“Delphi?” Hades prompted me.
I told him the whole story, from Zeus’s priests through Rhea’s rising and her threats to return the titans to their former glory.
He cursed long and floridly in Greek, but an older form, it seemed, because I only understood one in five words and they were enough to blister my ears.
“Then those at Delphi already know they’re coming,” he concluded, boring into me with his crazy Manson-eyes.
I swallowed a ball of acid that had burned up my throat and nodded.
“And once again I get to clean up my brothers’ messes.” He sighed dramatically, even for him. “Let’s go see which way they’ve gone. Perhaps we can cut them off or perhaps they’ve already dead-ended themselves. Many exits. Most of them are illusions.” He showed his teeth in a psychotic smile, something like the Cheshire Cat might give after picking his teeth with White Rabbit bones. I wondered what kind of horrors those illusions hid.
“How do we find out?”
Hades approached a wall and put his palm to one of the stones. I was shocked to see a smart board light up in front of him. I’d expected magic, some kind of all-seeing eye. Not a high tech screen he could tap and wave his hands at—almost like magic—to reveal different sections of his domain. I rose to follow him, expecting it to be painful, still shocked when it wasn’t. But before I went, I looked toward Hecate and Apollo. His head had rounded out again, and his color was good. Much better than it had been. He was still in the fetal position, but was now snoring gently. It was almost…cute.
“Head injury,” Hades said. “He’s going to need to sleep for a while. That kind of thing will take a lot out of you.”
I considered planting a kiss on Apollo’s head, but decided against it. There were witnesses, and anyway it would be just my luck that he’d wake up and make something of it.
Thanatos and Hypnos were rousing the wounded and Hecate went off to help others.
I went to see what Hades had in mind.
When I stepped up beside him, he was studying a schematic on his smart board, all lit up with red dots in one area. “Ah,” he said, not bothering to expand on that for my benefit. He tapped the screen, made an opening motion with his hand, brought in a second image and suddenly we were watching the escapees from two different camera angles. Security cameras…in Hell…who’d’ve thought?
Then I spotted something. “Right there,” I said. “Expand that.” He shot me a dark look at the order, but he gestured the screen to zoom in on the section to which I’d pointed. I thought I’d seen a person-sized figure running ahead of the crowd. On expansion, I saw that I’d been right. What’s more, I
knew
that figure.
Christie.
It occurred to me now that I hadn’t seen her at the meeting in the bridal suite. But…how had she gotten
here
? How had she paid the ferryman? However she’d gotten in, how would she ever get
out
alive? Hades, so far as I knew, had a one hundred percent success rate. Souls checked in but they never checked out. What would that mean for Christie? Or me? Something I’d carefully
not
thought about on my way down. But Hades had sent Charon for us. Apollo and I were invited guests now. That had to count for something.
Beside me, Hades froze the screen on the image of Christie. “I recognize her,” he said ominously. “A split second seen in a certain hotel room in San Francisco.” He turned on me. “A friend of yours?”
I met his gaze dead on. Oh, poor choice of words. There was no use in pretending. “Yes,” I admitted, “a friend. But not acting on her own. Rhea’s got to be controlling her.”
“First you steal my bride Persephone away from me. Then your friend breaches my security and leads an escape.” He lashed out on the last word and grabbed me by the throat. I never even saw it coming before I was on my tiptoes trying to ease the pressure on my neck to breathe.
I hated to think how the king of the Underworld would collect. My soul forfeit? Condemned to Tartarus in place of the titans? My innards pecked out every day like Prometheus or like Sisyphus forced ever to roll a boulder uphill only to have it slide back down again.
“Let go of her,” Apollo demanded, rising from behind Hades. My distress must have reached him right through his unconsciousness.
Hades swiveled his head, owl-like, to look at Apollo with a leer, and then pointedly turned back to me, dismissing Apollo as less than a threat, which, given the way he was swaying on his feet, still weak from his own destruction, wasn’t unreasonable.
“The two of you owe me,” he said, his eyes burning like hot coals. He took a minute to savor the situation. “I have it
. If
I help you stop the titans and defeat Rhea, you will watch over my kingdom while I take an extended vacation. Oh, the things I could do.”
I couldn’t have heard right. Oxygen deprivation had to have me hallucinating. He could
not
have just blackmailed us into housesitting. He shook me like a dog shakes its favorite chew toy before loosening his grip just enough for me to gasp the air to respond.
“What about them?” I asked in a whisper. Even that hurt. I indicated
them
with a flick of my eyes—Thanatos, Hypnos, Hecate.
He didn’t follow my gaze, but brought his face in close to mine and then murmured in my ear, “
They
might not return my kingdom.
You,
on the other hand…”
“We’ll do it,” Apollo said for us both. “Just…let her go.”
Hades’s hand opened, and I dropped to the floor with the sudden release, coughing as each wonderful breath seemed to saw at my throat. As grateful as I was to breathe again, I didn’t trust Hades. I thought about Atlas tricking Hercules into accepting the weight of the world onto his shoulders and then refusing to take it back, but if Hades was worried about a coup in his absence surely he wasn’t going to stick us with the Underworld for keeps.
Anyway, Apollo had already agreed. My throat ached as I took in air too greedily.
“Done,” Hades said.
Apollo rushed toward me, and I went into his arms, so glad to see him recovered and to be alive myself that I wasn’t worried about signals, mixed or otherwise.
“But no sitting on my throne,” Hades said, fixing us both with a glare from those coal-burning eyes.
Now that he mentioned it, I was a little tempted to play with his things. I could have a ton of fun with his helmet of invisibility on the off chance he left it at home.
“Fine,” Apollo said, though
I
hadn’t made any promises. “Now, what do you bring to the table?”
His eyes glittered. “Only all the heroes of old.”
Apollo smacked his head. “The Elysian Fields, how could I have forgotten.”
“Paradise sounds great until you have an eternity of it. Truthfully, the heroes have been growing restless. If I don’t do something, like let them out to fight an epic battle, they’ll start fighting each other.”
I was dumbstruck. The heroes of old! Hercules, Perseus, Odysseus, Achilles, Theseus, Jason and the Argonauts… Was I really about to come face to face with them? It was funny that the gods didn’t make me geek out—mostly because I hadn’t even believed in them at first—but the
heroes
, normal mortals facing overwhelming obstacles… (Okay, maybe some had Olympian parents, but the others…)
“You look like a fan girl,” Apollo said, a little grumpily, I thought. “I’d know, I’ve seen enough of them in my time.”
“Women interested in your on-screen attributes,” I teased, letting my gaze drop so that he’d have no question about the attributes to which I referred. Rumor had it that Apollo had started out in adult films before transitioning to more mainstream theatre.
“Exactly. Maybe if I showed you—”
“
Children
,” Hades snapped. “Focus.”
He pressed a button on his smart screen and then enlarged the thumbnail picture that came up…The Elysian Fields. Fruitful, lush, perfect, like the concept of the Garden of Eden. Butterflies chased each other in a meadow, and when Hades swept a hand across the screen, the image panned to show two young men wrestling nearly naked in a field—and looking very enthused about it.
A smile lit Hades’s face, and he clicked some kind of link. Then he cleared his throat and the sound seemed to carry through the screen and out across the fields, based on the sudden pause in the wrestling match. “Gather in the Hall of Heroes as soon as possible. Full battle gear. This is not a drill.”
“Drill?” Apollo asked.
Hades’s smile widened. “Keeps them on their toes. Plus, Cerberus likes the workout. Come on.”
“What about the titans?” I asked, looking at a moving picture Hades had relegated to the bottom of his smart screen, the one with Christie and a whole host of monsters who could crush her with a flick of their fingers or…whatever.
“They’re already at the Archeron.”
“The Archeron, but—” Apollo started.
“You see the conundrum,” Hades said.
“I don’t,” I cut in.
Hades turned his burning eyes on me. “Archeron was a god, son of Gaea. He aided the Titans during their first battle against Zeus, and as punishment he was cast into the Underworld and turned into a river. The question is, will he offer them aid again or has he learned his lesson?”
“He’s got nothing left to lose by helping them,” I said, horrified. What was it with the ancients and their crazy punishments? Who turned someone into a
river
?
“You’d think that,” Hades said, “but never underestimate the power of sulking. He’s had time out of mind to regret his decision and to blame others for the consequences. It will be an interesting experiment, no?”
“Experiment?” I asked, horrified.
“Yes, it all a starts with a theory of mine…”
“We don’t have time for this,” Apollo said. “They’re waiting in the Hall of Heroes.”
Hades’s eyes burned, not with the fire of suns, but with a much more infernal glow, like the molten core of a volcano ready to explode.
“Some day,” Hades told him, “you and I will have a reckoning.”
“I’ll look forward to it. Now, let’s go.”
If Hades had laser vision, Apollo would have been cut in half, but since he didn’t, he had to settle for a glare. Then his gaze swept past Apollo, and he rapped out, “Thanatos, you’re with us. Hecate, you hold half back with you to repair what damage you can and prevent further escapes. Hypnos, you take the rest and meet us at the Archeron. One way or the other we’ll defeat the titans. Either we’ll stop them at the river or if they’re beyond, marching on the gods, we’ll sandwich them between the two armies.”
Armies
. Right. I hoped the others’ recruiting efforts had been successful and I hoped that Rhea had been quiet while we’d been gone—other than possessing my best friend, which she was so going to pay for, and unleashing the titans. Come to think of it, that probably would have kept her pretty busy.
Hades turned back to us and ordered, “Follow me.”
He barked an order at the smart board and then made a gesture like he was closing it up between his hands. A door opened even as the smart board closed—part of the stone wall of the echoing space sliding out of the way. Beyond was a dark passage that Hades illuminated by clapping his hands. A Clapper? Seriously? Along the walls of the tunnel, torches seemed to flicker, but when I looked more closely, it was just a trick bulb. Electric torchlight.
“Nice effect,” I said wryly.
“I think so,” Hades answered.
I was eerily aware of Thanatos bringing up the rear of our party. He’d already tried to kill me more than once in our short acquaintance. Sure, those attempts had been at his father’s orders and we were temporarily on the same side, but if his father was worried about a coup, how much weight would that really hold? He could do away with his father and blame it on us without breaking a sweat. If we were killed in the assassination—if Thanatos killed us in supposed retribution—who could contradict his version of events?
Apollo, apparently picking up on my tension through our link, reached down and squeezed my hand. He let go almost immediately, to have both his hands free, I guessed, in case of trouble, but it was reassuring. Right now the odds were stacked against Thanatos. He had to know that. And anyway, who wanted to inherit a kingdom in the middle of crisis? Much better to let someone else do all the heavy lifting of putting things back in order.
It was a long corridor, and the walk was uneventful except for the gnawing in my gut, my precog trying to tell me what I already knew.
War is coming. Hurry, hurry.
When we hit the end of the corridor, marked by another sliding slab of stone, we stepped out into another desolate cave. Skeletal trees stood on rocky ground, bearing no fruit and only the most occasional leaf, looking like carcasses dotting the landscape. As we followed Hades’s lead, though, moss and lichen started to cover some of the rocks. Then grass. Then, slowly, flowers started to appear within the grass. Teeny, tiny white flowers, sometimes interspersed with purple. Just like above ground. The light in the tunnels had changed too. Though I couldn’t spot the source, weak sunlight seemed to sift down from above.
And then…and then we reached them—the Elysian Fields. The diamond gates gave it away. A hundred million facets glittered in the sunlight that had grown progressively stronger. It should have been gaudy, like a Miss America crown. Instead it was…Heaven. Or one incarnation of it, anyway. Because beyond the gates the sunlight shined, butterflies chased each other, the whole world was in bloom. The peace and beauty of the place called out from beyond the gates, beckoning, making promises I was pretty sure it could keep. I
wanted
with an ache that was almost physical.
“Tori?” Apollo asked.
“Why would anyone ever leave?” I gasped, awed.
“Maybe you should wait here,” he said gently.
That swung my startled gaze toward him. “
Like hell!
” I answered, catching the irony only as the words left my mouth.
“Fine, but don’t eat or drink anything. And for gods’ sake, don’t fall for Theseus’s sloe-eyed look,” Apollo warned.