Page 37 of The Catacomb King
I frowned harder. “These constellations are wrong.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The stars in the painting are wrong,” I repeated, louder.
Hades sneered. “Maybe it’s just because we have a different sky than you have. In case you forgot.”
“No, that’s not it. These stars are real, but they’re wrong. This picture takes place at a different time than mine. These constellations are…” I thought. “I think this picture is exactly one year after mine. See?”
“No, I don’t see, because I haven’t seen your stupid book. This ismybook. Give it back.”
“Okay, okay, don’t be such a baby. I don’t want to touch your gross spider-skin book anyway.” I handed it over. Hades snatched at it petulantly, but when he had the painting in front of him, he frowned at it the way I had. Eventually, begrudgingly, he suggested, “Maybe a copy of this book made its way out into the light-world a long time ago, and maybe you humans distorted it into something else.”
“‘A copy of this book’?” I repeated. “How many copies are there, exactly, that they can get so lost they end up in Limer?”
Hades was grumpily silent.
“Do you people have mass production?” I went on.
“You know we don’t.”
“Do you know what a ‘printing press’ is?”
“Shut up.”
“Maybewewrote the story first andyoupeople distorted it.”
Hades shook his head, hard and angry. “No. This is our oldest story. Our heritage. Our blood.Youfucked it up somehow.”
“I didn’t do shit. I’m a cleaning lady from a minor village.”
“Don’t talk about yourself that way,” Hades said, suddenly fierce. “You’re a goddess.”
He’d been calling megoddesssarcastically since I got here. This was the first time he sounded like he meant it.
My throat closed up. No one had ever spoken to me like that. Ever. Not Calix, my dearest friend. Not even my mother. Not even my dead father.
And suddenly I was angry. Where did he get off throwing around words likegoddess? He had no right to make me feel this way, itchy and short of breath, like I’d been caught in poison ivy. He had no right to make me long to watch him open his mouth and say those words again.
Hades bit his tongue. “Metaphorically,” he added. “Literally, of course, you’re just a weak, soft-bellied human.”
“Oh,fuck you!”
“Not even descended from the Monarch. Not even a half-god like the weakest of us.”
I could have killed him. And to think I’d just allowed him, a moment ago, to make me feelgood. “We call you worse than weak where I come from, you know. To us, you’re demons. Monsters. You tear innocent people from their loved ones, from their entire worlds. You imprison them. You kill them. You —”
“Yeah, yeah, we drink their blood and eat their organs,” Hades said sarcastically. “We crack their bodies open and hang up the bones to use as wind chimes. Trust me, soft-skinned Persephone. We do worse than that. But we’re still as worthy of survival as you are.”
“Agree to disagree,” I spat.
He ignored me. “So I’m going to make sure you have everything you need to fill that reservoir up. And that means that as far as my people are concerned, youarea goddess, when you’re with me.”
“Yeah? Well, first of all, in that case, I’m going to need you to stop calling megoddess. Second, stop being a dick. And third, I need a damn map.”
Hades huffed. He rubbed his forehead and put the strange book away. I tracked it with my eyes. I couldn’t get over it. Something about that duplicate illustration… it was just so strange.
Hades said once again, “We don’t have a map.”
