by E. A. Copen
The Baron sighed and tapped his cane on the ground. “That will only take you part of the way. There are seven doors to the After, Lazarus. You will have to open them all to find what you seek. It’s a task few undertake. Even fewer manage to complete it.” He tilted back his head to look up at the moon. “Seven nights, seven moons, seven doors, seven tombs. This is but the first of many. It is fortunate you should begin your quest on Halloween night. It will be much easier for your friend. Perhaps less so for you.”
“You going to help me?”
He shook his head. “It is forbidden. However, should you reach the seventh gate, I will be there to congratulate you.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
The Baron nodded once, turned, and walked off into the night, the telltale tapping of his cane echoing long after he was out of sight.
Nate came almost right after that. He got out of his car and stopped in front of the door. “Lazarus? Are you okay?” he asked, helping me to my feet.
“I’m about to be a lot less okay than this.”
Nate slid his ID through the lock and pulled open the door. “Come on. Let’s get you warmed up.”
Over coffee, I explained everything, including my need for a safe place to temporarily die.
Nate sighed and stared into his empty cup. “Just once I want someone to come to me when they need a cup of sugar. I’d much prefer that to ‘Hey, Nate. Keep an eye on my dead body while I go running through the underworld. I’ll be right back.’”
“You’d do it for Leah if you could, wouldn’t you?”
He thought about it. “If you have the power to help someone, you should. I can guarantee you a week in cold storage, but that’s it. Any longer and people will start asking questions. And it won’t be pleasant when you wake up.”
“Since when has it ever been fun coming back from the dead?” I handed him my empty cup when he offered to take it.
Ten minutes later, Nate opened an empty drawer in the morgue for me. I eased onto the cold metal shelf.
“Is there anything I should do?” Nate asked. “Someone I should notify?”
I popped the cork on the vial. It smelled like burnt honey. “Don’t tell Leah,” I said and upended the whole bottle into my mouth.
Nate helped me lie down and covered me with a sheet. We waited in silence for a minute for it to kick in. As I lie there on the slab in the morgue, I considered what Loki had said. In some way, what I was doing was helping him, and when I got back, I aimed to find out exactly how. Right after I kissed Emma and Remy both.
It happened slowly. Drowsiness settled in over me like a warm blanket, lulling me to sleep. All the pain of old injuries faded. I closed my eyes as if I were drifting off into the most well-deserved sleep ever. I’m coming for you, Emma. Hold on.
DEATH’S DOOR
Chapter One
Cold enveloped my body, pulling me down into an abyss of emptiness. Wind howled. Distant thunder rolled against the cawing of crows.
I opened my eyes in a dark cave. Roots hung from the ceiling, reaching downward like thin, hungry fingers. Red, rocky ground stretched into a black chasm beneath my feet. Rickety wood crossed the gap. Shreds of spiderwebs and rotten vegetation dripped from the trusses, flapping in the wind.
So this was Helheim, Viking Hell.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I lay down in the morgue and drank dew from the fabled World Tree, but an underground bridge wasn’t at the top of the list. They could’ve at least sent out a welcoming party. It wasn’t like they didn’t know I was coming.
From where I stood atop a massive boulder, the path down to the bridge wasn’t clear. I’d have to climb over sharp rocks in darkness. The only light came from whatever was beneath the bridge, a silver-blue glow the color of moonlight. Behind me, a solid wall barred my path back. Forward was the only way out, though getting out was the least of my concerns. First, I had to find Emma. To do that, I needed to get down those rocks and cross a bridge. No biggie, considering I’d killed plenty of gods to get this far. A bridge was nothing.
Before I took that first step, I flexed my fingers and felt something solid in my right hand. My staff had somehow come with me. I’d been holding it over my chest when I closed my eyes in the morgue, but I hadn’t expected it to materialize in the After. There were plenty of cultures that believed important possessions could follow the soul into the afterlife, but I’d never believed it personally. Until now. I was glad for the staff, though. If I had a staff, I had my magic. At least, I hoped I did.
I sat down on the rock to let my legs dangle over the edge. With a grunt, I dropped to the next rock and steadied myself. I waited for something to happen—for the rocks to crumble under my weight, or some unseen enemy to jump me. That sounded exactly like the kind of trick Loki would play. Send the Pale Horseman to the After in search of his girlfriend’s soul and then let giant mutant honey badgers gnaw off his face.
Nothing happened.
I let out the breath I’d been holding. Girlfriend…I guess that wasn’t right either. Emma and I weren’t technically an item because I’d screwed that up too.
I navigated my path down from the rocks carefully, inching ever closer to the bridge. From up top, it had looked small, no bigger than an overpass. The closer I got, the bigger it became. It stretched so far up that I had to lean back to see the top of the pillars holding it in place. Gods, man. They never do anything halfway.
The noise I had mistaken for thunder grew louder. When I reached the bottom of the rock pile, it was a deafening cacophony of clashing and crashing, metal against metal. I leaned over the edge to investigate the chasm below. The river flowing beneath the bridge wasn’t made of water, but of weapons. Swords, spears, guns, slings, and arrows. Every instrument of war from the exotic to the mundane flowed like water through a boiling blue mist and over a waterfall, moving deeper into the After.
Crows called to me from above as I stepped onto the bridge. It swayed in the wind and under my weight, boards shifting and groaning. Two steps out, the swaying was so bad I had to stop. My stomach lurched, and panic fluttered in my chest. I leaned on the frayed rope to the side. The river of weapons loomed dangerously close.
I forced my eyes closed. “Come on, Lazarus. It’s only a bridge.”
“Who would traverse the way to Hel?” demanded a loud, female voice.
I was wondering when I’d run into a guardian of some kind. I shoved away from the side of the bridge, swallowed the rising bile in my throat, and pressed forward.
At the end of the bridge, I saw her, the biggest, fiercest looking woman I had ever seen. Standing as tall as two and a half men, she wore a dress made of bones. Her helmet was the skull of a dragon. White hair flowed from beneath it. In the darkness, it looked like she had a ghost on her head. A great club as big as a small tree rested against her shoulder.
Her expression remained carefully neutral as she said, “State your name and business here, stranger.”
I stopped and drew myself up to stand straight, despite the swaying bridge. “My name is Lazarus Kerrigan. I’m the Pale Horseman. I’ve come to retrieve the soul of Emma Knight.”
My voice caught as I said the last part, my throat too tight to let the words out properly. I didn’t know if her soul was here, or in some other part of the After, but here had to be my first stop. Emma had known what was going to happen to her, and so she left me the vial of sap as a clue. I had assumed she’d left it to help me get her back, but I didn’t know that for sure. What if she didn’t want to come back with me? What if she couldn’t?
She’d traded her soul to Lucifer Morningstar to keep me from turning into a ghoul. This was the price she’d paid to save me, and it hadn’t seemed like there were any loopholes in her contract.
I pushed the thought away. Emma represented everything that was good and right in the world for me. Without her, I didn’t know how I would continue. Even with Remy, my daughter, waiting for me, going back to a world without Emma would feel em
pty. I needed her with me. To get her back, I’d crawl through a hundred hells and cross a thousand rivers of rushing death.
The giantess nodded and stepped aside. “Welcome to Helvegr, Horseman, the road to Hel. If you seek the gates of Hel, you must go further down and to the north, but I warn you. No living soul may pass through the gates and return.”
I nodded. “Thanks for the tip.”
She stood as a stalwart statue, making no answer.
I shrugged and pressed on.
Beyond the bridge, the path diverged. One fork wove into a narrow canyon, so dark all I could see was the opening. The other flowed straight into a grove of naked thorn bushes. Without the sky to guide me, finding north seemed impossible. I turned back to the giantess and found her back to me. She’d returned to her post guarding the bridge and would be no help.
Let’s see. If I were a Norse god, how would I decorate the path to the land of dishonored dead? I glanced at the canyon. Dark and creepy, the perfect place to get jumped by something evil, but not the road I’d choose to send a bad guy on. I sighed and turned to the thorn bushes.
“Well, at least I’m already dead.” I adjusted my clothes to cover more of me just in case. “It can’t hurt if you’re dead, right?”
I was wrong, oh so very wrong. Thorns like knives ripped open my clothing and tore into my skin, leaving stinging gashes behind. Blood trailed from my wounds, pooling in joints and in my shoes. The dead didn’t bleed, did they? Maybe I wasn’t as dead as I’d hoped.
Being a necromancer had its advantages, even without taking the Pale Horseman mantle into consideration. I could talk to ghosts, shades, and spirits, and I could interact with the land of the dead while still on Earth in a living body. Doing so required me to form a bridge between the realm of the living and the land of the dead—the After—with my magic. Since becoming the Pale Horseman, that bridge had been much easier to craft. On several occasions, I had pushed my physical body into the After, a realm reserved for the incorporeal.
Doing that didn’t come without risks. For one, if I hung out too long in the After, I didn’t think I could come back, not completely. I worried that part of me would be left behind. It also meant I drew spirits to me like a beacon, and not all of them were friendly. While they couldn’t attack my physical body so long as I was anchored on Earth, they could rip apart my psyche, destroying my mind and soul. That’d be a hell of a lot worse than dying.
As I pushed my way through the thorns, I caught myself worrying that the sap had severed my anchor to Earth and this was all just a projection of myself into the After. What if I had gone too far and couldn’t get back? I had a daughter to go back to, a life. Responsibilities that I had just walked away from because the woman I loved was damned to Hell and it was all my fault. She didn’t deserve it, but did Remy deserve to grow up without a father? Did Nate deserve to have to explain the strange body in the morgue to his bosses? I’d said fuck the consequences and just went for it. What if that was the wrong move?
I broke through the thorn bushes and found a huge fence topped in razor wire. It stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. On the other side, a smaller fence, also topped in razor wire formed a narrow walkway. Every so often, a guard tower rose, patrolled by pale-faced ghosts. Beyond the gate squatted a towering brick building. Iron mesh crisscrossed every window.
Son of a bitch. Of course, Hel would be a fucking prison I’d have to break into.
Getting in wasn’t going to be easy. No way I was going to get over all that razor wire. The thorn bushes were one thing, but the way razor wire was designed, I’d either gouge out a cut deep enough to sever an important artery, or I’d bleed to death. The guards in the tower would see me for sure. Going through the gate wasn’t an option. I was bleeding enough to convince me I was still alive in some capacity, and the giantess had said no living thing could pass through the gate and leave again. I had to scale the fence, but how?
I grabbed the fence, just to think. A siren blared. Shit! I let go of the fence, but it was too late. I’d already alerted everyone for miles that I was there. Spotlights danced over the yard, zooming for the gate in search of me. Bloodhounds brayed. Voices rose, shouting orders.
I backed away from the fence. Shit, Lazarus. Think! I could turn and run back into the thorn bushes and maybe wait for the heat to die down, but chances were good the dogs would sniff me out.
Hissing to my left made me turn my head. A figure hunched near the edge of a nearby thorn bush, face hidden by a black cloak. Dark, curly hair spilled from beneath the hood. “Come,” the person croaked. “Come, or they will find you and take you through the gate.”
I cast one more look out over the prison grounds in time to see several fiery dogs racing toward the fence. Hellhounds? “Can you get me inside?”
“Yes, yes!” the figure hissed through their teeth. “Come. There is always a door for Death.”
Go with the stranger or risk being caught by the guardians of Hel. It wasn’t a hard choice. I turned and ran from the prison gates, following the figure.
Chapter Two
Squat plants flew by while the siren screamed. I followed the figure through what seemed like an endless expanse of black desert stretching around the prison. Questions burned, begging to be asked, but I kept them to myself. The more noise we made, the easier it would be for them to track us.
Running from dogs and prison guards took me back to my own incarceration. I’d never tried to make an escape while I was an inmate, but one person I knew tried to scale the fence to retrieve a football full of contraband. His buddy on the outside tossed it over the fence, and he went for it. They never even shouted a warning. They just shot him in the leg. He dropped like dead weight. There was enough blood everyone in the yard thought he wouldn’t make it. He did, the tough old bastard. Never learned his real name because after that everyone knew him as Gimp.
But I thought about it. I used to dream about it. Every day in the yard, I’d stop and look and plan. How would I do it if I tried? How far would I get? Would they shoot me, or would the dogs get me first? The Louisiana prison system claimed the dogs weren’t trained to kill, only to disable, but dogs were animals. With animals, instinct reigned. I was more afraid of the dogs than I ever was of a man with a gun, and I had magic to fall back on.
Desert stretched on ahead, but we turned to go around the back of the prison, keeping our distance. The small figure I’d been following scurried up to a brick wall and paused. Razor wire topped the wall just like the rest of the fence, and the wall didn’t seem attached to any buildings. It was just a stack of bricks where once there had been a fence.
“Come,” croaked the figure and waved me forward.
I went. “Who are you? Why are you helping me?”
“No time.” A white hand shot out from underneath the cloak. Cold fingers wrapped around my wrist and pulled me forward. Something sharp bit into my palm and blood welled.
“What the hell, man?” I tried to jerk my hand back.
The figure held tight. As we grappled back and forth for control of my arm, the hood fell back, revealing a familiar face.
I blinked twice just to make sure. “Jean?”
Jean Lafitte—or more aptly, the soul of Jean Lafitte—and I had worked together to take down an Archon who’d started killing children. Jean’s half-brother, Dominique, had become Famine. Dominique was also a ghoul, and the Archon was using him to eat the evidence of his crimes. Last time I’d seen Jean, I was headed to Faerie. I’d asked him to keep an eye on Emma for me.
“What the hell are you doing in Hel?”
“There’s no time,” Jean snapped and slapped my palm against the wall in front of us. “Call your magic, you moron, and aim it at this wall. Make us a bloody door, or we’ll be hellhound chow.”
I didn’t like being told what to do, especially by the ghost of an uppity pirate, but I trusted him not to get me killed if doing so was in his best interests.
With my bleed
ing palm flat against the bricks, I closed my eyes and called up my magic, directing it through the open wound and into the wall. Slowly, the brick dissolved, and I fell through an open void and into a small storage room. Boxes and jars lined shelves on all sides. A locked door stood dead ahead, my only way out.
I turned just in time to see Jean stumble through the opening. Space zipped closed like a stitched-up cut behind him.
“Could you at least tell me what I’m supposed to be doing here?” I asked him as he righted himself.
“You drank the sap of the tree?” He turned around and went straight to the door, pressing his hands to it.
“Yes, I’m here looking for Emma’s soul. What are you doing here? Didn’t I tell you to keep an eye on her?”
“I was.” Jean grunted and moved his hands to the wall as if he were searching for some hidden lever. “She’s a rather boring person, honestly. A bit obsessive compulsive.”
That sounded like the Emma Knight I knew. At least he’d hung around enough to know that.
“Tragically lonely,” Jean continued. “Hopelessly devoted to lost causes like those heirloom roses of hers and a certain foolish necromancer who’s continually inventing new ways to get himself killed.”
“I’m not dead,” I growled.
He gave me an incredulous look.
“Okay, so I’m temporarily dead, but it’s a willing development. Like I said, I’m here to get her soul. Morningstar conned her.”
“If Lucifer Morningstar has it, you won’t find her soul here. Ah, here it is.” Jean pushed a loose brick in. The door slid open. He started toward the exit, but I put my hand on his shoulder, holding him in place.
“What do you mean she’s not here? She left the sap for me. It’s got to be a clue.”
He shrugged my hand away. “I mean your princess is in another castle.”
My jaw fell open. “Did you just use a pop culture reference that’s actually relevant?”
Jean rolled his eyes. “Not on purpose. It’s all those games she played late at night. They must have influenced me. You would think two plumbers would be better prepared for a pipe transport system and land populated by irritated fungi. Perhaps it’s because they spend so much time smashing their heads into bricks. Or perhaps logic simply escapes the modern male mind. Why else would you have come to the wrong Hell?”
