Hardboiled: Not Your Average Detective Story (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 5) (12 page)

“C'est la vie,” I replied, waving my hand at him. Behind him, the tunnel shuddered, and a shiver slid across my spine as the ground beneath my feet rumbled.

“Okay, well let’s go that way,” Thes replied, pointing ahead of us. “It smells less like rotting food in that direction.”

“Less?” I asked. “What do you mean by less?”

“What do you think I mean by less?” he replied, moving past me, Connor’s feet bouncing against Thes’ back. “Are there other meanings of the word I’m not aware of?”

I sighed, and as I began to follow him down the tunnel, couldn’t help thinking we were in a very, very bad place. We’d come here after the minotaur had been destroyed, so it stood to reason that we were in whatever magical realm monsters came when they died, which admittedly, could have been anywhere. Though, I had a pretty good guess.

“Um… where do monsters go in Greek mythology when they die?” I asked, glancing at Thes who shrugged at me. Which, I guess I should have expected because he hadn’t even known what was bullish and lived in a labyrinth.

“Is that a river of fire?” Thes asked, pointing off into the distance. I followed his finger and saw what looked like a dancing river of fire.

“Um…” I said as oranges and reds flickered across its surface, reminding me less of hot lava and more of an actual blazing forest fire turned liquid. It streamed over the gulley below like it was tearing after some super tasty gasoline. Heat wafted off of it so hot, it burned the sweat from my body in an instant. If we got much closer, I was going to need some SPF one trillion.

“We should go back,” Thes said, stopping and glancing back over his shoulder. That was when I realized that our little tunnel entrance led right up to the river’s edge. Since we were in a cave, we were left with all of two choices: cross the flaming river or turn back.

“Or we could, you know, cross the river,” I said, shrugging like it was no big deal even though it was a very big deal.

“It’s a river of fire,” Thes said, giving me a look that said he was unconvinced, but there at the very edge of his face, was a small twitch. “But you’re the big bad Lillim Callina. If you say we can cross a raging inferno, well, I’ll believe you.”

“Well, how does a girl say no to a statement like that,” I replied even though I had no idea how to cross a river that looked to be as wide as a football field.

“You have no idea how to cross it, do you?” Thes asked, quirking one dark eyebrow at me.

“I didn’t say that,” I replied as flames danced across my vision, but he was right. I was a bit rusty on my Greek Mythology so I wasn’t sure how it had been crossed in the myths, or if it even
had
been crossed in the myths.

“You didn’t not say that either,” he said. “Or deny it.”

“Shut up, I’m thinking,” I said, staring out across the bristling flames.

“We should go back,” Thes said, turning and glancing back down the hallway. “Even though it smells horrible.”

Instead of replying, I reached out with my power, my fingers trailing over the bangles as I murmured a single word under my breath. “Apep.” The faintest tingle of a giant leathery snake unfurled itself in the back of my brain, flicking its huge shadowy tongue across my senses.

“Yes?” The voice was like a thousand old cobwebs whistling in the night.

“How do we cross that?” I pointed at the fire river.

“One does not cross the Phlegethon. To attempt is to be burned to a cinder within its flames. Even Styx herself, who flows endlessly adjacent to us has been consumed by the fury of the Phlegethon.”

“You’re saying that’s the Phlegethon? As in the river of fire that burns within the bowels of Tartarus?” I barely managed to speak the question as fear welled up inside me, and my knees began to shake. We were in Tartarus, the freaking prison that held the Titans after Zeus defeated them. It was where dead monsters came to… well be punished.

“Yes,” Apep replied.

“Are you talking to yourself? Or is this a weird Dioscuri thing?” Thes asked, eyes wide as he stared at me, mouth slightly agape. “Your eyes are all distant, and you’re sort of talking to yourself so I think it’s a Dioscuri thing…”

He kept prattling on as I turned away from him so that his chatter wouldn’t totally break my concentration. I thought about answering him, really I did, but doing that might sever my tenuous connection to Apep, and I wasn’t sure he would awaken for a second chat.

“So what should we do, Apep?” I asked, casting one last glance at the river of fire before turning to stare back down the tunnel.

“I’m not sure, honestly,” Apep replied. The image of him tasting the air with his tongue filled my mind. “The only way out of Tartarus is to follow the river Styx back up to Hades, but that entrance will be guarded by Cerberus. I’m not sure what will happen if you turn back. I’ve never actually been here before. Either way, you’ll have to cross the river eventually, then cross the river Styx, outwit Cerberus, and make your way through Hades.”

I swallowed, and the sound was a lot louder than I’d meant to be. Thes’ eyes got as big as dinner plates as he stared at me. “What? What is it?” he asked.

“You may want to find a nice place to hole up and die. Get any last requests out of the way. That sort of thing,” Apep said as he curled back down, pulling himself back into the little pinprick in my mind he usually occupied. “That will be easier.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I replied, and the flickering image of a grinning snake turned away from me and closed its eyes.

“No worries. When you die, I’ll just sail away into the chaos,” Apep murmured before fading completely into the last tattered wisps of ether.

“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” Thes said before I could respond. “Your eyes aren’t dark anymore so I’m pretty sure you stopped talking to your demon or whatever it is you people do.”

“Apep isn’t a demon,” I said but before I could say more, Thes’ mouth dropped open, and he looked even more horrified.

“You were talking to Apep? The freaking big bad of Ancient Egypt?” he said, fear etched into his words.

“Uh… yeah?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “You mean you don’t know what a freaking minotaur is, but you know who Apep is? Really?”

“Ancient Egypt is sort of my thing,” he said with a shrug. “But that spirit is dangerous. Like really, really bad news.” He shivered. “I can’t believe the Dioscuri…”

“Apep isn’t so bad. He told me how to get out of here. It’ll be a piece of cake,” I replied, waving him off, partially because what he said was true. Apep was a big bad primordial deity. He was the darkness that blotted out the sun, the force that the combined powers of all the ancient Egypt tried to stop.

How Mattoc had harnessed Apep was beyond me, but then again Mattoc hadn’t been normal, and now that he was gone forever, I wouldn’t be able to ask him. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the story.

“I think that’s your lying voice,” Thes said, shaking his head at me. “When you lie, your scent changes and your voice goes just a twinge higher. You should work on that.”

“On my lying voice?” I smirked. “You want me to be a better liar?”

“When you’re trying to assure me we aren’t trapped in some deep dark doom cave? Yes, I do,” he said, looking back out over the Phlegethon.

“Okay, well, I’ll put that on my ‘to do’ list,” I replied for lack of anything better to say. Note to self, don’t lie to werewolves.

“I don’t think we can jump it,” he said, still not looking at me.

“What about, and hear me out, an ice bridge?” A smirk slid across my face as I said the words. It was so crazy it just might work.

“An ice bridge? Sounds great, where do we get one?” Thes asked, and his voice was a lot less dismissive of the idea than I’d expected.

“Well… this one time when a vampire lit my apartment on fire, I was able to channel the elemental energy from the blaze into giant storm clouds. Maybe I could do something like that?” I replied, holding my hand out toward the Phlegethon. “I don’t know if you can feel it, but the power coming off that river is intense. It would waste a lot of energy to do it, but I think that maybe I could form it into ice.”

“That seems kind of dangerous. What if it melts before we get across?” Thes looked at me dubiously. “This is even worse than your ‘jumping it’ plan.”

“I never suggested jumping it, but if you have a better idea, I’m all ears.” When he didn’t respond, I shut my eyes and reached out with my senses toward the raging Phlegethon. It rolled over me like boiling lava, searing my insides and making my lips dry and crack in the space of a second.

I concentrated, envisioning the massive ice bridge that I had crossed on the way to Warthor’s demesne in the nether a long time ago. I knew the mechanics of how to build stuff like that, even if I wasn’t good at it. You grabbed energy and thrust it into the construct until it became real. Usually, the problem came from not having enough energy to make your construct real, and the less experience you had, well the more energy you needed to compensate. But come on. This was the Phlegethon. It was teaming with energy, and if it went out? Well, I could cross that way too.

I inhaled, sucking in power and air at the same time, and when I exhaled I let the power of the Phlegethon flow into and through me. It rushed out like a roiling blaze, slipping into the construct in my mind with a whoosh, before settling and filling out. Sweat began to pour down my face as I dropped to my knees in the spongy earth as more and more energy rushed into me.

It was like poking a hole in the side of a balloon. More and more power rushed out as the pressure behind the hole increased, making it bigger and bigger… the only problem? I was the hole. I felt the flames filling me up, boiling me from the inside and turning my blood to molten lead. The construct was barely formed, little more than a skeleton in my mind when I dropped forward onto my hands and knees. Ice rushed out over the ground, splitting and cracking in the intense heat.

Instead of melting the bridge as it should have, the heat gave the bridge shape. It slapped into the bridge and solidified in my mind. When I opened my eyes, the bridge stretched outward from the cliff face below us, building slowly as my fingernails turned blue.

“See,” I huffed in a breath that came out in a spray of icy fog. “I told you I could do it.”

Thes glanced at me, eyes wide with amazement. “I didn’t even think that was possible,” he murmured and squatted down next to me on his haunches.

“It’s nothing,” I replied, voice straining as small icicles began to form in my hair and a shiver wracked my body. The bridge was still barely halfway across. Unfortunately, I was starting to run out of steam. At this rate, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.

“Is that so?” he asked, putting one hand on my shoulder. A surge of energy flowed into me that filled my peripheral vision with images of the moon, filled my nose with the scent of pine trees and forest, filled my mouth with the triumphant taste of blood from a fresh kill.

Frost crept over Thes’ hand, snaking up his arm like a thin white serpent, and power surged outward along the surface of the bridge in a sea of silvery flame. It leapt off of the edge and solidified in midair like a frozen staircase. A chill rippled over my body. It was all I could do to keep from crying out as ice surged out and out and out.

The ice hit the ground on the other side of the Phlegethon as I collapsed to the ground. My face smacked into the spongy earth, but I’ll be honest, I barely felt it. The edge of my vision began to go hazy and far away as Thes picked me up, throwing me over his shoulder.

“You did great, Lillim,” he said, taking a step toward the bridge. “Let me take it from here.”

I wanted to argue. To tell him to put me down because I was fine, but somehow, my mouth wouldn’t quite work. Darkness swam over me, obscuring my vision more and more until everything faded into inky blackness.

Chapter 12

The smell of meat roasting over a fire filled my nose, chasing away the last remnants of a dream I couldn’t quite remember. Maybe it was because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, or because I’d just made a goddamn ice bridge out of fire, but for whatever reason, it was the best smelling thing in the world.

“You’re awake?” Thes asked as I opened one eye and looked around. He had his back to me, so how had he known?

“Yeah, where are we?” I groaned, pushing myself into a sitting position. He was bent over the edge of the Phlegethon, holding a giant horse’s leg by the ankle. The haunch sputtered and popped as he turned toward me, sweat running down his face.

“Across the river. We made it, thanks to you. Unfortunately, Connor is still out cold. Whatever that guy did to him…” he trailed off as he sauntered toward me, the steaming leg held out in front of him. “I don’t know what to do for him. It makes me feel bad.”

“Um… where did you get that?” I asked, glancing around for a corpse, but the only thing I saw was a giant bloody smear a few yards to my left.

“Centaur,” he replied, holding it out toward me. “Want some? It’s not as bad as it seems like it’d be.”

“You’re eating a centaur? Those are sentient beings,” the words rushed out of me as nausea swelled up in my throat. It was like… like eating a person.

“I’m a werewolf,” Thes said with a shrug and bit into the haunch, tearing away a chunk of meat with his teeth. Juices dripped down his face as he chewed. “I eat what I kill.”

“That’s not an excuse,” I said, growing very angry at my suddenly rumbling tummy and watering mouth. I’d used a lot of energy up making that bridge… so much so that I was still weak and woozy. “I’m not eating that!” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him.

Without saying anything, Thes tore off a hunk of meat and held it out to me in a way that reminded me of a cat bringing you a dead bird. “You used a lot of power. You’ll need your strength to cross that,” he said, gesturing behind me with the meat.

I glanced over my shoulder to see a thin river of smoking white tar bubbling a couple feet behind me. “That must be the river Styx,” I said because what else could it be? The river Styx was said to run parallel to the Phlegethon in Tartarus. Besides, Apep had said it would be here.