“So what about the times where I do speak first?” I wondered aloud.
“People are often disturbed by this habit of mine, so I try to keep myself in their time stream as often as I can,” she replied. “But I am scouting ahead to make sure that we aren’t running into trouble, and I cannot help what I overhear when I return.”
“Ugh…” I muttered. “Time travel makes my brain hurt.”
Renata turned to me then.
“It is not time travel, it is two realms moving at different speeds through the universe and occasionally touching. Time travel is—”
“If you’re going to tell me time travel isn’t possible I am going to laugh in your face,” I said, before she could finish.
The petite young woman—I had rather resolutely decided that no matter how young she looked, someone who had killed as many people as she had couldn’t be considered a child—stared at me with blue eyes that reminded me far too clearly of her dad, and a shiver went down my spine despite my best efforts to look resolute.
“You sound awfully certain for someone who is so new to this world of magic,” she said, in a tone that suggested I was insane.
“I may have only just joined this world where dark matter can bend reality, but… let’s just say, I’ve been getting a crash course in what’s possible.”
Renata considered me for a moment, walking backwards down the trail as she did so, and causing me no small amount of angst as I worried that she’d take a step too far to either side and go tumbling down the side of the mountain.
Then she simply turned on her heel and continued on in silence.
Caw, said Az.
“Caw indeed,” I mumbled.
~~~
By the time we reached the citadel my dislike of this realm had gone from mild to emphatic. Aside from the harpies that had tried to kill us right after we’d stepped through the seam to get here, the changing landscape that seemed custom designed to slow us on our journey, and the fact that Az and I couldn’t access any of our powers, the city itself had slowly resolved into precisely what it had appeared to be from afar.
It was a life-sized Duplo construction designed and executed by a toddler. Only it wasn’t the vivid primary colors that a Duplo set boasted, but rather a combination of concrete and plastic blocks in a dull series of greys and tans that gave the impression of a sepia photograph of soviet Russia.
Consequently, I wasn’t even surprised when, as we tiredly stumbled our way up to a tall grey wall topped with medieval looking spikes that had no business in a Duplo set, a horde of harpy guards descended from atop the wall, rushed us with spears, and informed us that we were to be taken straight to Hel.
“AH, YES. WELCOME back, Renata, darling. You’ve done well.”
I glared around the massive hall that we’d just been prodded into. Harpy spears, as I’d learned on my first day in this shitty realm, were quite sharp, and I cannot tell you how little I appreciated being jabbed at with them for the entire three kilometer long walk that stood between the wall where we’d been apprehended and the hall that housed the ruler of the Realm of the Dead.
So, while I normally might have been quite impressed with the vaulted ceiling that crowned a chamber that had been studiously transformed from concrete block (which it had clearly been on the outside) to cavern-like structure of hedonistic pleasure, I was decidedly not in the mood by the time we got there.
There were steaming pools in every direction I looked, all filled with naked people of every variety. The diversity of bodies on display (in terms of size, shape, skin and fur colors, numbers of horns, eyes, and extra limbs) was equal to that of the crowded streets of Unterberg. Here, however, there was decidedly less clothing involved in the equation, and quite a bit more steam. The misty pools of naked people were spread evenly about the room/cavern/whatever this was, but terraces gradually raised the elevation a half meter at a time until the whole thing plateaued at a terrace covered in a series of boulders shaped into a throne. Atop the throne sat a scantily clad blue-skinned woman with eight arms.
“I thought you hailed from Norse mythology,” I said aloud, before I could think better of it. We had been dragged before the eight-armed figure, on the next terrace down, and forced to our knees by the harpies who had wrangled us this whole way, and my tendency to fight emotional overload with snide commentary seemed to be as strong as ever.
I was pissed about a few things, not least of which was that it sounded like Renata had been working with this blue-skinned deity to bring us here, and when I’m angry, I get surly. You may have noticed.
“Tsk, tsk, Victoria, I’d been led to believe you were intelligent,” replied Hel.
The silence that followed was clearly meant to give me time to piece together all that was wrong with my assumptions, so I stared at the goddess for a minute before shrugging.
“My Hindu pantheon is pretty limited, sorry.”
In reply, the blue figure stuck out her tongue, long and red with blood, and then she shifted to a form that was similar to the first but entirely black instead of blue, and added quite a few more heads and arms than I could count in the few seconds she held it. Then she shifted back to blue, with four arms. Which was when my world religions class from sophomore year poked my brain a few times, and it finally clicked.
“Oooh! Kali! Nice. I guess that makes sense. I’m not super familiar with the mythology, but there’s something in there about the realm of the dead, isn’t there? So you and Hel…” my voice trailed off as the deity shifted to a tall, lithe, fair-haired, blue-eyed white lady.
“I am Hel, and many others besides,” she said, filling the silence that I’d left, and indeed, filling the cavern with the resonance of her voice.
“Cool. Well, whatever you wanna call yourself is fine by me, but I am mainly concerned with getting the Hell out of here (pun intended), so if you could just give me my powers back…”
The woman laughed and shifted back to the blue-skinned, four-armed version of herself, and I blinked hard to keep the dizziness at bay. It was kind of like looking at Azrael when I couldn’t get one form to hold, but there must have been something else about Hel’s power that made my head spin, because she was only taking one form at a time.
“You are in my realm now, Victoria, and you will do as I require,” she said, placing one set of hands on her hips and crossing the other set in front of her chest.
“Look, I appreciate that this is your place, and I really appreciate the hospitality of a few dozen harpies trying to kill me the moment I arrived, but I’m going to have to pass on whatever else you’re offering.”
I held the deity’s gaze, even though her eyes were difficult to focus on, and I knew I was pushing my luck a lot farther than was wise. What can I tell you, my fear response is sass.
“No one leaves this realm without my consent, and none may use power save at my discretion,” she hissed. “Everyone completes a task for me. Renata here retrieved you and brought you to my doorstep, as she was bid.”
She gestured towards the ball of grey mist that obscured Renata, now quite a bit thicker than I had ever seen it, almost thick enough to block out Azrael’s giant crow form standing behind her, but I still managed to make out that Renata’s hands were no longer bound. The thought that Renata might have set us up angered me, but right now it was taking a back seat to a hundred other rage inducing thoughts, so I quickly turned back to the four-armed woman in front of me.
“Look, I appreciate that you enjoy a good power trip. Totally understandable, especially if you live forever and get bored easily, but if I don’t get back to my own realm as soon as possible, there may not be much of this realm or any other left, and I don’t have time to—”
“You will do as you are told, or suffer the consequences!”
And with that, all four of Hel’s hands snapped their fingers and two people were suddenly standing beside her that I’d never expected to see again. I recognized them even from afar, even with clouds of ste
am wafting between us. I would recognize them anywhere.
“Vic?” asked my mother.
“Vic?” echoed my dad.
“MOM?” I ASKED, my legs buckling beneath me as I looked from her to the man she was clinging to as if her own legs could barely hold her. “Dad?”
My world tunneled down to enclose only the two of them, the rest of the cavern’s steaming pools and dark architecture fading from view, the smell of warm bodies and wet rocks dissolving as well.
My voice was barely a whisper now, but it echoed through the rocky chambers and I knew that they’d both heard me call them. My parents and I both lunged towards each other at the same time, but the harpies holding me pulled my rope-bound wrists backwards and I sank back to my knees even while Hel made a mere gesture that held my parents by some invisible force.
“What are my parents doing here? Why did you take them?” I growled, turning back to Hel.
“They came to me of their own volition, I assure you,” Hel said, her smile curling into something almost feline, and in no way amiable. “They met the criteria, so they were permitted entry. What better place to hide, after all, than the Realm of the Dead?”
It felt like being stabbed, seeing my parents so close, yet completely out of reach, and hearing that they’d left me voluntarily. I looked at both my parents and saw the truth there. The flash of guilt in my Mom’s eyes, the sadness in my dad’s. Hel wasn’t lying. They had come here of their own accord.
“Now,” continued Hel, that same smile still curling the corner of her blue lips. “Everyone who comes to my realm must pay the price of admittance. You and your crow both meet the criteria, but that is not enough. You must complete a quest of my choosing, and then we will discuss the return of your powers, and the possibility of your being permitted to leave this place.”
I still don’t know if it was the surprise of seeing my parents alive, the torment of having them so close and yet not being able to hug them, ask if they were ok, and take them home, or just the blind rage at how fucking unfair everything had been for so long, but something inside of me simply snapped.
“No.”
I said it quietly, but in that moment it might as well have been a scream.
“No?” asked Hel, the predatory smile falling from her lips. “What do you mean no? Do you realize what I could do to you?”
And as she asked, fire leapt to life all around me, scorching my skin and hair, and beginning to burn the rope that bound my wrists. It was hot, painfully so, but I was beyond caring. I just glared, and let the rage consume me in even greater measure than the fire.
“I don’t care what you do to me,” I said, realizing the words were true only as I spoke them. It wasn’t that I wanted to die, far from it, it was just that I was so consumed with rage that I wanted to destroy everything, and didn’t care if I took myself down with the ship. “I have been doing my damnedest, for weeks, to save Earth, the people I love, and the rest of the universe from a lunatic, and I do not have time for your bullshit quests. I do not have time for your weird ego trip, for your power hungry kleptomania, for whatever bullshit made my parents run to you, or whatever you want to threaten to do to them to try to gain my compliance.”
I took a deep breath, ignored the heat that singed my nose hair, and got ready to speak again. It was like I’d broken a dam inside me and now nothing could stop it but getting the rage out. And there was… just so damned much of it. Who knows, a few weeks ago I’d probably have kept it all to myself and just played along. I’d certainly let everyone else tell me what was what ever since I’d learned that the world didn’t work the way I thought it did. This rage in me had been building up ever since my parents had “died,” and even more since I’d learned the truth about Trev, my powers, and everything else, but I doubt I would have let it loose like this—on someone who could probably destroy me with the snap of her fingers, no less—if I hadn’t spent the past five days remembering that there were a few things in the universe that I did understand. A few things I’d worked hard to become competent at, and damn it all, I’d just led an injured raven the size of a small car through a canyon as big as the largest on Earth, and then between two mountains big enough to sit comfortably in the Rockies. I’d dealt with more shit than was reasonable already, and I was fucking bone tired of being told what to do by mystical people who called themselves gods, whether they were on my side or not.
“My parents fucking lied to me for ten years and then disappeared without me to save their own skins. I don’t fucking care if you set them on fire right now. I’ve believed them dead for most of a year now, it won’t be that much more crushing to see them actually dead. I have been tested, again and again, over the past few weeks, playing by a set of rules I’ve never been told, with a hand I can’t even stop to look at, and I have no fucking clue who you are or why you think you have a right to anyone else’s dark matter just because they wind up in your realm. But I will fucking tell you this right now, if you try to make me go on another fucking quest I will fight you with every Gwendamned thing that I am, and I don’t care if it destroys me, your entire realm, and my parents too. There will be no quest. I have saved the world twice in the past week and I need to get home so I can do it again. And if that’s not enough for you, then you deserve to go up in flames with the rest of the universe when Rebecca Dryer implodes it all in her misguided attempt to bring the non-magical world to heel.”
Then I sat down on the ground, cross legged, in the ring of fire that was licking violently at my entire body and added, “and I will sit here and slowly burn to death until you make up your mind about how you feel about that, and everyone else can just fuck right off.”
I WASN’T BLUFFING, exactly. I was so damned angry in that precise moment that I really didn’t care if the whole world burned, and by the time I was done talking, the rage inside of me was burning so hot that I barely felt the ring of flames that licked at me as I collapsed into a lotus position on the floor of the cavern. I was even numb to the cry my mother let out when I sank down into the flames. In fact, hearing my mother’s despair only fueled my rage. If she was so damned concerned for my well-being, why had she abandoned me, abandoned Trevor, left everything behind and just disappeared? What the hell were my parents playing at? They’d been dead to me for months, and now they were back and I was supposed to care enough about them to abandon the people back on Earth who had NEVER LEFT ME BEHIND just to save them?
Fuck that.
Fuck all of this.
“You are foolish, human, if you think your tantrum sways me at all,” said Hel, although the flames surrounding me died away as she said it, so I wasn’t sure how much truth was behind those words.
But then the same ring of fire enveloped my parents, and it took every shred of self-control I had not to launch myself at the blue-skinned goddess holding them hostage.
“If your own wellbeing doesn’t convince you that your will is mine, then perhaps you need some external motivators.”
I was still angry with my parents. Furious, really, even though part of me thought that might not be the most fair response to everything they’d likely gone through. But I pushed thoughts like that aside, focused on the rage instead, and stilled the part of me that was begging to be unleashed in some heroic attempt to save them. An attempt that would probably get me killed, or at the very least leave me stuck completing some stupid, arbitrary, waste of time, just to appease the whim of a goddess who got her jollies by stealing power and making people do things.
I didn’t have time for that kind of bullshit.
So, I focused on my anger and ignored the part of me that still wanted to run to my parents’ arms, or tear off the extra arms of the woman who was using them as bait.
I sighed and stood up again, not easy from a lotus position while my hands were bound, but I was still so angry I barely noticed the effort.
“You don’t get it, do you? There will be nothing left for you to hoard if you don’t let me get back
to my friends. Your existence is as much at stake as mine. The weapon Rebecca Dryer plans to use will take out the entire universe. There will not be any realm that is spared. Anything that can be reached from Earth, or from an Earth-adjacent realm, all of it could be wiped out by a single use of this weapon. I have already wasted precious days scrambling across your ridiculous realm, dodging harpies, traversing canyons, and climbing mountains, but I refuse to waste another minute for your overinflated ego. And, I may be in a book, but damn it, I refuse, flat-out re-fucking-fuse to go on a side quest just because you have a hard on for pushing people around. If this damned author needs more words or something, they can fucking well figure out a plot twist that works, instead of sending me on a random adventure for no reason.”
I took a deep breath and reminded myself that throwing insults around wasn’t likely to get me anywhere. Egomaniacal tyrants didn’t enjoy being insulted any more than most people did, probably quite a bit less, actually. Besides which, I probably wasn’t convincing anyone of my sanity with the whole book rant. I tried changing tacks.
“I mean, look, it’s not like I even know what the fuck I’m doing, really, when it comes to this whole saving the world business, but I just learned something that the folks on Earth really need to know if we’re going to stop the madwoman with the evil plan, and I’ve already wasted…”
My voice trailed off as an idea struck me. Silence followed, probably because I sounded batshit nuts, not that I cared.
“Hel… How exactly is it that you take people’s power here?”
Hel glared at me as if the question were incredibly rude.
“That is not an answer you’ve earned, human, that is—”
“Renata said you can choose who has their powers and who doesn’t? Is that true?”
“No one accesses magic in this realm without my permission,” Hel replied coolly.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 50
