17. Theseus #2
When he lifts his face as Charon docks the ferry, I see that his eyes are full black. No faded color belonging to one of the shades there. It looks like someone colored them in with a black Sharpie, and my breath gets caught.
Everyone in the Underworld knows what that means.
He’s an Unmentionable.
Now that he’s docked, Charon steps onto the shore and lifts one hand in my direction.
It isn’t quite a wave. Charon… he’s not really the waving type, though I’ve worn him down enough that I want to believe we’re friends so, at the very least, he acknowledges Willow more than he’s showing deference to Persephone.
I do wave back. “Busy day for you, too?” I call.
His hood tilts. “Very.”
I glance at the lines stretching along the path to the gate. “I noticed.”
No wonder Hades needed to spend the day in the megaron…
“More coming,” adds Charon, his voice dry and brittle, like rattling bones. “Plenty more.”
Wonderful.
He lowers the gangplank. The cloak-figured steps off first, keeping her hood drawn tightly around her face. Charon gestures toward the palace with one skeletal hand. “The lord is waiting for your arrival.”
Oh. What’s that about?
I don’t know. The woman in the cloak strides forward, but before I can sate my curious side and ask, the male shade hovers over the gangplank, floating over to the edge of the dock. He remains near the landing, even after Charon nods his goodbye before climbing into the ferry and pushing off again.
No attendant approaches Theseus. None is needed. The mark in his eyes has already decided his path. The judges will confirm it, but everyone knows where he’ll end up.
He stares toward the distant gate, a small frown tugging on his lips.
My heart sinks. And, though I should probably just leave well enough alone, that’s never been my style.
I move toward him. Sir stays pressed against my leg, quiet, and I’m sure he’s waiting to see what I’m going to do.
“Hello.”
That’s what I do. I say “hello”.
He lifts his head, a stricken look on his face that’s terrible, but not as terrible as the mark of the Unmentionable.
“I didn’t mean to die,” he says in a voice that echoes. “Not while our story was still being told. But the beast… the minotaur… he was going after Ariadne. My wife. I had to stop him. I had to save her. But I was too slow, and now she’s with the beast, and I… I am here.”
One thing I’ve learned since I’ve been in the Underworld: if given the opportunity to plead their case to either the king or queen of this realm, nearly every shade will.
It’s just wired into them. Immortal or not, we’re all still human—for the most part—and we don’t want to be judged for all eternity based on singular mistakes we’ve made.
I’ve heard of murderers trying to justify themselves before being sent to the Fields of Punishment, but this is worse. If what Theseus says is true, he finally put his wife first, only to die and be doomed as an Unmentionable for it.
It has to be true. The shades can’t lie to me…
they can’t lie to Hades’s bride… not down here.
Sure, they can twist their circumstances to make them sound better than they are, but they can’t lie—and now, unless someone intercedes on his behalf, Theseus will end up in the fiery river, his soul never to reborn again, all because he didn’t finish his story with Aria before he sacrificed himself to try to save her.
My chest aches despite myself.
He had dismissed his wife. I remember the way she stood after he left, wounded and regretful, and how I told her she could do better.
Not one of my most tactful moments.
“I don’t know exactly what you did,” I tell him softly. “Or what was done to you. But if you became an Unmentionable because your story ended before it should have, and all because you tried to save her… that isn’t fair.”
“I would’ve done more if I could,” he says, and I believe him. “Theseus did love Ariadne in his way. But if this is my fate… I accept it.”
You know what? Repentance doesn’t erase harm. I taught enough children over the years to know that being sorry after hurting someone doesn’t magically repair what happened. But the man in front of me doesn’t look angry or frightened of what’s going to happen it him now.
Nope. He looks like he believes he deserves to disappear.
I know someone else who once believed the same thing.
Aiden spent decades convinced he was nothing more than a killer because other men turned him into one.
He carried every life he took as though the weight belonged solely to him, never that man who used him, never the government that trained him, never the world that taught him violence was all he was good for.
Maybe Theseus is guilty. Maybe he isn’t.
Either way, I won’t watch him surrender to oblivion without doing what I was born to do: stand up for the dead.
“I’ll speak to Aiden.” Whoops. “I mean Hades. You know. My husband.” Theseus nods, and I’m sure he does know.
“I can’t promise anything. Aiden doesn’t interfere with the judges often, and Hades takes the laws of the dead very seriously.
But he also understands what it’s like to have someone else use you. ”
A flicker passes through those black eyes. Hope. I think that was hope.
“Stay here,” I tell him. “At the gate. Don’t let anyone take you to the judges until I come back.”
That might be the most ridiculous instruction I have ever given a dead man marked for eternal destruction, but he nods. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” Seriously. I don’t even know if this is going to work, but I at least have to try. “Sir? Watch him for me, would you?”
Sir sits beside the shade, tail curling around his front paws. He yips, and I know he’ll make sure that Theseus isn’t shipped off to the Phlegethon before I have the chance to talk to Aiden.
I smile. “Good boy.”