Thunder Road (Rain Chaser Book 1) (26 page)

“Can we do it?” Leo kept staring at me.

Hades chuckled, and the sound vibrated inside me, threatening to turn my guts to jelly. Manea looked absolutely fucking delighted. And why wouldn’t she? I’d just agreed to a bet so insane I might as well have killed Leo myself.

“Escape.” I repeated the word one syllable at a time, hoping it had a secondary meaning I didn’t know.

“
It’s been done. Once
.”

My head bobbed automatically, and I fought the urge to sit down. This wasn’t a small task, like getting locked in a vault and trying to find a secret key. The underworld was just that, its own world. There were regions and levels and things people had never lived to talk about. How were we supposed to get out when I didn’t know what we were getting out of?

It’s not like there was a visitor map with a big glowing
You Are Here
and handy signs pointing towards the exits.

“We can do it.” Leo took my arm and started to back away from the throne. I went with him, my feet working on their own without assistance from my brain.

“Escape.” I looked at Manea, and the expression of victory she greeted me with brought me back to my senses.

I don’t know what it was about her condescending, gleeful grin, but it sparked a fire inside me that rivaled the flames outside.

They thought they had us beat before we’d even begun, which just went to show they had no idea who they were dealing with.

I
would
get out of here, no matter what it took.

And then I’d gladly tell anyone who listened how I was able to cheat death twice in one week.

It wasn’t until ten minutes later, standing outside Hades’s temple, I really got an idea of how mammoth a task it was we’d taken on.

Leo and I stood on the deep, bone-white steps of the temple, and looked out over the expanse of the underworld kingdom.

I’d stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and marveled at the sheer scale of the place, and how small it made bystanders feel in contrast. The Grand Canyon was a fancy ditch compared to the insanity that was the underworld.

Black cave walls rose around us on every side, smoked with charcoal from the constantly burning firestorm overhead. Beneath us, the ground was littered with tens of millions of bones, stacked up on each other the way I imagined a dragon would pile stores of gold coins. A narrow path led away from the temple towards a pass between the black cliffs.

It was the only road out.

Leo shuffled next to me, jamming his hands deep into his pockets and surveying the scene in front of us. The air was eerily still, with nothing even approaching a breeze to lift the heavy weight of the heat off us. I was already sweating, and we’d been outside only a minute or two.

“You know what I was going to do yesterday?” he asked. “Before you showed up in my bedroom?”

“No.” I wouldn’t hazard a guess. I was pretty sure this wasn’t what he had in mind for a fun night out, though.

“I was going to do my laundry. There’s a place a couple blocks from the apartment, next to a coffee shop. The girl who works at the coffee place gives me free refills. I would have washed my shirts and flirted with the coffee girl, and maybe see if there were some loose pockets around the Quarter.”

“Sounds nice.”

He nodded. “What would you be doing if we weren’t here?”

I wanted to shout at him, to shake him and tell him this was serious and we didn’t have time for games of
what if
. But at the same time there was a soothing sense of rightness in wondering what I’d be doing if I wasn’t trapped in an eternal hellscape with a guy I barely knew.

“If I wasn’t working, I’d be reading a romance novel at a Chinese food restaurant.” I thought about the night in Whitefish when my plans to do just that had been horribly derailed by the arrival of Cade.

Leo glanced at me and smiled lightly. “You’d be banging the bad-luck priest.”

I blushed. “Shut up.”

He elbowed me playfully, and the whole conversation was so absurd I forgot for a brief second what the stakes were. “Don’t worry, kid. If we manage this, he may get lucky yet.”

This only managed to make me blush more furiously, effectively ruining any opportunity I had to deny my blossoming feelings towards Cade. Not that I wanted to tell Leo he was right, but gods help me, if I did manage to get us out of this alive, I was going to defy the no-sex rule of the temple like no tomorrow.

If
we got out.

I scanned the endlessly bleak horizon and sucked in a breath through my nose. The underworld smelled of sulfur and ash, with a lingering stink of doom. I coughed, and my hand immediately went to my ribs. Breathing in this much hot, rancid air couldn’t be good for me. I worried the tar holding my wound closed might melt from the heat and leave me unable to continue.

“Let’s just be grateful Cade isn’t here,” I reminded him. “I think we could use all the luck we’ve got right now.”

Bleakly, I made my way down the steps to the ground, small bone fragments crunching below my feet like gravel. Leo followed behind, his heavy boots making a loud grinding noise, each footfall echoing with
crunch-pop
sounds that were vaguely obscene.

This whole place set my nerves on end.

“So, maybe this isn’t the ideal time to ask this, but…you have a plan, right?” He came up beside me, the road barely wide enough for us to walk abreast.

I didn’t look at him, keeping my gaze locked on the path ahead, expecting something to lunge out at us at any moment. “Sure.”

“Care to share it?” As he spoke, Leo stripped off his button-down shirt, exposing his muscular arms, displayed to great effect by the short-sleeved T-shirt he wore underneath. Dude was so built he could probably crush my skull between his biceps.

“Easy. Like Hades said. We get out.” I made a gesture of walking my fingers.

“I was kind of hoping you’d have something a bit more specific.”

“First we follow this creepy bone road.”

Leo grimaced. “And then?”

I stopped so I could face him directly. “And then we hope really hard that whatever is at the end of the road doesn’t kill us. If it doesn’t, we keep going, and we keep going, and we do that until we get out or we die. End of plan.”

Leo brushed his huge hands through his curly hair, scratching his scalp thoughtfully. For the first time since we’d left the temple he looked genuinely worried. Good. For once his expression matched the bottomless feeling of fear gnawing away at my guts.

“That’s certainly a kind of plan.”

“If it improves at all, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

I started walking again, matching my stride to his, which was still a bit faster than I’d like to go in my current condition. No one here cared about my injury. No one was going to take it easy on me because of it. I was going to have to suck it up.

We walked together in silence, the only sound the crisp grinding of bones underfoot. I was reminded, for some reason, of the day my parents had sat Sunny and me down to explain that we’d be going away from home and never coming back. At the time, being seven years old, I hadn’t appreciated the immensity of what
never coming back
meant.

Here, in the hellish landscapes of the underworld, I was provided a perfect visual for it. This was what it meant to go away and not return. This was what eternity meant, if eternity was a place.

I thought about my parents, their faces nothing more than fuzzy sketches of what I thought they looked like, as opposed to real memories. They’d explained to me and Sunny that we were chosen and our destinies meant we were on our way to lives with greater meaning and purpose than those of other little girls.

Mostly, we’d been excited that we didn’t have to go to school the next day.

It wasn’t until later, when my mother had taken Sunny away and my father was loading me up to go to Seattle, that I really got a sense of their intention. We were off to start new lives, but those lives would not include each other.

I don’t know what made me think of Sunny here. This place was everything she wasn’t—dark, foreboding, unwelcoming. Perhaps that was why she came to mind, because I needed to remember there were things out there beyond this, things that were warm and loving and beautiful.

All the things I hoped to see again.

“Would you be mad if I sang?” Leo asked, breaking the silence with an anachronistically cheerful tone.

“Yes.”

“Buzzkill.”

“That’s me, Tallulah Corentine, killer of dreams.” I wanted to ask if he could take this a bit more seriously, but before I could, it occurred to me that maybe he had taken it seriously, and now being playful about it was the only thing keeping him from abandoning hope and giving up.

If that’s what he needed, let the man tell bad jokes. But I’d die before I let him sing.

The road narrowed, and I glanced back behind us, astonished to see how far we’d come while I was busy dwelling on the past. The temple now appeared small and unassuming in the distance. From this vantage it didn’t give away any of the sense of menace that came from being inside it. The piles of bone had dwindled as well, showing patchy bits of brown grass in between femurs and pelvic bones. It was hard to imagine this had ever been a place where grass could grow long enough to dry up and die.

Soon the path was too small for us to walk side by side. I took the lead, wishing with all my might I had any kind of weapon with me. I hated the idea of going into a bottleneck with nothing other than fists and wits to fight my way out.

“You ever feel like you’re walking into a trap?” he asked.

“Far more often than is healthy.”

“How often are you right?”

I couldn’t help but smirk at the question. “When am I ever wrong?”

I shrugged off my jacket, the oppressive heat surrounding us finally getting to be too much to handle. My arms and neck were damp with sweat, and the small hairs at the base of my ponytail were plastered to my skin.

The clouds of flame bubbled overhead like a pot of water coming to a boil. I didn’t give them more than a passing glance, remembering what I’d seen back at the temple. I worried if I stared for too long, trying to see the people trapped inside the fire, I might lose my mind and end up joining them.

This whole world felt like one extended bad dream from which there was no waking.

We walked for over an hour, me leading him into the unknown. Eventually the pass between the cliffs became so tight my shoulders grazed the black rocks as we continued, and Leo had to turn himself sideways in order to follow me. Just when I thought it might get too squished for him to fit through, it opened up again and we were on the other side.

The black cliffs were at our back, like large feral trees we couldn’t trust. I half-expected the rocks to grow outward and push us.

On this side of the passage we were on the top of a ledge, and cascading down in front of us were millions more bones laid out along the edge of a tar-black river, looking for all the world like a beach.

I took a tentative step forward off the path, testing the bone landslide to see if it would hold my weight. If it wouldn’t carry me, there was no way Leo would manage. The bones shifted and cracked underfoot, making my balance stutter, but I was able to stay upright. My foot sank in to my ankle but stood firm after that. The bone pile must be so dense it could support being walked on.

“It’s safe. Just a little sinky,” I assured Leo.

He followed behind me and with his extra weight sank a bit deeper, the bones flowing up to his calves. But soon we were moving forward in sluggish, dragging movements, fighting the tide of death that threatened to hold us back.

A small boat was moored to the shore, its back end being licked at by the sticky current of the river. Whatever liquid flowed through these banks, it wasn’t water. The smell of it was foul, like burning tires, but also unlike anything I’d experienced on earth.

My pulse hammered as we approached the little craft, knowing whatever we found there would make or break the rest of the journey for us.

Shadows shifted on the bow of the ship, shimmering like oil on the surface of water. The shapeless blackness moved as smoke did, swirling and spinning, then as if it had always been real, the shadows became a man. He was slender and stooped, his spine bent at a crooked angle, leaning him too far forward. He had stringy white hair that dangled limply down to his nose, but given the swath of foggy whiteness of his eyes, I didn’t think he needed to see anything.

“The old man and the sea?” Leo observed. “Is Ernest Hemingway here going to get us to freedom?”

In spite of how far away we were, the old man grinned slyly at Leo’s words, having heard them across the distance. His beard was white but made of smoke, swirling loosely around his face. He scratched his chin, and as the smoke-beard parted to accommodate his fingers, I saw that the lower half of his face was a bare skull, the grin permanent without lips. He withdrew his hand, and the beard resettled, making him look human again.

“Come along, come along,” the boatman goaded. “We haven’t got an eternity.”

He started to chuckle a high-pitched laugh that would have done the Wicked Witch of the West proud. Leo grabbed me by the back of my shirt and pulled me to a halt. I almost slipped on the uneven surface of all the bones.

“Remember how we talked about the trap feeling?” he said.

I nodded. “Normally I’d listen to you. But that’s the River Styx, and that makes the creepy dude in the boat Charon, and unless we get him to give us a lift you’d better get really, really accustomed to my charming company, because you’ll be enduring it forever.”

Leo blinked slowly, looking from me to the terrifying figure aboard the vessel, openly debating which was worse before giving me an apologetic shrug and saying, “Ladies first.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

As we approached the boat, the smell from the river got more and more severe, until my eyes were burning and the hair inside my nose felt like it was being singed off. Why did everything associated with death and the afterlife have to smell so terrible? Couldn’t the underworld smell like cotton candy and unicorn farts or something?