Chapter 39

Chapter

Thirty-Nine

We fell for a very, very long time, or so it seemed. Or maybe it would have been more accurate to say we fell a very, very long way. Time had no meaning in the cold and dark.

Nor was I sure we were plunging down per se. The sensation was of movement, but after the initial drop through the bathroom floor our route could have just as well been in any direction. The sensations in my spectral body were all very confusing. I decided to call it down just to make myself feel better.

While my memory of my time in the Underworld remained clear, I had no recollection of either my fall into that place or my return from it to the Broken World. We'd only known that some time had passed during each passage and the journeys had been rather bumpy, judging by minor damage to our backpacks and bodies.

Unfortunately, I couldn't say the same for my trip to Tartarus. In my spectral state, I was aware of every moment. I didn't sleep. I didn't feel hunger or thirst. I simply was , for a long, long time.

Little fell at a rate greater than mine—enough to keep me out of his reach and vice-versa. He was returning to the place he belonged, while I was an intruder in this realm. At least he eventually exhausted his repertoire of curses and threats and lapsed into sullen silence.

I hummed the whole way down.

Every time I felt a bump, or my fall slowed, I repeated the little five-note tune Carly had taught me, and the plunge continued. Little, on the other hand, didn't need a spell to travel between our world and the place beyond the abyss where his damned soul had been sent to spend eternity.

Linear or even coherent thought proved surprisingly difficult in this eerie, icy darkness. I came to understand, at least vaguely, that I was passing by other places as if I were in an elevator traveling from a penthouse to the basement through every floor in between. With each "floor" or barrier I passed, my mind became foggy. By the time I'd regained my ability to think, I'd forgotten what I'd thought about prior. Moments felt granular and disconnected from each other instead of flowing in a stream like I was used to.

During a rare moment of clarity, I wondered if Valas would someday take a similar fall. Part of me wanted her to stay trapped in Carly's eggshell pit behind the mirror so I knew where she was. I had faith in Carly's ability to construct an escape-proof prison. If Valas fell to Tartarus, on the other hand, I couldn't keep an eye on her. She was too strange, too powerful, and too full of unknown magic for me to feel sure she'd be trapped there. If anyone might find a way out of its abyssal depths, it would be her.

At least I could feel reasonably certain she wouldn't have help getting out of Tartarus if she fell, even if a necromancer tried to summon her back. For all their power, a necromancer must possess bone, blood, or flesh, or at least an item that contained part of the ka of the deceased to summon their spirit back from Tartarus. Valas's spirit might have survived the events that took place in Colorado by hitching a ride in my body, but nothing of her body remained. I'd seen it burn to ash.

Then another wave of confusion hit and those thoughts drifted away .

Sometime after that—maybe an hour, maybe a day or a year—Little abruptly blinked out of existence, and in the next second, so did I.

I had no time to register my own lack of existence, which was just as well.

We arrived in Tartarus without warning or dignity. In my experience, this kind of travel usually ended that way.

And of course I landed face down in dirt. All the saints and sinners forbid I ever land in any realm in any other way than face down in dirt.

This dirt tasted like licking a battery, and it was black and mixed with ash. So was the air, in fact. And it was so fucking cold that it seared my skin like I'd dropped into a cryogenic freezer—or at least what I imagined one might feel like. I gasped reflexively and sucked in a lungful of ashy Hell-dirt that sent me into a violent paroxysm of coughing. Within moments of arriving, my bones ached from the cold.

I won't survive here , I thought, and nearly laughed at myself. I could almost hear Malcolm say, Duh, Alice—I'm pretty sure that's the whole friggin' point.

Right about the time I rounded up enough working brain cells to realize I actually had physical form now, someone huge, heavy, and screaming profanities jumped on my back and punched me so hard in the back of my head I was surprised his fist didn't come out my forehead.

I went limp as if he'd knocked me unconscious, hoping he wouldn't hit me again if he thought I was out. Not that much of an exaggeration, truth be told. My ears rang and everything went out of focus.

I had little magic in this place; my power was natural and came from the air and earth of the human realm. Little and I and every other denizen of Tartarus had physical form, but not the same kind we'd had in my world. That meant my blood magic had very limited use, but it wasn't useless. And most importantly of all, Carly's magic came from universal energies, meaning it was just as strong here as anywhere else.

Dimly, I thought about the fact somewhere far, far from here, the people who loved me were scrambling. They'd know where I'd gone and why because Malcolm had witnessed me fall and take Little's spirit with me. We'd had a plan for how the night would play out, but that had gone to Hell, quite literally, and now we'd all have to work out Plans B, C, and D. And possibly E through G.

First things first: I had a job to do, if I could manage to do anything but see stars and dirt.

I stayed limp and motionless as Little ground my face deep into the cold, black, ashy soil. He held me there until he was apparently satisfied that either I wasn't conscious or I'd chosen not to fight him anymore. Then he took his enormous weight off me and flipped me roughly onto my back.

When he loomed over me, I saw him clearly and in the flesh for the first time. As when he'd appeared to me as a spirit after the murder at the hospital, his face was twisted in fury and disgust. Even over the heavy stench of old batteries, blood, coals, and burning wires that pervaded everything in this place, he reeked of hate. His eyes shone with hunger, but not for food. He craved death in the way most people wanted food, shelter, and love. His thick body, all muscle and rage, trembled with his obvious desire to kill me with his bare hands. I felt his appetite for death as clearly as I felt the roughness of the dirt under me.

He wore tattered clothing that placed his living years at least a few centuries before my own: an almost shapeless shirt made of thick material that had worn through in several places and pants in a similar condition. His gnarled feet were bare. I spotted rope marks on his ankles and wrists and another around his thick neck that formed a V-shape at the base of his skull. Whoever he was, he'd been bound hand and foot and hanged for his crimes before his soul landed here in Tartarus, where by all rights he should have stayed .

Where he would have stayed if it weren't for the necromancer who'd summoned and unleashed him on the living once more.

He saw me looking at him and spat in my face. "Cunt. Whore."

Those were not words I liked. So I did what any reasonable person would do in that moment: I pulled a weapon and stabbed him right in the heart.

He screamed and fell backward onto his ass in the dirt.

My weapon was about twelve inches long and resembled a stake more than a dagger or sword. It came with me to Tartarus courtesy of Carly's spellwork, and I'd pulled it from my thigh where the spellwork had been hidden under my jeans. I had never wielded any kind of weapon that was nothing more than a two-dimensional drawing on my skin only moments before, but it was definitely handy—and the only kind of weapon I could have brought with me to this place.

Still woozy from that punch to the back of my head, I lurched to my knees and plowed my shoulder into Little's chest. We landed on the ground in a tangle and flurry of punches and kicks. He hit my cheek with his elbow hard enough to snap my head back, and I scratched his face so deeply I left gouges that oozed thick blood. As he cursed and tried to shove me away, I pushed blood magic out my fingertips to form blades and drove them into his gut.

Despite his nickname, Little was easily double my size and weight. To lessen his advantage, and because it had worked well before, I tried to knee him in the groin again. He managed to partially block my blow but I still made enough contact that he howled and tried to roll to his side to protect his sensitive bits. I needed him on his back, though, so I drew back my arm and landed an uppercut to his square jaw that hurt like hell and probably broke my hand, but my form and strength when I delivered that punch would have made Sean proud. All those hours punching the heavy bag and sparring were paying off.

While Little was dazed, I grabbed the hilt of the strange weapon Carly had designed and put all my weight into driving it the rest of the way through his torso. It grew longer as it plunged deeper into his chest, and it took every bit of leverage and force I could muster with both hands to get its point through his innards and ribcage and out through his back to stake him to the ground. Little's gurgly scream made me grin.

The moment the point slid into the dirt, spikes spiraled out down the length of the now almost three-foot-long stake, tearing through his flesh and pinning him to the ground with a flare of parchment-scented witchy magic. Little tried to wrench himself free, but the spikes and stake held fast.

With a sound that was almost a roar, Little punched me in the face so hard that I went down in a heap. The blow should have knocked me out pretty much instantly. In fact, I lay still for a beat, fully expecting to lose consciousness. Instead, I got the uncanny feeling this place denied its inhabitants any kind of escape or temporary relief—even right hook-induced unconsciousness. No rest for the wicked, indeed.

The best I could do was roll out of his reach and let him flail on his back like a dying roach. Sick to my stomach and dizzy, I sprawled on the dirt and blinked blearily up into dark, stinking nothingness.

The smell of this place never abated. If anything, the stench got worse. It reminded me of melted wiring and old blood with notes of burned flesh. At least I no longer felt the painful cold, though I wasn't sure why. The black dirt clung to my skin no matter how much I tried to brush it off. I got the itchy, burning feeling it was working itself through my skin to reach my blood and bones and organs.

The sky above me, if I could call it a sky, was as black as the dirt. Far, far above us loomed a ring of reddish-orange, as if fires burned all around the edge of the black abyss in which we lay. When I tried to focus on that light, I had the nauseating sensation that the distance between the dirt under my back and the fiery barrier was eternal…as eternally deep as this place was eternally vast.

For the first time, it really sank in where I was.

Tartarus—the Hell under Hell. The deepest, most wretched depths of any known realm, prison for all manner of damned gods, monsters, and humans. Named for a primordial deity who, according to myth, might have fathered the monstrous immortal Titan Typhon, who I'd smote with an almighty bolt of lightning in the Underworld. Luckily for my companions and me, a dragon the size of a jumbo jet had taken him away from the battlefield and re-imprisoned him. According to my research on the topic, he might be here in Tartarus.

My life took strange turn after strange turn, and yet still managed to come full circle sometimes.

I'd seen parts of the Underworld, but Ronan had assured me it bore no resemblance to Hell. The descriptions offered by myth and legend were simply that: myth. As a result, even after research I'd had no idea what to expect of this place. Hellfire had seemed reasonable. Masses of writhing bodies screaming in tortured agony had also been high on the list of possibilities. But much like the Underworld, Tartarus proved to be not at all as I'd expected.

Maybe each damned soul faced its own kind of suffering here. I'd arrived tethered to Little's spirit, so this might be his personal eternal torment. For someone who thrived on inflicting suffering and death, an eternity in a wasteland devoid of anything or anyone to torture would be a hellish fate, and one he'd certainly earned.

"Whore," Little rasped.

Now that I'd gotten him staked in place, I decided to just ignore him until he stopped talking, like I'd done during our fall. Really, my head hurt too damn much to think about anything except escape, and even those thoughts felt muted and distant. My right thigh ached and stung where I'd drawn the magical stake from my skin. My jeans felt warm and sticky there, like I was bleeding. I was surprised that I didn't particularly care about that.

This place sapped all my energy, as if the vast emptiness pulled it from me. Or was I concussed again? Was that a thing that could happen in whatever form I was in while trapped? Maybe so. If I could bleed, I could probably get concussed. And I'd kicked Little in the nuts and he'd felt it. I supposed an eternity of suffering in this place required a form that could experience pain and injury.

Little tried again to get me to respond. "Lil' birdie." He still sounded angry, but now he was also petulant, like a child. "Why cain't you just let us have our fun? What business is it of yours?"

Trying to explain morality, right and wrong, or justice to a sadistic psychopath would be like trying to fill a colander with water, so I didn't bother.

He was a murderer and a monster—as much of a monster as I'd ever met in any realm. I saw little appreciable difference between him and Typhon. At least Typhon had the excuse that he was born a monster. Little had chosen to become one and apparently relished every moment of it with no hint of conscience.

When I didn't reply, his tone changed again, to the same sneer he'd used when I'd knelt in front of him in the Hensleys' bathroom and he'd thought he was about to get what he wanted. "Big will kill everyone you love," he taunted. "He'll slaughter them all and leave the gutted corpses for you to find. He'll fill a cup with their blood and make you drink it."

"Boring threat," I mumbled. "My grandfather makes up better threats in his sleep. You're a boring monster."

Hmm. I usually had much better insults than that. Maybe I actually was concussed. Or maybe I didn't belong here and this place knew it. Maybe I was fading out of existence again.

Come on, Carly , I thought, willing her to hear me with whatever sixth sense she had that made her nose twitch when I was in trouble. Bring me back before it's too late .

Carly had described the spellwork I wore as a kind of bungee cord that would pull me back once I'd staked the spirit or spirits in place so they couldn't be summoned again. But that was based on the plan that I'd grab them and open her express elevator to Tartarus during the ritual we'd planned to conduct at midnight. I hoped the spellwork could at least be used as a fishing line now and she and Katy could reel me back up. I would have crossed my fingers if I had the strength.

The ground rumbled very faintly. Everything had been so eerily still for so long that at first I thought I might have imagined the sensation. But as the vibration increased, even my cottony brain processed that something was coming—something that felt way bigger than us.

Unfortunately, I didn't know where the rumble was coming from, and there was absolutely nowhere in all this vast eternal emptiness to hide.

Little thrashed against his stake and cursed with renewed vigor. "The Keeper," he howled. "The Keeper is coming."

I tried to get up, or even just roll onto my side, but my arms and legs didn't want to obey. Little's howls dissolved into laughter.

I still saw nothing but darkness, but a bellow rolled through us with visible shockwaves. When the first wave hit, it reduced my hearing to a high-pitched ringing as if someone had fired a gun six inches from my head. The pain made it nearly impossible to think, but at least I couldn't hear Little's mad laughter. The ground heaved and rolled.

I'd made it almost to my hands and knees when a body appeared out of nowhere and landed right on top of me.