by HP Mallory
Feeling a burst of joy light up within me, I laughed out loud and jumped up and down to the beat of the music, swaying my hips as I held up my fist, using it as a microphone to sing along.
“I’m beautiful!” I said again, and then yelled it a third time. “No, I’m fucking beautiful!” I sang out, enjoying the feel of the word “fuck” as it fell off my tongue.
“That’s right!” Bill’s voice sounded from behind me. I turned to smile at him, feeling only slightly embarrassed that he’d caught me lauding myself so obviously.
Bill, however, barely noticed my embarrassment, if he did at all. He was already too busy doing what looked like the twist while singing: “Who da bomb?” Then he pointed dramatically at me. “You da bomb!” He started doing extremely suggestive pelvic thrusts and singing at the top of his lungs: “I don’t care!” Then he added to the song, mimicking the same melody: “I forgot my wallet on the counter in the kitchen so I couldn’t get us no food, but I don’t care! I love it!” Dancing his way over to the counter, he put his wallet into his pocket before dancing his way back over to me.
Reaching for my hands, he twirled me around a few times until I started to get dizzy. Then, holding my hands up over my head, we both continued to dance terribly. I jumped up and down while Bill did some pathetically strange grinding move, and both of us sang off-key to the music.
“Hello?” I heard Tallis’s loud baritone at the same time that a sharp knock sounded against the wall.
I stopped jumping immediately and felt a wash of hot embarrassment pass through me. Glancing over, I realized Bill had left the door open. Now, the bladesmith stood in the doorway, staring at both of us with an expression of amusement and surprise in his beautiful midnight gaze.
“T … Tallis?” I asked, being caught totally unawares and not really knowing what else to say. I hadn’t heard from Tallis since we’d left him at his cabin in the Haunted Wood over two weeks ago. Sherita had traveled with us for the first two days of our voyage through the skeleton-tree forest, before she’d made her exit through a portal in one of the clearings. She’d returned back to Washington DC with the soul Tallis had retrieved. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole Tallis-willingly-allowing-Sherita-to-take-the-soul thing but figuring the credit wasn’t mine to collect anyway, I chalked the whole thing up to a learning experience.
As to Tallis, I’d expected to receive a letter from him, itemizing the expenses I owed him (I had, after all, given him my address), but I definitely never thought he’d make a personal appearance.
“Ah hope Ah’m nae interrupting,” he continued, glancing around the apartment with interest. He nodded a few times, as if he approved of the place.
My voice totally failed me because seeing Tallis Black standing in the doorway of my apartment, dressed in dark blue jeans and a dark black sweater, was the last thing I anticipated. Aside from his immense height and the scar that bisected his face, he looked … normal. Well, he looked hot, if I wanted to be honest with myself.
“No, no, you’re not interrupting,” I said as I walked across the room and straight into a box, the corner of which imprinted itself into my knee. I wasn’t sure which was worse—the intense humiliation or the stabbing pain shooting straight up my thigh.
“Smooth, Lil,” Bill said and laughed.
“Are ye okay?” Tallis asked, obviously trying to hide a smile behind his expression of compassion.
“I’m fine,” I answered hastily and turned off the radio before smoothing my hands down the front of my jeans nervously. After trying to discourage myself from thinking about Tallis Black for the last two weeks, I was nothing less than stunned to find him standing on my doorstep. I half wondered if maybe I was just dreaming the whole thing.
Bill started for the door, frowning at Tallis as he asked me, “Is Conan staying for dinner?”
I gave Tallis a questioning expression, answering, “Um, I don’t know?” Then the reason why Tallis had come in the first place suddenly occurred to me and I felt stupid for imagining it might have been anything else. “Oh, you came to collect the money I owe you.” I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my tone.
But Tallis shook his head. “Nae.” He quickly glanced at Bill before returning his attention to me. “If ye dinnae mind, Ah would like ta join ye for supper.”
“Um, yeah, sure,” I stammered, unable to hide my smile. “I mean, under the circumstances, it’s the least we can do.”
“What the fuck you wanna eat?” Bill grumbled, addressing Tallis with raised brows as if to infer he had places to go and food to order.
“Whatever the lass is havin’.”
“Whatevs,” Bill said as he started for the door. Then, thinking better of it, he leaned back in as he said to me, “Lil, cover your virgin ears.”
“What?” I asked with a frown. But his attention was already on Tallis.
“Just ’cause I’m playin’ errand boy, don’t think you’re gonna have Conan’s sexfest 2013 with nerdlet, namsay?”
Tallis shook his head, chuckling. “Aye, naamsay.”
“No, dude,” Bill said, shaking his head in dramatic exasperation. “You don’t say ‘namsay’ ta me. You say, ‘Yeah, I,’ meaning you, ‘namsay.’ Otherwise, it’s like you just said: Yeah, know what I’m saying?” He nodded and immediately shook his head. “Yeah, no. See? Dude, that makes like zero sense!”
“Bill,” I warned him, getting annoyed at his long-winded explanation that was more confusing than it was enlightening. Then I turned my attention to Tallis. “Um, can I ask why you’re here now?”
Tallis just shrugged like the answer should be obvious. “Did ye forget yer trainin’?”
“Training?” I repeated, clearly at a loss.
Tallis nodded, offering me a boyish smile. “Och aye, ye said yerself ye werenae fit ta travel inta the Oonderground.” Then he paused, his eyebrows raised. “How were ye plannin’ on preparin’ for the next time?”
I shook my head since I had no answer.
“Good thing Ah was thinkin’ aboot it for ye,” he finished with a little chuckle.
“Hey, Conan,” Bill started, his eyebrows meeting in the middle of his forehead as if he were in deep, meditative thought. “About our next trip to the Underground, I was thinkin’ …”
Tallis eyed me quickly with a drawn brow before facing Bill again with an entertained grin. “Aye?”
“There’re a few items we’re gonna need before we willingly go back down ta that shithole.”
“Such as?”
Bill took a deep breath and then flicked up his chubby index finger. “First, we need at least a week’s worth of frozen burritos, so we don’t have ta eat anymore o’ that nasty ass shit you catch. Second …” And his middle finger joined his index finger. “I can’t deal with all that walking and materializing so much; makes me a tired SOB, so I’m gonna need some sort of motorized wheelchair like a Rascal—something with like, four-wheel drive though, so it can handle that scary ass forest. Third … we need Ipods, dude! Then we can rock out and avoid boregasms …” His voice trailed off as he observed the ceiling, trying to remember the rest of his list. “Oh, yeah, I could also seriously use a Conan translator, ’cause half the time, I can’t understand a fucking word you say. And the Conan translator needs ta be a super hot chick. I ain’t picky about age but she’s gotta be a freeboober …”
“A what?” I asked.
“No over the shoulder boulder holder,” Bill informed me before turning his attention back to Tallis. “Speaking ah hot ladies, the last thing I could seriously use is the phone number of that naughty little Sherita number.”
“Naughty?” I asked, frowning at Bill as I wondered what alternate universe he lived in.
“’Tis all?” Tallis asked, shaking his head with a raised brow expression and a healthy smile.
“Yeah, for now, give me a little more time, and I’m sure I can come up with some other stuff,” Bill finished.
I couldn’t help laughing as I l
ooked first at Bill and then at Tallis. I suddenly felt extremely lucky to call them both my friends. Yes, my relationship with each one was quite odd, at the very least, but of one thing I was sure … I was exceedingly fortunate that Bill and Tallis had entered my life.
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light, I said to myself, remembering Helen Keller’s famous quote.
Yep, Helen, you definitely got that one right.
THE UNDERGROUND CITY
Book 2 of the
Lily Harper series
by
H.P. Mallory
This book is dedicated to the memory of one of my dearest friends,
Anastasia Hahalis.
Anastasia, your gentle smile, your contagious laugh, your magnanimity and your sympathetic nature will never be forgotten. To have known you was a gift in and of itself. The joy and love with which you enriched our lives will continue living in those of us who were lucky enough to have called you our friend.
Sleep well, my beautiful friend.
Music, When Soft Voices Die
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
The Underground City
“New torments I behold, and new tormented around me, whichsoever way I move, and whichsoever way I turn, and gaze.”
– Dante’s Inferno
ONE
It took me a moment or two before I could accept that Tallis Black was standing in my living room. Tallis, who was a two-thousand-year-old Celtic Druid, didn’t belong in my house, or, for that matter, in the city of Edinburgh at all. No, he should have been in the depths of the haunted forest, where I’d first met him. Why? Because Tallis wasn’t civilized.
Well, civilized or not, I basically owed Tallis my life. He’d accompanied me on my first mission to the Underground City, a mission that certainly would’ve been my last if not for Tallis’s brawn and brains. I’d been forced to go on the mission in order to retrieve a soul who was mistakenly placed in the Underground City during a Y2K glitch. Although Y2K hadn’t affected the natural order of things here on Earth, it most definitely affected the afterlife. Souls who were meant to go to the Kingdom (think of Heaven) were instead incorrectly routed to the Underground City and vice versa.
As a Retriever employed by Afterlife Enterprises, the government of the hereafter, it was my responsibility to find those lost souls in the Underground and restore them to their proper places. And to say I needed Tallis’s help was pure understatement. As a newly appointed Soul Retriever, I had no training on how to defend myself against the creatures of the Underground. Nope, instead, I was basically tossed into the deep end, which translated, meant I was battling demons. Given my lack of preparation, I was more than sure that Afterlife Enterprises assumed I’d have no chance in hell of surviving the Underground. Well, they’d been wrong. Courtesy of Tallis.
“Okay, yoze, I’m out,” Bill, my short, squatty roommate declared before starting for the front door of our lavish apartment. He gave Tallis one last discouraging glance, making it known to all that Tallis was not to touch me. It didn’t matter that Tallis had never displayed the slightest interest in doing so in the first place. “My belly’s ’bout ta eat itself!” Bill finished as he closed the front door behind him, leaving me alone with Tallis.
Bill was my guardian angel, although I couldn’t really say he was much of a guardian. It was on his watch that I’d been killed in a car accident a few weeks earlier simply because he’d been too busy “getting it on with a chick” (his words). His attention should have been focused on me, while I was driving in the rain, and paying too much attention to my cell phone. Bill was also an alcoholic, now in recovery and, as such, he was required to wear a monitor which equated to a narrow, black band around his wrist. The thing was supposed to alert Afterlife Enterprises if Bill ever strayed from the straight and narrow.
Since Bill was employed by Afterlife Enterprises and I’d died before it was my true time to go, they’d offered me the option of living again. The alternative was spending the next hundred years in a place called Shade, which was a lot like Limbo—a place which offered a whole lot of nothingness. It was sort of like a holding area for souls before they could move on to the Kingdom. In Shade there was nothing to look forward to, although there was also nothing to be frightened of. I imagined it was comparable to taking an open-ended vacation in Lancaster, California. Needless to say, I’d opted to live again. But as with most things in life, or in this case, the afterlife, beware the small print. My choice to live again required that I become a Soul Retriever. My full job description? Enter the bowels of hell and rescue any misplaced souls found there, being very careful, in the process, not to become one, yourself.
Along with my new line of work, I’d also had to choose a new body, seeing as how my old one perished when my soul had. The new body was the one fractionally good thing about this whole cluster f#%*. I went from being an overweight, unattractive, pale, plain redhead to an absolute knockout. While still maintaining my red hair, I now had large, round, green eyes, framed by inky black lashes. My face was a lovely oval with very high cheekbones that led down to a pouty mouth, and ended with lips like Cupid’s bow. And my body? I was five foot eight, with stork-like legs and 34 D boobs, that were surprisingly real even though I was thin. Yes, I had the body that some women would kill for. The kicker of the whole thing, however, was that my body still didn’t feel like it was mine. And I wasn’t sure if it ever would.
The best part about this whole Soul Retriever business was that I was again alive and I was beautiful for the first time ever. The bad part, no, make that, the worst part, was that I couldn’t contact anyone I knew from my previous life. And that was the sticking point because I’d been incredibly close to my mother and best friend, Miranda. Afterlife Enterprises were very strict and clear about making sure that all attachments to former family and friends were broken forever. And I guessed it made sense—I mean, how could I explain the new me to my mom or Miranda? They’d never believe it. In general, I tried to avoid thinking about my mom or Miranda because the end result was an overwhelming sadness that wouldn’t do me any good. Things were how they were. Salman Rushdie got it right when he wrote: When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
“Um, have a seat,” I said to Tallis as I glanced around my apartment, noticing all the moving boxes that littered the floor. Luckily, my dining table had been one of the first pieces of furniture that Bill and I, well, make that I, assembled. We’d recently moved into a townhouse and were still in the process of unloading the furniture I’d ordered using the relocation allowance provided me by Afterlife Enterprises. There were some other benefits to being an employee of Afterlife Enterprises—I had a company-supplied Audi A5, a constantly full bank account, and a plush pad.
“Thank ye, lass,” Tallis answered in his thick Scottish brogue. Taking a seat at my table, he dwarfed both the chair and the table. That was because Tallis was enormous and quite easily the largest man I’d ever seen. Standing at nearly seven feet tall, he was like looking up at an ancient redwood. Well, that is if a tree could have incredibly broad shoulders, bulky pecs and abs that were so defined you could trip over them. Tallis’s face wasn’t half bad either. Although I considered him “rugged,” he was nonetheless handsome. Well, handsome might be too feminine a word to describe him. There was nothing feminine about Tallis at all. “Striking” would probably be more descriptive. His face was comprised of a chiseled, square jaw, a masculine nose, and piercing navy blue eyes. His full lips, in the rare instance that he smiled, parted to reveal very white, very large, but straight teeth. Having
short, black hair and a tan complexion, most women would have considered him a looker except for the scar that ran down one side of his face and bisected his cheek. It started at the tip of his eyebrow and ended at his jawline. His scar only hinted at the hard life he’d led. Some people might have considered it a blemish, but to me, it embodied everything that was Tallis.
“So, going back to my training,” I started, hoping to focus on the task at hand because Tallis had a way of making me anxious. Tallis had just arrived on my doorstep to remind me of my sword training which I’d completely forgotten about. Tallis was, by nature, a bladesmith—someone who forged swords from hot iron. He lived in the Dark Wood, a place that existed in its own plane, somewhere between Earth and the Underground City.
“Aye,” he interrupted, nodding. “Time is wastin,’ lass. Ye require skill an’ knowledge on wieldin’ yer blade.”
“Okay,” I answered, biting my lip, as I glanced around my house. “Um, so are we going to practice here?” I was trying to imagine a place inside my smallish apartment that would lend itself to sword play.
Tallis laughed a deep rumbling sound, which I found very attractive. Then he shook his head. “Nae, lass, there is naethin’ here that would pose a threat to ye that ye would have ta defend yerself from,” he answered. “Nae. We practice in the wood.” He was referring to the forest where he lived. The same one that was rumored to be haunted and alive in its own right. The same one which could swallow up your tracks in the snow simply because it wanted you to lose your way.
“Great,” I said with an unconvincing smile. “One small problem though,” I started as I remembered having to drive all the way to Peterhead, a good two hours from Edinburgh, where Bill and I lived. From there, we’d managed to access the Dark Wood by entering an old shack which conveniently turned out to be a portal into the forest. “Peterhead isn’t exactly close,” I finished, thinking my training would have to be fairly regular in order for me to progress at a decent pace. The last thing I wanted to do was drive to Peterhead repeatedly. I still wasn’t used to driving on the opposite side of the road.
