Page 84 of The Catacomb King
I didn’t want to answer that question. Anyway, there was nothing for it.
I braced myself. Hiked my mother’s body up on my shoulders. My blood had begun to beat in the pit of my stomach at the thought of seeing Hades again. Hades in that deep, dark bedchamber, with its black silken bed and roaring fireplace. His hair in his face. His corded forearms. Forearms that had held me underwater and tried to drown me.
Well, if I ran into him, at least I could give him hell.
I snuck near-silently through the catacombs. I had never walked through them while wearing shoes before. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find the way with shoes on; I’d always relied on feeling the near-imperceptible thrum of the moving earth through the balls of my feet. But it was easy: Left, right, left, left, down, down, down.
I was surprised to see the metal door of Hades’s room hanging ajar.
But why not? Now that I was gone, no one was being imprisoned there.
My blood beat even faster.
Shut up, I told it. I took a deep breath. I had been strong enough to stand up to Hades when he had kidnapped me, and I was strong enough now.
I strode into Hades’s bedchamber.
And found the Vizeking.
Rescue
My hot blood turned to sludge.
I stopped cold. I wanted to back out of the room, but the Vizeking had already seen me. He was on the far side of the bed, the side with the bookshelf, flipping through one of Hades’s books. His wide, buglike body could hardly fit between the bed and the wall.
“Human girl?” he said, disbelievingly. “Who brought you back here? Not your little yellow friend.” I thoughtyellow friendmeant Calix, although I couldn’t tell whether the Vizeking was referring to Calix’s hair or his constitution. The Vizeking’s gaze flicked to my mother’s corpse, which I’d draped around my shoulders like a shawl. “Dear Monarch on high, what isthat?”
“None of your business,” I said with as much hauteur as I could muster. Something was wrong. Hades had kept this room as neat as he could, considering what he had to work with. But now the bed was unmade, the carpet was askew, and Hades’s clothes and books were strewn about. “Where’s Elke?”
“Who?”
“The servant! Hades’s maidservant.”
The Vizeking obviously had no idea who I was talking about. My blood simmered. These fucking aristocrats, never taking note of the slaving folks who made their cushy lives possible. It was how I had always felt about the Stammerer parents — although, in fairness, not about Josie. “I’m sureIdon’t know,” said the Vizeking. He closed the book he was holding. From here, I could see that it was the book Hades had showed me, the one I had a copy of back home, with the mountain and the trees. “You are… here to see a maidservant?”
“Yes,” I said stoutly.
The Vizeking considered. “And the human corpse? What’s that for?”
“It’s a present.”
“You have come… all the way back from the Lümerlund… after being rescued by your beloved” — who’d told him Calix was mybeloved? — “from the very jaws of the worst fate known to godlingkind, after successfully fleeing from Hell, a fate that none in centuries have managed to achieve… in order to… gift a human corpse… to a maidservant?”
“Yes,” I repeated.
The Vizeking thought about this for a while.
When he didn’t answer me, I added angrily, “Where’s Hades? This is his bedchamber. What are you doing with his book?”
Slowly, the Vizeking remarked, “I will give His Lordship credit for one thing: You are certainly more interesting than most of your predecessors. I am not quite sure what to do with you right now. I will leave you here while I figure it out. Excuse me.” He swept past me.
I realized too late what he was doing. My heart dropped the instant before the metal door slammed shut. I let my mother fall on the carpet and hurled myself at the door, pounding my fists against it. “Vizeking! No, wait! You’ve got to let me out! There’s going to be an invasion!”
Through the metal, I could just barely hear him laugh.
I wrestled with the door, but it was no use.
I turned slowly, my breath panicking in my lungs. Days after my kidnapping, I was trapped in here again. This time with my mother’s dead body, and Hades and Elke missing, and a brutal invasion on the way.
