Page 111 of The Catacomb King
And…
The rot-and-formaldehyde smell that had pervaded the air around my mother was gone.
I heard the Vizeking inhale.
Oh, no.
My mother smelled the way she had always smelled, up until the last year. Not like urine and sickness and blood, but like soil from working on the farm, and old ink from flipping through books with me, and — my father had always marveled at this — a hint of dried lavender.
With a trembling hand, I reached out to touch her stomach.
The wound in it was gone. It was squishy with organs.
They had grown back.
“Mommy?” I whispered. The Vizeking might have been about to stab me from behind and I would not have known it. There was water on my face. “Mommy? Can you hear me?”
A rasp sounded from the back of my mother’s throat.
I swallowed.
My dead mother opened her eyes.
And all at once, very suddenly, I was more afraid than I had ever been in my life.
But I tried to force the fear back. Why was I scared? I had done it, I had saved her. I tried to marshal a bit of composure. “Mommy,” I said. “Do you know me?”
“Mütte,” my mother said.
Elke gasped.
My stomach swooped. “What?”
My mother did not answer. She regarded me with blank eyes. Mere minutes ago, I had dreamed of her greeting me with pride. But this did not look like the face of a person who couldfeelpride. It was not the face of a person who could feel anything at all.
Then, behind me, the Vizeking started to laugh.
Full of dread, I turned.
Hades was looking down at the King’s body beneath his feet. He began to step sideways, very slowly. Moving toward the lower slope of the King’s corpse, where he could slide down to the water and swim to shore.
My mother seized my hand. I yelped. Her grip was like iron. Even healthy, she had never been so strong. “Let me go,” I said automatically. “That hurts.”
“You have to get out of here, Mütte,” my mother said flatly. “You and your little prince.”
“He’s not the Prince anymore,” whispered Elke. “He’s the King.”
Hades splashed into the water. The sound went patter-patter-patter as he began to swim to shore in fast, powerful strokes.
It sounded like… rain.
No, wait.
Thatwasrain.
My head snapped up to the opening in the cave ceiling. The opening to the Primordial Mountain. To the sky.
Thousands of water droplets struck the Lake. I squinted, my heart pounding, trying to tell myself that the drops hitting the water were just spray from the upside-down waterfall.
