by Bryan Davis
“Does it lead to Hell?” Lauren asked.
“To Hades, I think. There is a difference.” He pointed his beam at the dead end. “Bonnie told me about this part of Hades before we were arrested.”
Lauren read the series of numbers on the meter. White light readings jumped around because of the helmet beams, but the others stayed steady. “Mom said something about Tamiel starting her in paradise. Why would they go to Hades?”
“Other portals are there. My guess is that opening a portal to Hades wouldn’t show up on the government’s monitors. They’re focused on cross-dimensional signals directly from Second Eden, so they wouldn’t notice this one. They’re ignorant about other paths.”
“So Tamiel took Mom to Hades first, then someplace else?”
“Probably. The mysterious part is why the song is still coming from the portal, since it’s closed right now. I guess her song is able to travel through anything she passes through.”
“I suppose so.” Lauren heaved a sigh. “Well, we gotta do what we gotta do.”
“Right, but don’t worry. I’ve been to every realm I know about except one, and I survived. And Walter went to the only place I missed, the Lake of Fire, and he’s still kicking. I’ll be at your side every minute.”
Lauren shuddered again. Walter’s description returned with a vengeance.
“What’s wrong?” Her father touched her cheek. “Your glow is almost as bright as your light.”
She laid her hand over his and forced a smile. Telling him the truth about everything was so easy. “My emotions. And my hearing gets better. I can even read unguarded thoughts.”
He blinked. Thoughts? Like this one?
“Like that one. I guess I didn’t tell you before. It’s not exactly something people want to hear.”
“True, but it could be a big help.” He withdrew his hand and looked at Marilyn. “Better stand back. I’m ready to flash Apollo. If the portal’s too big, we don’t want it taking you with us.”
“Will do.” She retreated a few paces and stooped inside the low entry tunnel. “What’s your danger meter say?”
“Nothing, and that’s got me worried. The portal presence might be affecting me.”
“In that case …” Marilyn drew out a gun. “I’m ready.”
Dad tapped his jaw. “Larry, are you there?”
Lauren tapped her own jaw and listened to her tooth transmitter, but only static came through.
“Nothing,” Dad said. “Too much interference.”
Lauren opened her mouth, hoping to get better reception, but it didn’t help. “Could the portal be causing that, too?”
“Most likely.” He rubbed a finger along one of Apollo’s meters. “Can you still hear Bonnie’s song?”
Lauren touched the cave’s back wall. “I hear it better over here, but now it’s mixed with a lot of other voices. The others are moaning, but it’s not a song at all, just random moans.”
“The sounds of suffering.” Dad set his finger on a button at Apollo’s base. “I’m not waiting for Larry to answer. I’ll trust the local processor. Raise your hood and pull your hands into your sleeves.”
Lauren lifted her sweatshirt’s hood and set her helmet on top.
“Lights off.”
She flicked off her beam.
“Here goes.” A brilliant flash burst from Apollo’s center. Like a splash from a wave, the radiance spilled over the cave’s back wall, making a ragged square of sizzling light, as if someone had painted a phosphorescent double doorway.
Dad raised his hood and pinched it closed in front, his hands hidden in his sleeves. As he leaned through the opening, his backpack smoldered on contact.
“Dad?” Lauren called. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” He jerked back and batted away the sparks. “We should have put more of Ashley’s retardant on the backpacks.”
“What did you see?” Marilyn asked as she rose and drew closer.
“Just another tunnel. Apollo’s residual light let me see pretty far, and I felt no danger, so I assume it’s safe.”
“Except that your danger sensing might not be working.”
“Right. We’ll just have to be careful.” He hoisted the rope coil over his shoulder, covered his face again, and leaped through. After pivoting, he looked back, his forehead knitting. “From this side, the portal is a doorway in front of a pile of rocks, like the cave ceiling collapsed.”
Marilyn took a step closer. “So there’s only one way to go?”
“There’s a hole in the pile, but it’s too small for me to crawl through.” Dad waved a hand. “Lauren, let’s go. Bring Apollo with you.”
“Coming.” Lauren looked at Marilyn. A blend of pride and fear etched her expression. She needed a boost. “See you in a little while, Grandma. I’ll take good care of your son.”
“I know you will.” Marilyn kissed Lauren’s forehead. “Stay strong.”
Lauren grabbed Apollo, still glowing from the portal flash. She jumped through the hole and stumbled into her father’s arms. While he brushed sparks from her backpack, the sizzling doorway shrank further, now about the size of a single door. “Keep your face and hands covered for now,” he said. “We want to stay as invisible as possible.”
“I won’t argue with that. I’m sticking to the shadows.”
“Let’s check what’s ahead.” Dad let the rope coil drop to the floor and withdrew his phone.
As he looked at the screen, she nudged his ribs. “Any service? Maybe they built a tower since Walter’s been here.”
“No service.” The phone’s glow illuminated his smile. “Bonnie once drew a diagram of this place. Carly scanned it for me and sent it to my phone.”
“A map of Hades?”
“At least this part of it.” He handed her the phone. “Here. Try it. The map has a touch screen interface. There’s a map of Second Eden in there, too.”
She scanned the glowing diagram of twisting paths and chambers. Using her fingertips, she scrolled along a path and magnified various sections. “It’s like a maze.”
“It’ll help us get to—” He cocked his head, blinking.
Lauren set Apollo on the floor and stood behind him as the portal continued shrinking. “Is everything all right?”
“I feel something.”
Tingles spread across Lauren’s back. “Danger?”
His answer came in a thought. Hide!
Lauren shuffled back into a shadow and crouched. Dad withdrew his gun and pointed it at the tunnel leading to the crater. “Mom! Someone’s coming!”
Just as Marilyn extended her gun, a pair of projectiles flew from the low exit tunnel, each with a trailing wire, and jabbed her thigh. She grimaced and dropped to the floor, her body twitching as if locked in a seizure.
Dad fired his gun, ducked low, and leaped across the portal. His backpack sizzling, he jerked a man from the exit tunnel and snatched a taser from his grip. Gunfire cracked—twice, three times. Dad toppled, his face toward the portal. His eyes wide, he shouted with a thought. Cover Apollo!
The portal, hovering at eye level, shrank to the size of a doghouse door. Still crouching, Lauren grabbed Apollo and pulled it close to her chest.
The second man hauled Dad up by his wrist, forced him to stand, and pointed at the portal. “Does that lead to Second Eden?”
“Hades,” Dad said, his backpack still smoldering. “The place you’ll fry in if you don’t let us go.”
The first man, his face scratched and bleeding, pressed a gun against Marilyn’s cheek. “One puff of fire and she’s dead.”
As the portal dwindled to the size of a mailbox, Dad drilled a stare into the second man’s eyes. Lauren, you’ll have to do this yourself. You know how to use Apollo. Find your mother or get help in Second Eden. Don’t come back here. They’re sure to post a guard. Go! You can do this!
As the opening diminished to a mouse hole, a final thought flowed. I
love you. Never forget that.
Chapter 7
THE MOUTH OF ELIJAH
The portal disappeared in a splash of sparks. Lauren’s chamber darkened. A slight glow emanated from Apollo’s glass enclosure, barely enough to illuminate a ten-foot-high pile of boulders that blocked the way back.
Lauren panted. She swallowed hard. What now? Go it alone? Try to find Mom in the depths of Hades? With Dad captured and armed men guarding the entry cave, what other choice was there?
Tingles rushed along her scales. A click sounded. Water dripped somewhere. A skittering of feet raced across the floor. She flicked on her helmet light and pointed the beam at the base of a side wall. A red-eyed rat, black and scrawny, stared at her for a moment before dashing into the shadows.
Holding her breath, she panned the beam across the rock pile, a collection of stones and boulders that sloped upward at about a forty-five-degree angle. Near the top on the left side, the beam passed across the hole Dad mentioned. It was too small for him, like he said, but maybe she could wriggle through.
She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. All right, Lauren. Get a hold of yourself. This isn’t any worse than driving with a demon in the backseat. At least no one is texting you creepy messages.
After taking a cleansing breath, she climbed up, careful to step lightly on the smaller, shifting stones. Once near the top, she knelt on a boulder and peered into the hole—a cylindrical tunnel that ran through the pile for about twenty feet, ending out in the open. Not far away, a castle-like house sat atop a steep slope of grass and weeds. Mist hung in the air, and a flowery fragrance passed by.
Lauren replayed her mother’s description of where Tamiel was keeping her. It matched that place exactly. Could she be in the house on the hill? Mom had said something about starting in Paradise and descending into Perdition, whatever that meant, so she might have left already. Either way, there was more light outside than in the cave, so it made sense to try to get there.
She slid Dad’s phone into her sweatshirt pocket, pushed both arms into the hole in the rubble, and tried to squirm through, but after a few feet, the passage narrowed. She clawed at the walls, but the rocks wouldn’t give way. It would take a hammer or pickax to widen the path, and even then the hole might collapse.
She pushed her way back and descended gingerly until she reached the floor. Sweat trickled down her cheeks and back. It was definitely warmer here than on Earth, or maybe she had expended more effort than she had thought. In either case, with only a few bottles of water in tow, staying cool was a priority.
She set the helmet on the ground, aimed the beam deeper into the cave, and took off her backpack. After withdrawing the phone, she removed the sweatshirt and tied the sleeves around her waist. Now dressed in camo pants and a white T-shirt borrowed from the prison, she put the pack on and listened. Mom’s song drifted by. The source lay deeper in the cave, so she probably wasn’t in that house anymore.
After donning the helmet again, she hoisted the rope coil over her shoulder and picked up Apollo. Only one option remained—to venture deeper into the cave.
She marched ahead on the narrow descending path, waving her light from side to side and glancing at the phone’s map every few seconds. One path was labeled Exit Tunnel, her most likely location. If only it had a GPS locator to show exactly where she was on the map, that would help.
Still listening to her mother’s song, she slowed her pace. Every movement felt surreal, as if strolling through a dream. Even her shoes grinding pebbles emitted a plastic crunch, artificial, as if the sound had passed through water. Mom’s song, however, stayed constant, still somewhat pinched, and wailing laments continued to wash into the music.
As she walked, Dad’s explanation about this place came to mind, part of a talk they had while they flew in Merlin. “When Earth and Hades were merged, a passageway led to a series of tunnels where girls called underborns dug for magnetic ore long ago. Queen Sapphira was one of them, a pitiful waif at the time, and they lived in the depths of Hades without experience of anything beyond their world, though they read about a land without rocky ceilings, a land of sky and sun. Now that the two realms have been split once again, the path between them is sealed, so anyone wanting to go from one world to the other has to go through a portal. An Oracle of Fire can sometimes open an existing portal with flames from her hands, but normal people like us have to use Apollo. Without it, only a huge explosion and fire could open a door to another world, and that’s only if the conditions are just right.”
Lauren shuddered. Those poor underborns! But at least they had each other. Walking alone in Hades felt like being marooned on another planet. The oxygen tanks were nearly spent, and the only spacecraft had run out of fuel.
Memories of her father’s words continued. “I know of two portals within Hades. One is in a chamber that held part of a museum. At the top level of the museum, a portal led to a volcano in Second Eden, but I don’t know if that portal exists anymore. The other portal is at the bottom of a chasm. It leads to a realm called the Valley of Souls—a holding place for people and dragons who are waiting to get resurrected to Second Eden or to Earth. Your mother and I prefer to call it Abaddon’s Lair, because there’s a place in Second Eden called the Valley of Shadows, and we sometimes got the two names confused. Anyway, you and I need to avoid that place if we can. Bonnie spent four years there before she finally got out, and she said the master of that land is a pain to deal with.”
Lauren shook her head. If not for seeing a portal to another world herself, Dad’s words would be nothing more than a fairy tale, a scary bedtime story, but every bit of his tale was coming true.
Her light ran across a trap-door-sized hole in the floor. She stopped at the edge and shone the beam into the depths, but it revealed nothing but darkness.
She looked at the phone map. At the intersection between the exit tunnel and a wider tunnel, a label read Caitiff Trap.
“The ape men,” she whispered. She let the helmet’s beam knife into the trap’s darkness again. If one of them fell into this hole, he could never climb out, could he?
Again looking at the map, she listened to the song. The melody, still mixed with laments, drifted in from the right. She scrolled the map in that direction until it reached the end—a chamber that held a round symbol labeled Museum Room. No other labels indicated a trap, so it should be safe to go that way. If the museum room still held a portal, even if it led to a volcano, that might be the only way out of this place.
After bypassing the trap, she quick marched along a level tunnel, then through a series of turns, ascents, and descents, all the while following the song and glancing at the map. Every open area along the way carried a new odor, ranging from musty to biting to perfume-like. Temperature fluctuated as well, though it always trended downward.
Carrying Apollo in one hand and the phone in the other, while lugging the rope over her shoulder and a heavy pack on her back, she kept up the quickest pace she could. With darkness shrouding everything except for the helmet’s beam striking the tunnel floor a few feet in front, the path proved to be a dizzying maze. If not for the map, getting lost would have been unavoidable.
After several more minutes, she stopped and shone her beam on a high arch leading into a huge chamber. She looked at the map again. This had to be the right place. The museum room was probably somewhere past the arch. According to a pop-up notation, a flaming tree of life grew in a planter at the center of the museum, though a flood might have doused it years ago.
A light flickered inside the chamber, faint but unmistakable, and the pattering of running feet echoed within.
Sudden fear raised a tingle in Lauren’s scales. The footsteps sounded human—no red-eyed rat this time.
She flicked off the helmet light. Now in darkness, she raised an arm close to her face. No glow. But that didn’t mean much. While others often saw it easily, her own eyes never detected it.
She slid off
her backpack, withdrew the night-vision goggles, and put them on with her helmet still in place. As she tiptoed forward, she scanned the chamber. Darkness had transformed into an eerie blend of phantom images. The flickering light, now reddish, emanated from a circular building, too wide to see around to the rear and too tall to get a look at the top. A pair of broken doors lay open at the building’s front leading to the light within. The same light shone through windows higher up, though dimmer at each succeeding level.
A draft brushed her cheeks, cool and moist, and a whisper followed. “Will you be my friend?”
Lauren sucked in a breath and froze in place. Glancing all around, she searched for the source of the plaintive call. Was it a boy? Certainly not a grown man. Maybe a teenager.
The draft returned, swirling around her head. A stench filled her nostrils—rancid, like a soured dishcloth.
“I’m so lonely. Will you stay with me?”
A silky touch tickled her cheek. She whipped off the helmet and goggles and batted the air around her face, as if casting off a spider web. When she lowered her hands, the odor faded along with the breeze.
Trembling, she flicked on the helmet light and panned it across the chamber. The shaky beam knifed through the darkness, striking a bare wall in the distance, then the cylindrical museum room, then another bare wall that wrapped around behind her. Nothing moved. No one was there.
Lauren gulped. Dad didn’t mention anything about ghosts, but he probably just couldn’t hear them when he last visited this place. Obviously someone had to be adding those laments to the background song. Maybe a condemned spirit broke away from the ghostly choir and now wandered these passages.
She slid the goggles over her head and let them dangle at her chest, then put the helmet on. It wouldn’t do any good trying to talk to the poor soul. She couldn’t be his friend. She couldn’t stay with him. Loneliness would be his eternal shackles.
After taking several more steps, the helmet light now leading the way, she stopped at a pair of thin mats on the floor, like gym mats for tumblers and vaulters. Torn in several places, stuffing protruded from tiny holes. She looked at the phone’s map. Another pop-up note explained that Sapphira and Acacia slept here.
