Chapter 32 – Shade
SHADE
We fight, but the odds against us are impossible to defeat.
Bloody and bruised, we’re dragged to Hades’s prisons and tossed into a dark room.
A minute later, the laughing shades and the guards made of bones leave back the way they came, and we have nothing but a few flickering torches to light the darkness.
Medusa swears and spits blood onto the floor.
Keto sits up slowly, wincing.
Guilt turns my stomach. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. Why hadn’t Hades simply killed them and taken them to their fate? Why spring this trap for us?
“I don’t understand what happened,” I say.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Medusa shouts.
“Stop!” Keto responds, lifting a hand with bleeding knuckles. “Don’t you get it? They tricked her. She doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. So be mad, but not at her.”
I look from one woman to the other. “I don’t understand.”
The anger fades from Medusa’s face, and she looks away from me.
Keto sighs. “It’s true that Medusa and I have killed innocents, but it wasn’t by choice.
We’re not the horrible monsters that Norbert made us out to be.
We’re members of the gargoyle community.
We’re married to gargoyles, and we’ve raised our children there.
But that wasn’t good enough for the Elites, they wanted us gone, and they used you to do their dirty work. ”
Is that true? I feel every hair on my body stand on end. It feels true.
How could I have been tricked…again?
“They also setup a trap with Hades.”
The confident voice comes from the back of the cell, and I jerk toward the sound.
Out of the shadows, a woman emerges. Her skin glows a soft blue, and her hair is the same brilliant shade as it flows down her shoulders.
Dirt mars her flesh, and her clothes are torn and tattered, but she holds herself like a queen of this dark world.
“Who the hell are you?” Medusa demands.
She bows slightly and offers Medusa a hand. “Hecate, a long-term prisoner of Hades, and an ally.”
Medusa takes her hand cautiously, and Hecate helps her to her feet.
“I guess any allies are better than no allies here. So, any idea how to escape?”
Hecate laughs at Medusa’s words. “If I knew how to escape, do you think I’d still be here?”
For the first time, Medusa’s bravo falters. “My gargoyles will have started to worry about me by now, and the kids—“
“We’ll get out of here,” Keto reassures her. “And those Elites will rue the day they set us up.”
“What will you do?” I ask.
Keto looks at me, and our gazes catch. “We’re going to leave the sanctuary with our families. We won’t stay in a place we aren’t safe.”
I wonder if the Elites considered that could happen. “Hecate, do you know why we were captured?”
Her golden eyes hold mine. “Perhaps he plans to use you. Perhaps he plans to hurt you. Or maybe, like me, he plans to do all of those things from time to time and ignore you the rest of the time.”
“Why did he capture you?”
“Because…I’m a powerful witch. The first witch. I was a threat to him, and this was how he dealt with me. There’s more to the story than that, but I figured I’d give you just the need to know details.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
She gives the saddest smile. “I can endure anything… I only wish I could see my child again. I wonder a million times a day if she’s happy, or if her heritage has led her to a life of misery.”
“Her heritage?”
“Empusa is half demon,” she says, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.
“I hope she’s happy too,” I tell her. “But when we escape, you’ll see for yourself.”
Hecate sighs. “I admire your bravo, but seriously, I’m not sure escaping will be as easy as you think. Even if you could get out of these prisons, across the river, and to the tunnels, you have days and days, maybe even weeks, of traveling before you can reach the surface.”
I shake my head. “We need only to reach the tunnels; I can teleport us from there.”
Hecate stiffens. “You can teleport…out of the Underworld? How?”
“Technically,” I say, trying my best to explain myself, “I’m a shade, but I’m free from Hades’s command.
Meaning, my job is to punish the souls of those that hurt the innocent and drag their souls to the Underworld to be tortured, so I have the ability to teleport in and out…
but not past the tunnels. My powers don’t work here. ”
“Hell,” Hecate murmurs. “An actual shade. A free shade. That’s incredible.”
“But it doesn’t really help us,” Medusa says, and she sounds upset. “We still have to get out of this damn cell.”
Hecate draws her thin frame up taller. “I might be able to help with that.”
“How?” I ask.
“I know someone.”
Someone? But who?