and shook my head, biting back the words that sat like poison on my tongue. If I said what I was thinking, I’d surely be kicked out on my arse.
I remembered Hades, but only a very little and only from the games I’d been unwittingly sucked into just before the world had died and everything I’d loved had died with it. What little I knew of him was that he’d been fair, honest, and one of the rare good ones. But that man and this one—were they even remotely the same anymore? I was going with a resounding “no.”
His nostrils flared, and I grimaced. My bloody thoughts were gonna be the death of me.
“Dammit all to the Underworld,” I muttered.
“Already here, sweetheart,” he growled.
I fought a chuckle. Now probably wasn’t the time for laughs.
“Look, okay. You can read my thoughts, and I clearly suck balls at keeping them to myself, so I’m going to make you a deal right now and just tell you whatever dumb thing pops into my head from here on out. Only, I desperately need your help.”
He snorted, leaning back on his throne and kicking out one long, muscular leg. I’d grant he wasn’t a bad looking specimen of male flesh.
His brows rose, and I shrugged. “You’re hot. Whatever. Are you going to help me or not?”
He laughed. The sound was thunderous and made my ears ring. I gritted my teeth and clamped my hands over my now aching ears.
“So far, you’ve given me no incentive to help.”
After everything I’d gone through—being so close to the end of the race with that stupid witch, Baba Yaga; losing Lleweyn’s freedom only to watch in horror as he became completely encased by stone; being thrown into an eternal loop of time, resigned to an eternity of regret and the knowledge that I would never, ever be found and never get my chance to tell Lleweyn how I really felt; then Tymanon and Petra solving the riddle to get me out, feeling hope again—I’d been given a second chance to make things right, an opportunity to fix those terrible wrongs.
And now an arrogant, pompous jackass was threatening to take it all away from me. Well, screw that!
He scowled.
“What bloody happened to you!” I snapped, stomping my foot. “What bloody happened to all of you? You weren’t this.” I waved a hand at him, sneering with barely checked disgust. “None of you were this.”
“You may leave. We are through.”
I laughed and planted my hands on my hips. I wasn’t going anywhere unless he threw me out on my bubbly arse. “You want her, right? You dream about her?”
He went completely still, but his eyes blazed with fury.
I shook my head and laid my fist against my chest. “It’s because, whether you remember everything or nothing at all, they still beat in us, Hades. They will always beat in us and we, neither of us, will be whole again until we fix this mess the Blue unleashed. And we have to fix this.”
For so long he stared at me, saying nothing, not moving an inch, his gaze unwavering as it drilled through to my soul.
But I notched my chin and held my ground, refusing to cower, refusing to beg or plead. I was right, and he bloody damn well knew it.
“Say I believe you,” he said in his deep, shivering timbre.
I interrupted him with a flick of my wrist. “You believe me.”
“Say I do,” he repeated, and I grinned.
“Oh, you do.”
His jaw set. “Why should I help you? Why should I help any more of you?”
Hope beat powerful wings in me. The righteousness of my cause, the knowledge that soon this tide would turn, that soon we’d have our gods back, fighting with us and not against us, made me bold. Brave.
“Because it starts with me, you arrogant bastard. That’s why. She came to me, you know.”
He went still as marble. The snow blowing around him in gale force winds ceased abruptly, and the starlight in his eyes blazed like white flame.
“What did you say?” he asked softly. But his words were chilling, and despite myself, I shivered.
“I said she came to me,” I repeated, voice strong despite how I felt. “She told me to pass you a message.”
His eyes thinned to menacing slits, and the ebony stalactites hanging above us, that gleamed with raw veins of amethyst, trembled. I swallowed but refused to flinch. If I died, I would die swinging.
“Did she now?” His voice rolled like hot buttered rum on a frozen winter’s night.
Funny how I’d not needed to say her name for him to know the ‘her’ in question.
“She spoke of me?” he asked, voice deep, but I heard the anxious hope squeezing it.
“Only a little. Nothing flattering, I can assure you.”
He glanced over my shoulder to Charon, who stood silent as the grave behind me. I looked at the ferryman, and he nodded.
“The enchantress speaks truth. The ancient one they call Thalassa has returned to our shores.”
Hades visage appeared unmoved by our talks of Calypso, and yet I felt a wavering power roll through the air. It was dark, but no longer bitterly cold in the throne room. A pulsing warmth slammed into me, as though the god of death had just imbued the throne room with life. Creeping vines began to slink and slither out from behind his throne, climb up the stone walls, and hook themselves into notches. Flowers with petals of satin black and darkest violet blossomed open, and the chamber, which had once been so cold, hummed with an entirely different type of magick.
I looked at the god I’d pitied only moments ago with new eyes, seeing for the first time since my arrival a hint of the male he’d once been. He sat forward on the throne. His body vibrated, and he curled his iron-gloved fist into the skulls of his armrest. He was like a rattler coiled for the strike.
“Tell me what she said. Verbatim.”
I wet my lips, wanting to ask him if he remembered her, if he remembered their shared past at all. But that was not pertinent to my cause, so I checked my curiosity and repeated her words from memory.
“She said”—I blinked slowly, praying for all I was worth to any god that might take mercy on me that her words would strike something in him—“Tell him I want my heart back. Now.”
A rumbling sound rang out from his throat. He closed his eyes and sat back on his throne.
I did not know what the words meant. But from the way his shoulders wilted and his eyes pinched tightly shut, as though fighting with emotion, I knew the words had meant something very deep to him.
“Calypso,” he whispered so softly that I almost didn’t hear it.
By this time, the cavern wasn’t crawling with just blossoming vines. There were gems bursting out of the stone itself—beautiful, gorgeous rocks that glistened with all the colors of the sea: aquamarine blue, tropical Caribbean green, the black of the deepest trenches of the ocean, and every imaginable shade in between.
Finally, he looked at me, and the stars in his eyes glowed fiercely. “You have my permission to enter the line. But beware, enchantress. The thread weakens even now. You have only days to save your quarry from their own twisted madness of what is, what was, and what should be. Once they are ready, play your song, and I shall guide you out to safety.”
Then he turned his palm over, and in his hand was an hourglass with grains of sand slipping steadily, but slowly through its middle.
/> “When the final grain of sand falls, so too will the line be destroyed. Take it.”
He offered me the ornately decorated timepiece. It was beautiful, the glass smooth, the sand the color of the sky at sunset, and its holder a delicately hammered gold with vines that blossomed with the same blooms that curled behind his throne.
I stepped forward, tentatively reaching for the timepiece. He held it fast, refusing to release it.
“You say it starts with you, Rayale.”
I nodded. “Yes. The end of this madness and the beginning of a new world starts with me.”
“Who told you this? How do you know this?”
No one told me, but no one had needed to. I’d had a lifetime to work out the riddle in my head. I knew it started with the fairies but would end with the gods. Only they could truly fix it all.
“You will watch me in the lines, and I believe she will too. If you want her back, Hades, then follow my lead.”
He clenched his darkly stubbled jaw. “What have you planned?”
I’d never considered myself exceptionally brave, fast, or smart. But I was stubborn and tenacious. I shrugged. I had no plans at all, but even so, I knew I could do pull Violet and Ewan out of there. In my bones, I knew I could because I had no choice but to win.
“Whatever it takes, Hades. I will do whatever it takes.”
“Even if the doing destroys all you hope for in the end?”
I knew what he was really asking. He remembered something, at the very least. His memories of her, of their time together, were in him. But there was also fear. I knew because I felt it too.
“There is no room for fear. Either we do or we don’t. It’s that simple.”
He snorted. “And that daunting too. What if we move and lose it all?”
I sighed. “If we don’t try, we lose it all anyway. So in the end, is there even a choice?”
He released his grip on the hourglass. The weight of it was solid in my hands. But each slide of sand made me aware of just how little time I had left.
With a wave of his fingers, much like Ying had done, he revealed the opening to the ley line. It wasn’t as bright as it had been with Ying, and nowhere near as radiant. I could feel it was weaker than it had been just hours earlier. My heart skipped a beat.