Page 99 of A Subtle Scar
He seized the kid by his lapel. “I am a god, little human, older and more powerful than you could ever comprehend. I have seen entire civilizations rise and devour themselves, I have seen countless of your kind breath their first and die forgotten. You are young and ill-informed of the world, and I am inclined to be forgiving, but do not test my fucking patience, little human.”
As quickly as the outburst had come, Charon got back to his calm self in moments. His wings vanished. He took up his place next to me, and the last I saw of the kid was a thin, snotty face, lined with dirt.
“Ronny, that was really hot,” Hermes said.
“You made a child cry,” I said.
“Thank you,” Charon said.
We walked on, up a steep rise in the floor. There was a shelf of fallen rock here, about hip high, the well-like shaft beyond it. Hermes looked over the rock first, so I had a chance to turn back down to the more open area we’d been attacked in. They’d picked a nice spot for an ambush, the higher ground, they’d just chosen the wrong victims.
The people we’d left down there were moving now, scurrying in the shadows, and I was not looking forward to going back. The irrationality, the danger, of having gone here hit me, followed by an impact wave of shock.
“What happens if you two get shot?” I asked.
“We get very angry I’d say?” Charon said. “I’ve never gotten shot before.”
“I got kicked by a horse once,” Hermes said.
“Because you wouldn’t let me watch the races and decided blissing out after in his stable was a good idea,” Charon said.
So we were still on that topic. I sighed. I needed to climb over those fallen rocks and see what was ahead, in the well shaft, or whatever it was.
“I’m just asking about bullets because those people back there are regrouping, and if they have guns, that’s going to suck.” I shoved at Hermes, but Charon went ahead and slid over the rock on his side, then held out his hand to me.
Hermes sighed. “Burlap sacks. I need to get some of those, along with the rubber gloves.”
I tried my magic again but found that I couldn’t get it to work. It wasn’t like it had stopped existing, it felt more like wanting to sneeze and then not being able to before your nose settled again. I assumed Hermes was suffering from the same, only it affected him differently, and he was talking nonsense as a result.
He helped me over the ledge though, unnecessarily. I straightened and looked past Charon.
The cave floor tilted down from here, but it looked more even than anywhere else in the cave. I didn’t think it had been worked. I couldn’t see how, but then again, it lacked that wild cave feel. The smooth dark stone under our feet could have been fine hotel lobby or spa flooring, and yet, it was here. Underground. Hidden. The wrongness of that made it uncanny.
When Charon stepped forward and Hermes appeared behind me, having squeezed himself through to us, I saw what Charon had been looking at.
In the floor in the center of this space, a disc the size of a manhole cover shimmered in bronze and dull copper. Around it, several more people kneeled. Seven of them were naked women whose skin had been marked, and two men and another woman—well, girl, really, wore deer skulls and furs and were singsonging spells. Other people were also here, very few older, two with toddlers clutched to them.
Charon stood like a shield in front of me, but one of the men wearing a deer skull looked right at me, and I thoughtRegus.The woman I’d released from her puppet spell, she’d said that name, and while I couldn’t explain how, I knew that was him. He sat in the middle of the three who were clearly doing something magical.
And yet. For me, none of these people mattered. The disc did, and when I laid eyes on it, dizziness crept up from my toes to my eyeballs. I tried remembering whether trances could make you feel like this, but I had trouble focusing. All I knew was that the disc was important.
Every warning bell that hadn’t sounded when we’d first gone into the bunker were now truly blaring, making me nauseous. But there was nothing to be done, no backup to call, not from within a fucking cave.
Hermes’s arms came around me.
“What is that?” he asked.
The chanting grew louder. Regus’s eyes were like a vise on us, and I could have sworn they were changing color, going from regular brown to a glowing, coppery bronze.
“Pig Latin would be generous,” Charon said. “As for that—”
He took another step forward, and the naked women stood. The other people—onlookers? Hostages?—whimpered and huddled farther back against the stone. Some of the women’s wounds were fresh. One of the toddlers cried, and their mother hushed them, covered their mouth and nose with a filthy rag. She was scared her child would catch something, I realized.
“We—we are not sick,” I said.
“You can teleport out?” Charon asked with a look over his shoulder.
“I can, but Ronny—”
