Page 87 of The Catacomb King
She creaked the door ajar. “Your Lordship?”
Suddenly I was seized with both a terror and a desperate, hot, vicious longing: that I would enter this misty room and find Hades taking a bath.
“Hello, Elke,” I heard Hades say tiredly.
My heart fluttered.
He sounded like all the fight had gone out of him. Which was to say, he sounded the way I felt.
“There’s someone here to see you,” Elke said tenderly. She pushed the door open wide.
I saw Hades for the first time in two days.
He saw me, too. His eyes widened. Then he winced.
My heart stopped at the sight of his body.
His right eye had been blackened so badly it was swollen shut. His forehead and the whole right side of his face had been almost entirely skinned. The remaining flesh was stripped, scarlet, and crusted in black dried blood. He was sitting shirtless with his back against the tub — a much larger tub, I noticed vaguely, than the one in the other room I’d peeked into — and bruises and claw-marks raked all up and down his torso. His shoulders were the most bruised and swollen of all. They looked like someone had tried to rip his arms off…
…the way children tear the legs off spiders.
The King. The King had done this to him
I bolted into the room before I even knew what I was doing. “What the fuck happened!” I touched his right shoulder. He hissed and flinched. “Is it dislocated?”
“Not anymore,” Elke piped up behind me. “His Lordship managed to pop both his shoulders back in. Iwantedto get him a doctor,” she added reproachfully.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Hades rasped. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the tub again. “Go away, Persephone. I don’t want to see you.”
“Oh, fuck off!”
“You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be safe. You’re supposed to be high above, basking in the sun.”
“Have you just been wallowing here since I was taken?”
He laughed hollowly. “Taken? I’m the one who took you, in case you forgot. Your little blond friend is the one who rescued you.”
“You’re a dope. I can’t believe you haven’t even bothered to clean the blood off your face. You’re in a bathhouse, for gods’ sake.”
He cracked an eye open. “You’re one to talk. You smell like a corpse.”
“Yes, but I am going to clean myself off. Unlike some people.”
“I’ll draw your bath, but I can’t stay,” Elke said apologetically. She placed the little white dress carefully next to the brazier. Oh, gods, why had I let her bring that of all things for me to wear? “Someone will notice I’m gone and become suspicious. I’m not supposed to visit him.”
“Elke, don’t be ridiculous, of course I can draw my own bath.”
“I’ll draw it,” Hades said suddenly.
“You sit down and shut up. You shouldn’t even be moving. Elke, are there bandages?”
Elke pointed silently to a roll of bandages beside the door. They were next to the brazier and the buckets and the pomegranates and the bar of green soap. I also spotted a clay pot of what was presumably ointment. Elke mouthed at me,They’ve been there this whole time.
I said to Hades, “It’s pretty disrespectful of Elke that you haven’t even bothered to dress your wounds. She’s going pretty far out of her way to help you.”
That made Hades’s face flicker with shame.
Good. Maybe now he’d take better care of himself. But I was relentless. “Youshouldfeel bad. And no, you are not allowed to draw my fucking bath. What are you going to do after that, hold me underwater?”
