Chapter 26 The Baths Chamber #2
Hades’s back muscles flickered. He had started to whip around and then caught himself. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“No, stupid. It’s a bath, not a sword. I just realized I forgot the soap.
It’s over there, next to the pomegranates.
” I sank grumpily into the water. “It’s fine.
” I told myself to just be happy about the bath.
It was so annoying, though, to finally get the nicest bath of my life and forget the fucking soap.
Hades sighed. He creaked to his feet and picked up the bar of soap.
“You said you wouldn’t turn around!”
“I’m not turning around.” He walked backwards toward the tub. When the backs of his thighs bumped into the rim, he reached behind him with the bar. “Take it.”
I couldn’t help but gaze up at his bare torso through the steam. It was right there. The expanse of muscle and flesh. It was slick with dampness. I could imagine how hard it would be if I touched it. My mouth was wet.
I took the bar of soap. My wet fingers brushed his palm. He shuddered.
Then he went and settled back down beside the brazier. Still with his back to me.
“Start bandaging your damn wounds,” I said throatily. “You promised. And start talking.”
Hades picked up the bandages. He bit a length off with his teeth, wadded it up, and began to clean the blood from his body as best he could. “I wasn’t going to drown you in the Lake.”
“Please. Don’t bullshit me.”
“I’m not. That’s why I kept my hand on your throat.
I was checking your pulse. I was waiting for…
something. If that thing didn’t happen, and if your pulse slowed, I was going to pull you up.
I would have sacrificed my own self to the Monarch sooner than feed you to Him.
I would —” He broke off. Cleared his throat. “I want you alive, Persephone.”
Wanted me. He wanted me. “Why?”
“Because you’re good for my people,” he said.
“Better for them than I am. You took better care of them in three days than I’ve been able to do in years.
And… like I told you, up above. You’re a good person.
Good, period. And.” Another clearing of the throat.
“I don’t know. I just want you alive. I liked having you around, even though all you ever did was give me a hard time.
I liked watching you work. I don’t know. ”
I wasn’t about to admit it, but I knew what he meant. I liked watching him work, too. Watching him read, watching him think, watching him call the chaosgotten by name. The thought that he felt that way about me, too, made my stomach flip.
But I had never tried to sacrifice him.
“Why did you act like you were going to drown me, then? You even held me under. I even can’t swim.”
His back stiffened. “I didn’t know you couldn’t swim.”
“Answer the question.”
Hades said, as if by way of explanation, “Something is wrong with my father.” And then: “I really wish I’d known you couldn’t swim.”
He had cleaned the blood as best he could from his body.
I longed to go over there and help him get the rest of it off his back, but I held still.
He didn’t deserve my help. Not yet. Now he set the bandage aside and undid the drawstring on his trousers.
Stood up and shimmied out of them. I sank my teeth into the inside of my cheek.
Shadows pooled in the strong muscles of his ass and thighs.
His hips were violet and black with bruises. So were the swollen backs of his knees.
Whoever had yanked at his arms had tried to pull his legs off, too.
Perhaps sensing my shocked silence, Hades said, “My legs were easier to fix than my shoulders. I was able to use both hands. Elke would have helped, but she doesn’t have hands at all.”
“…Do you want me to laugh? This isn’t funny.”
“Aw, come on.” He soaked the strip of bandage and wrung it out. He began to clean the blood from his legs.
I couldn’t stand it. I had to close my eyes. I tried to remember what we’d been talking about. “Tell me about your father.”
“There’s very little to say. As I told you, before he came into the reservoir with the Vizeking two days ago, I had not seen him in six years.
So maybe I’m misremembering. But I don’t remember him being so…
large. I don’t remember his arms and legs being…
human, but wrong, like that. I spoke to Elke, too, who’s served the Royal Family for hundreds of years.
She remembered him as I did: large and spiderlike, but not enormous, and not… like that.
“I’ve suspected for a long time that something was wrong with my father, or at least strange.
He and I have never understood each other, but I did use to at least see him.
Now nobody sees him besides the Vizeking.
And then a year ago, we missed the tribute ritual.
As you know, we never miss a tribute ritual.
It’s the most important job the King has.
“So I thought that if I got a sacrifice for the ritual, I could lure my father out.”
There was a faint noise. I opened my eyes. Hades was bundling the soaked, bloody rags he’d used to clean himself next to the brazier. He reached for a towel. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought his hands were trembling.
He went on, “I want to be clear. I did not think my father would try to eat you. Chaosgotten don’t eat humans, Persephone.
I swear it. My people have been sacrificing human women for a thousand years, feeding them to the Monarch, and that’s fucked up and I get it, but we do not eat them ourselves.
That’s insane. It was insane, that he did that.
I would never have put you in his path if I had known that he was like that. ”
“I believe you,” I said begrudgingly. None of the other chaosgotten had ever tried to eat me, after all, even back when they’d hated my guts.
Hades exhaled. I was still mad, but the sound made my heart ache.
I realized it meant a great deal to him, to hear that I believed him.
“I thought, stupidly, that if I could just find a way to see my father, I could figure out what was going on with him. I could reason with him. Get him to come out of his cave more often. Get him to help our people, who’ve been dying.
And… get him to see what you and I and the people had done, with the reservoir.
I thought” — his voice cracked — “I thought he might even be impressed. Um, with me.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had never had to bargain for my mother’s love like this.
“I had thought it was the Vizeking who was keeping me from my father. But now I wonder if the Vizeking has been protecting him. Now that he’s become so… monstrous.”
“How did he get like that?”
Hades shook his head. “I don’t know. And when I ran after him while the humans were rescuing you, he tried to kill me.
He was rampaging, trying to return to the Lake to eat you, or maybe to eat everyone.
” Hades’s voice wavered. He paused. I could tell he was repeating that phrase to himself, eat everyone.
Everything in the underworld was strange to me, but this was strange to even Hades.
Strange and horrible and frightening. And it was his father.
He went on, “When I found him in the back cavern, the Vizeking was holding him back. The sound of the carnage from the Lake cavern was unbelievable. I shouted at them both. I thought surely my dad would talk to me now.
“Instead, he picked me up. He didn’t even seem to notice that I was talking to him. That I was even a person, let alone his son. He tried to pull my arms and legs off. Crushed me in his fist. The Vizeking ordered him to put me down, and my father threw me against the wall like a child with a toy.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I felt so inadequate. “What happened next?”
“I blacked out. When I woke up, I was locked in here. Elke told me no one’s seen the King since the incident at the Lake, so the Vizeking must have soothed him and gotten him back into his cavern.
” Bitterness and relief warred in Hades’s voice.
“Then, while I was unconscious, the Vizeking found out about the rabbit somehow, and he imprisoned me. He could have put me somewhere worse, though.” He gave an ugly little laugh. “Look how comfortable this is.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to defend the Vizeking. He’s holding you captive.”
“He has to. I broke the rules.”
“Sure, because you people love your rules.”
“We love the ones that please the Monarch,” Hades said sharply. “The Monarch would be extremely displeased that I fed you Lümerlund food.”
“Then why did you?”
“I told you. I want you alive.”
Hades hung his towel above the brazier and opened the ointment Elke had left for him.
The heady scent of something tangy like menthol or pine mixed with the thick aroma of camphor.
I wondered dimly where the camphor smell came from.
If they had trees down here where they grew camphor wood and pomegranates.
I pictured a forest growing upside-down in the dark.
I thought of the book Hades and I shared, the one with the razed forest and the moving mountain.
There seemed to be nothing else to say. I didn’t know how to grapple with what he’d told me. He had never been going to drown me. Everything he’d said lined up. And all he had ever done — by kidnapping me, by luring out his father — was try to save his people.
The camphor soap was slick on my skin and hair, like oil. I felt supple, soaked, melted.
And safe. For the first time in… maybe ever.
I got out of the tub and stepped over to Hades. He stilled. I reached over him and took the pot of ointment.
I couldn’t bring myself to say I accept your apology, or worse, I’m sorry, too. I hoped he would know what I meant by what I was about to do next.
He rasped, “What are you doing?”
“Hold still,” I murmured. I took a towel. The towel was the fluffiest thing I’d ever touched; I almost moaned. Instead I managed to say, “I’ve been watching you miss a giant spot on your back for ten minutes.”
“My shoulders aren’t exactly the most flexible right now.”
“Excuses, excuses.”
The air was muggy and hot. Droplets of moisture collected on my oiled skin. I cleaned Hades’s back gently. I massaged water and soap into his hair.
He sighed.
With my heart beating in my lips, I dried his hair and back with the towel. I rubbed the ointment between my fingertips. It tingled. I massaged it into the deep cuts and bruises on his shoulderblades, his shoulders, the shallow curves beneath his ribcage. His hips.
With every stroke, Hades turned more liquid. I could feel myself turning liquid, too.
I could stay here. In this hot, rich, soft, damp room.
I could coax him into the tub with me. There was room enough for us both to lie down, blanketed by the scented water.
Neck to neck, groin to groin, the way we’d been under the avalanche.
But this time there would be no avalanche.
Just silence except for the gentle sloshing of the water and the heavy beat of Hades’s breath.
And the fact that he’d told me that he wanted me alive. That he liked to watch me work.
And my mother rotting in his bedroom upstairs.
I flinched. Hades stirred beneath my hands. Discomfited, I went to put the ointment down and caught sight of the pomegranates glistening in their bowl beside the brazier.
I remembered Hades telling me about resurrection.
He had said, Anything that powerful requires a sacrifice.
And I thought:
Maybe there is a way to resurrect my mother without feeding her soul to the Monarch.
Maybe I can give something else up.
Myself.