Page 3 of The Catacomb King
No one had ever been there. There was no one watching me. No one had moved my boots; I’d probably put them down on this side of the border without noticing it.
Howembarrassing.
Suddenly, I wasn’t scared at all anymore. I was furious. I all but threw my basket over the border. I slammed my feet into my boots so hard it hurt. Gods, I was such a gods-damned idiot. Did Iwantto get kidnapped? Huh? Leave my mother to rot?
And what had I thought was going to happen, anyway? Had I really expected to see a godling? Feel his awful rough hands on my skin? Because everyone had already made it eminently clear: Nobody wanted me. Not my own mother, who couldn’t even recognize me. Not my childhood best friend and secret crush, Calix, who’d swanned off to diplomat school in the capitol city months ago and left me behind. Not Josie Stammerer, the daughter of my employers, with her beautiful strawberry hair and freckles. Not even the cursèd godlings, who’d had me tromping over top of their dark kingdom for three months now, ripping herbs from their very earth, and yet they couldn’t even be bothered to kidnap me, not even for their ritual quarter-century sacrifice, to peel my skin off and eat my teeth or whatever it was they did down there.
Whatever! I didn’t care! I knew I was never going to get to go anywhere but my tiny fucking village, and that was fine. I speedwalked all the way home, and I didn’t look back at the sun-limned grass of the underworld once. Not even to check when I heard that rustle again, the same rustle that could never be the wind.
And when I got back to the village, my best friend Calix was home from the capitol.
Calix
“Calix!” I shrieked.
He was standing in the village square, talking to Josie Stammerer and some other girls. Josie saw me before Calix did. I winced. I was supposed to be at work cleaning her parents house. But she very generously did not say,Hey, why aren’t you at work cleaning my parents’ house?
I rolled my eyes. I would have loved for rich, pretty Josie Stammerer to be more of a bitch. Unfortunately, she just wasn’t. She even sat with my mom when I was working. Of course, I often thought that it would have made more sense formeto sit with my mom, and for Josie to clean her own damn house, but then I wouldn’t have had any money.
Then Calix spotted me. His face broke into a wide grin. “Persephone!”
All my thoughts of Josie vanished. I couldn’t believe it. Calix, here in front of me. I’d missed him so much. If possible, he was even handsomer than before, his shoulders broadened, the last trace of baby fat gone from his face. I raced over with my arms thrown wide to hug him. But I skidded to a stop before I got there.
Calix was looking at me strangely.
I felt my face heating up. Why was he looking at me like that, with that blank, goggling expression? Was it that my dress was too short? Of course it was too short; it was a hand-me-down of Josie’s, made brown and threadbare with work, and it wasn’t as if I could afford to buy a new one. I tugged the hem down awkwardly, trying to cover more of my legs.
Then I realized the problem.
Calix was… clean.
Of course. He’d come from the capitol. They had water there, imported from the mainland.
Whereas I was living in a tiny remote village in the middle of a drought, and so I hadn’t… bathed. For months.
I swallowed. My face felt as hot as a coal. In a last-ditch effort to salvage some of my dignity, I threw my head back and straightened my spine. I refused to look at Josie and the other girls. They all came from money. They didn’t have atonof water, of course — a drought was a drought — but they sure had more than me, not to mention soap.
Calix coughed. He made a kind of abortive movement to come toward me, and then his eyes fell on the indecent hem of my dress and he stopped as if he’d run into a wall.
One of the girls cleared her throat.Herdress fit. I scowled at her.
It was Josie who piped up, sparing Calix the unpleasantness of having to hug me. I could have died. “We didn’t think you’d be home so early,” she said to him. I scowled harder. “We thought you were supposed to be gone a whole year.”
She was right. Calix had been at the diplomat’s college in the capitol city, Corcagia, for ten months, but he was supposed to have two months left to go. Surely he hadn’t… dropped out?
No. There was no way. Calix had always been the best of us. The smartest, the most charming, the most fun. Not to mentionthe best-looking. His hair was a darker golden-red than Josie’s strawberry, miles richer and brighter than my own white-yellow hair. His eyes had a way of catching the light and sparkling whenever you’d made a joke. Seeing him — even at moments like this, when I was embarrassed and annoyed — always made my body go hot.
Which only annoyed me more.
“I’m doing a special project,” Calix said. He was talking to me, even though Josie had asked the question. He was probably trying to make me feel better. This was Calix’s way of apologizing: lavishing attention on you until you weren’t mad anymore. To my irritation, it was working. “Kind of like a capstone.”
As if I, a woman who had never left Limer, was supposed to know what a capstone was. But Josie said, “Oh, cool. Like a thesis?”
“Sort of, but more hands-on.”
I could have killed them both. I said to Calix, “I thought maybe you’d come home because you wanted to seeme.”
I was aiming for joking, but I was clearly still too ticked off to make it work. Calix just laughed uncomfortably. I wanted to sink into the earth. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
