Page 24 of The Catacomb King
Elke hesitated. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Just take it!” I shoved the basket onto her platter with the fish. “Now go! Go, go, go! Hurry!”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Elke said. She scuttled over to the door and opened it. But then she hesitated. She looked back at me. She rolled whatever she wanted to say around in her mouth, and then, very fast, she said, “You know, I have been alive for three hundred years.”
Three hundred years! Her human face looked no older than forty!
“I am young, though not as young as His Lordship,” Elke went on, still speaking quickly. “In my time, I have been ordered to serve food to six tributes.”
Tributes. That meant kidnapped human girls. Sacrifices.
My heart quailed, but I refused to let my body follow suit. I squared my shoulders and regarded Elke head-on.
If she noticed my fear or my resolve, Elke didn’t remark upon it. She continued, “And not a one of them ever used the correct name for the Gestörbunlund.” She smiled thinly. “Let alone took the effort to pronounce it correctly.”
I didn’t know what to say. So what?
Elke waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, she left.
There was nothing to do now but wait, and to hope to the gods that Elke put my basket at the border and Calix found it. I began to pace. I hefted the spear, but there was no one to stab. I opened one of the books, but I couldn’t focus.
I was too hungry.
I kept thinking about Hades. His wide blue eyes. His strange sadness. His bedrock bellow, roaring at the Vizeking,She’s not my pet. Watch your mouth. I thought of my basket. Of Calix. My mother. Josie. The fact that I was here right now and Josie wasn’t. Because I was the one who had been captured by Hades. Hades. His black jagged hair, his muscular hands, his voice when he saidI wish I could have talked to my father—
No matter what I did, my thoughts circled back to him.
What was he going to do to me? Why was I here?
It had to be the fact that I was already thinking about him — because he’dkidnapped me, and forno other reason— that I knew as soon as the door handle turned again that it was him this time and not Elke. I could sense the difference just by the way the handle turned under the weight of his palm.
I picked up my spear.
Hades entered, holding my basket and frowning.
Traitor, I thought at Elke.
“What is this?” Hades demanded.
“It’s edenica herbs and water.”
“I know that. But why did you give them to Elke? You know she won’t go aboveground. No one ever does if they can avoid it.”
No, I had not known that. My face flushed with embarrassment. “Well, someone has to get them to the Lümerlund. They’re to keep my mother alive. I risked everything to gather those.”And the risk didn’t exactly pay off, did it,I thought bitterly. “Not that you monsters would know anything about loving someone so much you’d put yourself in danger.”
Hades’s face did absolutely nothing. “You think the half-cup of water you gathered last night is the one thing standing between your mother and death?”
My throat convulsed of its own accord. I could have stabbed him. “I’ve kept her alive so far, haven’t I?”
“I don’t know. Have you?”
“Yes.”
He was rotating the flask between his hands. “By yourself?”
“No,” I bit out. “Josie helps. But I’m trying. It’s something that I’m trying, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Hades said. “Absolutely.”
