Page 110 of The Catacomb King
The King’s spider-fangs grinned. He charged.
Hades tried to swim away with me. The King barreled into us and snatched us up. He was sobig. He lost interest in Hades at once and threw him off to the side as he had before. As he had done for all of Hades’s life.
But Hades caught onto one of his spider-legs. The King did not even notice.
The King raised me to his gnashing mouth.
I screamed.
Hades climbed up his father’s body like lightning. He wrapped his fists around the crown that was buried in his father’s eyeballs. “Don’t do this, Father!” he yelled. “Please! I’m begging you!”
The King could not hear him anymore. It was not clear how much of him was even the King.
And then the King ate me.
He tossed me into his mouth. It wasnotthe size of a human mouth. He closed his jaws around me. My hips cracked. The pain was blinding.
But my head and arms were still dangling free.
So I was able to see when Hades, far stronger than I was, forced the crown all the way into his father’s skull.
It was the Vizeking, not the King, who howled in fury.
Because the King didn’t even have time to.
His jaw fell lax. I tumbled, hurtling toward the Lake again. This time it was Elke, not Hades, who caught me — she had made it to shore, and she fired a fresh tendril of silk and caught me in midair and jerked me over to her. She caught me in her spider-arms.
I twisted my neck just in time to watch the King thud into the Lake.
He was dead. I could see his face from here. His spider-skull bleeding, his jaw still hanging open, his eyeballs shredded. Hades sat on top of his father’s body, as if he had summited a mountain.
Hades still held the crown in one hand. It was coated in his father’s rainbow blood.
I watched him look at it. Watched his shoulders slump. But he had nowhere to put it.
So he put it on.
He looked levelly at the Vizeking. He looked so exhausted. My heart ached for him.
But at least it was over.
Resurrection
What now? The Vizeking would need to be arrested, of course. Maybe even executed. The War Police would need to be driven out of the underworld. Calix would have to slink empty-handed back to Corcagia.
And, I supposed, someone would still need to make a sacrifice to the Monarch to end the drought. Well, the sacrifice wasn’t going to beme. If anybody tried to drown me after this, I’d tear their fucking throats out. My whole body felt like it was on fire. My broken leg, my broken hips, my stabbed arm, my broken face. I was bleeding so much I felt like I was leaking it.
Behind me, Calix went “Euugh!” and began to thrash wildly. He was still bundled in Elke’s silk, together with my mother’s corpse.
Elke said, “Okay, okay, okay!” Gently, apologetically, she put me down and unbound him and my mother. Calix rolled away from my mother as fast as he could.
“Shemoved!” he screeched.
I was in so much pain, it took me a second to catch up to what he had said.
My mother had what?
Everybody was silent. The Vizeking, the lackeys, the War Police. The King, the Prince, my mother. My heart.
