Chapter 15 The Third Day #2
I let go of the rock sheet. I rolled the boulders out of the way and curled up inside the divot. The earth was coated in Mackr’s green blood. The blood glazed my skin like oil. I thought I could taste it.
I called up to Hades, “Let go of the rock sheet.”
He looked down at me. His jaw dropped. “Get up!”
“No. Let go and fall. You’ll fall right in here, on top of me. We’ll be safe.”
“I’m not letting go of this thing until you get out of the way.”
“Well, that’s going to be tough, because I’m not getting out of the way until you let go!”
I was shaking. But I was sure this would work. At least I was sure that according to the laws of physics, it was supposed to work.
Hades shook his head furiously.
“Hades,” I called up. I was getting desperate. He was impossibly strong, but even he had a limit. Soon he would be crushed no matter what. “Prince. You’re trusting me with their lives, aren’t you? Try to trust me with yours.”
I watched as he started to shake his head again. “It’s not my life I’m worried about,” he started to say —
— and then his feet skidded on the rock.
We both froze.
Then I shouted, “I wouldn’t do it to Elke!”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t let you die, Your Lordship, because it would ruin Elke! I don’t give a shit about you, but Elke’s been kind to me. You can trust me to save you. Now let go!”
Hades looked at me over his shoulder, his eyes wide.
Then, to my astonishment, he did let go.
Just before his hot body crashed on top of me, I remembered that in the underworld, the laws of physics did not work the way they did back home.
But by then it was too late.
The sheet of rock slammed on top of Hades. He made a huffing exhale. My blood spiked. Where had he been hit? His spine? His skull? Had his vertebrae shattered?
The sheet had covered our divot like the lid to a coffin, like a wooden board falling on top of a bathtub. I felt the roaring vibrations of the rock smashing down on it.
But the rock sheet protected us. We were safe.
Almost not daring to believe it, I reached up and inched my hand around the back of Hades’s head. Into his hair. He was flat on top of me, his ear crushed against my ear, his chin nestled atop my shoulder, his breath hot on my own neck. My fingers laced into his hair.
There was a half-inch of space between his head and the rock.
The rock sheet had not struck him at all when it fell. He had only been startled.
He was safe. And so was I.
I moved my hand down his shoulders, then his back, almost not daring to believe it. There was a scant inch of space, all the way down.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he whispered. His hard chest pressed into my chest, almost snatching the breath from my lungs. His heartbeat pulsed, rabbit-fast, in the blood of his stomach against my own soft stomach. His heavy thighs trembled against mine.
I became miserably aware that my clothes had been shredded sometime during my two climbs. The skin of my abdomen was bare against his smooth, silky tunic. Our arms were pressed together, bicep to bicep, wrist to wrist.
I whispered back, “Saving your life, asshole.” And then: “You could say thank you.”
Hades huffed out a laugh.
Above us, the rockslide roared.
And then it was quiet.
My plan had worked.
Neither of us moved, though. He was breathing in tandem with me, or perhaps I was breathing in tandem with him. Our hearts were beating simultaneously; I could tell by the throb of my jugular against his.
The darkness was perfect. His skin was perfect. Nobody knew we were here.
But soon they would be coming. Looking for us.
Hades must have realized that too, because after a moment, very slowly and creakily, and with an exhale of what might have been regret or might only have been a response to his exhausted muscles, he pushed himself off me and lifted the sheet of rock on his back. He groaned.
I scrambled out from under him, shaking like a leaf.
The shaft beneath us was clear. The rockslide had washed all the roughage and debris clean out of it. Like… like water. It would be easy to lay the pipe.
I turned my head. The path in the other direction, too — up to the cliff face — was more open than it had been before, the rock having cleaved itself apart. There would still be digging, but… less.
We might actually be able to get this thing done today.
I looked at Hades. He let the rock sheet fall back down on our little hidey-hole, covering it completely.
No one would ever know it was there. That we had been in it together.
That for just a minute or two, he and I had been equal, only inches from death.
That, in fact, I had been the stronger of the two of us. That it had been I who saved our lives.
He looked at me. He was shaking, too, much as he tried to hide it. “Your ankle,” he said.
It was swollen and scarlet. “Oh,” I said, “it was like that the whole time.”
“Monarch’s balls.” He picked me up in his arms like he had the first day, when he’d kidnapped me. He carried me almost all the way back down to the reservoir. This time, I didn’t argue. I was too stunned by the whole thing. Too braced and jumpy for another rockslide. It didn’t come.
Just before we exited the shaft, he put me down. “Walk,” he said.
“Come on. Now your arms get tired?”
“Trust me. You want to be walking when they see you.”
Trying for hauteur and failing, I said shakily, “Should I also tell them I saved your sorry life?”
But Hades didn’t sneer at my quivering voice. “You won’t have to.” I couldn’t read his voice. “Walk.”
My ankle seared. But I braced myself against the shaft’s walls and slid down, onto the edge of the reservoir.
All eyes turned to me.
I was suddenly painfully aware of how sticky I was.
Covered in Mackr’s green blood. My hair and eyelashes and eyebrow hairs stuck together in hideous, putrid clumps.
I listed sideways on my bad ankle. My clothes were disgusting, clinging to my body, ripped to shreds, somehow damp and crusty at the same time.
I scrubbed dried blood out of my face, suddenly sure that I would cry. No. I set my jaw and instead gestured to Hades with a sarcastic flourish as he emerged from the pipe-shaft behind me. “Voilà,” I said. “Now. Where’s Mackr?”
No one said anything.
“Where is the son of a bitch?” I repeated.
Still nothing. Then, slowly, a few of the worker-godlings in front of the pack — spiderlike, all of them — shifted to the side. Out of my view of Mackr.
Who was lying on the ground, unmoving.
His head had split open the rest of the way. His human body, too, had cracked, almost down the middle. His limbs were situated at strange angles, like spider-legs; and where I could see his bones, they did not look like human bones. The bones looked like Elke’s carapace, black and shiny and hard.
“No,” I heard myself say. I found myself stumbling forward on my bad ankle, reaching for the body. I fell to a kneeling position beside Mackr. I shook him. “Mackr. Mackr, wake up.”
“He’s dead,” said one of the godlings who had moved out of the way.
“No, he’s not,” I said. “He’s just giving me a hard time.”
“Mütte,” the godling said to me, “he’s dead.”
Behind me, Hades bit out, “What did you just call her?”
A paralyzed silence. Mütte. That was what Elke had called me by accident.
The godling said, “That’s what Mackr called her.”
“He what?”
“He said, Mütte tried to save me. Those were his last words.” And then he said, “I, I apologize for my presumption, Your Lordship. When he said it, we all thought, in the pipe-shaft —”
“You thought wrong. Don’t any of you forget she’s getting drowned in the Lake if she doesn’t get her fucking shit together.”
A silence. My spine was turning to ice.
Then one of them said, in a tone that I supposed only a people born of chaos would dare to use on their beloved Prince, “Doesn’t that make her more of a mütte?”
A flurry of gasps.
“Watch your mouth,” Hades snapped. “Anger not the Monarch.”
“He’s already pretty angry,” the godling said insolently, and he gestured at the pipeline and the rockslide.
I choked out, high-pitched, “What’s wrong with you people? Why are you fighting? Someone is dead!”
Everyone was quiet again.
I touched Mackr’s hideous broken face. I wished he had eyelids I could close. Anything I could do, as a sign of respect. I managed to ask, “Are you going to take him to the catacombs?”
“Um. Not yet. The body must be prepared first,” said the godling who’d called me by that strange name. He sounded surprised by the question, but he didn’t show his surprise on his face. He was so spiderlike, I wasn’t sure he could show it.
“Is there a — a service? A funeral service? Can I — can I come?”
Again the godling’s spider-face didn’t change. But his silence spoke volumes. He looked up at Hades.
“She won’t be here by then,” Hades said. To me, he said, “It’ll take too long to prepare the body. Longer than what’s left of your three days.”
I almost retorted, automatically, Then I’ll stay.
But I didn’t. I didn’t know Mackr. Hell, I didn’t even like Mackr. I had my own people.
Still, as Mackr was lifted and carried off, I could not shake the sense that he was not as unlike my people as he seemed. Despite the spider-face and the douchebag attitude. I felt like I should be there for him. I felt like I was doing something wrong.
I realized I was crying. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck. I swiped my disgusting bloody hand across my disgusting bloody face.
Everyone was staring at me.
Hades touched my shoulder. He guided me away, handed me off to Elke. As Elke ushered me back to Hades’s bedchamber, Hades turned away and began to instruct the workers. I saw a few of them, hesitantly, climb back into the pipe-shaft, saw a few others carrying off rock and debris.
In the room, Elke brought me another bowl of water and a cloth. She bound my ankle. We were both silent.
I thought she would return me to the reservoir — I wanted to go back to work, wanted to escape the storm of guilt and horror in my head, and I had less than one day left — but she went away.
I did not even have the energy to pace. I curled up on the bed, naked under the blanket, and sobbed until my throat gave out.
When the door opened again, I knew it was Hades and not Elke. I could always tell.
“Go away,” I said. “I’ll go back to the reservoir in a minute.”
“You won’t be able to get there by yourself.”
“Yes, I will,” even though no, I wouldn’t, the catacombs fucking moved. This whole place was a horror. I wanted to go home, where at least if someone died I would be able to go to the fucking funeral.
Hades came over to the bed. He hesitated. Then he lay down, shoes and all, on top of the coverlet. He didn’t make any move to touch my naked body. He didn’t even say anything obnoxious. He just reached over and put his hand on my shoulder, over the blanket.
I didn’t soften or move toward him. But I didn’t move away, either.
My chest and stomach were hollow. The skin on my face was taut with the salt of my dried tears.
The weight of his body on the bed, I knew, was as close to comfort as anything this awful place had to offer me.
It wasn’t much.
But it wasn’t nothing.
Despite myself, I found my muscles easing under his hand. After a few minutes, I had recovered enough to speak again.
“Okay,” I said. “Give me a minute to get dressed. Go back to the reservoir. Send Elke to escort me.”
I thought he’d say, snidely, You could say thank you.
But he didn’t. He only sighed. Then, without a word, he got up and left. Doing as I’d said.
The room felt empty without him. I stood. Rubbed my eyes. Stretched my aching limbs. They hurt from hauling Mackr, from being crushed by Hades’s body. I checked my skin in the light of the fire. I was bruised all over.
But nothing was broken. Not even my swollen ankle. If I steeled myself, I could even put pressure on it.
This hideous place wouldn’t get me that easy.
I thought: One more day.