The Sea Queen (The Dark Queens Book 1) (2 page)

“Calypso,” the angry burr he’d had just moments ago vanished beneath shock.

So okay, maybe I’d become a bit of a recluse lately. Like, say, the past eternity or so.

“What are you doing here?” he asked quickly as he sank his paddle back into the waters, slowly ferrying the dead from the land of the living to the land of...well, the dead, of course.

I pursed my lip. “Char, baby, I can call you Char, right?”

“Well, I—”

I waved a hand, shushing him instantly. “I’m here to see Hades. He does still live here, right?”

The water frothed beneath my feet.

If it was possible for a skeleton to gulp, I was pretty sure he’d just done it.

“Of...of course, goddess.”

Giving him a tight smile, I swished at my imaginary skirts and sauntered by, head held high.

“Moron,” I grumped when he was safely out of hearing distance.

Not that I didn’t like Skeletor, but...okay, I didn’t like Skeletor. I didn’t like being here. I didn’t like these kind of dead, the ones that just floated by and didn’t blink, didn’t twitch, didn’t even say boo. It made me twitchy and grumpy.

So sue me.

I wanted desperately to sink back into the water, but it was teeming with ghost zombies, piles and piles of them. So I had to make do with stepping from one to the next, all the while pretending in my head I was walking on a swinging bridge and not cold, squishy chest parts.

I’d been practicing the past few years, perfecting what it meant to be “human”: how to laugh properly, act properly.

For too long I’d been nothing but the unseen presence of the deep, a heartbeat without form.

Thanks to Sircco’s crazy but wonderful bride, I’d learned the language of the people, and prided myself now on being able to interact well with others. Like, for instance, I had learned that when someone stole from me, the answer wasn’t always to drown them.

Maybe sometimes they were just hungry and needed food desperately. In those cases, a pardon was in order. Of course, with the threat of cutting off one’s balls should they ever try it again.

Or one time, I’d even managed to restrain my violent temper when a pack of bawdy sailors had kidnapped one of my sea maidens, attempting to rape her. Instead of following my first inclination of sinking their ship, opening up a fissure in the earth so that lava spewed up from its guts and boiled them alive, I instead chopped off their balls, boiled them in onion water, and fed them to Bruce, my pet great white.

I was rather proud of myself for that level of restraint. They may no longer be able to sire bastards, but at least they were alive. Win-win-win, so far as I was concerned.

Yes, I was much better at handling my anger now.

Which was why I was going to march in there, tell Hades to open the damn gates (nicely, of course), and then get back home ASAP (another fun little word I’d learned from Nim).

I was just about within spitting distance of the Bony Gates—a very large and menacing gate built of nothing but knuckles and long bones that gleamed a creamy white color—when something caused me to pause.

The Underworld was divided into two regions. On the left was Tartarus: black, leeched of any color save for the red glow of flame, where the screams of the damned were an eternal and lonely wail. And to the right were the Elysian Fields, which were as lovely as the name sounded.

I wasn’t much into land, but if I had to be stuck in any one place for long, I’d choose here. It was a land teeming with wildflowers, with breezes that smelled of every conceivable scent of rose imaginable, where no one aged, because no matter how old you were when you died, you returned to this place hale and whole and more beautiful than you’d been even in life.

Just a sip of the water running through this place could sustain you for a thousand years.

Even now two lovers were cavorting nearby.

My heart raced as a beautiful man with a sharply square jaw and shaggy dark hair lifted a hand toward a woman’s hair that seemed spun from the sun itself. They were both nude and gazing at one another with such fierce longing that it brought heat to my cheeks.

I nibbled on my bottom lip, telling myself I should look away and give them some semblance of privacy.

“Oh, hell,” I mumbled, not like they’d care anyway.

My eyes widened when he dropped to his knees. There was no wooing, no sweet words whispered; he took her in his mouth.

Down there.

Not that I was shy or anything. I mean, I’d had a gaggle of children. I understood the mechanics of sex. I saw the animals doing it all the time.

And felt the waves rock when my son and his bride “cavorted.”

I felt the life of that act move through my bones like ambrosia, and I couldn’t help but lean forward on my toes a little when she gasped, clutching the Bony Gates with white-knuckled fingers.

The body I stood on dipped beneath me as I shifted again.

“Oh, Zeus.” I clutched at my chest, imagining it was that lovely man’s fingers on my naked body, caressing me, fondling me...touching me down there, with his tongue.

As many children as I’d had, I’d never actually lain with a man. Not once.

Odd thing was, once upon a time, I didn’t used to care about that. Even prided myself on that fact. Like Artemis and Athena, I’d found men
lacking
.

But now I couldn’t help but wonder whether there was something to this “sexing” thing.

I wet my lips when the woman finally flung her head back and screamed with such rapture that the buds at her feet bloomed brightly.

The man came up for a kiss, and in less than no time, they were off and scampering away like two currently satisfied but still horny bunnies.

As I blinked back to reality, it took me a minute to realize the body I stood on was starting to drift away from where I wished to go.

Glancing around quickly just to make sure no one caught me gawking like a horny bunny myself, I shook off the strange feelings and hopscotched my way across the bodies until finally my feet touched land.

Clearing my throat, I glanced down at myself. Normally I walked with a watery form, but for some reason, today I was feeling “funky.”

I frowned, not quite sure I was using the right word here, but no matter. Squaring my shoulders, I tweaked my form just slightly, making myself more fleshy, less watery.

But then I felt rather dull, so I added just a touch of mother of pearl to my skin so that as I walked, there was a sheen. I saw Nimue do it once. She’d found some sort of lotion and had whispered in my ear that when she’d applied it the night before, Sircco had nearly lost his mind with need.

Not that anyone around here would appreciate my efforts.

Still...

In short order, I’d turned my sea-kelp hair into actual maiden hair that ended at my ass. It was now a stunning shade of soft sea-foam green and curled attractively around nubile breasts.

Nimue said men preferred their women nude.

“When in Roman,” I whispered, not really quite sure what exactly that meant, but Nimue said it all the time. Especially when she was trying out new things.

Or maybe she said something else? I couldn’t quite recall.

“Bloody hell,” I mumbled, more nervous than I had a right to be. Gripping my stomach, I studied the gates. Why was Cerberus not around?

The mangy, three-headed demon dog was always guarding the gates. Not only was Persephone missing, now too was the fleabag.

Pursing my lips, both annoyed and irritated, I figured there was nothing to do other than to push the massive gates open myself.

They opened with nary a squeak.

Immediately the backlog of bodies began to push through, being carted off to their proper places of eternal rest.

Huffing, I followed the Elysian trail toward Hades’ home.

A gentle breeze perfumed my bare flesh. The sky was blue. White birds dipped and dived through the air. Bees buzzed. It was all very nauseatingly perfect.

For a God of Death
he sure is annoyingly cheerful
, I thought.

And where was that damn god, anyway? Why was I seeing no servants rush up to meet me? Hades had always struck me as the pompous sort, theatrical in all he did.

I mean, one look around this ridiculous place—

“Oh, crab apples!” I gasped with delight, veering off the trail to pluck up a juicy red apple in the shape of a crab off a tree. They were my absolute favorites and quite difficult to obtain twenty leagues under the sea.

Taking an enormous bite, I groaned at the salty sweetness of crab-scented apple flesh.

In moments, I spied the grand mansion of the Under Lord himself. The stones that’d built it were as black and foreboding as his very soul. The architecture was Gothic, with massive gargoyles perched on top, claws flared wide as though ready to eviscerate you.

I smiled, quite liking the look of it already.

But still, there were no souls about.

Not even the dead ones. Elysia was devoid of all human life at the moment.

I’d be offended, but then I saw a strip of vivid red splashed along the dirt. When I noticed that, I immediately noticed a rather large strip of grass and dirt blackened by soot and still smoldering as though from a recently banked flame.

Tossing the apple core to the ground, I sniffed the air, scenting a peculiar odor. Tangy. Sweet. And dangerously venomous. Seren cone snail.

I frowned. Seren cone snails were bloodthirsty, devilish little creatures. Known for their paralyzing toxins, they could floor a sea maiden with one prick of their harpoons, knocking her out for days, sometimes even weeks, depending on the dosage administered.

They were also deep-sea-dwelling creatures and should definitely not have been here.

Lightning flashed, and the heavens suddenly quaked.

Glancing to the sky, I shook my head and groaned.

“You deny that you killed her!” Zeus’s voice was like thunder, rocking through the grounds.

More curious now than ever, I shook off my fleshy form like a dog shaking rain from its coat and called to the water in the sky, hiding within a droplet of it, seeking out quickly why the king of gods had deigned to show his face in Hell.

What I spied was more than I’d expected. Not only was Zeus here, but there was a crowd of gods. A pantheon of them, in fact. And at the very center was a giant of a man shackled in iron and yet holding his head high as he glared holy fury at the lot of them.

Chapter 2

Hades

Fury tore me up from the inside.

Persephone was missing. Cerberus was presumed dead. And the entire horde of gods believed I’d done it.

Themis stood before me, carrying a set of golden scales in her hand, with a white cloth tied around her eyes. Completely blind, she was also the Goddess of Justice.

She was cold, unmoving, and little more than a statue until the moment she handed down judgment.

I growled, looking at a glowering Demeter.

She stood before me, a regal beauty dressed in silks stained the colors of wheat, earth, and grass. Her nut-brown hair was coiled tightly about her oval face. She was not classically beautiful, but there was a sturdy handsomeness about her that had always attracted me.

Of all the gods on Olympus, I’d often thought her the most levelheaded of the bunch.

Until her daughter had turned up missing.

Rich brown eyes turned aside.

Clenching my jaw, I glanced elsewhere. My last hope had been a sign of goodwill from her.

Sneering, I stared down my arrogant brothers Zeus and Poseidon.

“It is not enough that you’ve cast me into this festering Hell; now you threaten torture! Do it, then. Do what you’ve always wanted to do anyway,
brothers
.”

Seeing as how a god could not be killed, the Olympians had almost created a sport of inventive ways to torture, be it being racked and laid out for the vultures to pick at my eyeballs for the next hundred years or being shut in a box and tossed into the ocean to continually drown and awaken over and over and over again.

The skies above suddenly opened with rain.

Rain in the Underworld never happened.

I glanced at Zeus and then at Poseidon (as the God of the Seas); he had the ability to control rain, too. But they both looked as puzzled as I felt.

Then Poseidon sneered, “Consort, show yourself.”

Consort?

That could only mean one thing. But Calypso never left the safety of her waters.

I sucked in a shocked breath when the droplets formed into the image of a woman more lovely than even the Goddess of Love herself. She sparkled like dew in the soft morning sun.

Hair of the softest green cascaded long and thick in waves down her back and front. She wore no clothes. And each time she shifted, I caught just a glimmer of tight, firm, rounded flesh.

As if unaware of the spectacle she’d made of herself, Calypso planted her hands on her hips and cocked her head, causing a tiny array of golden seahorses to glimmer like copper pennies in her hair.

And her eyes, when she turned them on me, burned like hottest flame.

“Your ghosts are fouling my waters, Dead Boy.”

Everyone gasped.

But not I. I was too devoid of thought to even think of uttering a sound. In all the years I’d known Calypso, two things were constant. One, she never wandered far from her home, preferring instead to live life as a water elemental rather than take on fleshy form. And two, she never spoke.

Not to those above land.

I couldn’t seem to pull my eyes away from the sheer beauty of a body I’d never quite imagined she’d possessed.

Poseidon was the first to shake the stupor off. “What are you doing here, woman?”

A long time ago, the two had been engaged.

A long, long time ago.

Around the dawn of time, to be precise.

Poseidon had called her a bitch with a heart of ice, and she’d caused a worldwide flood in return. Needless to say, the two didn’t get on.

Aphrodite curled her lip. Practically six foot, with a body built for sin, blond hair that fell past her knees, blue eyes that could rival the color of a cloudless sky, and a face that’d caused many a man to beg for death at the chance of having just one taste of her lips, she gazed calculatingly at a very naked sea goddess.