Page 43 of The Catacomb King
This was hisbedroom? Why wasIhere, then? Didn’t they have a holding cell for tributes, or something? “Why did you put the kidnapped tribute in your bedroom?” Unless the Vizeking was right after all about what Hades wanted from me. My mouth dried up.
Hades must have sensed my discomfort. He said, muffled and tired, “Not this again. Do I look like I’m trying to fuck you? I’m all the way over here. Go to sleep, Persephone.”
Despite myself, I believed him. I was even a little embarrassed for having doubted him for a moment. Butsomething still didn’t make sense. This couldn’t be the Prince’s bedroom. It was so small, and it was in the middle of nowhere.
I sat up and found my makeshift map. If the library washere, and the graveyard washere, then… “We’re so far from the throne room. Why is your bedchamber so far away from the rest of the palace? Or are palaces in the underworld just laid out differently?” I wasn’t even sure the wordpalacewas the right word to describe what I was talking about. Everything in the underworld blurred together, interconnected by the latticework of catacombs. But there was clearly a demarcation between the area I thought of as the palace, which contained the throne room and the library, and the other main area, with the graveyard and the reservoir and the bank. The catacombs around the throne room were wider, smoother, less populated, and more heavily jeweled than the ones in the rest of the underworld. If my map was correct, then technically I supposed this bedchamberwasin the palace area, but it was certainly on the outskirts.
Hades said, “It’s not laid out differently.”
“You kidnap a woman every quarter-century and you don’t even have a proper place to put her?”
“I put you right here. You’re fine. Stop complaining.”
I thought of him saying, earlier, that everyone hated him. Thought of his hard, handsome human body, so different from the bodies of the rest of the spider-people. I thought of him saying,No one has seen the King for six years.
His father had relegated his son to the far corner of the palace because he didn’t love him. And no one had ever done anything about it.
That made me so sad.
But I knew Hades wouldn’t want to talk about it. I lay down, staring at his fire-limned hair. When he didn’t move, I rolled onto my back to face the ceiling. I closed my eyes.
The fire died down.
I thought of Hades. His father. My mother. How lucky I was to have her. How terrible a person I was, to have ever wanted to get away from her and out of Limer.
I could have laughed at myself. Just look at me now.
I woke up sick with dread.
Today was the second day of my kidnapping.
The day I marshaled a society born of literal chaos to build a system that I wasn’t even sure could work.
Hades was still lying on the ground, curled in the fetal position. I could just make out his outline in the light of the half-dead coals. He was facing me; he must have rolled over in his sleep. His long black hair was all stuck up on one side, like a chicken’s feathers. I suppressed a snicker. His face was uncreased and relaxed in a way that it never was awake; it made him look handsomer than ever. His pulse beat in his neck. It was kind of a marvel, really, that he even had a pulse.
I wondered if the other godlings, the more spiderlike ones, had pulses, too. If they had human blood. If human veins ran through the bodies of creatures like Elke and the Vizeking.
I wondered what the King looked like. If there was even one way in which Hades took after his father.
Someone knocked timidly on the bedroom door.
Hades bolted awake. “Come in,” he said crisply, sounding for all the world like he’d been up for hours.
Elke came creeping in with a cooked whole fish on a tray, along with a little bowl of some rice-like, spherical grain.
My stomach rumbled.
But Elke set the tray in front of Hades, not me. She glanced at me guiltily.
“Ignore her,” Hades said to Elke. He was already chewing on the rice. “She doesn’t have to eat if she doesn’t want to.”
“Idon’twant to.”
“There you go. Everyone’s in agreement. Elke, are the workers gathered?”
“Some of them,” Elke said unconvincingly.
Hades scowled.
