The office I walked into was enough like my own to make my heart ache with a pang of longing. Endless rows of bookshelves. Leather chairs. Polished wood. The only light in the room came from the candles flickering on every surface. Shadows danced on the walls, more alive than any of the shades I had witnessed shuffling along in the endless lines outside, dragging with them their undone deeds, their shock and grief.
And yet, none of those sooty shapes proved to be as transfixing as the man sitting at the wide desk in the office’s center. He had the face of a king. Hard, unyielding angles tempered by dominant will and the skill to match. His black hair fell in unkempt waves over skin as pale and luminous as the moon. His eyes were the only source of color within that expanse, a pale, pitiless blue.
“Welcome, Doctor.” He stood when I entered, revealing a body befitting the name Titan. Having just come from a costume party, I wasn’t as jarred as I might have been by the attire clothing his hulking form. His suit was of fine make, but not modern. At least a century out of date, by my estimation. “Please.” He indicated one of the ornate brocade chairs on the other side of his desk.
I walked to it and sat down, embarrassed by the juxtaposition of my fishnet stocking-clad leg against the chair’s expensive fabric.
He sat only after I was seated and shrugged out of his jacket, rolling the cuffs of his linen shirt to the elbows. When his forearms came to rest on the black marble desktop, I was hard-pressed to decide which surface would be harder. Both were equally marked by prominent veins.
“What a pleasure it is to meet you after all this time. My brother has been keeping you all to himself, as usual.”
“Your brother?”
His eyes narrowed a fraction. “Zeus. Jove. Jupiter. First-rate woman chaser and second-rate ruler.”
“I’ve never met him.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not directly. But his agent has certainly taken an interest in you. Well, took, I suppose we should say. Young Crixus seems to have moved on the way his kind often do.”
Several elements of this statement plucked at me. Took, past tense. Young Crixus, an implication the being sitting in front of me had measured time in such excess that a couple thousand years qualified for that appellation.
“Which makes me wonder exactly why you brought me here,” I said. “Crixus obviously feels that Dr. Cinnamon Barbier addresses his needs, professional and otherwise.”
“I don’t happen to agree with him. I think you’ll find my opinions on many subjects differ from those of the upper realm. Not the least of which, their casual use and discard of women.”
His barb had hit the mark, and he knew it. I had trouble meeting his unrelenting, gem-hard gaze.
“You see, I happen to think you should be treated with respect and professional courtesy due a woman of your talents.”
“And what talents would those be?”
“You can hardly be unaware of them by now, I should think.”
“Seeing ghosts?”
“Don’t pretend it’s anything so simple.” Hades rose behind his desk and paced the floor, coming around behind my chair. “Any psychic can see them. Few indeed can actually communicate with them. Fewer still can persuade them.”
I turned, anxious to have him unobserved behind me. “I haven’t persuaded anyone.”
“Ahh, but you did. Sin Pantalones? Gaybeard.” He pronounced both names with an ironic amusement. “Three hundred years they had wandered the earth, locked in a fruitless battle. Two days after meeting you, they found their way here.”
“I don’t think I can take credit for that, really.”
“You wouldn’t,” he said. “Not as modest as you are. A quality most rare and charming indeed.” He perched on edge of his desk. Having him this close felt like lingering in the shadow of a monument.
“What exactly is it you want from me? Why did you bring me here?”
He stood again and walked over to a painting on the wall to my left. He looked at it the way men in other circumstances might look out a window.
“I can never leave this place,” he announced. “It is my curse for having defied Zeus. I must play this role for eternity. Can you comprehend that word, Doctor? Can you try? Days without end, denied of all—” he paused, his deliberate regard falling upon me “—earthly pleasure. My one satisfaction, my only joy, is to collect the souls of the departed. To help them to their final destination.”
“Would that be Heaven? Or Hell?”
“I have no idea.” He shrugged.
I stood, astonished. “How could you not know?”
“This is only a temporary station. The place where they learn to accept they are no longer alive. Once they’ve done that, they are no longer mine.”
“And you don’t know where they go next? What really happens after we die?”
His smile brought me no measure of comfort. “We do not die,” he said. “You die. You do all the things befitting a human. You eat. You sleep. You fuck.”
Hearing this word pronounced in his cultured, even-tempered voice sent an illicit thrill skittering through me.
“I do not. Death is a gift the immortals are denied. Which is precisely why I have brought you here. You are able to do something I cannot, and I want you to do it for me. With me.”
“You want me to bring souls back to you.”
“Not just that.” He turned and walked to me, stopping mere inches from my face. “With your gift, you have access to both realms. Like your mother before you.”
“You know my mother?”
“Matilda Hildegard Schmidt.” He curled his tongue around each syllable like a chocolate truffle—no easy task considering the proliferation of consonants. “There isn’t a soul living or dead I don’t know.”
“Please.” My plea surprised us both. “My mother, is she the way she is—”
“Because of the gift you share?” I had the distinct feeling he saved me from having to say the words I most feared. The ones that would doom me to share her fate. “Yes. And no.”
The scent of him was dizzying. His eyes, mesmerizing. I stared into them and felt myself falling. A disorienting sense of unreality turned my surroundings into a two-dimensional set dressing.
“As you are learning, yours is not an easy gift to bear. Without the careful guidance of one who understands, it can bend minds. It can break hearts.” His knuckles trailed down my cheek, tracing the tracks left by tears I had forgotten until now. “Let me hone your gift. Let me protect you. Let me…serve you.” His lips brushed my cheek.
“What are you asking?”
“Stay here. With me. Help me find the lost and the suffering. Alone in the world, you’re limited. But I can increase your powers a hundredfold. I can release you from meeting your mother’s fate.”
“But to do that, I would have to relinquish the world. I would have to stay here with you?”
“Yes. As long as you are bound to your human life, you can never be what you could be with my help.”
Help. All my life I had chased this word. Had chased it through three degrees. Through hospitals and other institutions. Had finally chased it into the office where I saw clients, day after day, chipping away at the emotional and mental chains that bound them.
I had only, ever, wanted to help.
And sometimes I had succeeded in helping them the way I failed to help my mother.
But could I do this? Could I relinquish all of it for the chance that Hades could erase the one thing I feared the most? Leave the world and everyone in it behind for the chance to help them all on a scale not available to me in the life I now knew? I thought of Julie. Of Sigmund. Even of Rolly and his kind, sad eyes.
Already my heart had decided what it took my reasoning mind several minutes to discover. “I can’t.”
Fingers tightened on my shoulders. “But why? What’s binding you to that life? Your unreliable hit man lover? Your unfaithful demigod suitor? Your crumbling practice? A future in the sanitized, linoleum-floored roo
ms your mother haunts?”
“No,” I answered. “And yes. My life is in a little disarray at the moment. I won’t deny that.”
Hades raised a dark eyebrow. “The Scarecrow tells me a vampire assaulted your goldfish.”
“Okay. My life is a total shit show. But the reason I became a therapist in the first place is that I believe with time, and the proper attention, even a shit show can be turned around. I believe that there’s hope. Even if it’s only for the next breath. For a day that hurts a little less than the one before it. There’s always hope.”
“Hope,” Hades sneered. “Hope is nothing more than a delusion. A tactic to delay inevitable disappointment.”
“You are entitled to that opinion,” I agreed. “But I don’t have to share it.”
“How can you, a woman dedicated to healing others, decline an opportunity to do so on a global scale?”
“Because I believe whatever bit of good I can do in my present form is enough. However inadequate I may feel some days, however disappointed I may be, however hurt or frustrated, I’m still alive. I’m still learning. I get to wake up in the morning and know that despite all the times I could have let life destroy me, I’m still here.”
His eyes had gone hard and cold, as impenetrable as glacial ice. “That sort of twee sentiment would make a delightful presentation to an auditorium full of elementary school children. Perhaps you may even inspire one of them to be something other than mediocre and disappointing.”
“Perhaps I could,” I agreed. “Perhaps I will.”
“If you’re determined to waste your life, I suppose I should have the Scarecrow take you back.”
Relief rushed over me. I was going back. I was going home.
“Unless…” Hades’s sardonic smile punctured the small bubble of comfort growing in my chest.
“Unless what?”
The God of the Underworld examined his nails. “You didn’t happen to eat anything, did you?”
“A muffin,” I blurted out. “Only a muffin.” Technically a muffin and a half, but this didn’t seem the proper time to bring up questions of quantity.
“Well, that does change things.” Hades strode over to his desk and slid back into his chair with a breezy, relaxed air. “I’m afraid you are now bound to the Underworld for all eternity.”
“What? That’s ridiculous! I’m bound to the Underworld by a lousy muffin?”
“You didn’t seem to think it was lousy while you were eating it.” Hades leaned back in his chair and folded his arms behind his head. “Charon said you seemed to rather enjoy it.”
“This can’t be happening.” Sweat broke out over my brow as my gut filled with the skittering of a thousand insect legs of panic. “But Charon was so nice. So accommodating. He wouldn’t have done that to me. Not on purpose.”
“He does what I ask him to, if he wants me to keep him in butter and cake flour,” Hades said. “Perhaps you should get acquainted with your new quarters. Fortunately, I had already prepared them as I had anticipated you would accept my offer.”
The office doors swung open, disgorging the Scarecrow into our midst.
“Take her to her room,” Hades ordered. “And make certain she isn’t tempted to run. I should hate to have to set Cerberus on her.”
No wonder Charon had instructed me not to run. I had become all too familiar with the three-headed hell hound’s talent for destruction during the unfortunate demise of Marvin J. Cuddlestein, aka the Easter Bunny.
I backed myself against the bookshelf and lobbed as many hardcover leather bound books at the Scarecrow as I could lay hands on. Not even The Count of Monte Cristo (the large print version, judging by the size) was enough to dissuade him.
Those large hands closed over my neck as his body blocked out everything else. A tidal wave of panic robbed me of all ability to react. I was stuck here. For eternity. I would never see my home again. No longer able to hold back the tide of unwelcome thought, I let myself sink into the oblivion offered me by the Scarecrow’s choking grip.
*****
I had guided enough clients through the five stages of grief to know what was happening, even though it was happening in a nicely appointed room in the realm of the dead instead of on the leather couch in my office.
Stage one—denial, saw me searching every corner of my room from the broad brick fireplace to the crystal chandeliers overhead for a path to escape. I beat on the door until my knuckles bled, crawled into closets, overturned furniture, and searched behind tapestries until I collapsed from exhaustion.
Stage two—anger, found me tearing velvet curtains away from windowless walls, shredding silk sheets, hurling priceless antiques, breaking mirrors, pacing, and howling until I could taste my own blood.
Stage three—bargaining, placed me with my face pressed to the narrow crack at the bottom of the heavy wooden door, whispering offers, pleas, and prayers to no one. I spoke aloud to a god I had never understood, asking forgiveness for whatever I had done to deserve this, promising to do anything, to be anything if it meant I could not be this person lying with her cheek on the polished cherry wood floor.
Stage four—depression, curled me into a ball on the bathroom’s marble tiles. Time passed, or didn’t. Trays of food appeared and were taken away. I neither drank, nor ate, nor slept. I cried until my tears made a lake upon the floor, and heaved empty sobs when none were left. Even the pain of mirror shards crushed between my skin and the unyielding marble eventually gave way to numbness.
This was grief, or so I came to understand it. The certain and terrible knowledge that despite anything and everything I could offer, against all hopes, despite the force of my entire will and being bent on a different outcome, the life I knew was gone, and nothing could bring it back again.
Every time this thought returned to me, I reached out and scraped my hands into the shards just to feel a different pain.
It was there he found me, on a bed of broken glass, dried tears, and blood.
So far was I from myself, I didn’t even look up when the deafening pop broke the silence within my prison.
Curses in a language I didn’t understand were just one more unexplainable element of my imprisonment, as were the hands grasping my shoulders, the arms sliding under my thighs, the musical tinkling of glass falling from my clothing as I was lifted.
Something new took root in the echoing void of my sadness. A tremendous pressure forcing whatever was left of me apart, scattering me like ashes onto the stifling air.
I smiled, and I died.
*****
“I won’t go toward the light!” I sat up swinging, flailing against the light prying my eyelids open. My limbs tangled in something. A burial shroud? “You can’t make me!”
“Easy,” a familiar voice urged. Hands caught my wrists and eased them to my sides.
I opened one eye, not entirely trusting this not to be a dream.
A blurry Crixus sat on the edge of a bed beside me. “Good morning, Doctor.”
My well-intentioned desire to ensure his face was made of flesh and not the stuff of hallucination turned into an accidental finger poke to his eye. I blamed it on the lingering disorientation of my sojourn in the Underworld.
“Gods damn it,” he cursed, batting my hand away. “What was that for?”
“Sorry. I just wanted to be sure.”
“Of what?” He rubbed his eyelid with one hand and grabbed my glasses off the nightstand with the other. “Here. Put these the fuck on, would you?”
I took them, finding comfort in their weight across the bridge of my nose. I looked around the room, frantic for some familiar detail, willing my apartment to assemble itself around me.
I was tucked into the plush bedding of an ornately-carved four poster wood bed. Giant arched windows filtered sunlight onto Crixus’s flaxen hair. Hardwood floors covered in thick Persian rugs stretched out around us. Machine-sized paintings in gilded ornate frames covered the walls. Bronze figures wrestled on top of the armoire
and slayed lions on top of the dresser. “Where am I?”
“My home. One of them, anyway.”
“You have a home?” Truly, I had never even considered this as a possibility. Crixus had always just been the mysterious figure who strayed in and out of my life. My thoughts had never wandered far down the road of what his own might look like outside our time spent together.
“What? You thought I floated around in the ether somewhere? I am half human, you know.”
“It’s just, we’ve never really talked about this.”
“We’ve never really had a chance.” He rose from the bed and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bank of windows. Through them, I could see an expanse of evergreens. Wherever we were, it was high enough for them to thrive. Crixus’s outfit was familiar, even if our surroundings were not. He wore the same tight black T-shirt that clung to the muscular planes of his chest and back like shadow pouring over rock. The same worn jeans hinted at his powerful thighs.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t remember what I had been wearing before I arrived in this place. I looked down to find myself clothed in an oversized black T-shirt like the one Crixus wore. A covert under-covers investigation revealed me to be panty-less beneath it.
“So you do have more than one.” I hadn’t even realized I’d said anything until Crixus glanced over his shoulder at me.
“More than one what?”
“Black T-shirt. You always wear them. I was never sure if they were part of some kind of…immortal uniform or something.”
He walked over to the armoire. The doors creaked open to reveal four waist-high stacks of folded black shirts.
“Oh,” I said.
“You want to see my underwear drawer as well?”
“That’s not necessary.” I scooted myself up against the headboard and noticed that my palms and forearms were completely free of cuts and abrasions. I hadn’t imagined the glass. Or had I?
“You didn’t imagine it.”
This not-so-subtle reminder of his ability to read my thoughts resurrected the regular give-and-take of our relationship.
“How did I get here?”
“Charon,” Crixus said. “He and I are part of a poker club on Thursday nights. We were all sitting around, swapping stories, when he mentioned he happened to give a lift to this beautiful brunette dressed in a devil costume, only she was kind of pretentious and had a pinchy face.”
Undeadly: The Case Files of Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist (The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Book 6) Page 7
