They arrived at Philonecron’s little clearing to find Mr. Metos on the ground, surrounded by about five hundred shadows, with Mew sitting watchfully on his leg. When he saw them, Mr. Metos looked as happy as it was probably possible for him to look—which was fairly impressive, considering half his liver had been gnawed off. Mew sprang up and let out a loud, happy chirp.
“Mr. Metos!” Charlotte ran up to him. “Mew!” She picked up her cat gently and buried her face in her fur. “Oh, you poor, brave baby.” She kissed the cat a couple of times and then turned her attention back to Mr. Metos. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, “Reasonably. I’m healing already.” He motioned to his bloody abdomen, and Charlotte winced. “Hey, I got an Immortal liver out of the deal,” he added grimly. “And you two?”
With rushed breath and overlapping voices, Charlotte and Zee told their stories. Mr. Metos seemed particularly satisfied to hear of Philonecron’s end.
“But won’t he make trouble in the Upperworld?” Charlotte asked.
“I doubt it. Stripped as he is of his connections to the Underworld, I don’t think his powers will last. He will wander about helplessly until he finds a group of Immortals to join and make petty trouble. Nothing to worry about. Energy schemes, mutual-fund bilking, insider trading, Department of Defense, that type of thing. And until he becomes accustomed to living up there, he’ll be quite uncomfortable. Now…perhaps we should get out of here?”
“What about the shadows?” Zee said.
The shadows, who had stood at attention at the sound of Zee’s voice, were lined up, waiting for their next command. Here, on the other side of the river, they looked small, like the children they had come from.
“We’re taking them with us. I was able to merge the replicated shadows into their hosts.”
“But there are more,” Zee said. “A few in the lab.”
Mr. Metos held up his hand. “I know, I know. A few of my trusty soldiers here got them. We have them all, and once they’re up in the Upperworld, they will find their way to their humans. It’s in their nature.”
“But some of them are from England,” Zee said.
“Yes. They’ll come with us through the passageway. We will end up at the door at that hideous Mall. There are doors like that all over the world, but it is all the same door, if you get my meaning—the shadows will find their way. Now, if you children will help me up…”
Charlotte put down Mew for a moment and grabbed Mr. Metos’s hands, and Zee moved behind him and lifted him from the back with his good arm. It was a long process, and Mr. Metos made little grunts as they helped him up.
“An A for both of you,” he said with a pained smile. “Oof.”
He moved as if to start off, but before they left, Charlotte had to ask him something. She looked at him shyly, chewing on her lip. “Mr. Metos…is there something we can do for the Dead?”
He shook his head and winced. Zee stayed behind, supporting him. “Awful, isn’t it? I’d heard about it, but I’d never seen it before. This is just what I was telling you before. The gods do not care about mortals, not at all.”
Charlotte thought about this for a moment. “Well, what about Persephone?”
“What about her?”
“And Orpheus. You know. Orpheus was in love with that girl—”
“Eurydice. Yes, Charlotte, I’m familiar with the story,” he said drily. This was one of Charlotte’s favorite myths—or used to be, before she found out it was real. Orpheus was a musician, and he fell madly in love with Eurydice, and then she died and was sent to the Underworld. But Orpheus was so heartbroken he went after her and pleaded with Hades for her return. Hades wasn’t moved, but Persephone was. She begged Hades to make an exception, just that once. And he did—except he told Orpheus to walk out of the Underworld without looking back to see if Eurydice was following him, and just at the end he looked back. Eurydice was taken into the Underworld forever. She was still here, now, though Charlotte hadn’t seen her. She would have liked to.
“Well,” Charlotte said, “Persephone helped Orpheus. She convinced Hades to let Eurydice out.”
“She was doing it for her own ends,” said Mr. Metos curtly. “She was just causing trouble for Hades. No god or goddess cares about people. You don’t see Persephone helping them now, do you?”
“I guess not,” Charlotte said. They hadn’t seen Persephone at all. Charlotte gathered she didn’t like being around Hades very much. Charlotte could hardly blame her.
“I promise you this,” Mr. Metos said. “I will make sure the Promethians look into it. Perhaps there is something we can do for the Dead, maybe a way we can convince Hades to acknowledge them or at least to control the Harpies. I don’t know what, but I will try. Now…can we get out of here? Speaking of Harpies, I’d really rather not see any more today.”
Charlotte couldn’t argue with that. With Zee supporting Mr. Metos and Charlotte carrying Mew, they prepared to set off, back through the Outer Banks, toward the passage to the Upperworld. Mr. Metos motioned toward the awaiting shadows. “Zachary, will you do the honors?”
Zee nodded and turned his head. “Shadows,” he called, “follow me!”
Going up the passageway was twice as arduous as going down, but Zee and Charlotte barely noticed. They were going back home.
What a sight they must have made—the boy, the girl, the cat, the bleeding, groaning man, and the five-hundred-odd shadows—working their way up to the world of light.
They were glad of Charlotte’s water and her cereal bars. (Good thing she hadn’t told Charon about those!) Soon it grew too narrow for Zee to support Mr. Metos, and at a few words from Zee two of the shadows picked him up and carried him—much to Mr. Metos’s consternation.
“I could get used to this,” Zee whispered, nodding back to the shadows.
“Don’t start getting a big head on me,” Charlotte said.
They were largely quiet on their journey back—just about everything that was to be said had been said. All there was left to do was concentrate on home and the home-like things that would be waiting for them.
“Zee?” Charlotte whispered. “Do you think we’ll wake up tomorrow and this will all have been a dream?”
“I don’t know,” Zee said, “but I wouldn’t mind going to sleep to find out.”
That sounded good to Charlotte.
She led the way this time, cradling Mew in her hands, her cousin following her, and Mr. Metos and the shadows behind them. Again Zee’s watch provided the only light, but it did not matter so much this time. She knew her cousin was behind her and that they would keep each other safe.
And slowly, carefully, they made their way up, up, up—the air grew more and more comfortable, the smell of Harpy grew faint, the Underworld seemed a great distance behind them—and finally, eventually, Charlotte saw the light reflecting off a cool metallic wall. The door.
“We’re here!” Charlotte breathed.
Zee sucked in his breath. “Think Hades left it unlocked?”
“Hope so,” Charlotte said. “He promised.”
Mr. Metos let out a small snort. But Charlotte reached out, grabbed the nondescript knob, and turned. The door opened.
Light. So much light. Charlotte, Zee, and Mr. Metos fell back a little into the tunnel, their eyes burning.
“Great,” Charlotte said, “I’m a bat.”
But slowly, gradually, they moved out of the tunnel, through the door, and into the world.
It was the same. The corridor was the same. The world was the same. The Mall was open—daylight streamed in from everywhere. At the end of the long, nondescript corridor Charlotte saw a pair of women pass by, and then another, and then another. They were all older women, wearing tracksuits and sneakers.
“Mall walkers!” whispered Charlotte.
“What?” asked Zee and Mr. Metos simultaneously.
“Never mind,” said Charlotte.
It was morning in the Upperworld. Early. There was no telling ho
w long they had been gone. They moved into the corridor, slowly adjusting to the light, while giddy mall walkers trotted past them.
Behind them the shadows came through the door. Only a fourth of the number that had come up with them emerged—the others had gone through other doors elsewhere. Except they were all the same door. Or something like that; it didn’t matter. The shadows would find their way.
And then suddenly the group of shadows took off, and great black flashes moved through the air and were gone before anyone could blink.
“There goes your army,” Charlotte whispered to Zee.
“I’ll live,” Zee grinned. It was a beautiful grin that stretched all the way to his ears, revealing straight white teeth. It was the sort of grin that made you want to grin too.
If the mall walkers noticed the bleeding man supported by two sooty, filthy kids and one ratty-looking cat with a tuxedo-pants sling heading for the doors, they didn’t say. Perhaps their minds were on other things. Perhaps they were concentrating hard on their mall walking. Perhaps they saw groups like that all the time in the Mall. We can never know. All we know is Charlotte, Zee, and Mr. Metos stepped outside the great glass automatic Mall doors, surveyed the mostly empty parking lots, the great tangle of roads and freeway exits, the cars honking and buzzing by, and together took a great breath in, savoring the air. Charlotte had never taken such a beautiful breath.
“My car is here,” Mr. Metos said. “I’ll drive you home. Then I’m going to take a nice long nap and wait for my liver to regenerate.”
Home, Charlotte thought. Then something occurred to her. She gasped and turned to Zee, panic in her eyes.
“What are we going to tell Mom and Dad?” she whispered urgently.
Zee shook his head and grinned again. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
EPILOGUE
Grandmother Winter’s
Last Adventure
THE PASSAGE INTO DEATH WAS SO SIMPLE, LIKE THE end of a breath. All Grandmother Winter knew was that at one moment her body and her soul were intertwined, and the next they were not. The body became a shell, no longer a part of Dalitso Winter.
Interesting, she thought.
She could no longer see, really, or hear—not in the way we always think of seeing and hearing. Her eyes and her ears were dead, gone, but she found she still knew everything about the room—Zachary’s head was bowed by her side, with tears running down his cheeks; her daughter was leaning in to wrap her arms around her body; her son-in-law reached in to embrace the whole family. Grandmother Winter was aware of everything—the strange, sharp smell of the air, the cotton sheets about her body, the taste of lemons in the room, and her beloved family, so close and impossibly far away.
She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And she did love them so very much.
And Zachary. The taste of her last premonition would not leave her. Something was going to happen to her boy, something terrible. There was evil in the world, and it was going to come for him. She could not protect him, she could not warn him—she had not had the breath left. She could not say, “Find this man, he will help you”; all she could say, with her dying breath, was, “Metos,” and hope that someday he would understand.
And now she was leaving them. For there was a presence beside her, something decidedly not human, something tall and thin and Immortal, and she could feel herself being drawn to him. He reached into her body—the shell that contained her—grabbed her soul and began to pull.
Like that, Grandmother Winter was out of her body, floating in the air, led by a messenger with winged feet. She scarcely had time to look about the room for one more glimpse of her family, her grandson, before he pulled her off. But she would be back. She had promised her grandson that she would be back, and Grandmother Winter always kept her promises.
Through the house the Messenger led her, out the door, and down the street. The world sped past. It was all wrong somehow, the light, the noise, the air. She did not belong here anymore.
She was a little surprised when they went into the bowling alley, but she didn’t ask questions because the Messenger clearly wasn’t answering them. They traveled through the bar, past the bowling lanes, through a wall, into a storage room filled with cracked bowling pins, and then through a nondescript door that read, NO ADMITTANCE.
Down they went, through wetness, through blackness, through coldness. It made Grandmother Winter slightly nervous, of course, that they were heading downward, but it did not seem prudent to panic.
And then suddenly there was light again. Well, not light exactly. But not darkness, either. They emerged from the tunnel and before her was grayness, a great, flickering grayness, like a fog lit by fire. The world was made of rock—a deep red rock that looked like nothing on Earth, craggy and cliffy and endless. They flew over a great expanse of rocky plain, and then the Messenger began to slow.
Below her was a great strip of light spreading out before the snakelike form of a river, which appeared to be steaming. No, not a strip of light, but rather lights, hundreds of lights. Bodies of light. Ah, she realized, they were the Dead. She was the Dead. They were all the same.
The Messenger dropped her off at the end of the line, slipped her a small coin, and flew off.
And there she stayed.
She was standing next to a form like hers, a creature of death and light, and behind her was the rocky terrain they had just come over. She could not see what lay ahead.
The being next to her spoke. “Hello. Long line, huh?”
Well, no, he hadn’t spoken, not really, but his words appeared in her head. And she found, too, that she could not talk, per se, but she could project words to him.
“Quite,” she agreed. “What is this place?”
“Greek Underworld,” he shrugged. “Who knew?”
“Hmm,” said Grandmother Winter. That was a surprise. “What are we waiting for?”
“To cross the Styx,” he said.
“And what happens after that?”
“I don’t know….”
This did not seem the time for further questions. She would wait, she would cross, and then she would set about getting back to her grandson.
She spent her first weeks in the Underworld learning about the way of things. The best way to do that was to be quiet and listen, and that’s what she did. She learned about the Immortals and the Dead; she learned about the City and the Plains, about Hades and his Administration, about the absent Queen. She learned there were the official rules and then the way things were really done. And that, of course, was what she was most interested in.
And she began to ask around. “I need something,” she would say. “Where do you go when you need something?”
And she learned. She learned there was a guy who could get her some blood to drink. (Strangely, that sounded pretty good to Grandmother Winter, though not what she was looking for.) There was a guy who could sneak her into the City, a guy who could give her a brief power of taste and some wine to boot, a guy who could get her gold, a guy who could smuggle things from the Upperworld (lots of guys like that, actually)—but there was no one who could help her keep an eye on her grandson.
I made a promise to my grandson, she said. I promised I would watch over him. And I always keep my promises.
The City guy, the taste guy, the smuggling guy—none of them knew. This is beyond us, they said. But I can get you a great deal on some Harpy repellent.
Then she met the blood guy. And she told him, “I need something. I need something beyond the City, beyond gold, beyond blood.”
“Beyond blood?” he asked carefully.
“Yes, beyond blood.”
“You need the Witch,” he said quietly.
“The Witch?”
Yes, the Witch. Grandmother Winter needed the Witch. The Wi
tch was a great secret, almost a myth in the Underworld. Some thought she did not exist. The blood guy, though, he had seen her—or so he claimed. The Witch hid in the caves behind the City, wearing a great black cloak made out of night and shadow. She was almost as old as Earth itself, and she looked it—shriveled, wrinkled, haggard. The Witch had great power and was greatly feared. The Witch could grant wishes, impossible wishes, but she was angry and unpredictable. People went in there and they never came back. That was the price you paid for having an impossible wish.
“I will go,” said Grandmother Winter.
“You might not come back,” the blood man warned.
“I know,” she said.
It took quite a while for Grandmother Winter to find the Witch. The blood man had told her to go to the caves beyond the City, but the caves were vast and confusing.
And then, after days of searching, she found a small cave with a small stone door marked with a Greek letter that she could not read. She knocked, and a raspy voice said, “Who has come?”
“My name is Dalitso Winter,” Grandmother Winter responded in the soundless way of the Dead. “I have come to see the Witch.”
“Enter.”
The woman before her was small and bent over and completely wrapped in a black cloak with a black hood. Stark, white, bony hands reached out from black sleeves, strings of white hair escaped from the hood, and Grandmother Winter could just make out a face made entirely of wrinkles, with a long, crooked, Witch-like nose.
“Why have you disturbed me?” the Witch croaked.
“I have worked hard to find you, the great Witch who can grant impossible wishes. I have a grandson. I promised him I would watch over him.”
“I see,” said the Witch. She sat down at the stone table in front of her and looked up at Grandmother Winter. “Why should I help you?”
So Grandmother Winter told the Witch. She told her about Zachary, about how there was something all closed up, hard and tight inside of him. How the only time he seemed to expand, to live, was in the summers with her. How he was a boy with a good heart who did not know quite how to use it. How she had left him too early, how there was so much more help she wanted to give him. And how she had decided she would come back to him even before she had had a final vision, a portent of great danger.