BURN IN HADES (23 page)

She jammed her top hat on her head, and grabbed her rope dart; it wrapped around her waist. She snatched the obsidian blade from the wedge in the floor and swooped out of the hotel holding onto her top hat as she soured through the air. She mounted Gimlet, galloped down the road, scooped Forfax, and fled Elysium with the rogue squal.

The Raven and Forfax set foot on their second con together in the toneless and grey Asphodel Meadows. She removed her justaucorps because it had become soaked in too much sweat. Red sky didn’t bother her too much, but the heat from the blistering blue sky beat down on her like it did every other soul.

From her hiding spot among the brush, the Raven lay on her stomach, listening to the ceremonial chants taking place yards away. Forfax lay on the altar, while ghost-like spirits prayed over him. The spirits were shadows of thin air called shades. Winged creatures fluttered around the apparitions, attached to the specters symbiotically in a meandering, meaningless existence.

One soul stood out among the shades—a man wearing monk-like robes and appeared to be a spirit of similar ilk to Cross. He glanced her way.

She ducked. The brittle asphodelus ramosus bush split apart and crumbled to dust. The flakes caught in the back of her throat. Her eyes watered as she held the cough back, fearing any noise made on her part would warn the shades of her presence thus ruining the con.

A familiar voice spoke nearby: “Brilliant blue sky today, isn’t it?”

Off to her right side, Cross pointed a pistol at her. Nobody ever snuck up on her once, let alone twice. She was losing the one advantage she always had over her adversaries, or Cross was getting better at besting her.

He nudged the barrel of his revolver into her temple and uncoiled her rope dart from her waist. “Hello, Ropey,” he said once he had the rope dart in his grasp. He laughed and patted Gimlet on the horn. “How’ve you been my friend?”

“You came all this way to find me,” she said, “instead of drinking from the River Lethe?”

“Sometimes you search so hard for something, and when you finally get it, you realize there’s something else that you want even more. Luckily, you weren’t that hard to find.” He ruffled her wings. Feathers fell off and glided onto the ground.

“You’re molting,” he said. “I found a few of your feathers stuck on top of Gimlet’s warm droppings. Now, get up.”

“Let me take care of Forfax.” She nodded over to the altar and the shades.

Cross shook his head.

“No?” she pleaded. She had assumed that the pattern of her partners never surviving a second con had ended with Cross.

But in keeping with a miserable motif, a shade plunged its ghostly fist into the screaming squal’s chest and held its leaky heart high in celebration. The man wearing the monk robes reached into the squal’s bandaged skull and removed the Eye of Providence.

“Sorry, Forfax.” The Raven almost crossed herself.

Cross did it for the both of them. Then he cocked the hammer to his revolver. The click reverberated through her temple and drowned out the cheers of Forfax’s festival.

“You and I are going for a walk.” He roughly bound her arms, legs and molting wings.

“There’s no bounty on my head you know,” she said. “I’m not worth anything to anybody.”

Cross yanked her backwards until their bodies touched. His hot breath grazed her ear.

“You are to me, Raven,” he said. “You’re mine.”

An unbalanced hiss colored his tone. It rattled her. He was always full of rage, but even when he was really livid, she had never heard him sound so delirious.

He snatched her top hat off her head and sat it on his, and then neatly folded up her justaucorps.

“How can you even where wool?” he said, tucking the justaucorps into Gimlet’s saddlebag. “It’s way too hot for that. And it covers up your figure. Makes you look like a man when you’re not really all that bad to look at. Under different circumstances, you and I might’ve been something.”

He scooped her over his shoulder and placed her on the back of Gimlet just as she had courteously done him months ago.

She bobbed up and down uncomfortably on the cornurus until they reached the smoggy kingdom of Hades, where he sat her down in the dirt. A thick combination of smoke and fog buried the kingdom and obscured anything that wasn’t within a few yards of them. The towers of the palace rose above the mist. They were the only visible structures of the kingdom from where they stood.

“I have to get supplies for our little outing,” said Cross. “You stay here. Don’t move.” He tugged on her binds and stroked the cornurus’s horn. “Gimlet, you keep an eye on her. I’ll be back later.”

“You can’t leave me out here like this,” she said. “This is hellhound territory.”

“They’re not so bad. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Gimlet will take good care of you. She’ll make sure you don’t burn in Hades like some shade.”

He tipped her top hat, mockingly, and vanished into the gloom, leaving her sitting out in the open at the mercy of the elements and the carnivorous creatures that often roamed about.

Souls straggled in and out of smog. Some of them looked directly at the Raven, but kept going about their business, disappearing into the mist.

The stench of the Inferno’s bowels traveled the cold wind. It was worse than the odor from Gimlet’s rear-end and was growing stronger every second. The fog receded like drawn curtain, revealing the Inferno.

Above the volcano, within the smoke, a face hovered. It was too uniform to be an optical illusion. It swayed and rippled in the ash cloud, staring up into the northern mountains. The dark clouds in the sky had parted in an oddly specific fashion, leading directly to Mount Mictlan.

She squinted, but whatever was up there was too far for her to see. Molten lava spewed into the sky and engulfed the smoky head. It dissipated.

The ground jolted her up and down on her bottom and shook Gimlet awake. The opening in the clouds sealed back up and the fog rolled back in. That eruption was bigger than the one two sleep periods ago. Minutes later, ash fell softly on her head. She leaned back on Gimlet.

A bottle rolled through the ash. A green hodder wobbled about, pushing the bottle uphill. The bottle rolled back, on top of the hodder burying it in the ash. It burrowed its way out of the ash and shoved the bottle again.

“I could help you,” said the Raven.

The hodder’s rat-like head shot up and darted around, searching through the fog.

“Over here,” she said.

The plump pack rat peered at her squinty-eyed. “You look like you need more help than I do.”

“We can help each other. How about loosening my restraints?”

“Sorry. Tis no business of mine what you have got going there.” The hodder went back to heaving the bottle.

“I can get you objects,” she said.

The hodder halted. Its pointy ears popped up. It swilled from side to side surveying the misty desert around them, scrutinized her binds and landed a cautious eye up on Gimlet. “Objects you say? As in more than one?”

“Thirteen, if you can free me,” said the Raven.

The hodder climbed up on the Raven’s chest and began gnawing on the ropes. Gimlet bowed her head and chomped down on the hodder. The Raven cringed at the crunch of the bones.

Black blood, purple guts and yellowish bodily fluids oozed out of Gimlet’s wide mouth and dripped onto the Raven’s chest. Gimlet’s tongue swiped from one side of her head to the other and she laid her head next to the Raven.

“Thanks for looking out for me,” the Raven said to the beast.

Two black hellhounds crept out of the mist and stalked them from yards away. Gimlet raised her enormous head. The Raven struggled to free herself. The binds were too tight.

The two hounds called into the smog with squeaks. Minutes later, three brown hellhounds joined the two black ones, and at once, the pack of five stormed and flocked around the Raven and Gimlet.

The cornurus swung her spiked tail and bludgeoned a hound. Instantly, it keeled over dead. A hound charged toward the Raven. Gimlet’s tail whooshed over her head and impaled the dog with a smash and short yelp.

The remaining three hounds fell back and chirped to each other like birds in conversation. In a turning of the tables, Gimlet became the aggressor. She swung her tail at them. They ducked and hopped.

One hound grabbed hold of the fat end of Gimlet’s tail. A second hound chomped into her nose and locked down. They held her in position as the fourth hound approached her midsection to disembowel the poor cornurus. It snapped at her midsection, but missed when Gimlet twirled at the last second.

The hound at her nose knocked into the snapping hound. It released its grip on her nose and rolled off. Gimlet lifted the hound that was locked on her tail up and slammed it into the ground. It held on.

She flicked it up again and bashed it into the earth. Its grip seemed to loosen, but it was still attached to her tail like a leech. She flipped the hound into the air and spun under it.

The hound flopped down into the horn on the center of her head, skewered. The final two hounds backed away, chirping to each other. Gimlet advanced toward them with a powerful roar that boomed in the Raven’s chest.

She hadn’t heard the cornurus bellow that strongly since they’d known each other. That was why Cross nicknamed her the Roaring Gimlet. Hounds brown and black trotted off into the smog in retreat.

The Raven leaned her head against the cornurus. “Thanks for looking out for me,” she said. “Truly. I mean it this time.”

Gimlet licked her cornurus blood off the Raven’s face.

Cross emerged from the mist with brand new holsters for his revolver and for the holey obsidian blade.

“You like?” He modeled his new accessories. “I traded in some of your useless objects to get ‘em. Hope you don’t mind.” He surveyed the three dead hounds, who hadn’t turned to Nothing because they born in the underworld. “Looks like the party started without me,” he said. “You alright, Gimlet?”

The cornurus grunted as if to communicate how tough she was and that a pack of hellhounds was nothing to her.

“Here, let’s get these ropes off,” said Cross. “We don’t need them anymore.” He untied the Raven.

He must’ve felt safe owning all the objects, leaving her with no weapon to fight with. He was safe for now. She didn’t know exactly how she was going to get out of her predicament. But whatever his plan was, she would make sure it wouldn’t go well as soon as the opportunity presented itself. She wouldn’t make the same mistakes thrice.

“We shouldn’t let good meat go to waste.” He chopped the beasts up, and shoved her down to her palms. He grabbed the back of her head and forced her face it into the meat like she was a dog.

“You do the gathering this time,” he said.

Each day of the following week was just a blur of a horrible journey to nowhere under the blistering blue sky.

First, Cross forced her to walk through the Vale of Mourning. The lost love of the spirits that dwelled there drained her being. Her mind sloshed with dejected thoughts of how she had pretended that she chose her solitary lifestyle. In reality, she had been cast out of society for mediocrity. She was too good to be a demon but too bad to be considered righteous, let alone holy. The best of both worlds, she would proclaim. Not of any world, she would lament. She was unwelcome everywhere.

She staggered across the iron bridge that passed over the flaming river Pyriphlegethon. The husk on Gimlet’s feet merely sizzled as she trotted over the bridge, but the sweltering metal softened the soles of the Ravens boots and scorched her feet.

Cross opened his parasol. It didn’t really shade him from the sky but it drizzled rain onto his head. He stuck out his tongue and caught the droplets.

She peeled her justaucorps halfway off.

“You keep that on,” said Cross. “Remember what you said about people with fair skin? They can’t take too much heat, and I wouldn’t want you to burn. Not yet anyway.”

The Raven took out her canteen from her belt and held it to her mouth. A distinct bang rang out, and the canteen jerked as if smacked with a club.

Devil’s water spouted from the canteen’s new bullet-sized hole. Cross aimed his gun and fired a second round. The canteen snatched out her hand and tumbled down into the river Pyriphlegethon.

He tossed her a calabash from her sack. “Try that instead. I thought these would have spoiled by now.”

She dodged out of the way. The fruit bounced on the bridge and she squashed it under her boot. The juices fizzled on the heated metal.

“Drop the next one and I drop you,” he said.

“Do it,” she said. “Burn me and get it over with.”

“You’ll burn when I say you will. You didn’t burn me and get it over with. I risked getting my head chopped off twice. I spent nearly a week trying to find my way out of Sheol and almost ended up in Hell. But I was saved by three little creatures that you went and burned. If you think drinking from the calabash is the worse I got planned for you, you’re wrong. So maybe you should drink it. Who knows? The poison in that fruit might be more merciful than me.”

He pitched another calabash, which she caught this time. She split the fruit open and drank. It was the sweetest thing that had touched her tongue in years, the most delicious liquid that she had ever tasted in the underworld. She swallowed every last drop of juice hoping it would eventually put her out of her misery before Cross upped the ante.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Refreshed.”

“Don’t joke. I really want to know. Do you feel any different?”

“I do.”

“How so? How different?”

“At first I felt like you weren’t so bad. Now, I feel like I should’ve burned you myself when I had the chance.”

“I can relate to that. Keep walking.”

Cross refused to allow her any rest or food for two straight sleep cycles. The heat from raging blue sky ate away at her and drank all the liquids from her body.

They reached the black hole that was the prison Tartarus. Concentrating on the eerie silence deep within the prison kept her mind off her melted feet and mushy brain for a while.