Loki gestured to the others to go ahead and hung back a moment before following. “This used to the city’s main graveyard. Back when there was no city. Back before everything. Actually,” he clarified, rounding the southwest corner of the building, “we’re walking across what once was Potter’s Field, where the indigent were buried, a hundred or so years ago.”
“This used to be a graveyard?” Ava glanced behind them. “Actually, now that you mention it, something about this place does feel weird.”
“It was a long time ago. When we first came over from Europe, we moved westward, and this seemed as likely a place as any to settle, when it was still a small town. A few years in, Odin erected a back door here, an escape hatch of sorts, in case we ever needed it. With the Dagda’s permission, of course.”
“There’s a door here, leading to the Tuatha de Danann’s world?” Ava shook her head, looking around, as if trying to see if anything had changed. “It’s the air,” she murmured. “It feels thicker here. Heavier, somehow. As if we’ve been submerged. Can’t you hear it, like everything’s gone quiet?”
“Yes, we’re getting close. Once we’re through the Tuatha doorway, that will lead us to the Underworld.”
The trees cast shadows across the steps when they rounded the white marble building, following the scent of Mir’s cigarette smoke, heading for the raised dais of the Lincoln Monument, the open sweep of steps crowned by a solitary, blackened statue.
“Why here?” Ava asked.
“Because in places like these the veil is already thin, so it’s easier to create a portal between worlds. Besides, this area has always remained fairly isolated, which will work to our benefit tonight.”
Loki cut to the right, stepping off the concrete into the grass then under the trees. Mir and Vali stood waiting. “Tyr’s already gone ahead. Scouting it out.” Mir nodded to Ava. “You sure about this?”
“Jeez, is this the theme of the night? I’m going.” Frustration thrummed through every single word.
Mir held his hands out in defense. “Suit yourself.” He stepped toward the trees, where the faintest glimmer of what looked like moonlight seemed to hang in the shadows. One pace. Two. And disappeared.
“I fucking hate this, you know that? This had better not be anything like last time,” Vali muttered before following him, quickly poofing into nothingness.
Fen repeated the disappearing act, leaving only Loki and Ava. “Should I stick my hand through first?” she asked, stepping closer, eyes wide as she took in the shimmering wall that appeared in front of them. “Would that make this easier? Like testing the water or something?”
“It’s going to either kill you completely or not at all,” Loki tried to look encouraging. “And there’s no way to know for sure except to go through. Magic is a weird, unpredictable thing. Its rules are not always known to us, not even to those of us who think we make the rules.” He watched her curl her fingers back against her palm, doubt on her face as she took in the shimmering doorway.
“What I can tell you is this. You have already been through this door. You have survived this realm. And you returned stronger than when you went in. Fear is a weakness, Ava, don’t give it power over you.” He gazed at the door. “Besides, think about how you can gloat once you bring her back. You’ll be even and she won’t be able to hold anything over your head.”
When Ava stepped through, the smile on her face was blinding.
The doorway left a sticky sort of residue all over her, as if glue had dried in her hair and on her face, and she couldn’t quite get it out. But she was through and alive and ready to kick some ass. And now she was here, she definitely felt a firm, definite tug from the dark writhing thing inside her. The urge was stronger here, dragging her onward. Toward something.
Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off the newcomer talking to Tyr. He was devastatingly beautiful. His eyes were a rich golden brown, with elegantly pointed ears below a gold and silver woven band, his golden brown hair pulled back into a long braid down his back. As if he were made purely of light, he shimmered.
“That’s the Dagda,” Fen whispered in her ear. “They say you shouldn’t look at a Fae male for too long or you’ll go blind. They’re pretty damn shiny.” When she turned to stare after him, he winked and strode away, motioning her to follow.
As they walked, there was a muffled discussion about weapons. Of Mir’s magic. Loki’s fire. Tyr and the golden Dagda kept their heads together most of the time. Loki posed a question here and there, but she felt he was mostly being polite. She was only half listening anyway, so focused on this nagging, infernal pull, so urgent it threatened to yank her off the path they followed.
Then the world turned foggy, the air around her molasses-like and thick. Her feet slowed, dragged down by something she could not see. She halted in front of another shimmering doorway, sensing the gaping maw was just on the other side.
“This is where I leave you.” The Dagda’s voice was layered harmonics, each word an orchestra of melody. He turned to Fenrir. “Remember your oath, wolf. You have until daybreak to leave our lands.” And like that, he simply vanished.
Ava’s breathing turned shallow. Tyr, Mir, and Vali strode ahead and vanished as well. Loki took her arm, pulled her, and like before, she felt that infernal drag against herself and then she emerged into a dim, bleak landscape. Fen popped out right next to her. On this side, the coiling, dreadful tug inside of her turned into something truly agonizing as her breathing shallowed out.
“How are you feeling over there?” Mir’s carefully worded question brought her head around. “You need to keep it together. Long enough for all of us to get in there, find your sister, isolate Hel.” His words seemed to stall for a moment. “My best guess is, Morgane’ll be in bad shape. You’ll have to keep it together,” he repeated, his brow furrowing.
“We all need to keep it together,” Ava warned. The scent of brimstone heavy with sulfur leeched through to her senses. Its familiar tang offered a gruesome reminder of the years she’d spent here. “You forget, Mir, I was imprisoned in this place. For a long, long time. So before you shake your finger in my face and treat me like a child, let me remind you, everything Morgane is going through? I’ve endured before.”
A flash of something that might have been respect shone in his steel-blue eyes.
“Still. Control yourself. Until we find her. Then you can burn the place to the fucking ground, and that bitch along with it, I don’t care. But we get Morgane out first. Understand?”
Ava bristled but agreed, her breathing steady. “Will do.”
The walk to the back entrance to the Underworld was a dark blur of rock and shadows growing steadily colder with every step. Once they passed through, a few demons fell beneath Tyr’s sword, his lazy, almost halfhearted swings felling them like cordwood. As if this were a game. As if there weren’t a million more where these came from. Loki stalked out in front, every inch the avenging male. They pushed along, faster and faster as he set the pace, until Ava’s feet were tripping over the jagged rock, trying to keep up, the odor of the place encrusting the inside of her nose.
Charred flesh and screaming.
That’s what the stench would always remind her of. Of the few times she’d slept up there in the real world, the smell leached back into her consciousness and roused some sort of waking nightmare, so real she swore she still lay curled on wet, cold stone. Only to wake up in a soft bed overlooking the city.
Gooseflesh rose all over her.
Willing her feet to move faster, she caught up with the rest of them as they emerged onto a shallow ledge, overlooking an open plain where far below, a raging black river tore at the banks, a shiny gold bridge spanning it like a gossamer thread.
“We aren’t going in that way. We don’t have anything to offer Modgud, and I don’t want to give my daughter a heads up.” Loki gestured to a honeycomb of black holes down along the bottom edge of the ridge, right below their position. “There, we go in through ther
e.”
“Are you crazy? Do you even know what those are?” Tyr surveyed the ruined shadowy landscape.
“I know exactly what they are. I was hoping you didn’t.” Loki had a definite curl to his lip as he scanned the side of the mountain, settling his unfaltering gaze on one spot in particular.
“We can’t get through there,” Tyr said, “and live. We go across the bridge. It’s got to be the bridge.”
“We go in through those burrows, right there,” Loki insisted gravely, nodding to the spot he’d picked. “No one will see us, Hel won’t even know we’re here. And we emerge straight up into the dungeons. Exactly where we need to be. It’s the easiest way and the quickest.”
“We won’t make it ten feet.”
“What are those holes?” Fen asked, his nose twitching, chancing the air blowing past them, foul and damp.
“The entrances to the underground hive for the Grim. Those are their little nest-holes, and they run the span of this valley from the base of the mountain all the way down into the dungeons, cutting beneath Hel’s great hall. A straight shot, if we pick the right one, and she’ll never even know we’re here.”
Fen turned a curious eye to his father. “Gods, you must have a death wish. Those holes must be packed tight with the bastards from end to end. What’s your plan?”
Loki nodded toward Ava. “Her.”
“Wait, what do you mean, me?”
When Tyr, Vali, and Mir looked at Ava as if they were all in agreement, she raised her palms. “I don’t know what you’re planning, but I can assure you, I’m not going in there. Not if those holes are dark. I don’t like the dark, and I don’t like tight places, and I sure as hell don’t like demons. So forget it.”
“Do you want to save your sister?”
Of course she did.
“Then get on board with the plan, Ava,” Mir said neutrally, slipping down along the edge of the cavern toward a set of stone steps leading to the floor of the valley below. “Do what we tell you and this will work.”
“Are you positive this is the only way?” Twenty minutes later, she had to ask again, just to be sure. The holes were huge, now that they were this close, the ceiling looming thirty feet overhead.
The smell wafting out was horrifying. Another step, Ava thought, and it would suffocate her. As if the whole world was rotting underneath of them, and this was the only place the stench could escape. Even now, the skittering of claws drifted out of the darkness to meet them, adding another layer of horror over the smell, the yawning endless sprawl of the space spiraling down before them. Ava turned to Loki, “Because…”
“They will think you’re one of them, Ava.” Loki paused, determination glinting in his blue eyes. “Only because of the darkness that’s inside you. Because of that, they’ll allow us safe passage.”
“No.” It was one thing to know you’re going to your death for a noble cause. It was entirely another to be used as a tool because the enemy thought you were one of theirs. “No,” Ava said again, horrified. “There’s no way I can go in there.”
“This will work,” Loki assured her, Fen already beginning to shift into the wolf, his handsome face turning lupine, his canines lengthening to an enormous length.
“It’s not that,” she explained, her voice becoming increasingly shrill, nigh hysterical. “It’s that you think…all of you know those…things will believe I’m one of them.”
Loki grabbed her by the arms and gave her a shake. “You are not one of them. The darkness inside you, once we’re hidden in the dark, will make them think we’re them, and we’ll be able to get through. It’s either that or we fight our way through a sea of them, across the valley, across the bridge, then into the hall. There are six of us. How far do you think we’ll get?
“Hel has the entire dungeon spelled against intruders. There is no other way inside. Except the demons’ entrances. You can do this, it will work.”
His reasonable, calm voice forced her to reevaluate.
She was being a pissy, hysterical little bitch.
She tucked her hands underneath her arms, surveying the hole. “Are you sure? Because once we get in there, once we get past the opening, I have a feeling…” Skittering emanated from the dark.
“I swear.” Loki’s eyes gleamed. Behind her, she felt the mass of Fenrir looming. Tyr and Vali’s swords. Mir’s knowledge. They couldn’t all be wrong, right?
Taking a deep breath, she plunged into the opening and heard the claws skitter away.
Another step and the dim, barely there light receded until darkness completely enveloped her, the sound of claws moving away. One more step, and again, the claws retreated. She felt, rather than heard, all of the loosed, relieved breaths behind her. And her hands tightened into fists.
“You’re all bunch of pathetic liars, do you know that?” she muttered, walking faster as demons scrambled to get out of her way.
37
Morgane was surprised she was not dead.
More accurately, she was surprised she was not still dead.
Because this last time…
This last time had lasted a very long time. An endless, suffocating darkness she hadn’t been sure she would escape. She almost felt the grasping of something pulling her down, down, down.
Yet here she was. And on the floor instead of overhead, suspended from those chains hanging from the ceiling. Cold, hurting, hungry. But very much alive, once again. Not like her mother. Hel had killed her mother.
No, she’d done worse than that. She’d rendered her truly nonexistent. Morgane idly picked at the scab covering one of her wrists until it bled, remembering the look in Gwen Burke’s eyes as she’d died. Bright red blood bubbled up, shiny and horrifically bright against her gray skin, the scarlet brilliant and beautiful against the dirty-black of the stone and dried gore coating every inch of this place.
It was a relief to discover she still bled. She still hurt. That her bones ached and her head pounded and her stomach felt carved out. Anything else would have worried her. Anything else might have…
“Well, well, well. Look at you. A bit worse for wear, although I must admit, I’m relieved to see you breathing.”
Such savagery contained in that lovely, slim body. Watching the way it glinted from Hel’s obsidian eyes, it occurred to Morgane she would not be so lucky to escape this time.
Not that escape was foremost on her mind. Survival was. And if she succeeded at that? Then, maybe, discover why she was a pawn in this much bigger game. Before the end.
“You have a bit of grit to you, I’ll give you that,” Hel continued, tapping a manicured fingernail against the bars. The hollow sound pierced the dull pounding in Morgane’s head. “It won’t matter though. Everyone breaks down here. Everyone. Balder.” She paused. “Your sister.” A note of satisfaction snaked through Hel’s voice as she went on. “It took me months, years to break that one. I tried sooo many things. Had to get creative. Rather bloody, in the end.”
Morgane stopped watching her own blood, though it was snaking down to her fingers. Instead, Hel’s words seemed to take on a life of their own, each one containing an image of Ava, her face outlined in pain.
“The floor you’re squatting on right now is caked in her blood, as a matter of fact. Rivers of it I spilled.” Morgane tried to tune the words out, tried to ignore them, but they wormed their way into her brain. “However…in the end, she broke. Her body, first. Then her soul. As I knew she would. And that was that.”
Morgane curled up her toes, away from the dried gore covering the floor, away from the sheen it left behind. So thick the stones seemed buried beneath it. And she knew only one thing would happen down in this hideous place. Only one outcome was possible.
Death.
The barest ember kindled inside her. Not hope, nothing so futile as that. But defiance. Hel had killed her mother, burned her soul into oblivion. She had hurt Ava. That ember flickered into a steady flame of fury.
Morgane would not allow Hel to
erase her. She meant to survive. If only long enough to see Hel pay. Her mother…her mother had ordered her to live. Ordered it, with her very last, dying breath. But her mouth wouldn’t make words, and her body was almost done for.
Staring back down at her wrist, at the band of caked blood, at the wounds cutting in some places almost to the bone, Morgane traced the cut tendons, the broken flesh, celebrating every vibration of pain echoing through her. Alive. She was still alive. And alive meant she had a chance.
“Nothing to say? Not a single word? No pithy comebacks? No smart ass remarks? If I knew I could shut you up this easily, I would have hung you from the ceiling at the start.” A small, cool smile curved her perfect face. “Perhaps burned your mother to ash first. But another round…would destroy you, I’m afraid. As I destroyed your sister.”
The words rattled around in Morgane’s brain, as a hazy image formed of Ava, draped from the ceiling above.
After another long minute, the goddess snapped, “Fine. Rot down here for a few more hours then I’ll be back. I’ve got plans to finalize. The sort that will ensure I’ll never be stuck down here in the dark again. Pretty soon, girl, your world will be all mine. And those gods of yours? They’ll be my slaves. Or worse.”
Morgane kept her mouth shut until, finally, Hel spun on her heel and left. Whatever these plans were, Morgane would bet her eternal soul they had everything to do with why she was down here.
And who had the power to make the immortal gods slaves?
She was not going to die.
Not before she figured out why she was here and what Hel wanted her for.
Lifting her eyes to the chains dangling from the ceiling, she wondered how many nights Ava had sat right here, hoping the very same thing?
38
Ava was overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the tunnel. The stench burned her eyes, her nose, wormed its way into her senses until Ava knew she would smell it and taste it every time she closed her eyes. Bile rose in the back of her throat, and she swallowed it down as she had a hundred times before.
The Banished Gods Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 21
