“How close would you have had to be to vacuum him out?” I asked.
“Ah, now you get to the heart of the issue,” Hades said, nodding, a little of his enthusiasm gone. “You ask why we develop these serums? Why we partnered with people such as Edward Cavanagh and President Harmon to produce them?” He leaned in closer to me. “We have had the base power serum for a long time. It is an ancient formulation, in fact, one that might have been used to unlock the original metahuman powers. The other serums we produced in concert with our partners, using their expertise to bridge knowledge gaps that we could not. The Skill Tree Unlocker and Power Booster, as I think your friends have taken to calling them … catchy names, to be sure, better than the dull scientific ones we had assigned … these were the fruits of our efforts, bent toward doing one thing. And one thing only.”
“Which was …?” I asked.
Hades sat down, looking up at me. He took a long breath, then held it in, before answering, and I could see his reluctance in the tension of his shoulders, of his whole body. “Restoring my powers.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“You have died before, yes?” Hades asked, as the thing he’d said about not having powers kind of sunk in. “In Los Angeles, in the subway tunnels, correct?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking him right in the ice-blue eyes. “I got zapped to death by the LA subway. Heart stopped for … I dunno, a minute or two.”
“A minute or two.” Hades nodded. “A minute or two is nothing, as these things go.” He turned away from me. “When Persephone killed me, I was dead for quite a while. My body had time to …” He touched his chest, where that massive scar had been, “… decay. By the time Zeus started my heart again …” He looked up. “Not all of the damage could be repaired when my natural healing abilities returned. Cell death had set in, and my powers, once able to rip life from a body miles away, were now very finite, compared to what they’d been before.”
“Death, hobbled by death,” I said, and he shot me just the trace of a smile. “There’s some irony there.”
“It was not lost on me,” Hades said, still smiling faintly. “I have never returned to my original strength. My powers are but a shadow of what they once were. Like you, I could once use the souls of metahumans I took to harness their abilities in my own service. This terrified my brothers, as it should have.”
“But you can’t anymore?” I asked, and one of his hands twitched.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I can feel a soul as it passes through me. There is a sensation, a bare fractional amount of what it felt like to drain souls in the days of old. But they don’t stay as they used to. It is as though my brain’s capacity to hold them was ruined when I died.” He touched the side of his head. “Brain death, you see. Cellular shutdown, we know now. Modern medicine has given me answers for questions that have eluded me for over a thousand years.”
“His brain is more than half dead,” Lethe said, apparently deciding to take up the role of Dr. Helen Slaughter in order to drop some medical exposition on me. “The core functions work, probably because his brain compensated when it was brought back to life, but it was deprived of oxygen for so long that he’s permanently impaired in many ways, the damage done by his death unable to be healed.”
“So … you’re not exactly powerless, but …” I said.
“I am much reduced,” he said. “I could—barely—have dragged Harmon’s soul out of his body across the White House lawn if he’d been there when I arrived, but I would not have been able to do anything else for several days. And his soul would not have stuck with me as it did with you. He would have passed through my mind with but a scream, his intelligence attempting to nest somewhere in the dead sectors of my mind, never to be heard from again.” Hades touched his head, and I realized for the first time that his hair really did not look right. It looked a little dry, like a wig, even though it seemed to be bound into his skull, and I wondered if that was because the hair had died once or if he was just wearing a really good rug.
I hoped I wouldn’t find out. There are some things about your great-grandfather you just don’t want to know.
“All the serums … were to try and re-unlock your powers?” I asked.
Hades nodded. “The Skill Tree Unlocker … the one that releases tangential powers related to your own? I was hoping to turn loose additional abilities.” He shook his head. “It did not work. Nor did the Power Booster. My range and strength remain unchanged, permanently reduced by the death of so many of my cells.”
“His MRI is … impossible,” Lethe said. “The fact that he’s survived over a thousand years since it happened …”
“And only thanks to you,” Hades said, with a small smile.
I looked at Lethe. She had her arms folded in front of her, but caught my question. “I was in Norway when things in Greece went … bad.”
“She refers to my granddaughter—Janus’s child—being killed in the market,” Hades said. “You have heard of this, I think?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” I said.
“I was … enraged,” Hades said. “I struck back at those responsible. And then I struck back at those beyond. Confined as we were in the caves for so long ….” He looked at his shoes and let a little laugh, a pretty dour one. “I think I went a bit mad.”
“By the time I made it back to Greece,” Lethe said, “it was done. Mother had killed him to stop the madness. To stop him from draining the world. Or at least the nearest part of it.”
“She was right to do so,” Hades said, still staring at his shoes, like a scolded child. “I had taken leave of all my senses.”
“When I got back,” Lethe said, “Janus was blocking passage to the cave.” Her eyes flashed. “I didn’t know him, my brother-in-law. Didn’t trust him. He was there on behalf of Zeus. Keeping the family prisoner, captive, until they could decide what to do with our kind.”
“I’m guessing they didn’t do anything good with us,” I said.
“Made us pariahs over time,” Lethe said with a sneer. “Caused us to be in danger of being killed anywhere we went in the meta world, eventually.”
“That was the end of our world,” Hades said. “Or the beginning of the end.” I saw in his eye the first glint of something dangerous, something I hadn’t yet seen from him. “If I had known what was coming, I would have fought them then, regardless of consequence.” He clenched a gnarled fist, the age spots showing on the back of his hand. “It was funny, because before … I had the power and lacked the will to go against my own brothers. After my own brush with death …” he smiled bitterly, “… then I lacked the power. Our family was torn asunder, forever after I died. Your grandmother dragged me off, following their wishes. Took me north, out of Greece and eventually to here. Where we have been ever since. Watching the world and watching our family … diminish.” He looked up, and the glint in his eye changed. “Until you.”
“Oh, geez,” I said.
“What does it mean to you … to be Death?” Hades asked.
“To me?” I asked, trying to shrug casually out of it, like I hadn’t been touting the fact that I AM DEATH to people I wanted to fear me for a few years now. “Nothing good, at least not for the people standing across the battlefield from me.” I cleared my throat. “It’s an intimidation thing I say.”
“Death is frightening, no doubt, but … it shouldn’t always be,” Hades said. “We all come to death in our own time. It is the inevitable end to all our journeys. The uniting thread that binds us all together as humans. We are born, and someday, we die. This, above all else, should be the thing that unites us. For in knowing that death is all our ends … we should see that despite all our differences we are more the same than we usually give credit for.”
“‘So what you’re saying is … we’re all equal in the face of Sienna and her fam killing us,’” I said.
“I like how you put yourself first in that,” Lethe said, “as though you’re the most dangerous p
erson in the room.”
“Hey, I know I’m an amateur compared to you old pros,” I said, “but I’m definitely the one doing the heavy lifting in the name of Death these last few years, okay?”
“Without doubt,” Hades chuckled. “When I sat on the throne of Death, I was perhaps … too aggressive in the fearful elements of my job. Now I look back on my foolhardy youth—I was so obsessed with power, with using fear to cultivate that power, that strength—I see only the mistakes I made. Ones that led directly to my downfall. Death is, indeed, a gift we possess to be dealt out. But it is not to be used indiscriminately. And if we avoided cavalier use for intimidation and power, it would be so much stronger.”
“Oh?” I asked, feeling a little like I was about to walk into a supervillain explanatory speech.
“Imagine if the suffering of the world could be diminished by our powers. Used responsibly, my gift now gives death near instantaneously.” He snapped his fingers. “The soul is no longer trapped in my mind, in my body. It moves on to … wherever. If Death is my gift, imagine what good I could do for the terminally ill. No slow-acting drugs, my power works in seconds. The pain is minimal, especially if they are sleeping. One strong pull and … they are free of this life.” He raised his hand. “Gone, with dignity. Freed from their chains.”
“You’re the breaker of chains, then?” I asked.
He smiled. “I am no Daenerys Stormborn, but in this small way, I see how I could help. I fulfill the function here in Revelen, circling to the hospitals when asked, bringing relief to those who will never recover from their ailments. There are many fewer of them now that the serum has circulated, but some remain. I remove their pain, once and for all. I get nothing out of it but the satisfaction of giving them peace.” He flicked his gaze away. “And someday, perhaps … I will find that peace for myself. I suspect it is not as far off as I might wish.”
“It’s nice that you’ve turned your talents toward assisted suicide,” I said. “But, uh … I can’t help but feel that maybe you’ve only gone this way because your power got hacked off at the stem. That if you still had full Hades abilities, you might not be so much about the warm and fuzzies.”
“And if you hadn’t gotten your brain ripped apart by Rose, you might not be as humble and sweet as you are today,” Lethe said. “You might have nuked us from orbit with Gavrikov powers. Just to be sure.”
“Did you Sigourney quote on purpose?” I asked. Lethe was, as usual, inscrutable.
“‘Nuke it from orbit,’” Hades chortled. “A classic. But the point remains, we are all changed by the trials we undergo, are we not? Me by Persephone and my brothers, you by Rose, a distant cousin, surely—”
“The message I’m starting to get is, ‘Don’t trust family,’” I said. “Not sure that was your intention, but …”
“We change, princess,” he said, and it took me a second to realize that there was nothing sarcastic in his use of “princess.” “I hope I have learned from my adversities. Being humbled is a gift of its own sort,” he said, nodding. “You are correct. I would not be the man you see before you, working toward a better end, a better use of powers had I not been humbled. Just as you would not be here now, standing where you are if you had not been brought low in Scotland.”
“Thanks to you,” I said, and he looked away. “Rose had the serum. Tons of it. She was giving it to people, harvesting their powers, making herself an unstoppable goddess. I got stuck under her wheels, true, and eventually stopped her, but … you had a plan to deal with megalomaniac Harmon.” I looked at Lethe, who was back by the window. “What was your plan to deal with crazy cousin Rose?”
“The same as yours,” Lethe said, not looking away from the window. “You just did it first.”
“Get in her head?” I asked. “Let her beat you within an inch of your life? Have a group of friends ride into the rescue at the last second and blow her brains out with an expanding micro-bullet?”
Lethe shook hers. “No.”
“You must keep in mind,” Hades said, “the power boost serum.” He looked at Lethe. “We were prepared to give it to your grandmother … so that she could—”
“Drain Rose like a canteen on a hot day,” I said, giving them both a sour look. “Boy, that would have come in handy about a year ago if I’d had a shot of that.”
“You were not ready,” Hades said quietly.
“And who gets to decide that?” I asked, heating up.
“You did,” Lethe said. “When I tried to reason with you a few years ago and you nearly beat my skull in without provocation.” She turned. “Do you know who you were after you beat Sovereign? You were angry. You’ve always been angry, don’t get me wrong, but the fury, it just boiled off of you back then. Running your agency into the ground. Driving away your friends, one by one. Putting a wedge between yourself and your brother. You were testing the limits of your power.”
“This is normal,” Hades said. “You see it all the time in the metas you go after. But instead of becoming lawless in service of your own greed, you broke the law while following your own moral compass.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Nadine Griffin,” Lethe said.
“Eric Simmons,” Hades said. “You recall the video of you slapping him around for making a sexually charged remark to a waitress?”
“You kidnapped Simmons,” I said. “Turned him loose against the USS Enterprise. Got him killed—”
“Yes,” Hades said. “But don’t distract from your own accounting with whataboutism. I will answer your charges … but not just yet.” He pointed a finger at me. “Yours is a history beset by overreaction. You have tested the line between wrong and right, trying to find your footing. You stole hundreds of millions of dollars—”
“From Omega,” I said.
“—and have killed in what you think is the name of justice,” Lethe took up for him. “All of those acts could be righteous, or some of them could be. Or perhaps none of them. Perhaps there was a different way—”
“I didn’t start those fights,” I said.
“You left two hundred mercenaries dead or wounded in that quarry in Minnesota not a week ago,” Hades said.
“They had it coming,” I said.
“Perhaps,” Lethe said, and she came over to stand by her father’s side. “This is the point, though. You have exercised your power over life and death, substituted your judgment for the natural order—”
“The law of the jungle is the natural order, in case you missed it,” I said hotly. “I do my best to put human order back in place. The law of man. You want to talk about justice? It’s a human concept, and it’s based on reciprocity, not some magical fairness. Someone strikes at you, either you strike back or the law does. That’s human justice—”
“That’s a dim view of humanity,” Hades said.
“It’s a little Hobbesian, I’ll grant you,” I said. “But what’s the alternative? Let bad guys skate around, doing all the evil they want, unchecked? Because that’s a recipe for more bad, lemme tell you—”
“You don’t have to tell us,” Lethe said.
“We have lived long,” Hades said.
“We know this is true,” Lethe said.
“It’s creepy that you’re doing this dual-monologue thing, finishing each others' sentences,” I said. “Also, it feels like a tag team.”
“Fine, I’ll tag out,” Lethe said and wandered back to the window to stare out.
“We are not trying to ‘beat up on you,’” Hades said. “We are not angry with you. We do not condemn your choices. We know that you made the best ones you could in the moments you were in and were always striving to do the ‘right thing,’ at least as you saw it from where you stood. But time, and Scotland, and doubt … these have given you a gift of perspective you lacked in the days after Sovereign. You have tasted defeat. Clawed through adversity. Leashed your powers … limited your responses. Think of how you have been pursued by law enforcement these last years. Did
you ever take a shot at them?”
“No,” I said.
“Your life was always on the line,” Hades said. “Yet you turned the other cheek in those moments. Admirable. You fought, at times killed those who took up arms and fought you, but only when you had to. Again, we don’t fault your judgment. I did much worse in my day, at your age. You operate from a moral principle. In those times, I operated from power.”
“But you are different now than you were a year ago,” Lethe said quietly.
“Now … you are ready,” Hades said.
“Ready for what?” I asked, feeling a cold trickle of doubt roll down my spine as I stood before my great-grandfather.
A knock at the door stopped him answering. “Come,” he said.
It opened, and Aleksy was standing there, looking like he was about to stick his head in a lion’s den. “I am sorry to disturb you, my—”
“It is fine, Aleksy,” Hades said, shaking his head. “I hope you are well?”
“I … yes, of course, my king,” Aleksy said. He looked a little starstruck and snapped to attention. “I bring word from General Krall regarding …” And he looked at me.
Hades traced his eyes to me, and smiled with deep amusement. “This is now the crown princess of Revelen, Aleksy. You need not hide news from her, good or bad.”
I raised an eyebrow at that. Yesterday I’d been a prisoner. Today I was a step below queen. Man, the wheel spun fast in my life. What the hell was I going to be tomorrow?
Dead, probably, because this was batshit levels of crazy.
“The arsenal is in place, and the defensive missile system is ready for testing,” Aleksy said.
Hades smiled thinly. “Tell General Krall that she may proceed when ready.” Aleksy snapped a salute and started to leave. “And Aleksy?” The soldier turned, looking like he might trip over himself to show respect to Hades. “Give it your absolute best, yes?”
Hero Page 15
