All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (38 page)

While there was no
city set against the horizon, it didn’t sit bare. A
conflagration spewed billowing clouds of smoke into an otherwise
colorless sky. Rough and rocky terrain stretched out before me—the
badlands gone badder—and a cliff rose behind me; the mouths of
caves dotted its surface. Uneven stairs hewn from the rock connected
the openings, and pairs of glowing eyes shone from many of them.

“
Shit.”

Two choices: set
out into the canyons and crags to find my way to who-knew-where
using my limited rock climbing abilities and end up like the guy who
got his arm caught and had to cut it off to survive, or chance the
caves. Door number one or door number two? Behind one lies a tiger,
the other a shark.

Some choice: die
here or die there.

A lot of effort and
wandering stood between me and the fires burning on the horizon,
and, truthfully, Dominic’s labyrinth had provided all the
wandering I could stomach for a while. And I didn’t feel like
scrambling over boulders and through crevasses. Once again, like so
many times in my life, I made a decision based essentially on
laziness.

I wandered to the
nearest set of stairs and put my foot on the first step. The
precarious staircase climbed steeply, switching back on itself time
and again to connect the myriad caves, each of its steps less than a
foot wide. I took a deep breath and stepped up, shoulder brushing
the gray cliff face. I’d gone five steps when I looked up and
saw the man on the staircase blocking my way.

He might have been
the man piloting the ferry across the river Styx, or perhaps a close
relative. Same hook nose and lank hair but without the ferryman’s
eye patch. He didn’t sport the patch, but the eye socket it
should have covered gleamed with taut pink scar tissue.

“
Uh,
hey. What’s happening?”

Not the cleverest
thing to say, but even the best action hero runs out of amusing
comments eventually. Hell, when Arnie Schwarzenegger and Clint
Eastwood ran out, they went into politics. I hadn’t reached
that level of desperation yet.

The man didn’t
reply, only stared his one-eyed stare at me. Overhead, a huge raven
circled. I watched it glide effortlessly through the air for a
minute until it disappeared onto one of the ledges above. A second
later, it cawed loudly and a woman screamed.

I went up two more
steps and stood ten paces from the man. He smelled bad and the look
of his hair suggested non-bathing the cause. Beneath the dirt and
sweat, I whiffed a far more unpleasant odor I preferred not to
identify.

“
Don’t
mind me, I’m just going up the stairs.”

More staring. Two
more steps.

“
Not
going to bug anybody, just looking for a friend.”

Frown. Two steps.

It shouldn’t
have surprised me when he lurched toward me, but it did. His head
morphed into some sort of monstrous rooster; his body slammed into
mine sending me sprawling down the stairs as his beak sank into my
upper chest.

I’ll admit
it: I screamed.

The thing rode me
down the stairs like a living snowboard until my back hit the ground
at the bottom and my breath whooshed out of my lungs. I closed my
eyes, teeth grinding with the pain, and felt a rush of air on my
face, heard feathers rustling. The man-thing’s weight lifted
off me.

So much for not
getting bit.

I didn’t know
what it meant in the long run to have some of Hell’s denizens
take bites out of me, but I imagined it couldn’t be good. A
question to ask Mikey next time I saw him. If he ever talked to me
again after all this.

Minutes
passed as I lay there, eyes closed, waiting for my breath to return.
Over the last few months, I must have set a record for the number of
times a guy’s wind was knocked out of him. Where are the
Guinness
Book of World Records
people when you need them?

My eyes jerked open
when a shadow fell across me. I looked up at a figure with dark,
wild hair, high cheekbones, a square jaw.

“
Mother?”

“
Are
you okay?”

I am now.

†‡†

Trevor sat down
hard on the wooden chair behind the huge desk and felt the empty
eyes of the comedy/tragedy masks staring, heard the breathy hiss of
laughs and groans passing their pulled-thin lips. He found himself
wondering whose faces those expressions were peeled from, how they
came to adorn a wall in the kingdom of Hell. Were their disembodied
cheeks and mouthless lips pulled into those expressions, or were
they alive when the flesh came off? Trevor shivered.

The boy remained by
the tapestry where he’d revealed the events surrounding
Icarus’ death. Trevor didn’t completely understand what
he’d seen, but he realized it might mean something to his
father.

“
Make
sure you tell Icarus what I’ve shown you,” the boy said,
a chuckle camouflaged beneath his words.

Trevor looked up at
the boy, but the tapestry behind him snatched his attention. A
rainfall of colors ran and melded across its surface: a crimson lava
flow, a yellow sun dog. Blue flowed into green into black, but the
predominant color was red—the red of blood and fire and hate.

The boy appeared
directly in front of Trevor, blocking his view, though Trevor didn’t
see him move.

“
Don’t
look at it too long. You’ll see things you don’t want to
see. Eventually, you’ll become part of it.”

Trevor glanced at
his face, at the mischievous smile on his lips, then attempted to
look around him. The boy extended his arm toward the wooden cage
holding the skeleton-lizard, blocking Trevor’s view as he
stuck a finger between the bars. The lizard scuttled over, snapped
its jaws, and bit off his fingertip. The boy neither acted surprised
nor jerked his finger away as the lizard chewed it with the relish
of fully-fleshed lizard devouring a cricket. After it
swallowed—Trevor couldn’t figure out where the fingertip
disappeared to—it took another bite.

“
Someone
will be here to get you soon,” the boy said withdrawing his
finger from the cage.

He walked out of
Trevor’s line-of-sight and the teen felt a surge of relief
when the tapestry came back into view. Short-lived relief, however—a
static depiction of a head on a spike, a bleak wasteland stretching
out behind it, replaced the riotous colors. Droplets of blood hung
frozen in the air below the ragged flesh of the neck; unmoving black
flies buzzed around the wound, one sat on an eyeball rolled back to
show the white. The man looked familiar, though he didn’t know
why.

Trevor shuddered
and looked away.

“
Who
is that?”

His question found
an empty room. He looked around, stood and paced the length of the
floor to confirm he was alone. The boy had slipped out, or perhaps
disappeared into thin air. Trevor glanced at the fleshy masks on the
wall, the skeleton-lizard in its cage, sat back down on the chair
and pulled his knees up to his chest.

Someone will be
coming for you.

Now that he was
alone, the words felt ominous—more warning than statement.
Trevor clenched his teeth and suppressed a shiver; his eyes wandered
back to the tapestry where he’d saved his father, where he’d
been the first to find out the truth about his death.

Was what I saw
the truth?

A vast blue sky had
replaced the decapitated head on the cloth, the perspective making
it look three-dimensional, like it stretched on forever. The sun
hung high in the corner, its orange rays diffusing to yellow.

In the foreground,
a man was falling from the sky, melted wings of wax trailing behind
him.

†‡†

I stood and brushed
dust off my pants and shirt, each movement of my arm causing pain in
my chest where the nasty chicken took its pound of flesh—okay,
maybe only a few ounces of flesh, but it hurt. My mother watched my
pained expression.

“
Can
you do anything about this?”

She shook her head.

“
I
am neither angel nor demon. I can’t heal you.”

I breathed deep,
felt the taut pain of the wound, the warm flow of blood trickling
down my meager pec. If she couldn’t fix me, I’d have to
deal with the pain until we found someone who could.

Where’s
Piper?

“
How
do you keep finding me?”

“
You’re
my son.”

It didn’t
seem like much of an explanation, especially since my reason for
coming back was because my son was lost. If she could find me, why
couldn’t I find him? I looked at my feet, kicked at a
Hell-rock.

“
Trevor’s
safe,” she said.

She couldn’t
heal me like an angel, but apparently she read my thoughts like one.

“
How
do you know?”

“
I
know.”

She mounted the
stairs before I said anything else and I followed. I had to pivot my
shoulders sideways to fit up the stairs, the position making the
wound in my chest ache and throb. Ahead, my mother seemed to
practically float up the stairs with the ease of someone who’s
followed the same path a thousand times before.

We emerged on a
wide ledge running the length of the cliff. More stairs ran up to a
second ledge overhead. I paused, waiting to see where she’d
lead me, but she stood in place like she waited to see where I’d
go.

“
Well?”

She looked at me,
dark eyes gleaming, and a shadow of a smile brushed her lips like
something was mildly funny that she didn’t want to share. For
the first time, I wondered if this woman who was not only my mother
but had spent four decades living in Hell had my best interests at
heart.

“
Where’s
Trevor?”

“
Somewhere
here.”

She swept her hand
in front of her, gesturing toward the cave openings. I looked at
them, counted them silently, stopping when I reached fifteen because
each number beyond dampened my spirits.

How am I
supposed to find him in there?

“
How
am I supposed to find him in there?”

“
You
will find what you are supposed to find.”

I cocked an
eyebrow. For someone who wasn’t an angel, her response came
off as a cryptically angelic answer.