Ungodly: A Novel (The Goddess War) (21 page)

“There’s no one here,” she said suddenly, and loudly. “So why are we creeping? Can’t we get some light?”

Thanatos and Calypso moved to light candles. They might have tried the light switch. It wouldn’t have surprised Cassandra to find the electricity on. But she supposed the candles attracted less attention.

“Where is the best place to wait?” she asked as they walked up the stairs.

“No telling how he’ll return. Through which door he’ll come,” Calypso mused. “Perhaps we should just squat. Make ourselves at home. As long as we avoid the tarp-covered wing, it should be as comfortable as the hotel.”

She swept the candles across a dark shadow and Cassandra winced when the light shone on the oily eyes and bared fangs of a stuffed wolverine.

“I don’t know what hotel you’ve been staying in,” Thanatos said. He brushed passed them to recheck the hallway, and Cassandra headed for the windows. She craved the light. The natural light of the sun, to remind her that outside still existed.

It’s only a building.

But that was a lie. It was Hades’ house. Death and decadence around every corner, and the idea of staying more than an hour, let alone sleeping there, made her stomach clench and flutter.

Maybe if we knocked all the windows out. Let air move through the place.

She took a deep breath against the cool pane of glass and abruptly spat it back out again. No less than two dozen dead flies and moths lay in piles on the exterior sill. Dead when they came too close. Like the cat and the three rats.

Like the three of us.

But not exactly. Thanatos couldn’t die, and Cassandra suspected that Hades’ death wouldn’t rebound on her. Even if he was a ticking time bomb of bubonic plague, of Ebola and smallpox, cholera and Spanish flu. But Calypso—Cassandra looked over at her, where she stood studying a tapestry of a unicorn woven with gold thread. Calypso should go. As soon as they caught a glimpse of him, they’d send her away, just to be safe.

“Clear,” Thanatos said, emerging from the hallway. “Plenty more floors. If you don’t want to see the stuffed doorman, hang by the stairs for this next one.”

Cassandra didn’t need to be told twice. She and Calypso stayed close together and made small talk with their eyes until he finished his sweep. Thanatos didn’t ask if Cassandra was all right. He didn’t put his arm around her, or walk two protective steps ahead. And she didn’t know why she wanted him to, when she could take care of herself.

They passed so many floors that by the time they made it to the last she’d lost count. But she’d begun to feel better about being inside. The air on the upper three floors was fresher, thanks to the missing walls. Now that they could see under the tarps, it was clear that a cave-in had occurred. Large chunks of plaster blocked the hallway. Hades hadn’t bothered to clear the damage.

“Top floor,” Cassandra said. She stepped off the stairs into a wide open space. No hallways here. Only the shadows of what looked like rows and rows of shelves and cases. Calypso leaned forward and her candlelight flickered feebly in the dark. Heavy curtains had been drawn shut against the sun.

“May I?” Cassandra asked, and Calypso handed the candles over. They walked past the first row of shelves together, heading toward the windows to let in some light. But when the flame illuminated a severed head floating inside a jar of cloudy liquid, Cassandra squeaked and dropped the candles. The wax extinguished the flames at once, leaving them in complete darkness.

With a head. A severed head in a jar. Cassandra bit her tongue and cheek hard to keep from screaming.

What does it matter if I scream? It’s not like I can wake it.

She bit her cheek harder to shut her brain up. She’d had less than a second to look at the face behind the glass, but her imagination filled in the blanks: waxy skin around the mouth, and eyes like pickled onions behind half-closed lids. A tongue as gray as a storm cloud.

“It’s all right.” Thanatos threw the curtains back from one set of windows and then another until cold white light ruled the room.

They stood in the center of a row of shelves. Each shelf held six jars. Each jar held a head. Cassandra wasn’t well-versed in plagues and disease, but Thanatos said that the head she’d glimpsed in the candlelight had belonged to someone who died of the Spanish flu. Another face covered with blisterlike pustules appeared to have succumbed to smallpox. And in the center, a bloated, twisted skull floated in an oversized jar, the victim of whatever disease had taken down the Elephant Man.

Thanatos said it was all right. But the hell it was. They stood surrounded by death and disease, preserved body parts and grotesque medieval books on anatomy. Covered petri dishes lined three rows, each labeled lovingly in fancy, handwritten calligraphy. She thought she read
ANTHRAX
below the nearest one and stumbled away. Calypso caught her by the shoulders and steadied her until they passed the shelves.

A large white bed lay near the windows.

“This is his bedroom?” Cassandra asked, and shuddered.

“He’s the god of the dead,” Thanatos said. “He’d sleep like a baby here.”

“And so would you, I suppose?”

He kept his eyes on the window. Not exactly a denial, but no admission, either.

“Having second thoughts about facing him?” Calypso asked Cassandra.

“No,” Cassandra snapped. But the place had her rattled. From the dead cat and friends on the stoop to the taxidermied butler to the cavalcade of heads, she would have liked to smash everything and run screaming, even if she would likely die of bubonic plague, yellow fever, and botulism before she made it out the door. “But Calypso, maybe you should go. This isn’t exactly the safest place.”

Calypso smiled and nudged her shoulder, as though that was the silliest suggestion in the world. “I’ll stay with you. You know that.”

Cassandra glanced into a shadowy corner at what looked to be the entire mummified corpse of a woman, and couldn’t help being relieved. Having Calypso there was comforting as a soft breeze. But she wished even more for the warmth of Aidan’s hands.

Calypso turned to Thanatos.

“How long do you think, until Hades comes home?” she asked.

Thanatos shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s still underneath. I should’ve drunk the rest of Megaera’s blood. Maybe then I would’ve been able to pinpoint him.”

“It would have put you on your ass for days. What use would you have been to me then?” Cassandra grumbled. She looked away. She sounded cold, like Athena.

“What use will I be to you now?” he asked. “I said I’d bring you here. And here you are.”

“But … you’re not leaving?”

He smiled. “One minute a murderess and the next a frightened girl. I don’t know how you manage to pull off so many things at once.” The smile faded, and he looked at her in that way he had, as though he could see the future better than she could. “I don’t know how much longer you’ll be able to.”

“It will be dark soon,” Calypso said. “I’m going to gather more candles.”

It was probably too much to hope for something with batteries. A camping lantern or, hell, some extravagant electric chandelier. Cassandra approached Hades’ king-sized, white-blanketed bed and ran her hand across it.

“How likely am I to catch hepatitis if I sit on this?”

Thanatos smiled. He went to the bed and sat. Cassandra sat on the side opposite.

“You’ve been vaccinated, right?” he asked, and she chuckled nervously.

“Asshole.”

They talked quietly, with one eye each trained on the setting sun. The other they kept on Calypso, who set lit candles around them until the room looked less like a lab at the CDC and more like the apse of a church. It was almost pretty, if they ignored the way the firelight lit the gaunt cheeks of the formaldehyde-soaked heads.

Time passed. The candles burned down by half, and Cassandra’s eyes grew heavy. She thought it monstrous that Hades slept in the same room as his shelves of death, but the bed was so soft. Thanatos touched her arm.

“I’ll stay awake if you sleep,” he said.

“Mm,” Cassandra muttered. She couldn’t stay awake forever. Who knew how long it would be before Hades returned.

“What was that?” Calypso asked suddenly.

“What was what?”

Cassandra hadn’t heard a thing. But both Thanatos and Calypso sat upright and stared through the candles to the shadows near the stairs. Cassandra trained her ears in the same direction. There it was: a papery whisper, like old parchment rubbing together.

It might have been nothing more than air moving through the building and stirring the pages of an open book. It might have been the sound of the tarps covering the collapsed walls. But it wasn’t. It was too deliberate.

Cassandra rose off the bed quietly. Thanatos stood with her, and Calypso, too, but Cassandra held her hand out in front of Calypso’s chest.

Cassandra’s eyes tracked over the floating heads, the preserved digestive tracts in sealed plastic. But the noise wasn’t coming from them. The flickering candlelight only made them
appear
to move. She walked through the rows of shelves, heat flowing to her fingertips. Fear lent itself to anger with comforting ease.

Whatever it was whispered again. A meatier sound this time, and closer. Not paper rubbing together, but leather. She should have brought a candle. But Thanatos was beside her, and his preternatural eyes could see where hers couldn’t. She looked deep into the far corner, toward the preserved, shriveled corpse of the woman.

It wasn’t there.

Cassandra grabbed Thanatos’ arm.

“What?” he asked.

“There was—” She paused. How could she explain it? She’d barely looked at it before, out of sheer aversion. Part of her thought she’d imagined it, or gotten the placement wrong. “There was something there before.” She pointed into the dark. “A body. It isn’t there now.” Thanatos came close and she leaned into his chest, not caring whether it was something she should do. “Why would Hades move it?”

The leathery whisper issued from somewhere to their left, in the shelves.

“He didn’t.” Thanatos dragged her back toward Calypso and the candlelight. He held her tightly. “It’s not Hades.”

They retreated fast into the circle of candles and stumbled against the side of the bed. Calypso had drawn her knife. Thanatos held Cassandra by the wrist and kept her carefully behind him.

The corpse of the woman ran. It ran, letting them glimpse it through jars of formaldehyde. Then it disappeared. All was silent for a span of minutes. When it moved again, it was much, much closer.

“Can I kill that?” she asked Thanatos. “It looks like it’s already dead, so can I kill it?”

“No,” the corpse laughed. “You can’t kill it.” She stepped out from between the glass cases, a beautiful, dark-haired girl in a black dress and high boots. A Fury.

“Alecto,” Thanatos said.

The girl smiled, and Cassandra flinched. Alecto of the Unceasing Anger. The Fury they’d taken such care to avoid.

Or no care at all, considering we drank her sister like a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Thanatos lunged, and knocked up against the shelves of dead and diseased things. Cassandra held her breath while they rattled and rocked. If anything fell and shattered, she wasn’t sure if she could control her panic.

Alecto laughed and danced easily out of his grasp. She moved too fast to be seen. Even Hermes might have had trouble getting his hands on her.

But he would have eventually, and Cassandra wished he was there.

The Fury stepped into the light again. Her face was sharper than her sisters’ and her eyes smaller, the dark irises so large Cassandra could barely make out any white.

“What? Just one charge?” She clucked her tongue. “I would very much like to see you bull your way through this china shop.”

Alecto traced her fingers along the row of petri dishes. Surely most of the specimens were dead, but Cassandra had heard stories of mass plague graves that authorities were afraid to disturb even sixty or a hundred years later.

“Hades would be displeased,” Calypso said. “If you damaged his collection.”

“More displeased than if I left you here to try and murder him?”

“It’s not murder. It’s an assassination,” Cassandra said.

“Semantics,” Alecto hissed, and gave them a view of her blackening teeth, so mismatched with her beautiful face. But that was her true form. The girl was an illusion stretched over the top of decaying wings.

“What are you doing here?” Thanatos asked, and Alecto slipped behind them, fast as a light going out. She stayed just long enough for them to spin and stumble against the bed before flashing back to hide behind the stacks. She was too fast. Trying to follow her movements felt like a case of whiplash.

“I’m here to do what Furies do.”

“Your sister’s dead,” Cassandra said. “Let it go.”

“Let it go?” Alecto screeched. “Like you have let Apollo go?”

“Your sister was a monster.”

“We are all monsters here.”

Cassandra stepped forward. If Alecto wanted to join Megaera, then so be it. What was one more Fury? Thanatos was there. He would move when she did. Alecto didn’t look that much more terrible than Megaera had. Cassandra didn’t know what they’d been so afraid of.

“A little girl who presumes to kill gods.” Alecto grinned. “Who kills them with her hands. And with her heart.”

“What are you talking about?” Cassandra asked.

“I’m talking about your … Aidan,” the Fury said. Her eyes lit up when she said the name, and Cassandra grimaced. It felt as if Alecto had reached into her head and torn his name out with clawed fingers. “Your Aidan, whom you killed.”

“I didn’t kill him.” Her hands burned. “But I’ll kill who did.”

“You killed him as sure as you stand before me.”

“No.”

“He died for you. Because of you. He never would have been there. Never would have fought. And one mortal girl lives, while a god lies dead.”

Cassandra’s vision swam and ran hot. Everything blurred around the edges, whether from tears or rage she couldn’t tell.

“Cassandra, don’t listen.” That was Thanatos’ voice. Far away and unimportant.