The Catacomb King (Rise of Persephone #1)

Chapter 1 Journey to the Underworld

Journey to the Underworld

Three o’clock in the morning. The air frigid as teeth, the sky stained jet-black. You’d think anyone with any damn sense would be asleep.

But no one ever said I had any sense.

I couldn’t sleep. I never could. Not with my mother coughing up blood in our only cot while I lay on the hard wood floor next to the fire. I’d long since given up trying to soothe her; it was no use, and I’d only wake her up.

Besides, her poor dried-out throat could only be soothed with water. And eleven months into the drought, we didn’t have any.

We didn’t have any of anything.

At the beginning of her illness, I used to just lie there and listen, my terror and anxiety ratcheting higher and higher, my own chest hurting in solidarity, like someone was scratching my lungs with a fingernail.

Like I was climbing a flight of steps cut into a cliff, each jagged stair one step closer to my mother’s death.

Then, just three months ago, I hadn’t been able to take it anymore.

I had known the risk, but I told myself, Surely I can get away with just once.

In the middle of the night, I’d braced myself, pulled on my boots, and snuck out to the fields over the underworld.

There, I’d gathered the little red buds that grew only in those lands.

They were analgesic flowers called edenica herbs, which could be heated over the fire until they leaked a pain-dulling elixir.

I had almost been too afraid to give my mother the elixir — everyone knew that eating food from the underworld was like eating a magnet that dragged you underground, trapping you there — but I theorized that the herbs didn’t really count as food, and the fields over the underworld didn’t really count as the underworld itself.

More to the point, I was so desperate.

I would only do it the once, I told myself.

That was what I told myself the next time, too. And the next time. And the next.

But this week, I’d promised myself I would stop.

Really. The risk of getting kidnapped was too great.

I’d been raised on stories of the dark, evil godlings who lived in the underworld, sharp-toothed and many-legged, who dragged women underground and cracked them open and ate their bone marrow.

If that happened to me… well, for one thing, I’d be dead.

And for another, it would ruin my mother, who would have no one left to take care of her.

But lying here, listening to her die, was ruining me.

Does it count as lying to yourself if you know you’re lying?

I rekindled the fire, tucked our single meager blanket more tightly around my mother, and snuck out.

The walk from my village to the border of the underworld stretched ten interminable miles.

Three hours in the bitter dark. I had tried to hate the walk — its length, the frigid air, the soreness in my legs, the fear as I approached the border.

But if I was being honest with myself, I couldn’t hate it.

The terror felt too much like anticipation.

The pain in my legs felt too much like I had an ounce of control.

Even ten miles from the border, Limer was too close to the underworld for most people’s comfort.

Traveling merchants came through occasionally, as did tourists who wanted a cheap thrill.

But everyone agreed that no one should live so close to the underworld — that strange, haunted land where black shadows slithered in and out of pockmarks in the cliffs.

The underworld itself was deep under the earth, but the grass and herbs overtop of it grew as thick as fur year-round, and dew glittered on that grass even in the afternoon, unscorched by our insipid northern sun.

Even the sun was brighter on the underworld side of the border. And it set a few minutes later.

When I’d started making this journey, I’d told myself it would be a one-time thing.

Hell, it might have turned out to be a zero-time thing.

I’d stood so long at the border that I had lost feeling in my feet.

The monstrous godlings kidnapped a nubile young woman every quarter-century.

Every twenty-five years like clockwork. It was the only time they crossed the border, but cross it they did.

It did not matter if everyone ran; they would travel hundreds of miles to get their woman, if they had to.

They had done this in my mother’s time, and in my grandmother’s, and in my great-grandmother’s.

They had done it for at least a thousand years.

Except this year.

This year, it had not been twenty-five years since their last kidnapping.

It had been twenty-six.

At first, I’d worried that by journeying to the underworld, I was placing myself in the line of fire. That when the underground monsters did decide to kidnap their woman, I’d be the first one they saw. And no one would be around to hear me scream.

But over the course of these past few months, it had become clear that no one was going to bother to kidnap me.

Which meant it was getting harder and harder to talk myself out of gathering the herbs.

There were never any scaly hands wrapping around my waist, no broad-shouldered, shadow-faced figures rising from the depths to snatch me underground.

Just me going home to my mother, simmering the red herbs, coaxing the syrup down her throat, then running off to spend ten hours cooking and cleaning at the Stammerers’ house in exchange for a pathetically small salary, which I needed to keep my mother in threadbare clothes and dried beans.

I had originally taken the job with the Stammerers because they were rich enough that they had water for me to steal.

But by the time I resorted to going to the mouth of the underworld, the drought had lasted so long that the Stammerers had started ordering me to scrub the floors with sand instead of soap.

And still the fields withered and crackled.

And so did my mother’s lungs.

And so did the earth under my feet on my illicit trips to the underworld.

And the drought and my mother’s illness both stretched on and on.

And on.

This time, when I reached the border, I unlaced my boots and peeled off my socks.

The boundary between worlds was as stark and obvious as a horizon.

On one side, dry rocky earth ruined by the drought.

On the other side, grass. I always knew it was a bad idea to take off my shoes, but what could I say?

These ill-advised trips were the only time I got to feel anything alive on my skin.

Gods knew I wasn’t exactly bedding down with anyone.

I inhaled through my nose, enjoying the shiver of anticipation.

Then I crossed.

I loved this moment. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did.

Even without the visual marker of the grass, you knew as soon as you crossed over that you were somewhere new.

The air over the underworld was thicker and more humid, shot through with static electricity.

It slid into my lungs like water and made my hair puff out.

It was warmer here, too. And the grass was always dewy.

I filled my basket with herbs and swept as many dew-drops as I could into a glass flask.

By the time my flask was half-full, the black sky was lightening on the Underworld side, and the bite in the air was weakening.

I was furious at not having had time to get more water, but I had to go to work.

I put the flask in my pocket and turned to leave.

Then something rustled behind me.

It sounded like a… footstep.

I paused.

It sounded again. My heart thumped in my chest, a mouse in a cage.

Why was I so scared all of a sudden?

My body stayed frozen on blind instinct.

No, come on. I wrestled with myself. I was being stupid.

There was nothing behind me. No one was going to kidnap me; the godlings famously only kidnapped beautiful women, and I was only wiry, sarcastic little Persephone.

I’d been coming to the fields over the underworld for three months, and there had never been anything, or anyone, else. Nothing but the wind.

Except… wind didn’t make that sound.

I swallowed. My fingers trembled on my basket. I forced myself to keep walking, toward the human world and my boots…

Wait.

My blood chilled.

My boots were on this side of the border.

I always left them on the rocky side, my own side. But here they were, surrounded by grass.

Had someone… moved them?

And if so… who?

I froze.

The little hairs on the backs of my arms had stood on end. Like the hairs of a rabbit watched by a hawk.

Someone else was here.

And I discovered that I was very, very afraid.

My heart began to thrum. Gods, I had been so stupid!

I closed my eyes, petrified; I thought I sensed whatever it was — whatever he was, I thought wildly, somehow knowing that whatever was stalking me was a male, who ever heard of a female godling kidnapping a human girl — drawing closer and closer to me, reaching out its scaly claws…

I imagined his teeth in my flesh, blunt and slick, sinking into the meat of my breasts, my thighs…

No. I wasn’t going to go down like this.

With one deep breath I gathered all my courage and whipped around with my fists up.

There was nothing there. No one behind me.

Just the paling sky. The rustling grass.

No one had ever been there. There was no one watching me. No one had moved my boots; I’d probably put them down on this side of the border without noticing it.

How embarrassing.

Suddenly, I wasn’t scared at all anymore. I was furious. I all but threw my basket over the border. I slammed my feet into my boots so hard it hurt. Gods, I was such a gods-damned idiot. Did I want to get kidnapped? Huh? Leave my mother to rot?

And what had I thought was going to happen, anyway?

Had I really expected to see a godling? Feel his awful rough hands on my skin?

Because everyone had already made it eminently clear: Nobody wanted me.

Not my own mother, who couldn’t even recognize me.

Not my childhood best friend and secret crush, Calix, who’d swanned off to diplomat school in the capitol city months ago and left me behind.

Not Josie Stammerer, the daughter of my employers, with her beautiful strawberry hair and freckles.

Not even the cursèd godlings, who’d had me tromping over top of their dark kingdom for three months now, ripping herbs from their very earth, and yet they couldn’t even be bothered to kidnap me, not even for their ritual quarter-century sacrifice, to peel my skin off and eat my teeth or whatever it was they did down there.

Whatever! I didn’t care! I knew I was never going to get to go anywhere but my tiny fucking village, and that was fine.

I speedwalked all the way home, and I didn’t look back at the sun-limned grass of the underworld once.

Not even to check when I heard that rustle again, the same rustle that could never be the wind.

And when I got back to the village, my best friend Calix was home from the capitol.