Talbot and I arrived back at Eternity Road at the same time. Ambrose was locking the door.
“Everything okay, Dad?” Talbot asked.
“It was quiet, so I thought I would make an early night of it,” he replied.
Talbot and I exchanged glances. It was barely 4 p.m.
Ambrose caught our concerned looks and snorted. “I’m tired, that’s all,” he said bluntly. “I opened the store at nine a.m., while you two were getting your beauty rest.”
Ambrose was a big man, but there were deep circles under his eyes and his skin had a gray cast.
We offered to work, but Ambrose waved us away. Instead, we followed him up the three flights of stairs to their apartment.
“I’ll make you a cup of tea,” Talbot offered his father.
Ambrose snorted. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
After he went to bed, Talbot and I settled on the couch with a couple of beers to brainstorm.
“So who is running the underworld while Hecate is upstairs possessing Willow’s body?”
“What are you looking for anyway?”
“A way to get that particular genie out of the bottle,” I replied.
At his blank look, I elaborated, “Find a way to get Hecate out of Willow’s body.”
“Why is she still possessing her anyway?” he asked. “Wren took the bead.”
“I know,” I said. “She’s either keeping Willow just to piss me off or…”
“Or what?”
“The bead didn’t work for some reason.” Maybe I’d brought back the wrong bead when Wren had sent me through time and space, to India, where the simple red bead had been hidden.
“Like what?” Talbot asked.
“I’m going to go to the underworld and do some snooping.”
“Pretty risky. She probably left a legion of demons behind to guard the place,” Talbot commented. “I’ll go with you.”
“No,” I said. “I have to go alone.”
Too many people I cared about had already been in danger because of me.
I’d originally come to Minneapolis to avenge my mother’s death and then end my life, but things had gotten complicated. Hope, however fragile, like me, was hard to kill once it had bloomed, and a tiny part of me still thought a happily ever after might still be possible.
That was, until Wren slit my throat and left me to die in a pool of my own blood. I’d thought my aunts were the worst thing around, but they were girl scouts, although rabid ones, compared to Hecate. And I’d unleashed her on Minneapolis.
I remembered Bernie’s little trick and had stopped by the butchers for three slabs of meat for Hecate’s hounds, which I laced with some horse tranquilizers and a hidden command spell. It wasn’t as fancy as Talbot’s had been, but it did the trick.
There was a gate to the underworld directly under Hell’s Belles, the restaurant my aunts owned. It was located near a three-way crossroads.
I didn’t want anyone to know I was coming, so I skipped the express route through Hell’s Belles’ basement and took the long way at it, through the tunnels. The tunnels were as disgusting as ever, and there were signs that someone else had been there recently. It was probably just kids looking for somewhere to party, but it set me on edge.
I’d been to the underworld before, to rescue my cousin Claire from Hecate. Not that Claire had been particularly grateful, but the aunts had been holding something over my head to get me to do it.
Now I was going back of my own free will. The trip downstairs was just as cold, nasty, and smelly as I remembered it. The road to the underworld smelled like the devil’s armpit.
The hounds were guarding the gate. From a safe distance, I tossed the steaks at the hounds and then waited. There was a thud and then another, and finally the third dog went down. I tiptoed past them to reach the gate to Hecate’s realm.
The road to Hecate’s castle was strewn with false paths, traps for the unwary, and poisonous plants that would make a rattlesnake’s venom taste like mother’s milk.
“Stop that and take me where I want to go,” I muttered, when I passed the same patch of wolfsbane for the third time. The path immediately formed a straight line.
I yawned. There was something I was supposed to be doing, something important. My lids started to droop. I was drifting off into a comfortable fog when I realized dark magic was lulling me to sleep.
“Wake up,” I told myself. Then, when that didn’t seem to be working, “Excitare.”
I fought off the urge to doze, but had to slap myself every few miles to stay alert.
Hecate’s castle was in view, but I didn’t seem to be getting any closer. There was rustling in the underbrush, and I froze, but the noise was not repeated.
Still, the hair on the back of my neck prickled. I was being followed. I bent down and pretended to tie the laces of my beat-up Docs. I scanned the horizon, but no demons appeared.
I decided I needed to be more specific with my requests to the enchanted pathway.
“Take me to where I want to go quickly,” I clarified.
I walked along the path for no more than twenty minutes before I entered the palace. It was abandoned, and not even the lowest demon of the realm had stayed.
I wandered from room to room looking for clues as to Hecate’s current whereabouts, the location of Hecate’s physical body, which I was sure was still in the underworld somewhere, or a sign of a possessed Willow, but came up with nothing. The castle had been stripped bare.
I’d lost all sense of time during my search, but my growling stomach made me realize I’d been there some time. “This is a bust,” I muttered to myself, but I went down one last hallway anyway. I was sure Hecate’s body was still stuck in the underworld.
I came to a room I’d never seen before. The door was carved yew, the handle crystal. It was locked.
Before I could pick the lock, a roar sounded. There was a creature standing at the end of the hallway, blocking my escape. It had the head of lion, followed by the head of a goat. Its tail was the head of a deadly serpent. I was facing down a chimera.
The chimera charged me. I was trapped. I muttered, “Obscura,” before it reached me and the chimera stopped, confused by my disappearance from its vision. It skidded comically as it tried to correct its trajectory, but came close enough to touch. The nostrils on the lion flared. I didn’t wait to find out if it picked up my scent. I ran.
I made my way back through the same treacherous forest. I looked over my shoulder constantly, still worried about the chimera tracking me, but there was no sign of the beast.
I crossed back using through the same gate I’d entered, but someone was waiting. Danvers appeared to be looking for a way in, his wheelchair moving quickly over the uneven path. The movement rattled his teeth and his composure, but when he stopped in front of me, his usual snarl was in place.
Hecate hadn’t needed Danvers any longer and thrown him away, but why was she still hanging on to Baxter? The flesh eater had vanished, but the harpy feather I’d found at the scene convinced me that Hecate was behind his disappearance.
Willow’s husband. Danvers had stuck with his golf shirts, but his tan had faded. The curse I’d lobbed at him right before I died had taken care of his golf swing. His hands shook with palsy so much he could barely grip his wheelchair.
I probably should have felt sorry for him, but I didn’t. He’d killed at least a baker’s dozen of naiads to break Hecate out of the underworld. And he’d hurt Willow. In my book, that meant the bastard deserved every agonizing second.
The hounds still snored.
“You need to get a new trick,” Danvers said. “Why not just kill them?”
“I’d never kill an animal,” I replied. “Unless it was disguised as a human. But calling you an animal is an insult to the poor beast.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“None of your business.”
“She was only playing before,” Danvers said. “Hecate doesn’t like to lose.”
“Neither do I.”
He smirked at me. “Just you wait, Nyx Fortuna. A whole lot of trouble is coming your way.”
I smirked back. My life had been full of trouble.
I waited, but Danvers didn’t make a move to cross over into the underworld.
“Been taken off the guest list, have you?”
“She left me in charge. I can go into Hecate’s realm whenever I want,” he blustered, but he stayed where he was.
I was torn. I needed to get back home, but I had an overwhelming desire to wrap my hands around his neck and squeeze until he told me where Willow was or he stopped breathing. “You don’t have enough magic left in you to call up and order pizza, let alone control the dead.”
“You’re dead already,” he replied. “You just don’t know it yet.”
I’d always known I wasn’t destined for a paint-by-numbers happy ending, but I wasn’t going to let a monster like Danvers be the one to kill me. He didn’t make a move, though, and we stood there, locking eyes.
A single roar was the only warning I had before the chimera appeared.
Danvers’s bloodshot eyes opened wide. “I didn’t think they existed anymore,” he said.
I was going to have to kill it. Hecate could do infinite damage with a chimera on her side. The chimera made its cousin Cerberus look like a teacup poodle.
The snake struck my arm. A sharp pang and then my vision blurred as the venom hit my bloodstream. Even if I managed to extract the poison, the lion would tear me to shreds. Or the goat’s pungent odor would kill me. Fortunately, I wore my World War II fighter pilot jacket, which had healing charms sewn into the lining. It would slow the poison.
“Freeze,” I commanded. The chimera froze. I took out my athame and cut two small slits into the wound and sucked out the poison. It tasted as bad as the chimera smelled, like rancid goat meat, and moldy fur, and dog barf. I spit it on the ground and then repeated the process until most of the venom was out.
When my vision cleared, Danvers was gone. The chimera was still frozen, but I could see its multiple eyes furiously working. What should I do with it? It didn’t seem sporting to lop off its heads while it couldn’t defend itself, but if I left it there, Hecate would use the chimera to wreak havoc topside later.
I weighed my options. The spell would hold the chimera for a few hours. If I got lucky, I’d have just enough time to figure out where to stash it before the magic wore off. If I wasn’t lucky, the chimera would probably kill me.
I hated to wake him, but I was in a bind. I picked up the phone and dialed Ambrose’s number. “Know anywhere I can stash a chimera in cold storage for a few days?”
“I do, but you’re not going to like it,” he replied. He was right.