Hisses and Honey (The Venom Trilogy Book 3)

by Shannon Mayer

  Her smile was sad, and in it I felt my heart break. “Alena, there is no going back. Your grandmother . . . she is wrong.”

  The flower slipped from my fingers. “Why, why would she tell me it was possible, then?”

  My mother’s eyes never left mine. “Because she wants to believe that this isn’t the end. She’s always been afraid of death, Alena. Always. But this isn’t the end.” She smiled and blew me a kiss. “Trust me, this isn’t the end.”

  The peony floated down onto the bridge, and the wooden planks trembled, cracked, and fell into the water. I was pulled back as the vision tumbled in on itself, as my mother faded from sight and in her place was nothing but a patch of broken, dead trees, their limbs twisted with blight.

  “Your mother is a smart lady,” Remo said. He tucked me against his side. “Very smart.”

  He guided me away, following Strike farther into the underworld, because I was a blubbering mess. Everything in me wanted to turn around and run back to search for the bridge. To cross it and have the peace my mother held in her eyes. What was the point of seeing my mom if I couldn’t even hug her? If I couldn’t truly say good-bye?

  “What you saw there is as much a threat to your success as the monsters, Drakaina. Your love for her almost did you in.” Strike didn’t look at me as he spoke. “Hades is no fool, he knows you are coming, and he will continue to try and stop you. It is obvious you are less afraid of the monsters than most, so he will use other things against you.”

  As if his words had summoned the next challenge, a slumped figure sat on a log ahead of us.

  “Do not touch her,” Strike said. “No matter what.”

  The figure looked up, but I didn’t recognize her. Remo sucked in a sharp breath. “Elizabeth.”

  She raised her eyes, clear gray eyes that sparkled with unshed tears. “You said you loved me.”

  Remo’s whole body jerked as if she’d stabbed him. I grabbed him around the waist as he lurched toward her. “It’s not really her, Remo.” Her. The girl he’d loved before me. The one Santos had turned into a vampire.

  She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked, a low keen on her lips. “You did this to me. You trapped me here.”

  Remo shook his head. “No, I never wanted this for you.”

  “But you did it. Your love was a lie.”

  He slipped out of my hands, and I leapt forward, grabbing him around the ankles and tackling him to the ground. I crawled on top of him. “Remo, this is not true, this is not her. If she loved you, she would never say these things to you.”

  He breathed hard underneath me, puffs of dirt blowing up around us from his breath. Elizabeth stared at him. “You love her more than you ever loved me.”

  He didn’t deny it, and I couldn’t help the curl of warmth wrapping around my heart.

  Her gray eyes narrowed, and she leaned forward. “You’re going to be the death of her too. That is the way you are with the women you love. Your mother. Your sister. Me. Her.”

  Remo pressed his face into the ground. “I cannot leave her. Not again.”

  I glanced up at Strike. “Help me.”

  We lifted Remo and physically dragged him away from Elizabeth. She cried after us, begging for him to save her. Begging for him to hold her one last time.

  When we no longer could hear her, we finally stopped. I sat on the ground beside Remo. “You okay?”

  He grunted, his face coated in dirt and mud, scratches bleeding from the branches that had cut at him. “Yeah.”

  So, really, he meant no. But I understood. We had to keep going.

  “Strike, how much farther?” I asked.

  The snake opened his mouth to answer, but it was not his voice that spoke, but another I knew from my past.

  “The question is not how far, but why would you really want to go there, granddaughter?”

  I lifted my eyes and stared at the smiling man in front of us. “Gramps?”

  The man in the long cloak and old-fashioned clothes swirled his hand out and bowed in front of me. “The one and only.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I glared at Gramps, who I recognized only from his younger pictures, because he was hardly the old man I remembered. In fact, the resemblance to Merlin was there in the dark hair slicked back, the build of his body, and the shape of his jaw.

  “You jerk! Why didn’t you tell us you were a warlock?” I snapped.

  He barked a laugh and touched his overlong nose, the same way Merlin did. He shook his head. “Your parents forced me to swear I wouldn’t. They didn’t want you and your brother to know. That whole Hera business was a mess.”

  I rubbed my hands on the arms of my jacket. “So why are you here now? Surely Hades knows that we’ve figured out his ploy; I won’t be coming over to hug you.”

  “Oh, Hades didn’t send me. Warlocks don’t truly exist the same way others do when they die.” He tucked both hands behind his back. “You see, I thought perhaps I could help.”

  I frowned, wondering if anything he said was true. “Strike?”

  “Lies.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I looped my arm through Remo’s and walked away from the vision of Gramps.

  “You’re going to get yourself stuck here, one way or another, Drakaina,” Gramps growled at me, and I had no doubt it was Hades who was speaking, not my grandfather.

  I spun and glared at him, feeling the hiss roll up through my belly. Maybe the power of the Drakaina was not there in me, but the desire to snap my teeth hadn’t left. “Hades, you can go stuff your head in a gas stove and light yourself on fire.”

  “Oooh, now she’s getting testy.” Gramps grinned at me, and his face began to melt like a wax candle, the skin sloughing from his face and slowly revealing the bones beneath. “How do you like me now, Drakaina?”

  I turned my back on him, and Remo kept a hand on me. “Games. These are games to him, that’s all.”

  Strike nodded. “That is true. Hades gets bored.”

  As we left Gramps, or the vision of him, behind, a thought spilled into a question.

  “Why didn’t we end up in the meadow with my mother?”

  Our guide was silent a moment. “Most likely because it wasn’t really your time. When it’s your time, you go to the place designated for you. But if you come through early by accident, then you wander the swamps until you are drawn across the bridge. Or down the tunnel.”

  “The tunnel?”

  I shouldn’t have asked. A hole opened up right in front of us, so fast Remo and I teetered on the edge, staring down into the depths. Strike whipped around us, jerking us back, but not before I saw the leering faces, the broken and scarred skin, the eyes filled with horror and pain. I saw them as they reached for us, begging for help.

  I clutched at Remo. That was where I’d end up, I knew it. The place where murderers and liars went. Okay, I was assuming that last bit. I closed my eyes, but the images remained.

  I walked, hanging on to Remo with my eyes closed, trusting him to keep me safe while I tried to process what I’d seen. My future, that’s what I’d seen.

  “You won’t go there, Alena.” Remo’s voice was soft, but it cut through the horror.

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  Strike interrupted us. “We are here.”

  I opened my eyes. Strike coiled to a stop in front of us, his head dropping down so we were face to face. “This is as far as I can take you. There shouldn’t be much between you and Cerberus from this point on, but do not touch anything you do not have to.”

  I peered around him to see a large chain-link fence that was hung with signs:

  “Stay Out.”

  “Do Not Enter. Guard Dog on Duty.”

  “I Can Make It to the Fence in 3.6 Seconds, Can You?”

  “Thank you, Strike,” I said.

  He bobbed his head and winked one large eye. “For my queen, I would do all I can to make sure you have the help you need. I will pass the word through
our kind that you are alive and well. And that you have a new face but the same strong heart.”

  I reached up and ran a hand down the middle of his face, his skin smooth and cool under my fingers. “Thank you. Now go. I don’t want you to take the heat for this.”

  Strike slithered away, disappearing into a sudden fog that swept up and around us, obscuring my vision to no more than a few feet in front of us. “Well, isn’t that a bowl of peaches,” I muttered.

  “How bad do you think Cerberus is going to be, exactly?” Remo tightened his hold on me.

  “Not a clue, to be honest.” I stepped toward the chain-link fence, glad for the distraction from the pit behind us. The fence faded in and out of the fog, and I wondered if it was even all that solid. I touched the metal, using it as a lead as I made my way down the fence line looking for a gate. I made it all the way to a rock face that blocked us on one side, then went back the other way.

  “There may not be a gate,” Remo pointed out.

  I nodded. “I know, but I’ll feel like an idiot if I climb over the top and fall into a pile of stinking dog poo only to find out that there was a gate.”

  We made our way down the other end of the fence, slowly, nothing stopping us.

  And that alone made me nervous. So that meant either we’d outdistanced all the monsters—which I seriously doubted—or they were afraid of Cerberus. I was guessing the latter.

  I paused at a section of fence where the wire was pulled back at the corner, small with jagged edges, just big enough to crawl through. “Bingo.”

  I crouched and pulled the wire back, bending it easily. I held it, and Remo went through first, then I dropped down into a crouch and followed him through. I was on my knees, and Remo stood in front of me, his very nice rear end blocking my view. “See anything?”

  “Alena, this is bad,” he whispered.

  I made myself peer around him, though my heart hammered and my body wanted nothing more than to run. I stared up, way up at the three-headed dog that stood over us, silent as a statue, saliva and blood dripping from his mouth.

  Remo had understated the situation. This was far worse than bad. This was epically bad.

  Cerberus didn’t move, but he didn’t have to in order to scare me. Neither of us really had anything to face him with. No power, no strength of a monster, only our wits.

  His three heads were trained toward us, each one with a maw filled with teeth, as though someone had just kept adding teeth until there was no more room and then added a few more for good measure. I’d seen the effect once when an employee had overstuffed a cream puff at my bakery until it spilled out the edges. But I highly doubted Cerberus was anything as sweet as a cream puff. Two of his heads had short ears that stood straight up, and the middle one had no ears at all, like they’d been cut off. He stood easily over twenty feet at the back, his three heads higher yet than that, and I had no doubt he could snap us each up in a single bite. But all he did was watch us. Or at least that’s what he seemed to be doing. Every once in a while one of his heads would swivel to the side, swaying back and forth . . . like he couldn’t hear us. I looked at him more closely.

  “Are those scorch marks on his heads?” As in lightning-bolt scorch marks. If Zeus had blasted him, maybe he couldn’t hear us. “What if he can’t see us when we hold still? Like T. rex?”

  “That was a movie, Alena. And this is a giant dog. He should be able to smell us, right?” Remo kept his voice pitched low, but I noted that he didn’t move either. We were as frozen as Cerberus. I dared to slowly lift my hand, putting it on the back of Remo’s belt. Just in case I had to yank him out of the way fast. My heart hammered, sweat flowed freely down my spine, and I had no idea what to do. How to get past this big monster and how to make it all the way to Hades was beyond me.

  The oversized mutt swiveled one of his heads again, tipping it as if he could almost pick up on us. There were more scorch marks down the side of his neck.

  “I think Zeus nailed him. It would hamper all his senses. I think we just have to make a run for it,” I said as I jerked to my feet.

  “I can’t run as fast as I used to,” Remo pointed out, but I was already moving. I tightened my hand on his belt and bolted straight toward Cerberus. The middle head locked eyes with me, let out a snarling bark, and lunged. I dodged to one side, dragging Remo with me, as the middle head snapped where we’d stood only seconds before. I spun, like dodging Tad as we played basketball when we were kids, my back against the right head of Cerberus. I rolled with my back against his mouth, so close, and yet he missed me except for a flick of his tongue. I yanked Remo, and we were under the three-headed dog and running for the far side of the compound.

  The place was a full-on junkyard with strange machinery and broken-down metal in piles everywhere.

  “Let’s split up, he can’t take us both.” Remo pulled my hand from his belt and pushed me in one direction as he headed in the opposite.

  “No, we can’t split up!” I yelled, but it was too late, and Cerberus was rushing between us. I held my ground; I couldn’t let him go after Remo. I waved my arms at him. “Come on, dumb dog, I’m just standing here waiting on you.” Cerberus took one look at me . . . and swerved after Remo.

  His huge paws dug into the ground, churning up dirt and metal, flinging it every which way. He swept past me, and I did the only thing I could think of—I grabbed his one long tail and yanked it backward. I didn’t know how much strength I truly had left in me, so I gave it all I had. The tail gave way at the base, tearing partially off as I pulled and Cerberus ran. He howled and spun as the pain finally reached at least one of his brains. I was flung into the air like a kite with its string snapped loose. At the peak of my flight, my hands slipped on the slick fur, and I flipped through the air . . . and landed on his back. I dug my hands into the mangy fur, realizing that his body was covered only in patches. Sections of his back were indeed burned off like Zeus had really given it to him.

  I felt bad for him. “Cerberus, stop this!”

  One head turned around, and he snarled at me. I realized he could actually reach me from there. I held on tighter. “Zeus shouldn’t have hit you with the lighting.”

  He grunted and shook his head. I blew out a breath. “Look, I just need to talk to Hades. Can you let us go through?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Not even if I say please?”

  He snapped his teeth at me, missing me by mere inches.

  “I don’t think you can talk him down. Not all the monsters are on our side, Alena,” Remo shouted, and Cerberus began to turn back to him. It was now or never. I pushed myself to my feet and scrambled up his neck to sit behind the ears on his middle head. Or where his ears should have been. I dug my hand into the edges of the burned and charred skin and pinched hard. He whimpered and went to his knees.

  “I don’t want to hurt you more than I already have, dog. But I have to get to Hades. So either you are going to take us, or . . .” I had no real threat, so I left it hanging in the air.

  I hoped that the big dog had something of an imagination, and it would fill in the blank with something truly horrendous. Maybe fire hydrants that attacked him, or a herd of cats that would chase him up a tree, I really didn’t know. Below me, he whined and licked his lips. He tried to shake his head, but only got one flick in before I gripped harder, pinching him again. Mostly to keep my seat, but he didn’t need to know that. Cerberus let out another whimper, and I dared to let go and slide down his back.

  That was the mistake, though. He lunged at me the second my feet were on the ground. I threw myself out of the way, but one of his teeth caught the edge of my leather jacket, hooking me close to his slobbering mouth. I stared into his maw, thinking that I was done like an overcooked cake, ready to be tossed. But Cerberus stumbled, which threw me upward and unhooked my jacket from his tooth. I hovered in the air for a moment and then fell to the ground with a heavy thud. Cerberus whimpered, cried out, and fell back away from us, a
length of pipe protruding from his chest, air and blood bubbling around it. Remo grabbed me and hauled me to my feet. “I don’t know how long that will hold him. We have to run.”

  I struggled to put together what had happened. How had Remo lifted that big pipe without his vampire strength?

  “I have muscles, Alena. I am not really as weak as a newborn kitten, you know.” He ran beside me as we wove our way through the junkyard, dodging sharp metal and leaping over deep holes. I glanced down at one of the holes, noting the bones sticking out, the pieces of skull that had been shattered and half buried. Cerberus was not a nice dog, not a nice monster at all. I clung to Remo as we ran, left, right, left, right, trying to find our way out. We circled around a chunk of metal that looked like a downed airplane hull, and skidded to a stop. Cerberus was in front of us, on his side, struggling for breath.

  He was in pain, that much was obvious, and again I felt bad, I couldn’t help it. Wasn’t his fault he’d been turned into a guard dog.

  “Stop feeling sorry for him; it’s going to get us killed.”

  Remo was right, but I couldn’t help it. I liked dogs. “This place is like a labyrinth.” I tugged him back behind the equipment and out of Cerberus’s line of sight. “How are we going to find our way out?”

  A flutter of wings snapped us both around. Ernie grinned down at us. “That’s where I come in.”

  I held my arms out, and he swung into them for a hug. “I have never been so happy to see you, Ernie.”

  “I thought I’d find you back at the swamp, but Strike told me he brought you to the dog.” He shook his head and then peered over my shoulder. “He’ll be okay. He can’t be killed, which means we need to get you two out of here before he pulls the pipe out and heals up.” As if his words were the cue, there was a loud squelching, sucking sound of a pipe being pulled from flesh. Ernie swept up to our head level. “Come on, this way.”

  He flew ahead of us fast, and we ran after him, fear nipping at my heels. I kept glancing back. How long before Cerberus was on us again? We couldn’t kill him, so we had to get past him. A howl of a hunting cry ripped through the air, and the ground shook.