I could only hope there wasn’t a sea voyage in our near future. I’d always been terrified of drowning or any body of water deeper than my waist. Not to mention that I got terrible seasickness just riding It’s a Small World at Disneyland.
The lariat hung from my neck like a noose. I tried not to think about the fact that only slightly more than half the stones were still transparent. Not only was I running out of time, but part of me was wondering what it might be like to stay in this world that I’d spent my whole life imagining.
Without Hades, if possible, but still.
Once I’d saved my friends, how was I going to return to the real world like none of this had ever happened? Go back to my sterile apartment and put on my play, as if this entire journey had simply been make-believe. Even Hades, who seemed so cold and cruel now, was different in the stories I told for years. Perhaps he could change into something closer to the god prince I imagined.
Before I could chase that line of thought too far, Cerberus came to a sudden stop, so I ran into the back of him. The metal armor he wore was warm against my skin like a living thing. It made me wonder how much hotter his skin must be underneath.
And then I heard it.
A feminine giggle drifted through the air.
“That’s Cleo.” I recognized her laughter because it was the same sound I’d hear at night when I was trying to sleep, and she was watching late-night television. “She’s here. Hades doesn’t have her.”
Cerberus’s face remained tense. “Or it’s a trap.”
But I didn’t care about that. Dropping their hands, I ran in the direction of the infectious sound. Ryn shouted for me to wait, but I didn’t listen. If there was any chance that Cleo could be free of Hades, I had to find her.
The men caught up with me, careful not to trip on the broken flagstones underneath our feet. Cerberus’s sword creaked in its leather holster, and he held onto it with one hand. His long stride brought him several feet ahead of me. Apparently, as the one to finally relieve him of being trapped in stone, he’d become determined to return the favor by protecting me. Ryn fell into step beside me, moving with a loping grace that shouldn’t have been possible on only two legs.
The maze abruptly ended and opened up into a large courtyard. The far side of it was shrouded in fog, so it was impossible to see what might be on the other side without getting closer. But it was what was at the center of the courtyard that caught my attention and made me skid to a stop.
Piles of detritus and trash littered the ground, some even higher than I was tall. Everything from rusted children’s toys to old tires was gathered in a way that looked recklessly deliberate. It was as if everything that had ever been lost or misplaced in the human world had ended up here to rot.
And smack dab in the middle of it was Cleo.
She sat on a pile of rotting kitchen rubbish that had been formed into the general shape of a couch. In her hand was a headless baby doll that she held like a remote control and flicked in the direction of a sagging refrigerator box.
“What are you doing?” I asked, coming to a stop a few feet away from her. “We have to go.”
Cleo rolled her eyes at me as she flicked the doll again. “Of course you want to go out right now when my favorite show is on. Have you seen this episode? The baby and the alien go back in time to kill Hitler, but he’s just an emo art student with girl problems. It’s so wrong but somehow hilarious.”
I looked between her and the sagging box. It had a mysterious stain on the bottom corner that looked green and slimy. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Ryn came up beside me. “Your friend doesn’t know where she is right now. She must be trapped in an illusion, an elaborate one. Your apartment from the sound of it.”
I grabbed her shoulder and shook it. “Cleo, snap out of it!”
“That isn’t going to work,” Cerberus added with a sigh. He looked around the piles of junk and trash. His booted foot stepped over the maggot-ridden corpse of some kind of animal. “You can’t talk someone out of an illusion. She has to make the connection to reality on her own.”
“And how do we get her to do that?”
He just shook his head.
If I managed to get her out of this, we were going to have a conversation about her television addiction. Talk about a love that would never be requited.
I turned to Ryn, who watched Cleo with an expression of pity on his face. Seeing it made my heart drop. He was the one with the most knowledge about how best to overcome illusions. If he didn’t have the answer, then it was impossible to know what to do.
When he looked at my face and saw the desperate entreaty there, Ryn let out a long sigh. “The only way to break an illusion is to force your mind to see through it. That’s what we did by throwing stones on the path. But that illusion simply made us think we were in a different part of the Underworld than we really were. This . . . this is something different.” He gestured to the piles of trash that could defeat all the Febreze in North America. “If she can’t see through this, then there may be no hope.”
But I wasn’t going to give up that easily. It was impossible to understand how, but the knowledge was there that she’d die like this, trapped in a fake reality surrounded by garbage if I couldn’t find a way to convince her of the truth. Hades wouldn’t have left her here otherwise, he taunted me with my inability to save her.
“Want some popcorn?” Cleo asked as she stared into the empty air in front of her. She picked up a battered wooden bowl and held it out to me. “I just made it.”
When I looked down, I nearly puked all over her. Inside the bowl was a writhing mass of worms and grubs, wriggling out of a few pieces of rotten fruit. The smell alone was enough to knock me over. Forcing myself to take the bowl, I placed it a few feet away and out of her reach. “Thanks, I’ll just put it over here.”
“Don’t hog it.”
If she ate anything out of that bowl, I might completely lose my ability to function. I couldn’t even sit through an entire episode of Fear Factor without having to leave the room. Watching it in real life was just out of the question. Hades could have picked almost any other torture, and I was positive I could withstand it, but this was just fucking disgusting.
“If she tries to eat that, you need to get it the hell away from her,” I told Ryn, who gave me the ghost of a smile in response. But something in his eyes made me wonder if he had seen things here that were significantly worse.
What had happened here?
In my dreams, the Underworld had been a place of shimmering magic and exquisite fantasy with beautiful creatures roaming the landscape. Of course, even Hades of my imagination ruled his realm in the mercurial way of all gods, but nothing about this place had been the stuff of nightmares. How could it be? His whole thing was luring girls away from the drab and boring real world so he could keep them here forever, using their life force to sustain himself. The beauty might be a trap, but it was exquisitely rendered just the same.
But as I watched Cleo settle into her pile of trash, it was like warring images competed for dominance in my mind. The things that seemed so real the doctors called them hallucinations, just didn’t jive with what I was seeing now. When I first arrived here, I’d thought that maybe I somehow managed to wish this place into existence or been gifted with a second sight to see into the gods world, like in the stories.
Now, I felt like Alice in a broken-down Wonderland. Nothing was the way that it was supposed to be, which scared me more than if it were all wholly unfamiliar.
A half-truth could be so much more devastating than a lie.
I knelt beside the couch-shaped pile of dirt and tried to take the doll from Cleo’s hand. “Why don’t we turn off the television?”
She yanked it away. “Don’t be rude. If you want to talk to me, at least wait for a commercial break.”
The situation would be funny if it weren’t so close to life and death. What was it Ryn had said? The only way to break thro
ugh an illusion was to realize that it couldn’t possibly be real.
“Don’t you want to meet my friends? You’re being rude by ignoring them.” I had never in all the years she’d known me brought anyone to our apartment. Even Adonis had never been there because I knew he’d finally be convinced I was crazy and run for the hills if he ever got a good look inside my bedroom. He’d think I was some idiot girl who never grew out of the phase where she obsessively collected statues of unicorns and dragons. The motif was pretty similar to what it would look like if The Nightmare Before Christmas and Lisa Frank had a baby then all their family portraits were done by M.C. Escher.
Colorful chaos and total madness, in other words.
Her gaze flicked over the men behind me, and a momentary awareness flashed in her eyes. One had a body that was impossibly lithe covered in tattoos that shifted or changed shape when you looked too closely. And the other was a stone warrior who had only come to life enough that his skin was warm and tanned, but with a sheen like polished granite and the imprint of marble.
I waited for her to see them for what they were.
Then Cleo rolled her eyes and turned away. “I swear they let weirder kids into the drama program with every year that goes by.”
Well, fuck.
If she couldn’t see that these men would never end up inside our apartment, then I had no idea what would knock her out of this—if anything even could. I looked around the garbage heap for something that might trigger her awareness of our surroundings. Inside the bowl of rotten fruit, a worm wriggled out of the blackened core of an apple, and I could have sworn it winked at me.
We might be totally screwed.
Racking my brain for other options, I came around the dirt couch, so I was standing directly in front of Cleo, blocking her view of the refrigerator box television. “Cleo, we need to talk.”
“I told you to stop bothering me while the show is on.” She tapped the beheaded doll as if increasing the volume on the television that only existed in her head. She tried to shoo me away, and when I didn’t move, she glared up at me. “Why are you being so annoying right now? I leave you alone when you lock yourself in your room for hours doing God knows what.”
“C’mon, Cleo.” I held my hands out and gestured down my body. “You’re not even wondering why I’m dressed like this?”
The fanciest outfit that I owned was made of cotton, and I almost never wore skirts or dresses. My Converse high tops usually had some intricate design that I drew on them with colored Sharpie markers, but my appearance was rarely my highest priority.
She glanced at me, gaze traveling over my dress before resting for the briefest moment on the lariat. “At least you’re out of sweatpants before noon. Diana will be happy to hear that. You know she calls me for updates on how you’re doing like every day, right?”
That was old news. “I do.”
“Did you know that she said you’ll still be a little girl when you’re forty?”
I didn’t know that, and a spark of anger shot through me. Diana was the closest thing I’d ever have to a mother, and she protected me when I’d had no one left in the world. She made sure that my bills got paid without me having to think about it and kept my flights of fancy from getting the best of me. In hindsight, the time she’d put her foot down when I wanted to buy a two-hundred-pound piece of raw sapphire that would have cost the same as the GDP of a small country was almost certainly for the best. She forced me to get a roommate, not just because she wanted eyes and ears for when she couldn’t be there, but so I wouldn’t spend all my time alone. I didn’t have to wonder if Diana cared about me.
But she could also be overbearing as hell.
“What else do you and Diana talk about?” I asked, momentarily disregarding that Cleo was trapped in an elaborate illusion. This version of her was a lot more forthcoming then I’d ever seen her before. “Concerning me, I mean.”
“You’re lucky this is a rerun.” She let out a dramatic sigh and squinted up at me. Her gaze fell on the lariat again, focusing briefly on the fifth stone that shifted between a pale green and darker sage. You’d have thought she would figure out that gemstones didn’t typically change color before your eyes. But it wasn’t enough to filter through the illusion, and she looked back at my face with an expression of exasperation. “I mostly tell Diana whatever she wants because she pays our rent and makes sure that we’re set up with every streaming service known to man. And it’s not like she’s ever surprised by the weird shit you do.”
My teeth ground together. “Give me an example.”
“I don’t know, she always wants to know about any guys you’re seeing.” Cleo reached for the bowl of maggots, but Ryn was fast enough to pull it out of reach and toss it over his shoulder. She looked put out for a moment, but then shrugged. Because a strange man throwing what she thought was popcorn across our living room was completely normal. “And I told her you were too much of a coward to ask Adonis out, despite the fact that he’s obviously into you. No guy would put up with all this nonsense otherwise. She’s the one who suggested I try to make you jealous by going after him, but the guy is clearly smitten.”
It felt like a hole had opened at the center of my chest, and my heart was moments from falling down it. Adonis had so many chances to make a move, but he never did.
Or I was too much of an idiot to notice when he tried.
“Did he tell you that?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking. I heard a muffled laugh behind me and didn’t have to look back to know it came from Ryn. The daemon had the uncanny ability to find the humor in even the worst situations.
Cleo gave me a look that said I was the dumbest person she’d ever met. “Can I get back to my show now?”
Without waiting for me to answer, she scooted down so that her view of the “television” was completely unobstructed. She laughed at something that would probably be hilarious if the rest of us could see it.
“Talking to her isn’t going to work,” Cerberus murmured, his voice soft but able to carry across the space separating us. Everything about him was quietly forceful. “I’m afraid you may have to leave her here if she can’t be convinced. Your time is running out, and this place becomes more dangerous the closer that you get to Hades’s castle.”
The thought of what might be worse than this didn’t exactly sit well with me, but what could we do? The only way forward was through.
“Perhaps it would best to go on without her,” Ryn suggested. He walked around the garbage version of our living room with a strange sort of expression on his face. “I don’t understand the relationship you have with this girl. She spies on your life for the person who controls you.”
“Diana doesn’t control me, she just tries to make sure that I stay on the right track. And I wouldn’t exactly call Cleo a spy. She could have lied this whole time about why Diana picked her to be my roommate, but she has always told me the truth.”
With a little spark of awareness, I realized that Cleo is the closest thing I have to a girlfriend. We didn’t make pillow forts or braid each other’s hair, but at least when she was mocking me, it was more like friendly teasing. That was more than I could say for any of the other girls at Olympus who did their best to pretend that I didn’t exist, as if my crazy would somehow rub off if they got too close.
Even though I wouldn’t have called her my friend until this very moment, I couldn’t leave Cleo behind. No matter how much she drove me crazy.
“We just have to show her something that will convince her what she’s seeing can’t be real. I think I know what might work.” My voice held more confidence than I actually felt. Because I had no idea if what I was thinking would actually work, or if I was just going to embarrass myself. “Come over here for a second.”
I gestured to Ryn. For some reason, he seemed like the safer option because he was used to playing tricks.
He turned to me with an expression of mild confusion. “What do you need?”
“Hold s
till?”
Without hesitation or permission, I grasped his cheeks between my palms and brought his face closer to mine.
And then I kissed him.
At first, it was only a chaste touch of lips as a shock of surprise made him go still. Then his hands came up, and for one terrifying moment, I thought he was going to push me away. But then he grasped my waist and yanked me so hard, I practically fell against him.
Then I heard a shocked gasp behind us, which was my reminder that we had an audience, that there was a greater point to this than sexual gratification.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Oh shit.” I gasped and broke the kiss with Ryn. I might have completely forgotten Cleo was there for about a minute. Maybe. Okay, definitely. “Cleo, what are you seeing right now?”
I dropped to the ground when he abruptly let me go, painful shocks shooting up my knees as I landed on my feet.
“Fucking trash everywhere,” she snapped, shaking her head and rubbing her eyes like a deep sleeper who’d been forced violently awake without warning. She looked around us with an expression of dawning horror. Then the smell of garbage hit her, and she gagged. “Where the fuck are we?”
Chapter Nine
Adonis snapped awake with a violent headache, convinced that someone had just dumped cold water over him while he was sleeping. His roommates could be complete dicks like that, especially after a night of drinking. The first person who passed out for the night was going to wake up with a penis drawn in marker on their forehead, or their hand dipped in a bowl of warm water in the hopes they’d piss themselves.
It only took a moment for him to realize that the cold seeping into his bones was from the stone floor beneath him. His headache was likely a result of the awkward position he’d been lying in because the ropes binding him didn’t allow for much movement.
Tempted by Darkness Page 9
