1 The Bitches of Everafter (24 page)

There, in the center of the massive room, stood the thickest, tallest, most luscious, fruit-bearing giant beanstalk Snow had ever seen. She stared at it, willing her eyes to stay focused, her mind to remain alert. But her efforts were futile. She could feel her consciousness draining. She struggled to speak, but managed only two faint words.

“Find Jack.”

Her knees buckled and she slumped to the floor, the screams of the other princesses sounding far, far away. The walls closed in around her and everything darkened. As Snow drifted off, she imagined the most precious thing in all the world.

Her one true love.

END

Coming spring, 2015…book two of the Everafter trilogy.

The Bitches of Enchantment

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Read on to discover more of Barbra Annino’s books including a sneak peek of Sin City Goddess.

SIN CITY GODDESS

Chapter 1

Life in the Underworld had its perks, and poker night was one of them. Ever since I could remember, on Thursday evenings, Bill and I would meet by the river, appoint one of the newly dead as our dealer, and play until one of us busted out of the game. Occasionally, others would join in for a hand or two, but Bill and I were pretty good, so not many challengers could outlast us. Tonight was poker night, and we had been at it for several hours now. I was waiting for the next sweet hand before I made a push to go all in with my coins. The hour was late, I was tired, and the air would grow chilly soon. Furies were not fans of the cold. Not to mention, I needed desperately to stretch my arms, legs, and wings.

The dealer shuffled the cards and flipped three over onto the table. The flop was a jack, king, and ace of spades, all suited. When the dealer flipped the fourth card over (the turn), I eyed my opponent. I was relieved to see that it was an ace, because 70 percent of the time, Bill had pocket eights or pocket aces. He was prone to dead man’s hand. But since I was holding one ace and there were two on the board, that meant he might have one, but he couldn’t have a pair of them. Then again, he could have been holding jacks, kings, or something else entirely.

I set my gaze on him, trying to ignite a flame in my violet eyes. He hated when I did that. Said it gave him the heebie-jeebies. So naturally, I fired up the lights. There was a tiny bit of heat that accompanied the spark, but it felt good, like a massage.

It worked. A bead of sweat bubbled around Bill’s forehead, breaking his poker face.

I smiled. He was holding eights. Had to be. If it had been a pair of jacks or kings, he’d have been cool as granite.

I was holding big slick, an ace and a king. In Texas Hold’em (a game I wasn’t nearly as fond of as Five-Card Draw), you shared the cards on the board with the other players at the table. Which meant that it could be anyone’s game until the final card was dealt—the river. That was the one aspect of this game I enjoyed. The excitement. The thrill.

The danger.

Right now, I had a full boat, aces over kings. The guy across from me with the wild hair and the floppy ears best kept under a hat narrowed his eyes. There was one card left to deal.

I collected my breath and steadied every muscle in my body, which came easily to me. A little trick I picked up on the job, policing humans. I had noticed—ages ago—that if I was calm, they would be too. I leaned in ever so slightly and pushed the rest of my coins forward.

“All in,” I said.

Bill raised his upper lip and snarled at me, but he pushed his coins in too. If he was holding what I thought he was holding—a pair of eights—then he couldn’t beat me. That would give him a full house, aces over eights. Or he could have the queen and the ten of spades, which would give him a royal flush, kicking my full boat out of the water. Even a straight flush would get my ass handed to me on a silver platter.

But I was here to gamble.

The dealer flipped over the last card, or the river, as it’s called.

Ace. Combined with the other two aces on the board and the one in my hand, that gave me four of a kind. Only thing that could beat it would be a royal flush, and the cards were showing that was a possibility, but it was a long shot.

Bill grinned at me wickedly and spit a chunk of cigar onto the black slate patio. A flutter of doubt ruffled my feathers, and I sat taller, hoping he wouldn’t notice. I still had trouble controlling my wings when I was tense.

He flipped over pocket kings, sat back, pleased with himself, and twiddled that ridiculously long mustache. Then he blew a ring of smoke across the table to circle my head like a halo.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, intending the pun. I widened my eyes, feigning surprise, toying with my prey like I used to in the old days.

Bill grunted and reached across the table to claw at my coins, assuming his full house—kings over aces—was the winning hand.

I slapped at his meaty paw. “Not so fast, Hickok.”

I turned over my hole cards.

Bill took one look at my hand, cursed, and kicked a rock that sailed into the river Styx. It landed with a splash that startled a black swan, who squawked violently at us.

I smiled at my opponent, stood, and scooped up my coins.

“That’s the bitch of it, Bill. That damn river will get you every time.”

Bill pounded his fist into the table, throwing a temper tantrum. The dealer, a wispy shade still getting used to its surroundings, jumped.

I stood there, patiently waiting for Bill to finish his outburst. After he had kicked a few more rocks, toppled a chair, uprighted the chair (because the last time he hadn’t, Hades had not been pleased), crinkled up a card, and laced the air with a stream of obscenities, he removed his weathered hat with the bullet holes, ran his fingers through his too-long hair, and said, “Same time next week, Raven?”

I would never understand human emotions.

“Absolutely, Hickok. And stop calling me that. You know I hate it.”

He had given me the nickname because my hair was a stream of black curls and that was the only color I ever wore. And also because of the wings.

He smiled sheepishly and bowed, and the onetime lawman lumbered off to meet up with his love, Jane.

I stood up from the table. The shade stood too, and I said to it, “Put the cards back in their place.”

The shade nodded, the inky blackness of its shape bobbing in the moonlight as it collected the cards, trying to unwrinkle the one Bill had crushed. Finally, after a few clumsy attempts, the shade gathered all the cards in its less-than-solid hands and whispered off to the den, where gaming supplies were stored in the Underworld.

A few minutes later it was back, wandering around the ebony table, wondering what to do next.

I stopped it on its third pass.

“You’ve done well in serving the gods.” I plucked a few coins from my winnings and placed them in the shade’s hand. “Here, give these to Charon and tell that greedy bastard that if he doesn’t allow you passage, he will have to deal with Tisiphone and I will not be in a generous mood.”

The shade nodded and rushed off toward the ferryman, Charon, to pay for his ride across the river.

I’m ashamed to admit that our system for transferring souls to their final resting place was embarrassingly outdated. I and my sisters, Alecto and Megaera, had tried to convince Hades that Charon’s work as the ferryman was no longer needed. That since we three did not police humans with the same tireless intensity with which we once had, our time was free to help deal with matters of the dead. Especially the lost souls who needed guidance. As daughters of the dark, we thought it only fitting that we be put to work in such a capacity. The ferryman objected, of course. He enjoyed his position of wealth and power, so naturally he argued before the court that his role was vital to the process. Hades agreed, insisting, “Tradition is tradition.”

Personally, I believed it had more to do with family squabbles and politics than with tradition. Otherwise, why would Hades have allowed me to interact with the shades at all? I should explain that “shades” were what we called the newly deceased who haven’t yet gained access to Hades’s realm. Souls who had lost their corporeal form in death but had yet to obtain their Underworld body. Humans, I had heard, called them ghosts.

Such an odd word.

Once the mortals completed their burial process, the souls arrived here, at the river’s edge, carrying only their shades and their valuables. Long ago, humans knew to place coins or jewelry in the coffins of their dearly departed to pay Charon to escort them across the river and into the Underworld, but that practice had slowly faded over time. Even though many were buried with heirlooms or trinkets that would satisfy the fare, for reasons not related to our system, some souls arrived with nothing of value—the homeless, helpless, familyless, and victims of foul play whose bodies were never discovered on the outer plane.

The lost, we called them. They were the shades that wandered the riverbanks, searching for a purpose, a plan, some guidance on what to do in the After. It was through no fault of their own that they had nothing to offer Charon. Cold reptile that he was, he simply didn’t care. Rules were rules. Coin was all he cared about.

But I had never been one to play by rules that served no purpose.

For what was law without justice?

I stretched my legs and released my wings to their full, six-foot span. I shook them once, limbering up, and drank in the night air. Patches of clouds drifted over the water, which sparkled like black diamonds. The gentle lapping of the current relaxed me, and I listened for a moment, meditating, absorbing the perfume of the blooming night jasmine. A few minutes later, I calmly tucked all the coins from my winnings into my feathers, making certain they were secure and prepared for flight. It was brisk, but I preferred the heat, so I would welcome the exercise.

I took a running start and leaped off the river bank, soaring high into the velvety-black sky, past cliffs made of ebony and marble, and up, up, up, until I was just beneath the moon, looking for the lost ones.

There were pockets of them along the hillside, in the dark fields, and at the water’s edge. I released the coins from my thick feathers as I flew above them, one by one. I could see that some shades were afraid at first, until they spotted what had fallen from the sky. Some of them looked up and waved, while others collected the coins and passed them out to confused ones. The river was rocky this evening, and I could see the waves crashing into the jagged granite, sending up fresh sprays of seawater that coated my long hair.

After I had dispensed all of the coins, I landed on top of a gray cliff twinkling with fool’s gold. I flapped my wings, shook out my hair, adjusted my pants and top, and watched as Charon was approached by dozens of souls waiting to gain passage, coins in hand. He lifted his cloaked head and raised a gnarled fist at me, his face twisted into a rage.

“Tisiphone, you spiteful hellcat! I’ll get you for this!”

How very original, Charon, I thought. I smiled and waved at him. “Nice to see you too, you overinflated rhinoceros scrotum.”

I watched for several minutes as the shades formed a polite line. Then I turned, expanded my wings, and lifted my head to bathe in the moonlight, my best source of energy. When I felt refreshed enough for the journey home, I turned to walk through the dark forest, a smile on my face. Before I could take a step, however, I bumped into Hermes, messenger of the gods.

“Tisiphone, I’m so happy to have found you.”

The small god fluttered his winged sandals and landed before me. He strained his neck to look up at me as he spoke. He was a twitchy little thing by nature, but he seemed unusually antsy tonight.

“What is it, Hermes?”

“Hades requests your presence immediately.”

Perfect. Charon had complained already, and now I was going to get a tongue lashing. Honestly, gods could be so sensitive. I bent over at the waist and cracked my neck. Then I tucked my wings away and faced him again.

“Why?”

“I’m not supposed to say,” the messenger god stammered.

This piqued both my curiosity and my suspicions. Hermes was well known around Olympus for his practical jokes.

I narrowed my eyes. “Why not?”

Hermes looked around nervously. “It’s top secret.”

I bent down, stared Hermes right in the eye, and lit the fire in mine.

He tried to snap his eyes shut, but it was too late.

You see, my little ability, which I had mastered over the last millennia, could function as a simple parlor trick, as with Mr. Bill Hickok, but it also had the power to coax a god to tell the truth. It didn’t always work on one with more strength than I had, like Zeus, but on minor deities it worked quite sufficiently. I still hadn’t perfected the trick on humans yet, but I was working on it.

“He wants you to go back,” Hermes blurted out.

“Go back where?”

Hermes bent his head, shifted his eyes to the right.

“You know...there.”

I shot up to my full height of six feet.

Now it was my turn to be twitchy. I had vowed never to return. Not after what had happened last time. Not after what I had done.

It was too dangerous.
I
was too dangerous.