“Sita, no!” Jamaal shouted as she took off in pursuit. “Stop it!”
Jamaal planted himself firmly in Sita’s path, holding his arms up as if to stop her from jumping over him. Not that it would have worked—I’ve seen Sita jump before, and with her supernatural nature, I’m sure she could have cleared that hurdle just fine. But in her current state of mind—or mindlessness—she apparently didn’t feel like hurdling. So instead she just ran Jamaal over, knocking him to the cavern floor and continuing down the main street of the city.
I ran to Jamaal’s side, shocked by what Sita had just done. She’d knocked the wind out of him, but otherwise he seemed unhurt as I helped him sit up. He blinked and shook his head as if to clear the cobwebs.
Oscar screamed, a high, shrill sound of abject terror. Jamaal used my shoulder for support and jumped dizzily to his feet, calling Sita’s name. I looked on in horror, covering my mouth with my hand to keep myself from screaming. Oscar made it about ten yards past the tunnel opening before Sita caught up to him and knocked him off his feet with one easy swat of her paw.
A swat that tore through the backs of his legs like tissue paper and sent a shower of blood splashing against the nearest building, a many-columned structure that had to be a temple.
Sita swatted Oscar again, this time across his back. More of his blood spattered the front of the building and the columns.
Still shouting Sita’s name, Jamaal ran full tilt down the street toward them. I wasn’t sure running toward Sita at a time like this was a good idea, but I’m not much of a fan of playing the helpless bystander, so I followed him.
Sita continued playing with Oscar like a cat torturing a mouse, raking her claws over him and biting without doing enough damage to kill him. I don’t know if it was shock or blood loss that silenced him, but he wasn’t screaming anymore, though his pathetic attempts to crawl away proved he was still conscious.
Sita acknowledged Jamaal’s presence for the first time when he was a few yards away, still frantically shouting at her to stop. She was looking straight at him when she closed her mouth around Oscar’s neck. There was a sickening crunching sound, and Oscar’s struggles abruptly ceased.
“No!” Jamaal yelled, still running toward her, though he had to know as well as I that it was too late to save Oscar.
Her jaws still locked in Oscar’s neck, Sita leapt impossibly high, landing on the roof of the temple at least twenty feet above her. Oscar’s blood-soaked, torn body slammed against the bas-relief that decorated the temple’s upper reaches. Sita gave the body a tug until enough of the weight was supported by the roof so it didn’t fall, although one leg still dangled over the edge, dripping down blood like rain.
I caught up with Jamaal, and we both looked up at Sita and our now-defunct ticket out of the Underworld.
“He can heal from that, right?” I asked Jamaal in a small voice. I’d died twice since becoming Liberi, and both times I had come back. It was not a fun process, but it was better than the alternative.
“Maybe,” Jamaal said doubtfully, and I looked at him in alarm. He shrugged. “We’re in the Underworld, in a City of the Dead, and Sita is death magic incarnate. I’m not so sure I know what the rules are right now.”
Perched on the roof with her kill at her feet, Sita began calmly licking the blood off her fur. I hoped that meant she was done killing, because I was suddenly feeling awfully small and vulnerable.
“Sita, honey, will you come back to me now?” Jamaal coaxed, beckoning to her with his hand.
It took all my willpower to keep still when Sita cocked her head at him, then leapt easily to the ground. Her paws left bloody prints as she walked up to Jamaal and gave him an affectionate head-butt. Jamaal reached down and touched the top of her head, and she disappeared. Apparently, Oscar’s death had satisfied the death magic, at least for now.
I looked up at Oscar’s body. “You should have had her bring him down with her. I don’t know how we’re going to get him down from there when he recovers.” I refused to think of it as if he recovered.
“Shall I summon her back and have her fetch him?” Jamaal asked caustically.
If I weren’t all weak-kneed and queasy, I might have managed a clever comeback. As it was, I had to settle for silence.
FIFTEEN
There wasn’t any point in going anywhere until Oscar recovered, so Jamaal and I sat on the steps of a modest white marble building across from the temple to wait. I still didn’t know how we were going to get him down, but perhaps the matter would sort itself out. In his precarious position, he might well fall to the ground when he woke up—which would probably kill him again, but at least we wouldn’t have to fetch him.
I leaned against Jamaal’s side, and he put his arm around me. Despite the hot, stifling air, I shivered, wishing I could be anywhere but here. My eyes kept being drawn to the massive quantities of Oscar’s blood that had splashed all over the temple’s front stairs and supporting columns, and that was even now leaking from his dead body and leaving streaks on the bas-relief.
I tried to focus on the temple instead of the blood, but that was no less disturbing a proposition. If you didn’t look at it too closely, it would look like your typical Greek- or Roman-style temple, with maybe a hint of Egyptian thrown in, because the columns were etched from floor to ceiling with intricate battle scenes. But when you took a second look, you couldn’t help noticing that all the etchings and carvings and bas-relief featured skeletons rather than living people. Even the animals—horses mostly, though I also spotted what might have been a lion or a large dog—were rendered as skeletons.
My eyes roamed all over the temple, looking for some hint of life, some reminder of the outside world, and my eyes finally picked out one figure that had flesh on it. Partially obscured by a splash of Oscar’s blood, the carving appeared to be of a ferocious dog. Its head was at an odd angle relative to its body, and something sprouted out of its neck only to be hidden by the blood. After staring at it another minute, I realized that thing sprouting out of its neck was another neck. This was Cerberus, two of its heads blotted out by blood.
Jamaal withdrew his arm from around my shoulders and jumped to his feet, shaking out his arms.
“I’m too restless to sit still,” he said, and I noticed that his fingers were twitching ever so slightly.
I stood, too, though my feet hurt and I wouldn’t have minded sitting down for a week or two. “Maybe we should wait back in the tunnel. This can’t be a good place for you to hang out.”
Jamaal moved his head from side to side, and the clacking of the beads at the ends of his braids couldn’t drown out the snap, crackle, pop of his neck. “No, it’s not. But if Oscar wakes up and we’re not here, you know he’s going to create a portal immediately and disappear.”
I wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to do that so soon after coming back to life—dying and healing take a lot out of you, and even lifting your head can feel like a challenge at first—but it wasn’t a chance I was willing to take. Even though my own sense of restlessness and discomfort seemed to be getting worse by the minute.
“Why did Sita have to drag him up to the roof?” I grumbled. If Oscar’s body were somewhere we could reach, we could carry him away into the tunnel and maybe escape the city’s aura of malice. I kept looking around, expecting to find hostile eyes boring into me from the darkness.
“That was probably my fault,” Jamaal said. “She saw me coming toward her kill and wanted to make sure I didn’t take it away from her.”
I shuddered, realizing we were probably lucky she didn’t eat the body. Maybe Oscar would have come back from that, too—I had come back after my body was burned—but it would have taken days rather than hours.
I gazed up at Oscar and hoped to view signs that he was beginning to heal. Sita had torn the entire back of his leg open, but between the shreds of fabric, the copious blood, and the insufficient light, I couldn’t get a good look at the wound to see how it was doing.
br /> Jamaal was pacing now, his hands twitchy and never still. The air felt more stifling than ever, and for no discernible reason, I felt the distinctive sensation of adrenaline leaking into my blood. My breath came shorter, and I found myself continually checking over my shoulder, afraid something was sneaking up on me. Jamaal was doing the same.
The City of the Dead had had a distinctly unwelcoming vibe from the moment we set foot in it, but it was exponentially stronger all of a sudden.
“You feel this, too, don’t you?” Jamaal asked, his eyes wide as he tried to look all ways at once.
There was no pretending this was a figment of my imagination. Something was happening, even if I couldn’t tell what. I nodded and moved closer to Jamaal. “Yeah, I feel it.”
I kept looking around for the threat my body insisted was near and found that my gaze kept returning to the temple. It took me a second to see what had caught my eye, but when I did, I grabbed hold of Jamaal’s arm.
“The blood!” I said in a choked squeak. The sense of dread reached a crescendo, and I couldn’t force out a more coherent statement. Not that Jamaal could possibly miss what I was seeing.
Oscar’s blood had been splashed willy-nilly all over the front of the temple, marking the stairs, the floor, the columns, the walls—even the roof. The blood had operated according to the laws of physics, with trails and droplets streaming downward toward the ground. But physics had apparently taken a coffee break, because instead of those drips and streams pointing toward the ground, many of them were now headed sideways or even directly upward. I swallowed hard. The blood had formed a large, rough circle and was trickling inward toward the center. Toward the figure of Cerberus that I’d noticed on the temple wall. The figure looked larger than it had when I’d first spotted it, and as more blood touched its outline, it grew larger still.
“It was Cerberus’s job to guard Hades,” I said. My voice shook, and the air felt so thick and heavy I couldn’t get the words out in one breath. I loosened my grip on Jamaal’s arm and groped for his hand instead. His fingers closed tightly over mine, and he edged backward.
“Don’t think we should”—gasp for breath—“be here when all that blood is absorbed.”
The blood circle continued to contract, continued to move closer to the carved Cerberus. And Cerberus continued to grow, its features becoming disturbingly lifelike as it did.
Jamaal gave my hand a tug and started backing down the road away from the temple, toward the tunnel through which we had entered.
“But Oscar . . .” I protested. And yet even with that protest, I found myself not resisting Jamaal’s pull, every instinct within me crying out for me to get moving, to get out.
Jamaal and I both kept backing up at a brisk pace. We could have moved a lot faster if we’d just turned around and run. I assume that Jamaal didn’t do it for the same reason I didn’t—I couldn’t stand the idea of having that temple at my back, of not knowing what was happening behind me.
We were about halfway back to the tunnel opening when a massive slate-gray figure leapt out of the wall and landed in the street with a loud thump.
About eight feet tall at the shoulder—and weighing who knew how much—Cerberus was literally as big as a house. Well, maybe only a mobile home, but that was more than big enough. Three snarling wolf heads fixed their yellow-eyed gazes on Jamaal and me, and the growl that massive body produced was enough to shake the buildings.
We continued to back away, but by silent mutual agreement we moved more slowly now. If Cerberus had anything in common with Sita, the worst thing we could do was trigger its predatory instincts by running away.
“Maybe it’ll be satisfied just to chase us out of the city,” Jamaal said.
I swallowed the knot of fear in my throat and nodded, hoping that was the case. I had no viable weapons on me, and even if I had, I doubted any would affect a creature like Cerberus. Jamaal had Sita, but even if we could trust her, Cerberus was big enough to make her look like a fluffy house cat.
The middle head lifted up and howled like the loudest siren you can possibly imagine, and the other two quickly followed suit. Worse, that howl was echoed by other voices throughout the city.
“We are fucked,” Jamaal said.
Cerberus stopped howling and fixed its attention on us once more, stalking forward. I glanced at the tunnel over my shoulder, trying to calculate the odds of us reaching it before Cerberus got to us. We might have a shot at it, though it wouldn’t be much help if the creature planned to pursue us past the city’s limits.
“I think it’s time to run now,” I said, and we turned in unison and charged for the tunnel.
Cerberus let out a ferocious roar that made Sita’s sound dainty by comparison. The creature was so massive the pavement beneath our feet vibrated under its thumping footsteps as it gave chase. The tunnel that had seemed so close a moment ago now looked about a mile away.
“Go go go!” I yelled at Jamaal, and tried to give him a little shove to hurry him up. With his long legs, he could easily outrun me, but he had slowed his pace to match mine and refused to go ahead. I lowered my head and poured on every bit of speed I could conjure. I didn’t have to look behind me to know that Cerberus was gaining fast.
Cerberus was so close I felt its breath against the back of my neck when Jamaal and I barreled over what we hoped would be the finish line, the opening of the tunnel. Naturally, we kept on running as fast as we could. And naturally, because pretty much nothing had gone right since we’d entered the Underworld, Cerberus pursued.
There was no doubt in my mind we were about to die. And there was a lot of doubt as to whether it was the kind of death we could come back from. I wished Jamaal would run ahead, wished he would let my own death buy him some time, but even if I’d had the breath to speak, I knew he wouldn’t do it. We would face our hideous fate together.
All of a sudden, a blinding white light speared through my eyes, and I thought my head would explode from the piercing pain of it. Jamaal cried out, and behind us Cerberus let out a pained yelp.
I closed my eyes tight against the burn of the light and held my arm up to try to block it out. I kept moving in the direction I hoped was forward, but despite the terror behind me, I couldn’t force myself to run full speed when I was blind.
I crashed into something solid, and yet slightly yielding, and something that felt like an oversized arm wrapped around my shoulders to hold me still. Beside me, I heard Jamaal curse and his heavy footfalls ceased.
I tried opening my eyes just a tiny crack. The light was still painfully bright, and all I could see was a white blot, as if I’d just looked straight at the sun with my naked eyes. I quickly shut them and tried to wriggle out of the arm—or whatever it was—around my shoulders. Weirdly, it seemed smaller than it had when it had first landed on me, but it was just as strong, holding me tightly in place.
Once again, I cracked my eyes open. The light was less blinding, and I was suddenly aware that I was pressed up against the source of it. Three sets of yellow eyes glowed in the brightness, but even Cerberus seemed unable to look directly at the source, its heads bobbing side to side as it backed away.
All three sets of eyes vanished, and I heard the sound of clawed feet against stone as Cerberus finally retreated.
The glowing arm released me, its dimensions continuing to shrink until it was human size, the light receding so I could make out the vaguely humanoid figure from which it was emanating. And with Cerberus no longer literally breathing down my neck, my brain finally made sense out of what I was seeing.
“Anderson!” I gasped.
The light was fading, the shape at its center becoming more distinct until I could finally make out the form of a familiar man. Naked, of course, because Anderson’s godly form and clothing were incompatible. Jamaal stood on Anderson’s other side, gaping at him as the glow subsided.
Anderson crossed his arms and looked stern, which was a neat trick when he didn’t have a scrap of clothin
g on him. Although he spared a quick glance at Jamaal, most of his attention focused on me. “The Underworld has felt agitated all day, and I figured that meant some moron of an Olympian was wandering around,” he said. “Good thing for you I decided to check out the disturbance. How the hell did you get here?”
He looked and sounded like the same man I had known for these last several months, and he certainly had the scolding tone down. But after learning his history, I didn’t know if I could ever look at him the same way again.
“We had help,” I told him. “Cyrus let me borrow one of his Olympians so I could look for you.”
Anderson glowered at me. “Did it occur to you that I was here because I didn’t want to be found?”
“Did it occur to you that it’s not all about you and what you want?” Jamaal snapped in reply. He had to be incredibly pissed off to use that tone with Anderson, who had always commanded his respect.
I shot Jamaal a look of warning. Anderson was no longer trying to pass as an ordinary Liberi, and maybe if he was no longer trying to fly under the radar, he wouldn’t be as tolerant of our human foibles. Now that we knew what Anderson was capable of—no matter how long ago that was or how much he had changed—it seemed wise to treat him with a certain degree of caution.
Jamaal showed no sign of having noticed my warning, but thankfully Anderson didn’t get his back up. Instead of getting all alpha and bossy, he swallowed the rebuke with relative grace.
“You have no idea what I’m dealing with,” Anderson said. “I don’t have time to—”
I cut him off, forgoing caution. “If you’re referring to Niobe, then I’m afraid that cat’s already long out of the bag.”
Anderson was rarely speechless, but he’d obviously been spending too much time in the Underworld and had no clue what had been going on above in his absence. His first expression was shock, followed quickly by dismay. Maybe there was some shame in there, too.