Underworld's Daughter

by Molly Ringle

  It wasn’t because he was aging, she said. She loved his maturity, and still found him as handsome as ever. So she said, and she looked miserable—but never actually wept. Had he ever seen her weep, in fact?

  “I’m holding you back,” she had said. “You can’t live like this forever, when you have the vineyards, and a good life to give a family, if you only would. Your mother wants you to marry, have children. You know she does.”

  His mother had been dead almost a year now, but yes, thanks to Aphrodite, he still got to visit her.

  “You’ve always taken me to the Underworld. Who would take me if you wouldn’t?” he’d asked, pathetically.

  “Hermes would. He likes you well enough. Obviously.”

  Adonis hugged himself, grimacing at certain memories. “We only did those things together because you wanted us to. I don’t want anyone except you.”

  “Maybe you only did it to please me, but he truly likes you.”

  “He taunts me.”

  “He taunts everyone. Look, as to the Underworld, if no one else could take you, I still would, as a friend. But…” She wrung her hands, and stepped back to evade his embrace. “You have to learn to stand alone. And you have to learn to share me, or you can’t have me at all.”

  Adonis had kicked furniture over, broken vases, shouted that of course he got jealous; who wouldn’t? Did she love him or not? How could a mere mortal (he’d sneered the words) learn to share with gods?

  They’d hashed out the argument many times before. But tonight his words didn’t move her, nor did the tears he finally surrendered to.

  She told him it was over, then brought him to the festival and left him, after placing him in the care of a sweet girl who always sent moony gazes at him. The girl was nearly two decades younger than him and he couldn’t remember her name. After his first two cups of wine, he had chased her away with a snarl, declaring he wanted to be alone.

  Alone he was. Quite alone.

  The bonfire, burning high as a house, swam sickeningly back and forth as he blinked at it. The dancers swirling around it looked like moths, or strange animals from the other realm.

  He refilled his cup from the barrel of wine provided for the festival—from his own vineyards, which were mostly kept by his trusted overseers and workers these days, with only the slightest input from him.

  His workers wouldn’t care if he died. No one would, much.

  How much more wine would it take before it poisoned him and stopped his heart? Or at least gave him the courage to walk into the ocean and let the waves close over his head? Not the fire—he knew nothing could make him brave enough to jump into that, and anyway, someone would drag him out before he died. The ocean was good and dark, out there at night. A cool, quiet death. Its surf beckoned to him at the edge of hearing.

  Did suicides always end up in Tartaros? He should have asked Persephone one of those times he was visiting the Underworld. Oh, well. Even Tartaros couldn’t hurt this much. And he’d led a good life mostly, hadn’t he? He’d avoided hurting others, tried to be of use, tried to please everyone. It hadn’t worked, but he had tried. Surely the Goddess would only place him in the caves of punishment a short time, if taking his own life did offend her. And after that he’d be free to walk the fields as a placid soul alongside his mother.

  While he gathered his strength, planning to stagger down to the ocean, an arrogant laugh cut across his thoughts.

  Ares strolled into view between Adonis and the bonfire. He wore an immaculately white tunic, clasped over one shoulder with a gold pin. His skin and short dark hair and even his bare feet gleamed with health and vitality in the firelight. Three young women walked with him, clinging to his arms, stumbling and giggling. Ares supported all three easily and teased them.

  Rage returned Adonis’ spine to him. He rose, letting his wine cup fall on the ground and spill. He stormed forward into Ares’ path.

  The immortal soldier stopped and lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, it’s Aphrodite’s puppy. He’s lost.” Ares looked around, pretending to be solicitous. “Anyone have a leash?”

  The girls giggled again.

  “She never loved you,” Adonis snarled. The words didn’t sound as clear as he wished, but Ares obviously understood them, from the anger hardening his eyes. Adonis kept on. “She thinks you’re pathetic. She only takes you into her bed because she pities you.”

  Or was he actually referring to himself? Adonis was confused now.

  Ares shrugged off the young women and stepped forward. “You’re not worth a single flick of my knife, pup, though that’s all it would take to kill you.”

  “You all think you’re so magnificent,” Adonis slurred. He spat at Ares, pleased to see the wine-colored spittle stain the white tunic.

  Fury contorted Ares’ eyes, and his foot lashed out and caught Adonis in the stomach. The kick sent him rolling across the rocky ground toward the fire, gasping and gagging.

  Another kick bruised Adonis’ ribs. Adonis groaned and kept his face in the dirt.

  “Had enough?” Ares asked.

  Adonis said nothing.

  Ares turned away, evidently satisfied.

  Adonis pushed up onto his hands and knees, grabbed the end of a branch that stuck into the bonfire, and yanked it out. He jumped up and whirled the flaming tip toward Ares’ back.

  Warned by the screams of the girls and other onlookers, Ares spun around and knocked the burning branch to the ground. Then his hand was at his belt, and something gleamed in it, in the firelight, and he rushed at Adonis.

  Pain scorched deep into Adonis’ gut. He lost track of time for a bit, then refocused. He found he was lying on his back, the taste of vomit in his mouth, his whole body sticky and bruised and racked with pain, especially his belly. The bonfire sent sparks high into the night sky. People screamed and shouted around him. Someone familiar knelt above him, with neck-length curls and a handsome face topped with a gold-winged crown.

  Hermes turned in anger. “Perfect, you fool. That’s exactly what we need, to kill harmless mortals in front of the whole world.”

  “He attacked me,” Ares’ annoyed voice said. “With fire.”

  “Oh, save your breath, Ares, I saw the whole thing.”

  Adonis tried to make sense of it. “Killing” harmless mortals? Then he was dying, as he had wished? With very difficult movements, Adonis transferred his hand to his belly. He found, instead of his smooth skin, a ripped mass of blood and flesh. Oh, indeed. People died from knives to the gut. Fairly fast. Gods, but it hurt. He could hardly breathe.

  “Get out of here!” Hermes shouted—at Ares, Adonis supposed.

  Then Hermes lifted Adonis carefully, keeping him as flat as he could. The fire and the revelers and the noise all vanished. “You poor bastard.” Hermes sounded shaken, but gentle. He sighed and lifted his face to the stars, as if lost and searching for direction among them. Finally he looked down at Adonis again. “Shall I take you to Aphrodite?”

  Adonis nodded and closed his eyes. Hermes lifted him higher.

  Adonis had the impression of swift movement, then he tumbled out of consciousness.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  So,” Zoe said over the phone, “Sophie’s parents know now, and so do mine.”

  Adrian stopped walking. “What?” Sophie and her parents moved along ahead of him, crossing the field toward the farmhouse after their visit to the Underworld.

  “They caught me using my eyes. I considered the whole ‘miracle medical cure’ explanation, but they would only want to talk to the doctors involved, and I couldn’t produce them, so…” Zoe sighed.

  “How’d they take it?”

  “Oh, they think it’s fab. They were flinging questions at me left and right. ‘How strong are you? Can you lift a car? How about a bus? Can you fly? How fast do the horses go? Can you kill someone with magic? Can you conjure up spirits just to, like, freak someone out?’ I mean, I knew my parents were geeks, but wow. I didn’t realize how far it extended.”
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  Adrian grinned as he thought of her parents: both of them stout and unruly-haired, her mum a software engineer and gamer, her dad a security systems expert and also gamer. “They probably hope you wear some cool superhero uniform. And have special weapons to carry round.”

  “Ick. So not me.”

  “Nor me. Let’s make a pact. No uniforms.”

  “The good part is, now they can help cover for us,” Zoe said. “They’re totally into using all their tech tricks to do that, and will even help track down Thanatos if they can.”

  Adrian felt the same chill that had shook him when his dad reported acting as a double agent. “Tell them to be careful. Thanatos people aren’t always smart, but they’re violent. I’d rather not get any of our families mixed up in it, if we can avoid it.”

  “Says the guy who just took Sophie’s parents to the Underworld.”

  He turned to see them talking to Sophie by the side door. “Touché,” he said, defeated.

  “How’d that go?”

  “Fine, basically. They saw Sophie’s grandfather, and an aunt of her mother’s who died a while back. So they believe it all now. Also, Sophie’s mum ate the pomegranate. That’ll be interesting.”

  “Indeed.” Zoe sounded impressed. “Not her dad?”

  “No, he’s not reached that level of trust with me.” Adrian turned away from the house, and watched Kiri nose around in the garden. He lowered his voice. “He got me alone at one point and confronted me on the strength issue. Whether being unnaturally strong meant I’d accidentally break Sophie when I touched her.”

  “Oh, Goddess,” Zoe said wryly.

  “I gave him the whole kitten analogy—”

  “The kitten analogy?”

  “Yes. You know. Like when you play with a kitten, you don’t worry about breaking them really, because even though they’re so delicate, you know that and you’ve adjusted the way you deal with them. It’s second nature.” He grimaced. “But I think he only came away with the impression that I molest kittens.”

  Zoe laughed. “As long as he’s stopped calling the police on you.”

  “For now. They say they’ll defend us against Thanatos, even. But same with your folks, I don’t like them taking a stand when it might get them…hurt.” Killed, he didn’t dare say. Though of course it could. What wouldn’t Quentin authorize, if she sent suicide bombers after innocent uni students?

  “We’ll be careful, Ade. I promise.” Zoe sounded confident. She hadn’t seen it firsthand, the explosions, the flesh and hair burned off the assassin, off Niko too…

  Ugh, he shouldn’t have ejected Niko.

  “How are the memories?” he asked, to pursue a less difficult topic.

  “Good. Or dramatic, at least. I’ve got to where Ares stabbed Adonis. Hekate wasn’t there, but saw the aftermath.” She added a garbled shuddering sound.

  Perhaps she had seen grisly sights firsthand, come to think of it.

  “Never a dull moment. Then or now,” he said.

  “Never,” she echoed.

  Hekate sat upon the rocks above the cave’s entrance, gazing at the full moon in the dark sky. Its magic flowed over her, cool and fresh as spring water. Kerberos prowled around, sniffing the earth, perking up his ears at the occasional howl or screech of a night animal. Arriving souls streamed past and dived below ground. Hekate smiled at them and spoke welcomes.

  Kerberos lifted his head, his ears rising to full alertness. He barked a hopeful greeting. Hekate turned to look that direction, and soon she spotted the horses speeding toward them, carrying riders whose solid bodies and rippling tunics caught the moon’s rays differently than souls did.

  Immortals. Hermes and Aphrodite. She rose to watch them approach.

  Aphrodite held someone across her lap, a cloak wrapped around the person to secure him there: a full-sized adult but evidently unconscious. Hekate barely caught a glimpse in the moonlight before Aphrodite plunged into the cave with her passenger.

  Hermes noticed Hekate, and pulled up his spirit horse to hover beside her. He stretched out his arm. “No time to dally, love. We have a dying man.”

  With a tremor, she guessed who the dying man was. “Adonis,” she said.

  Hermes nodded. Large splotches of blood stained the front of his tunic. Not his own: though he looked more somber than usual, he wasn’t hurt as far as she could see. Someone else’s blood.

  Adonis. Dying.

  She grabbed Hermes’ arm. He swept her up in front of him onto the horse. Kerberos barked and bounded over, and leaped up to join her. She and Hermes caught the dog. Hekate held him in both arms. Hermes snapped the reins, and the horse shot forward and down, plummeting into the cave’s mouth with the other souls.

  “She brought him hoping for a miracle.” Hermes reined in the horse as they settled to the entrance chamber’s floor. “From you or from Persephone. But I don’t think there’s any hope.”

  Hekate slid off the horse. “There might be. I need to see him first.”

  They hurried through the tunnel along the river. “Your magic,” he said. “Can you ease someone’s pain?”

  “A bit. If nothing else. But I hope I can do more for him than that.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of his pain, love.” They emerged across from the wide, glowing fields to find Aphrodite kneeling in tears beside Adonis. “I was thinking of hers,” he said softly.

  Hekate rushed forward.

  Adonis lay on the black rocks, eyes closed and face pale, his clothing a nightmarish mess of blood, vomit, and other bodily fluids spilling from a rip in his belly. Persephone knelt near him, speaking rapidly with Aphrodite.

  Hekate fell to her knees, trying to ignore the frightening stench coming off Adonis, and carefully took his hand. She closed her eyes in pain at once. Dying, without a doubt. The life was flowing out of him, its sparkle dwindling with each heartbeat.

  “There are poultices I can try.” Persephone unwrapped the bloodstained wool from Adonis’ torso. “But oh, Goddess, a knife wound like this…”

  “There isn’t time!” Hekate leaped to her feet and scrambled to the raft. “I’ll fetch the orange.”

  “Hekate, we can’t make a decision like that,” Persephone said.

  “Can we vote?” Aphrodite’s voice shook. Tears had left tracks down her cheeks. “Are there enough of us—can we get enough?”

  “Hades is out tonight,” Persephone said, “but even if he were here, no, that isn’t enough of us.”

  “They keep voting him down.” Hermes paced beside them with hands on his hips. “What good would it do to vote again?”

  So Hermes hadn’t voted him down, or at least not every time, Hekate thought briefly. She steered the raft across the river and darted up the other side. She paused to call across, “I’m fetching it!”, then sprinted into the orchard. She ran easily in the near-darkness, familiar with the paths and logs and rocks.

  The glossy tree’s crown rose higher than her head now. She halted beneath its branches and snapped a ripe fruit off. With it in hand, she raced back and crossed the river again, and dropped to her knees at Adonis’ side.

  Persephone had uncovered his wound, and poured river water over it to clean away the blood and fluids. She winced as she probed his flesh. “No. When the intestines are cut through like that, infection sets in so fast, and—”

  “Yes, he’s dying!” Hekate interrupted. From the choked sound of her own voice, she realized how near tears she was herself. “And we can’t let him.” She tore into the fruit. “Remember, Aphrodite? We can’t let him.”

  “I don’t want to,” Aphrodite wailed. “This shouldn’t have been how it happened. But—”

  “But nothing. This won’t be how it happens.” Hekate pulled off a section of the blue fruit and squeezed its juice onto his unresponsive lips.

  “Hekate!” Her mother pulled her hand away. “We can’t choose this.”

  “Who would find out?” Aphrodite’s voice trembled.

  Persephone stared
at her, then up at Hermes, who lifted his eyebrows with a permissive shrug.

  “How wouldn’t they find out?” Persephone asked.

  “Say if he left the country,” Aphrodite said. “Disappeared a while, took on a new identity. Then at least it’d be a long time before they did find out. Their anger would cool.”

  “We’re saving a life,” Hermes added. “Worse not to, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Hekate said, and yanked her arm free from her mother’s grip. She placed one hand against Adonis’ face and held the orange to his lips with the other. She pulled every scrap of energy left in his body toward his mouth, willing him to open it, to accept the piece of orange.

  If the Fates wished him to die, then of course he would. He’d be a soul here and she could talk to him, as long as he wished to stay, but that was nowhere near the same as talking to a living person. She couldn’t touch him; he’d never fall in love with her. Souls didn’t fall in love with new people. They only relived the love they had felt in life.

  But if she brought him back to life, gave him immortality, he’d have a reason to be grateful to her forever. He would live and love again. So if the Underworld’s powers didn’t mind her saving him…

  His lips parted. His breath slipped inward. Hekate wedged the orange between his teeth. “Eat,” she said. “Swallow.”

  His jaw moved a few times, crushing the fruit, then his throat pulsed in a swallow.

  She slid her fingertips down to his neck. His energy picked up strength, heartbeat by heartbeat. The glow and warmth filled back up inside him. Hekate breathed freely at last.

  The others looked at her. “Did it work?” her mother asked.

  Hekate nodded. “He’ll wake up soon.”

  “Are you sure?” Aphrodite gasped as his eyelids fluttered. “Yes—look.”

  Hermes crouched and peered at the knife wound. “The bleeding’s stopped. He’s healing.”

  Adonis’ face crinkled in pain. His hand moved to his belly. The torn skin there twitched, beginning to pull itself together. “It’s…” he breathed. “What…”

  “Shh, it’s all right, dear.” Aphrodite stroked his hair. New tears ran down her cheeks through her smile.