Furious

Chapter Fourteen

When I'd tumbled through the portal on other occasions, it hadn't felt cold and wet. Before, it felt like running under sheets that billowed on the clothesline in the yard. They just sort of floated over and around you, grazing your head and then gone.

This time was less majestic; first it sucked at my hair and my clothes, then it pushed me forward like it was shoving me off of a cliff and when I emerged on the other side, I felt similar to a drowned cat. I even smelled wet, like grass after a storm.

Imagine my surprise to find out that I wasn't dripping, my rumpled clothes weren't limp with moisture though it had felt so real. The sensation crawled over my skin and I shivered to fight off the chill.

Hector, who came through the portal a moment after me, grabbed my shoulders and spun me around to face him. "You should not have let go."

I hadn't realized that in the riptide of the portal my hand had lost his. My eyes darted suspiciously to the portal behind him. "Last time was much less wet."

"The portal?"

"Yeah. When I went through before the experience was pretty serene. This time I felt..." I looked at my arms, at my shirt. They looked as dry as the dirt along the River. "It felt like I'd gone swimming in my clothes."

I could see the wheels churning behind his eyes, searching for an answer. As if he didn't know. "If you'd kept in contact with me, that probably wouldn't have happened. The portal isn't designed for human use. Even to half-humans it can be incredibly dangerous."

"You should invest in an elevator. Or stairs, like a normal person," I mumbled.

"I'm not sure if I should be more offended that you don't like my portal or that you think I'm normal," Hector said, not looking at me. I waited for him to laugh at his own joke but the grin never came, his energy too low.

Instead, he looked out at the expanse before us. "This is the Underworld dungeon and it is in a word dangerous. The portal didn't want to allow you passage both to protect you and keep the prisoners safely locked away. You are lucky to have had me as a traveling companion; I pushed you out before the portal dispensed eternal justice and kept you prisoner." Was he flirting or just being self-important?

I tried not to think about it. The breadth of the Underworld continued to grow the more I learned about it and the more time I spent with Hector the less I hated him for the mess he dragged me into. And I almost had to spend the rest of eternity in a mirror. No predictable plot twists here.

At that point, I wasn't sure if I could identify flirting at all.

"Why is it forbidden?" I asked. Curious, I took a few ginger steps into the cavern, wary of the dungeon I knew to be waiting somewhere unseen.

Because it had to be somewhere and I just wasn't seeing it.

"Some places are too dangerous not to be off-limits. In fact, no one else can get down here. We're on the lowest level of the castle, nothing is so low, so buried, so forbidden, as Tartarus. Not a single living soul, save for those kept here, has ever visited my dungeon."

Maybe his weariness made him forget his unusually bad habit of keeping me in the dark. It felt good to make some kind of headway with him, to get a glimpse into the man Hector was when he wasn't being Hades.

This is how friendship starts. Not on the playground in fifth grade or over a mutual hatred of the class know-it-all or even through your moms; friendships are made in dungeons.

Around us was a big fat lot of nothing. The mirror behind me had darkened, contrastingly old and clouded to the clean surface I was used to staring at; in front of me, a rocky area spanned as far as I could see, with small flickering points of light from the torches equally space along the walls.

We had landed in a giant cavern, though not as large as the outside where the River was. This place was darker, colder, evil. Even the torches on the walls providing light every few feet were cold. The fire was stagnant and hard. Red flames produced light but no warmth, no fluid motions, no dancing shadows. Looking into the endless cavern I forgot how the sun looked, or what holding hands felt like. All warm memories were stripped from my mind. Calling it a dungeon was kind; this was a prison, quite literally a deep, dark pit of hell.

When I stopped looking for signs of life I thought I could hear them. The creak and the groan of something large slowly moving towards us—but there was nothing out there. The cave stretched on and on and nothing moved. My ears strained to hear. I closed my eyes and tried to will my brain to register the sound. It sounded like pain.

There was a scent in the cavern, something like blood and dirt, something old and abominable. If misery had a smell, it would be the molding aroma in the massive room. It was similar to smelling something rotten in the refrigerator but you don't know what it is, so you close the door and wait for it to get worse. My skin prickled, waiting.

Simply trying to comprehend the desolation of the empty space was going to drive me crazy. I heard nothing so loudly it clanged around in my skull, threatening to asphyxiate my brain. He had said it was a dungeon, right?

Was this where I would end up if I failed to win this war? With all of the space I could ever want and the silence in my head to drive me insane?

All at once wordless screams erupted from the far side of the cavern, bouncing off the walls and up into the domed rock ceiling. Immediately I was reminded of the moment when the street opened up before me, grinding and thundering open large enough to swallow me. The ground under my feet trembled, the roar deafening enough through my hands, clutched over my ears. I squeezed my eyes shut against the sound as if that would keep the reverberating cacophony from splitting my skull.

"You look like you're having trouble." Hector's fatigued voice echoed between my ears, all at once the clamor died. My ears rang. "If you look down, you may find the source of your agony." He came to stand next to me, so close, too close, and gestured to the floor below our feet. The nearness of him had me frozen, soaking in the memory of him there; at that thought I shook my head, stepped away. There was no color in his face and Hector looked like he needed something to lean on but I wasn't going to be that something.

Don't play dangerous games with dangerous people, Autumn. You'll only end up hurt. Or dead. Probably dead in this case.

So I studied the floor instead.

It wasn't the same color as the walls and low ceiling; the ground was dark. In the hard light I noticed patches that looked wet but could see no evidence of trickling water; I hoped it wasn't blood or bodily fluids. As I turned away from the ugly thought, I surveyed the ground in front of me. Numerous circular openings covered with bars dotted the floor of the cave. Looking at them, I realized where the massive silences were coming from: not in the room, but underneath it.

Absence of sound emanated from the holes in the floor, drifting wearily upwards to create a void. If I could experience the torture on the outside I didn't want to imagine what the void would do to me inside one of those holes. Kneeling, I peered between the bars of the nearest hole. Nothing but blackness, defeat and misery, peered back.

Hades' prison wasn't around me, it was below me.