The True Legend of Ganymede

Chapter 4

"I had it!" Ganymede's voice shook the tunnels. "It was practically in my hands!"

"But you don't have it," Hades replied, making no attempt to hide his displeasure as he lounged in his throne. "Shame, I almost had high hopes for you, kid."

Ganymede gnashed his teeth and stared between his own clutching and empty fingers. Pacing back and forth in the centre of the Great Skull, throwing wild gestures around his body, his shadow hit the back wall in a warped and grasping projection.

"The hole they dug was clean!" he roared, yelling at himself as if the god of the dead wasn't even there, "No human could have done anything like that! And the timing - my village was on high alert when we showed up, so the trail can't have even gone cold!"

Hades' gaze followed Ganymede's blond head as it bobbed to and fro. He wasn't sure exactly why he had let this little 'meeting' continue for as long as it had, except that watching a mortal shake his fist at Olympus was kind of funny, in a pathetic kind of way.

A finger jabbed suddenly towards him. "You!"

"Me?!"

Ganymede faltered, dropped his hand to his hip, then rubbed his smooth jaw in thought. "No... If you'd taken it, you'd still be bound by our deal, and it's not in your best interest to keep it a secret. Besides, why send me on a wild goose chase with Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee? Waste of time and resources."

"You sure think you've got it all figured out, huh?" An incredulous smirk crossed Hades' face. Snapping out of his own head, Ganymede turned to face him in a toss of hair.

"What'd you mean?"

"I mean..." Hades drew himself to a stand as smoke crawled up the cavern walls. "You've got quite the little ego for someone who got himself sacrificed - what, this morning?" Ganymede drew back as the air around him turned to soot and the smoke, coagulating up and along the ceiling, merged into one bubbling dome. Hades disappeared in a lick of flame.

He reappeared an inch from his face. "Boo."

Ganymede jolted. Hades' voice steamrollered over him, raising an octave and quivering on the very edge of true fury. "You think you've got problems, kid?! You think I'm a pawn in your little deathbed game?!" Even as Ganymede staggered back from him, he pursued. The smoke around Ganymede turned to flame as, with a cry of concern, he leapt back from the heat. "I've got waaaaay bigger problems than some jilted catamite, ya little worm, but you seem to wanna demand a monopoly on my schedule! Well-"

The smoke vanished. Hades clapped his pulseless hands to Ganymede's cheeks. Grinning like some creature with far too many teeth from the bottom of the sea, his eyes as wide as the very first monster under the very first bed, he growled, "Now you've got my attention. I'd be very careful about how you use it."

Ganymede's white-knuckled fists shook, his body rigid, as dread infected the anger that had been so successfully animating him before. But, as if his own fear was a wolf to be threatened into submission, he opened his eyes wider to get a better look at the sociopathic pupils burning a hole in the back of his throat.

"Maybe I got a little overheated," he said, his voice cracking only once before returning to a low, vibrating monotone. "Not a great first impression, I admit." Hades scoffed, but he let him go.

"Don't get me wrong, kid, I love the energy," he said as he sat back down in his throne, "You'd just better make damn sure it's pointed away from your benevolent patron." Muttering to himself, he added, "And I thought getting 'fixed' was supposed to stop this kinda bad attitude."