She bent her mouth to his, tasting one last time the lips that sang the words she loved so well. He arched under her, electrified by the vision she gave him in return. Inspiration, the current passing between them. Her parting gift was the masterpiece he wouldn’t live to finish.
His release and his death came together, a final burst of ecstasy swelling her veins with light. She kissed his cooling forehead and turned his face away before the eyes went dull. She wanted to remember him bright and full of promise. He had lasted longer than the others.
Her purpose achieved, she unsheathed him from her, slid into her coat, and closed the door to his London flat.
She was art.
She was love.
She was the muse.
And she would not be stopped.
Chapter One
Storming the gates of Hell wasn’t as difficult as it sounded…if you had the right equipment.
Crixus—demigod, former gladiator, and supernatural bounty hunter, made a point of always having the right equipment.
Today, it was a Le Creuset four-quart casserole and a bar of Valhrona baking chocolate. Odd items to bring to the realm of Hades, but perfectly suited to the entrance he had in mind.
The accessory he hadn’t had in mind was the balding, middle-aged ex-accountant who had attached himself to Crixus’s side as he elbowed his way through the crowd of shrieking shades at the gateway to the Underworld.
Crixus would have killed the pasty bastard, if he weren’t already dead.
Not just dead, but newly dead, which is the most annoying kind. The kind where it’s all tears and denial and but the light was green.
“Please.” The accountant clasped his no longer corporeal hands in the universal gesture of pleading. “I beg you. I’ll give you anything. Just get me out of here. It wasn’t my time.”
“Anything I want, I can get.” Crixus stepped over a crumpled figure in the throes of wailing and teeth gnashing that made the commute to Hell such a downer. “Your help is not necessary.”
“My collection of first-edition Dickens’ illustration copperplates?”
“Dickens,” Crixus laughed. “Good guy. Chuck and I used to have lunch. I have some hand-written manuscripts of his, as I remember.”
“My firstborn son?”
“What the hell would I want with a kid?”
“My wife? She was a gymnast.”
“Marie.” A genuine smile of fondness lit the demigod’s face. “She says hi, by the way.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Crixus came to an abrupt halt, possessed by the urge to scrape this guy off before he got to the next phase of his journey. “Look, even if I wanted to, I can’t help you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re dead. Zapping people back to Earth isn’t something I can do.” Granting spontaneous orgasms to your wife, however…
“But you’re not like the others here. I can tell. You have a casserole. No one else got to take anything with them.”
“That’s how it works. You’re human. When humans die, they come here to be processed. Trust me, you’ll get the hang of it. Why don’t you save yourself some time and get in that line over there?” Crixus pointed to a section of the gray expanse where the mood was calmer and the screams had quieted.
A long phalanx of the dead who had finally schooled themselves into a line wound back from the dock where this depot met with the River Styx. The very place Crixus was bound with his goodies.
The accountant looked into the shifting mist with trepidation. “What about you? Are you getting in line?”
“Lines aren’t my thing.”
No. Where lines were concerned, Crixus had always been better at crossing them than staying in them, a fact he proved to himself now with the continuous shifting of his own motorcycle boots on the gravel. Funny how three minutes could seem like an eternity even to someone who’d been alive over two thousand years.
Immortal as he was, Crixus had not landed here after an unfortunate meeting with a wood chipper or by kissing the bumper of a semi-truck.
He had been summoned, and summoned meant business. Business for Crixus meant a fat bounty and a rogue supernatural in need of persuasion. The sooner he found out who he would be hunting, the sooner the fun could begin.
But the Lord of the Underworld was nothing if not patient. Methodical. Cautious. All qualities as foreign to Crixus as mortality.
And monogamy.
“What about a Lexus?” the accountant offered. “I just bought a Lexus, and if you could—”
“You’re dead, okay? Your body is in the county morgue, they hosed your brains from the street, your wife is already filing the life insurance paperwork and sizing up your gardener. Denial is not going to help you. It’s time for you to accept reality and move on with your life—er, afterlife.”
The cadence of this lecture had entered his speech from another source, one Crixus could not think of without an attendant stab of pain.
Matilda. Her name floated to him unbidden, and for a moment, Crixus wanted nothing more than to see the man she had married writhing in the mire with these wretches. Dead, and out of the picture. The demigod could make it happen in a million different ways, but all of them would bring her grief.
The thought of her tears was ash in his mouth.
“But—”
“No buts. You’re dead. Deceased. Departed. End of story. Best of luck.” Crixus turned his boots toward the river of flame and shuffled on.
“Silver! I have silver bars,” the accountant called after him.
“Had,” Crixus said. “Let it go.”
Even as he said it, the demigod knew how unlikely this was. In his experience, humans clung to cherished objects in their lives with a doomed tenacity he didn’t envy. Emperors of their own realm, convinced they had some control over what or who stayed with them. An elaborate show of self-delusion at best.
Recent events had reminded Crixus of this only too well.
He moved past the curious stares and hushed whispers of the souls awaiting judgment, brushing flakes of brimstone from his leather jacket as he approached the place where flames lapped at the gray shore.
Luck was with him. The long, black boat was still anchored at the ancient dock, the cloaked figure at its helm checking names off a coiled scroll.
“Hey, Bones. What’s shakin’?”
The cloak’s wearer looked up from his list and smiled. At least, Crixus was pretty sure he smiled. Facial expressions are difficult to discern without the aid of muscle and flesh.
Charon, ferryman of the dead, stowed his feathered quill between his clavicle and scapula and stretched out a skeletal hand.
They bumped knuckles—Charon’s bleached white bones against Crixus’s battered skin. Scars were the one thing the demigod got to keep.
“Crixus, old friend. What brings you to our humble realm?”
“Business. Any chance I can hitch a ride?”
Black eye sockets scanned the gathering crowd at Crixus’s back and lit on the passenger who had seated himself on the bench at the opposite bow of the boat. “Business or no, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait your turn. You know the rules.”
Rules. Rules fell into the same category as lines for Crixus, but he made a point of knowing them well enough to understand which ones he was breaking and why. Just as he made a point of knowing the currency of every realm he strayed through. Eternity attached to a rowboat of the damned had left the ferryman desperate for a hobby, and Crixus himself had once obliged by suggesting he take up baking.
That act had paid dividends ever since.
“I thought you might say that.” Crixus brought the casserole out from under his arm and held it up for Charon to see. “Interested?”
The tips of bony fingers wedged themselves between Charon’s exposed white teeth. “I…I couldn’t.”
“Almost forgot.” Crixus dug into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out the bar of chocolate.
<
br /> The eye sockets widened. “Is that…Vahlrona baking chocolate?”
“Seventy percent Guanaja, my friend. Extraordinary bitterness. But the warm notes are supposed to be exquisite.”
Charon snatched the bar from Crixus’s hand and stuffed it down into his cloak. “I’m sorry, Mr. Horowitz,” he said, turning to the man seated on the bench. “There’s been a change in plans.”
“But I’m next. It’s my turn. I’ve been waiting for six days.”
“Never fear, Bernie.” Charon picked him up by the collar of the shirt he’d been buried in and marched him up the rickety ramp. “You’ll still be dead tomorrow.”
*****
Everyone tells you to go toward the light. No one tells you it’s fluorescent.
In Crixus’s experience, death was a disappointing endeavor for humans on a number of levels. All the imagined choirs of angels or imps with pitchforks gave way to a machine more like the governments they were used to.
Even the buildings.
Hades preferred the kind of classical architecture that brought Crixus back to his earliest memories of childhood. Dragged from his native Gaul to Rome as a slave, he had broken himself and others on similar imposing marble columns and entablatures. He had rolled down stone steps like these, bloodied by opponents in the gladiatorial ring.
The chill these vast structures clung to even in this bleak place cooled Crixus’s perpetually heated blood.
Sentinels stood at either side of heavy brass doors of this oversized mausoleum. Demigods like himself, clothed in black, faces blank.
For him, the gates opened. He was expected.
Claustrophobic silence descended as Crixus stepped into the atrium. Color had been leeched from this place. There was no sky overhead. No sun to light the marble courtyard. Only the great nothing hanging above him like frozen smoke.
This space never ceased to pulse with the promise of oblivion. To Crixus, it felt like those last maddening seconds between a general’s raised arm and his order of attack.
He cut through the tension with his own breach, pushing open the polished wooden doors to Hades’s office without knocking.
The Lord of the Underworld looked like someone Crixus might have met in battle. Dark in a suit several centuries out of the current fashion, Hades sat ensconced in bookshelves whose endless tomes Crixus had the time but never the patience to read. Candelabra stretched their brassy arms toward the vaulted ceiling from every surface. Their flickering light made dancing shadows of the room’s furniture, an attic jumble of pieces from all periods. Eyes stared down at Crixus from the paintings in heavy gilt frames, giving him the feeling of being watched whichever way he turned.
Hades was a collector of more than just souls.
“Crixus.” Hades did not rise behind his desk. He didn’t need to. Even seated, his hulking form promised retribution for any offense that required him to find his feet. He was not soft like Zeus, dulled by the penchant for pleasure and distraction. Hades’s eyes—a bright, pitiless blue—held none of the humor or capricious will that made some of his colleagues easier to manage.
“You made good time.” Hades set aside his pen and steepled long fingers under his chin. “Have a seat.”
“I’ll have two.” Crixus selected one of the brocade chairs in front of the desk and sat down, scooting its mate closer so he could prop his boots on it. “Who do you want and what’s in it for me?”
“You always did have a delightful way of cutting straight to the point.”
“Would we be having this conversation otherwise?”
“I suspect not.” The sheet of stiff parchment whispered as Hades pulled it out of his drawer. He stared at it for a moment before sliding it across the desk.
Crixus scanned the contract with his usual impatience for small print, which always looked to him like insects swarming a page. He got as far as the third paragraph, saw the name, and covered his crotch out of reflex.
Lavinia.
A.k.a. Vinnie, a.k.a. Levane—the last of the leannán sídhe. A hot-tempered Irish succubus muse who fed from the creative power of any artist she could lay her red-lacquered claws on. Like the muses of Crixus’s acquaintance, Levane granted her prey exquisite inspiration…only hers came with the unfortunate side effect of dooming the artist to madness and inevitable self-destruction.
Last time they had crossed paths, Vinnie had driven her spiked heel into his groin and kicked him off the Eiffel Tower. He had been trying to pry her off Vincent Van Gogh at the time, and the demigod was in no hurry for a repeat performance.
Crixus set the paper back on the desk and rose to his feet. “Well, it’s been great talking to you. Give my love to Persephone.”
“Not so fast, gladiator.” The candle flames guttered as Hades’s voice rumbled the room’s cathedral heights. “You haven’t even heard my terms.”
“The terms don’t matter. No way am I going after that crazy bitch. Not again.”
“Not even for…Matilda?” The Dark Lord had a smile that could peel paint.
“What about her?”
“Charming woman,” Hades said. “I rather enjoyed her company. I can see why you’re still so enamored. Even though she’ll soon give birth to another man’s child.”
Acid ate its way up from Crixus’s gut and into his throat, the reaction an irritating reminder of the human side of his nature he couldn’t be rid of. Just as he couldn’t stop the hands tightening into fists at his side. “I’m aware.”
Hades picked the pen up from its golden ferrule on his desk and tapped it against his lower lip. “What if I told you that the birth wouldn’t go well? That she was scheduled to return to me rather soon?”
“I would tell you to go to Hell. Oh, wait…”
“Your defiance, while amusing, doesn’t serve your cause at all. I have the schedule here if you’d care to peruse it.” Hades pulled one of the leather-bound tomes from the many shelves behind him and flipped through the gold-leafed pages. “Yes, here it is.”
Crixus received the book with numb fingers. Its weight in his hands had a grim finality. Silvered script slid across the page before his eyes, new words appearing even now as seemingly unimportant decisions were made, outcomes affected, paths changed. The demigod slid his hand across the buttery parchment as he had Matilda’s cheek during so many stolen moments. She was one person, one gear in an infinite machine, a machine older than the world and vast beyond measure. Every choice she made, no matter how insignificant, sent ripples through every other life it touched.
Some of those ripples were too small to be felt. Some turned into tidal waves, leaving wreckage in their wake.
“What will you do to change this?” Crixus asked.
“It’s what you’ll do to change it that matters. Bring me Levane, and I will see that your Matilda is safe.”
“How?”
Hades took the book from Crixus’s hands, closing it with care. “Those details are better left unspoken.”
“Levane has been causing havoc since time began. Why bring her in now?”
“Her activities of late have been more…problematic.”
“More problematic than Hemingway? And Van Gogh? And Keith Richards?”
“I’m afraid so. She’s started taking her prey before their time. Sucking them dry and killing them outright. It’s created somewhat of a multi-agency issue for us. As she is a succubus, she falls within my jurisdiction, but now Calliope and Atropos are involved.”
“Shit.” Crixus scrubbed his face with the roughened palm of his hand. “The Muses and the Fates?”
“Calliope was never especially excited about a Celtic leannán sídhe dabbling where the Greek muses had once ruled. Given these recent developments, she’s become positively insistent that Levane be stopped.”
Crixus had been around long enough to know that when Calliope, chief of the muses, was insistent, important ears had no choice but to listen. A verbal sparring match with the muse of eloquent speech was a surefire way to
get your ass handed to you on a silver tray and your balls in a teacup on the side.
“You can see why I am so eager for your assistance.” Hades pushed the contract back across the desk with a single finger.
“If I do this, what assurance do I have that Matilda won’t be harmed?”
“Really, gladiator. You should make a habit of reading these things carefully. It’s all outlined here in clause A.7 of subsection three: Recovery agent payment pursuant to the surrender of fugitive. Would you prefer to look it over again before I sign?”
Crixus put his hands on the desk, the contract pinned beneath his palm, and leaned close enough to whisper to the Lord of the Dead. “I would prefer that you look me over and decide if you really want to take a chance that you can’t deliver if I do.”
The icy blue eyes didn’t blink. “Threats, Crixus?”
“Vows, Hades. If anything happens to Matilda Schmidt, you will pray for mortality to end the suffering I will bring upon your head.”
“She is mortal, Crixus. She will die. But you have my word that it will not be before she’s had a long, full life with her husband.”
For how deeply this word wounded him, Crixus could have signed in blood.
Hades picked up the pen, scribbled a signature across his appointed line, and angled it toward Crixus. “Do we have a deal?”
In their time, Crixus’s hands held all manner of weapon, but none felt as deadly as the pen now clasped in his hand. With the last loop of his mark, the contract furled itself into a scroll and disappeared in a flash of flame and smoke.
“Acta non verba,” Crixus said.
Deeds. Not words.
Chapter Two
Vinnie was breaking her own rule.
Never screw a man whose jeans are skinnier than yours. At this rate, she was going to need a crowbar and some axle grease to get this soporific poet out of his pants.
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