The Death King Read online

  “Hello,” I said softly, keeping my voice dulcet and hypnotic.

  He cocked his little head, blinking large eyes back at me. I grinned. He’d not changed a bit, and I was surprised that I’d actually forgotten who he was. I’d rather liked Pea Brain when last we’d met, though it felt like many lifetimes ago now, which I guessed it actually was.

  “Pretty rock,” he whispered in his gritty voice, the sound high-pitched and innocent sounding.

  Fire imps were Fiera’s protectors in this realm, and though they looked like something straight out of a nightmare, they were also quite innocent in many ways. Intellectually, they could be compared, at peak maturity, to that of a seven- or eight-year-old human child. Pea Brain was several centuries older than that, but he would never lose his child-like innocence.

  I grinned and stretched out my arm to him. He reached for me with a long, black clawed hand and ooh’d and aah’d as he trailed that wickedly curved claw along my diamond skin.

  He giggled, blinking rapidly as he looked at me, making me think of a shark, with its double eyelids, right before its attack on the unwary.

  “Do you remember me, boy?” I asked him sweetly.

  Fire imps were demonically sweet, which was quite the contradiction, but it was true. If they did not know you and suspected you to be invading their mama’s home, they would turn into the stuff of nightmares, attacking you in a vicious wave of teeth and claws before they made quick work of… well… eating you was about a nice a way of putting it as any. But if they liked you, it was really quite the treasure.

  Pea Brain circled me slowly, cocking his head and tapping his gnarled finger against his chin several times before saying, “I thoughts you’d all forgotten Pea Brain. But you remember.” He got back to the front of me and nodded. “You remember Pea Brain!”

  I was not prepared for his attack. He jumped me, spindly arms and legs wrapping around my neck and waist as he began sobbing and squeezing me tight in the mother of all hugs.

  “Pea Brain remembers everything, Beautiful One. All of it. But Mama don’t remember me hardly at all,” he said between trembly sniffs and buckets of tears.

  “Oh, Pea Brain. Shhh. Wee one, shhh now,” I murmured tenderly, cradling his small frame in my arms like he was naught but a babe.

  Shivers wracked his near-skeletal frame, breaking my heart and moving me to sympathy for him. I too knew what it was to remember when all those around me had forgotten.

  So I held him for as long as he needed me to hold him, merely letting him get it out. He cried for several more minutes, until finally he began to shudder and quiet down and he was merely stuttering his breaths. He buried his nose in the crook of my neck, and I cringed as I felt the mix of tears and sludge slide down my back.

  But still I held on.

  After what felt like an hour, he was calm enough to disentangle from my arms and look at me full on. His beautiful eyes were bloodshot, but he no longer seemed as pensive or heavy.

  I grinned, and he patted my cheek almost lovingly between his palms. “Beautiful One wishes to see Mama, yes?”

  I nodded. “Yes, little Pea Brain. I have matters of great urgency to speak with your mother about.”

  My voice cracked at the end as I wondered whether this would be yet another letdown in a long string of them for me lately. I was trying so bloody hard to keep myself together, but everything—and I meant literally everything—in my life worth having hinged on Hades remembering all. And unless Lachesis’ potion actually worked for that, I was at the very bitter end of what I could do for either of my friends.

  Pea Brain, who’d always been able to suss out my true emotions, even back in the games before the curse had felled our worlds, cocked his head. “Beautiful One is sad,” he said simply and with childlike honesty.

  I smiled, but I knew the light of it didn’t reach my eyes.

  “You were always so good at seeing right through me, imp,” I said seriously, but noting the bright shimmer in his eyes again, I grinned broadly and tickled him just beneath the chin.

  He chuckled, swatting my hand away with his own clawed one. His laughter was infectious, and soon my attempt at levity was actually real.

  He and I shared a moment of true bonding and laughter, and I hugged him tight.

  “You do not understand what you have done for me, little Pea Brain, but I thank you most sincerely.”

  His grin was as genuine as my own. “Pea Brain likes Beautiful One.”

  “And Beautiful One likes Pea Brain too,” I said with a quick flick to the tip of his nose, which appeared more like a melted stick of wax.

  “Come then,” he urged, hopping down from my arms. “Come with me.”

  I allowed him to guide me, and he was very careful to keep me off the path that would suddenly open up with great big pools of magma bubbling up from deep underground. In fact, he took us off the trail completely, guiding me through the fire forest, and looking back at me every so often to assure himself that Beautiful One was safe.

  “Always safe. Safe, safe, safe,” he murmured. And soon enough, he proved his words truthful.

  We crested a hill, and I finally spotted the fiery, glittering beauty that was Fiera’s castle. It was not made of stone or brick or any other traditional building material, but of fire so hot and so dense that it was the blue of hottest flame and as dense as a dwarf star.

  As we neared the drawbridge, I expected the heat from it to brush against me and make me want to weep in misery.

  But wee Pea Brain kept muttering, “Safe, safe.” And he was right. There was little to no residual heat emanating from it. Either he was protecting me somehow, or the land understood my intentions here were pure.

  I expected to meet Fiera inside her castle, in some elaborate chamber fit for a primordial goddess of old. But instead, she was kneeling and working the soil of a garden, dressed in simple frock of buttery-yellow, like the sun. She had a kerchief tied around her long hair, which incidentally, was also made of flame and the green of the rolling hills of Olympus.

  She was digging in the rocky soil with a spade when she finally noticed us and immediately sat up with a frown marring her pretty face. My heart squeezed in my chest so tightly that I almost lost my breath.

  I’d forgotten just how much she and Caly looked alike. In mannerism, they were nothing alike, and when she had her green fire hair hanging long and loose, it was easy not to see it.

  But looking at her now, standing and dusting off her skirts with her dirt-smudged hands and her face cleared of make-up, she looked eternally youthful, just like all her other sisters. But where Aria and Tiera had features to match their surroundings, Fiera didn’t at all. Looking at her was like looking at a ghost. I swallowed hard and curled my hand into a fist.

  “Pea Brain?” she asked softly, with a hint of confusion in her words.

  He bowed deeply, moving nimbly as he nearly fell on his face. “Mama, a visitor,” he said and then glanced over his shoulder at me with raised brows, as if to say, “Introduce yourself.”

  I squared my shoulders. “Hello, Fire. Do you remember me?”

  She cocked her head, staring at me, brows furrowed quizzically. My heart sank. Why had I come here? What could Fiera possibly have to do with Hades and Caly? Lachesis had gotten it wrong, surely.

  Planting her hands on her hips, she dipped her head once. “Why have you come to my realm, Love?”

  My brows shot up, hope fluttered delicate wings in my breast. “I… I was sent here.”

  She thinned her lips. “No one comes here willingly. Ask me when was the last time I had a visitor, Aphrodite.”

  “When was the—”

  “Never,” she snipped, and I almost grinned to hear it.

  Last I’d seen Fiera, she’d been as waspish and quick to temper as the element she controlled. So it was good to see a bit of that spark still in her.

  “I remember you,” she said, softly, as though mostly to herself. Her jeweled orangey-golden eyes narrowe
d to thin slits. “Though I don’t remember how. Or even why.”

  Pea Brain, who was standing again, looked back at me. He knew how. In his eyes, I read misery. I hadn’t been the only one who’d been made to suffer by being forgotten by the one I’d loved most.

  I gave his hand a quick squeeze before looking back at Fiera and nodding.

  “True. You do know me. How much of the old life do you remember? Do you even recall a curse? What do you know, Fiera?”

  Her nostrils flared, and it looked to me like she was grinding her front teeth. The hands she’d held loose and relaxed just seconds ago were now squeezed into tight fists, her knuckles a shade of bone white.

  “It’s been many moons since I awoke in a land that looks and feels real but does not feel like home. Pea Brain has spoken to me often of another life, one I can barely remember, but that feels so very real. We lost something, didn’t we? Something of great importance.”

  I inhaled deeply. “Yes, Fiera. We lost a lot.”

  “And is that why you’re here, then?” She snorted. “Because if you have, you shouldn’t have bothered. Most of what Pea Brain tells me, I can hardly remember, only feelings, impressions that his stories were once true. But whether they were or weren’t, they aren’t now. I can’t help you.”

  I took a step forward. She looked like a woman dejected, but also like a barely leashed tiger. She was angry, spitting mad, but she couldn’t understand why. I’d thought my situation worst of all, remembering everything while those around me had forgotten it all, replacing the real with a version of reality that had no merit or basis in fact. I’d almost begun to envy those who’d forgotten everything. There was no old life to miss for them because this new one was all they’d ever known. I’d not stopped to consider that there might actually be worse than my situation, or even Pea Brain’s.

  Not to have the memories, but to feel the pain and longing for what had once been surely had to be worst of all. At least I knew what I yearned for. To be so completely in the dark about all of it and yet still crave it, still want it… I couldn’t fathom how that might turn a god mad.

  She swallowed hard and took a step toward me. Her dress was crackling at the hem with licking curls of golden flame. “Pea Brain told me… tells me,” she corrected herself, “of a love game. That I was there because I had commanded the one I called sister to give me a companion.”

  “He is right. You were there.”

  Her long lashes fluttered like feathered wing tips upon her alabaster cheeks as she inhaled deeply and shuddered. “And did I? Did I find such a one?”

  I thought of Xolotl, the Aztec fire god and her proposed mate. They’d not gotten on at all—or so Caly and I had believed. Xolotl and Fiera had bickered from sun up to sun down. Like oil and water, they’d simply not mixed. But then we’d seen him sacrifice himself for her in the games. Baba Yaga’s attack on Fiera had nearly been successful, until Xolotl had gotten in front of her and taken the hit himself. Fiera had gone mad to get him back.

  I knew little of the Aztec god. I’d never bothered to get to know him because I hadn’t thought them a good match. They were both too fiery and fierce—alphas, the both of them, each trying to dominate the other. But in that one moment of sacrifice and selflessness, I’d felt the spark, the shivering promise of more between them.

  But then the curse had rolled through the lands, and any thought of making successful love matches had been shoved far to the back of my mind. Like so many others, I had no idea where Xolotl was today, and up until this very moment, hadn’t much cared, if I was being honest.

  I rolled my top lip between my teeth and worried it. Never a dumb one, she glanced at my mouth, then back to my eyes. “You know something, don’t you? Tell me,” she commanded.

  I might be a goddess, but the primordials were something else entirely. Not even the Titans could stand against them. They were the most ancient of us and also the most powerful. And unlike the rest of my brothers and sisters on Olympus, they rarely cared for the bloodthirsty games of the Golden Pantheon, as they called my kind. The primordials simply wanted to be and to do as they pleased, rarely interfering in the lives of those around them.

  Their powers weren’t derived from or even strengthened by petitioners or believers. They simply were and always would be, so long as the many earths in all the universes rolled with land, air, fire, and water. They’d existed long before us and would continue on long after we’d all gone.

  I sighed deeply. “Fiera, I wish I could tell you what you wanted to hear. But the truth is that I don’t know. We did pair you off.”

  Her nostrils flared, and she went absolutely still. But I knew she was listening with all her heart because of how she stared at me so unflinchingly. I shook my head and spread my arms.

  “What was his name?” she asked, voice sounding deeper, more determined.

  “Xolotl,” I said.

  Her lashes fluttered, and for a second, she swayed, and a tiny curve of a smile crossed her features, there one second but gone the next, making me question whether I’d even seen it all.

  Then she opened her eyes, and it wasn’t only the hem of her skirt but her entire gown that burned with flame. The kerchief that had been holding her hair back was gone, and the green fiery curls danced like electricity around her trim shoulders. She looked every inch the powerful goddess she was.

  “You were honest with me,” she said, and I frowned.

  “What?”

  “I was testing you. I had to. Hades was very specific that I not hand this over to anyone but you. The real you. I had to make sure that you were really you and not the Aphrodite of this time.”

  “Wait,” I shook my head. “You remember me?”

  Her beautiful face was an unreadable mask, but her eyes flashed. “No. Only this. I am haunted by dreams every night. The same thing since this all began. He comes to me, and hands me a skeleton key.”

  I blinked. “Wh-who comes to you?”

  Inhaling deeply, she looked suddenly angry. “Him. The one they call Death. He tells me the fate of my world and his hinges on me not forgetting.”

  Feeling shocked and numb, I stare at her for a minute. “So you knew I was coming?”

  “Like I said, I’ve been dreaming of this. The memories are not my own, and yet somehow, they are. He told me that if I safeguarded his key, he and Calypso would restore my timeline. My…” She cleared her throat. “Xolotl. That somehow by helping them, I’d be helping myself too.”

  Saying that I was shell-shocked would be a slight understatement. I was speechless, and my fingertips tingled. I swallowed and then swallowed again, trying to force the jumble of words out of my throat.

  “Where’s the key, Fiera? Do you know? Please, tell me you know.”

  She squeezed her hand into a fist, and a flash of golden light shone through her fingers. Then she turned her fist over and stared at me, her eyes hard and flinty. Her beautiful rose-colored lips were thinned.

  “There is so much I don’t remember. But I do know this. I feel hate burning like a cinder in my heart, spreading deeper and wider every day. It takes everything I have not to raze the world for what it has done to me.”

  “So why haven’t you?” I had to know.

  Blue sparked in the pupils of her golden eyes. She was now a towering inferno of fire and fury. And accustomed as I was to seeing displays of power, she did make me feel breathless and dizzy.

  The primordials were truly a spectacular sight to behold when in god mode.

  “Because I want it back!”

  Her words trembled with the echoes of thousands of voices, adding a shivery resonance to her tone. I curled my free hand into a fist. Pea Brain, who I’d nearly forgotten about, squeezed my hand tightly, as if to ground me.

  I trembled, grateful to the little imp for staying by my side.

  As quickly as her flame had come on, it vanished, leaving behind only the dirt-smudged, pretty female with sad, woebegone eyes.

  “He pro
mised me,” she whispered tightly. “He promised.”

  “Hades always keeps his promises, Fiera. You should know that about him. He never says anything he doesn’t mean.”

  She snarled, then swiped at her cheeks, and I noticed the shimmering trail of fiery blue sliding down them. The goddess of the flame cried.

  It was so shocking to see that all I could do was stare in helpless wonder. It was beautiful and haunting and would probably stay with me all the days of my long life.

  “He’d better,” she whispered huskily before opening her hand.

  Resting on her palm was a skeleton key with a skull and crossbones at the end and two black hearts joined by hands in the middle. It was dark and foreboding and exactly what the god of the underworld would weave.

  I couldn’t seem to make my feet move. Finally, Pea Brain released my hand, moved over to her in his strange, hopping walk, and reached up tentatively for the key.

  Fiera didn’t move a muscle or even look at him. Instead, she watched me with hard, flinty eyes.

  Pea Brain came back to me and, taking my hand in his, gently set the key upon it.

  I stared at the key, my stomach was so unsettled that I felt like I might vomit. Hope sat on my chest like an anvil, making it almost impossible for me to take a proper breath.

  After staring at the thing in silence for a good five seconds, I finally remembered to look back at her.

  Fiera didn’t look like anyone special anymore. There was no glow or burn on her now. She merely looked like a simple mortal who’d been completely broken by time and circumstance.

  I shook my head because it wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of it was. Fiera wasn’t this. She was as powerful a force as her sister, Caly. She was a ball of raging wildcat, not this broken and lonely looking woman.

  “Thank you, Fiera. Thank you.”

  “Make it right, Aphrodite. Make him remember, or I fear Calypso and I might not survive this.”