Stranger Danger

Kore woke to hot air puffing in her face. Hot and smelly. She opened her eyes, wrinkled her nose, and found herself inches away from a monstrous three-headed beast. She screamed.

The dog titled each of its heads as it watched her scramble into a sitting position. She ignored the flare of pain in her side, because the beast stood taller than any domestic animal she’d ever seen, high enough to stretch up to her chin even with all of his paws remaining on the ground.

Footsteps hurried from somewhere behind her. A man came around the corner, lean and sharp and bewildered. A shock of black hair made his pale skin seem ghostly, his eyes so blue they looked startled. He wore a nice button-down and slacks, though whatever color they might have been had been drowned in a wet, sticky mess of gold. Ichor, Kore realized. He was drenched in immortal ichor, the same that flowed through her veins and Mother’s and the nymphs.

She screamed again.

The man held out his hands. “It’s okay! I’m not going to hurt you.”

Kore didn’t hear him. She tried to find her feet and hissed, fire burning up the side of her body again. She looked down and, to her horror, found her skin split open beneath a tear in her dress.

The memory of the dead rushed through her, the claws and the empty eyes and the press of their cold bodies. Kore resisted the urge to throw up.

“Are you okay?” The man asked, his voice tentative. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”

Kore was in no mood for tentative. “Where am I?”

The man winced. “Do you not remember?”

She shook her head slowly. Remember what? Had she asked this question before?

“Ah. Okay. This may come as a shock then. Welcome to the Underworld.”

Kore looked around herself for the first time. She didn’t recognize the room where she sat, monochromatic and clean. She rested on a gray couch that looked nothing like the one on the farm, sharp corners not faded and sagging from hundreds of girls sitting on it. The gray walls carried little adornment, except for a big black screen that might have been a TV if Theo’s descriptions proved accurate.

Kore’s heart leapt into her throat. How she’d gotten here, she didn’t know. The last thing she remembered, she’d been fighting with Mother, and she’d gone into the human world and—.

Mother.

Mother was going to kill her. She wondered how she could possibly justify her presence here, and came to the conclusion that no words she knew would make any of this okay.

“I don’t know if you’re supposed to sprout plants in your hair, but you’re doing it.”

Kore’s cheeks heated. Slowly, she reached up to pick yellow and purple flowers from her head.

The man, with a strange expression, turned and disappeared around the corner again. He returned a moment later with a cup, filled halfway with water. “Here. This should keep them happy for the time being.”

Kore stopped with her hand partway to dropping the flowers on the floor, the way Mother had her do at home. She looked to be sure the man was serious.

“Nothing grows here,” he said with a sheepish expression. “Some color would be nice.”

Kore dropped the stems in the cup. She refrained from saying they didn’t have a node, so they couldn’t sprout roots, only watched the man set the cup on a coffee table and look at it with something akin to awe.

Kore slowly lifted herself to her feet, taking care not to move in a way that would anger her injury.

The man noticed. “I have some ambrosia if you need it. I wasn’t sure whether you could heal yourself or not.”

Kore twisted to look at her side. It had stopped bleeding, even if her dress already carried a sizable gold stain. Her skin would seal itself in a few hours, but her headache could certainly use something to dampen it.

She nodded.

The man motioned for her to follow as he made his way into a kitchen. The place looked brand-new, from the black countertops to the white cabinets and the metal appliances. The kitchen at home hadn’t been upgraded in a few decades, not that Mother let them cook often. Human food confused the digestive system.

The man reached into a cabinet for a tiny glass, barely the height of his little finger. He turned to the fridge next and retrieved a heavy pitcher of shimmering golden liquid. This, at least, was familiar. Kore knew ambrosia, the drink of immortals.

The man offered the glass to her with a small smile. The expression looked almost boyish on him.

“Yamas,” he said, a word Kore didn’t know.

She took the glass and drained it as quickly as possible. Ambrosia wasn’t tasty by any means, and getting it down easily meant going as fast as she could. She shivered as it warmed its way down to her belly.

The pleasant tingle that followed stilled the pounding in her head. Kore heard herself sigh.

“So,” the man said. He leaned his back against the counter, and Kore sensed the beginning of an interrogation. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you clearly don’t belong in the Underworld, which means you’re here for something else. Let me tell you now, if you’re trying to bring someone back, it won’t work. The laws are clear on that one.”

Kore almost laughed. He couldn’t be implying that she’d come to bust someone out of the Underworld? If he was, he gave her far too much credit.

She shook her head. “It was an accident, I think. I was on the farm, and then I…I stumbled in. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

The man’s head tilted like his dog’s. He studied her with those deep-water eyes, narrowed in thought. “Not many immortals, the Twelve included, could survive on that beach like you did. Not even if they planned for it, trained for it, had blessed weapons and divine enhancements. And yet you stumbled in and defeated an army of the dead?”

Kore would not use the word defeated. She would use the words ran for her life and barely escaped with it.

The man blew a long breath out of his nose. “Who are you?”

“You mean my name?”

“Sure. Let’s start there.”

“Kore.”

He waited, like he wanted her to elaborate. Did he think she had titles, a dozen epithets the people called her as they worshiped her in the streets? Besides the fact she wouldn’t want any of that even if she had it, the old days had long since slipped by, as Mother so often reminded her.

“Well, Kore,” he said when she didn’t add anything more. “Tell me why that name doesn’t sound familiar.”

Kore couldn’t help the scoff that escaped her. “How should I know?”

“Could you go by something else, maybe? A name I’ve heard of?”

“What, because you know every god that exists?”

“Most of them.”

“Okay, then, who are you? I would bet I’ve never heard of you, either.”

He searched her face. If those eyes stayed on her any longer, she risked getting lost in them.

As soon as she had the thought, she wanted to wring it from her head. What would Mother say about her ogling at a man she’d just met? Or ogling at a man at all? Even if the way he stood, with his hands against the counter behind him, pulled the shirt tight across his shoulders in a way Kore found appealing.

As if he could sense her staring, the man shoved his hands in his pockets. “My name is Hades. If you’ve never heard of me, that would be a refreshing surprise.”

Kore’s heart stuttered in her chest. Her mouth went dry, and she realized with a croak of dismay that she’d thought the king of the Underworld had nice shoulders.

Hades chuckled at what she could only guess was a horrified expression. “I take it I’m known wherever you’re from.”

“You could say that.”

“So, Kore, let’s make it fair. You’re too powerful to be a demigod, and I know all of the Titans by sight. That makes you an Olympian, like me. I didn’t see you at the last Pantheon meeting, which means you’re either very young or very secret, both of which are interesting in their own ways.”

Kore remembered her mother leaving for that meeting a decade ago. She’d worried about it for weeks and when she came back, she had to lay down for two days straight. Too many egotistical gods in one place, she’d said. Kore struggled to remember if she’d said anything about Hades, but she only remembered Zeus’s and Hermes’s names being thrown around.

“Well?” Hades prompted when she didn’t answer. “Which one of us do you belong to?”

“I don’t belong to anyone,” Kore snapped. “But if you’re asking who my mother is, her name is Demeter.”

The carefully neutral expression on Hades’s face dropped like a stone. A beat of silence passed, and another, then a stream of curses left him, words in the old language Mother had never bothered to teach her.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

“You have something against my mother?”

“Not personally, no. Demeter is fine, when she’s not making everything infinitely more complicated than it needs to be.”

He wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t mean he could say it. Kore shook her head. “She cares about me, which is more than I can say about most divine parents. Yours included, isn’t that right?”

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Shock registered on Hades’s face, then his brows drew down above his eyes and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “We’d best get you home. I’ve worked very hard for peace, and I’d hate for it to end at the hands of a panicked Demeter.”

Part of Kore wanted to apologize. She shouldn’t have said it—the words just came out of her. But before she could form the sentence, Hades pushed off the counter and towards the room they’d just left.

“She’s not as reckless as the rest of the gods,” Kore called after him, mostly for something to say. She did not want the conversation to end with her rudeness.

“I hope you’re right,” he replied over his shoulder, and kept going.

She followed, stopping in the living room when he disappeared down a hallway. She wondered where he was going, and if he intended her to follow. But Hades returned as swiftly as he’d gone. He held a stack of folded clothes, which he set on the coffee table.

Kore stared at them, uncomprehending.

“I don’t know how well they’ll fit,” he said when she did not move to take them, “but you should change.”

“Why?”

“You can’t very well prance around the Underworld wearing that.”

Kore looked at herself, at the long dress she and all the other girls wore on the farm. Comfortable, simple to make, easy to breathe in during the summers. And, what probably had concerned Hades, stained gold from her ribs to her ankles.

He, though, had fared little better. She glanced at his shirt. “And you?”

“I thought I’d get you settled first. If you’ve got it handled, I’ll be right back.”

He turned to leave the way he’d come, but a rush of panic caused Kore to call out for him again.

His expression held enough of the question that he didn’t have to speak it.

“Am I supposed to change in the middle of the room?”

Something that might have been amusement ghosted across his features, a relief from the weight she’d put there. “If that’s what you want. If not, you can use the guest bedroom.” He pointed down a second hallway.

Kore took the clothes and followed the way he’d indicated. The dog, without her asking or even really looking at him, trotted after her. She found the room, as sparsely furnished as the rest of the house, and closed the door behind her. The last thing she saw before she did was the dog, all three heads tilted different directions as he watched her. His expression held a question she did not know and therefore did not have the answer to.

The clothes Hades had given her did not fit. He stood almost a foot taller than she did, so she had to roll the pants several times to get her feet out the end of them. Luckily, he’d chosen a stretchy cloth with an elastic band that accommodated her figure, curvier than his. The shirt, plain and gray and short-sleeved, swallowed her arms nearly to the elbows. She tucked half the hemline into the pants so it didn’t look like she’d completely drowned in the fabric.

Hades waited on the couch when she returned to the living room. His eyes flickered over her, once up and once down. The movement would have made Kore flush, if a smirk didn’t immediately follow that told Kore she looked as ridiculous as she felt.

“I’d appreciate it if you keep whatever you’re going to say to yourself.” She lifted the balled dress in her hand. “Where should I put this?”

He did his best to lose the expression, but Kore still saw hints of it as he stood and held out a hand. “I can take it. There’s a trash can in the kitchen.”

Kore hated the thought of throwing away the dress so easily. It was the only piece of comfort she had in this strange, monochrome world. But, as the wetness against her hands testified, the thing had been thoroughly ruined. A big gold spot on the couch where she’d woken said keeping it would do more harm than her feelings justified. Who knew what else she’d done in the short time she’d been here?

At least, she hoped only a short time had passed. If it had been days, Mother would be panicking. She would organize a search, and when they didn’t find her…well, Kore didn’t know. The faster she got home, the sooner she could feel Mother’s arms around her again, and the sooner they could put the whole thing behind them.

Look, Kore would say. Look how far I went, and I’m still in one piece. You don’t have to worry about me so much.

“Kore?” Hades’s voice roused her from her thoughts. He still stood, waiting for her to hand him the dress.

She did, thankful her skin couldn’t hold a blush. That would be the last thing she needed, turning red as some of the nymphs did when they got embarrassed.

Hades took the garment and disappeared into the kitchen. A cabinet opened, then closed, and he came back wiping his hands on his jeans. “All right, we should get going. Where are you from?”

Kore stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Where were you before you ended up here?”

“I grew up on a farm.”

“Great. Where is it?”

Kore glanced behind him, like the answer would be written across the cabinets. “It’s just a farm.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that, but I’m wondering where on the planet to take you. Northern hemisphere? Southern? I need to know which gate to use.”

Kore understood with a rush that his question related to the human world. She winced. “When I left the farm, I was in the middle of some woods.”

The memory existed in fuzzy pieces. White trees, ghostly in the night. Ferns under her feet, their curling tips brushing her ankles. And then, all at once, there had been nothing to stand on and she’d tumbled, bashing her head against the ground and the rocks and who knew what else. She’d landed in a heap on a rocky beach.

Hades crossed his arms over his chest. “I see.”

Kore felt heat rise to her cheeks again. “I…I think we’re in the northern hemisphere. At least, our harvest is in the last half of the year, and our plant in the first.”

“That’s a start. Any idea where in the top half of the planet?”

Kore shook her head, hating the motion.

A muscle clenched in Hades’s jaw. He pulled something from his pocket, small and black and rectangular. “I didn’t want to have to do this, but we can’t very well go wandering around down here. What’s your mom’s number?”

Kore felt small and so, so stupid.

Hades blinked. Blinked again. “Let me guess. She doesn’t have phones on the farm.”

Kore squeaked out an answer.

That stream of words, by their tone curses she didn’t want to know, flew from his mouth again. “Great. I suppose we can communicate the old-fashioned way.”

“What’s the old-fashioned way?”

“Ever met Hermes?”

Kore hoped Hades asked a question she actually knew soon, or her neck would begin to hurt from shaking her head.

“This should be fun.” He shoved the rectangle back into his pocket. “Come on, we’ll take the Asphodel gate. At least then we don’t have too long of a walk in front of us.”

Hades started towards the front door, leaving Kore no choice but to follow or be left behind. They emerged onto a small island, nestled in the middle of a broad river. The same rocks that she’d landed on when she’d fallen covered the ground, and it made their steps crunch as Hades led them towards a boat moored against the shore.

They’d nearly reached it when he stopped short, his spine taut like someone had shoved a rod through it. He muttered something under his breath.

“What?” Kore hurried to catch up.

“We can’t take the boats.”

“Why not?”

“Nymphs,” was all he said before turning and making for a point on the shore closest to the opposite side.

He stopped at the edge, his fists clenching at his sides. The ground beneath Kore’s feet shook, and she wheeled her arms to catch her balance. Her hand found his shoulder and she held on, her feet sliding on the trembling rocks.

An arm slid around her waist, setting her upright again.

“Sorry,” Hades said. “I should have warned you.”

When Kore gained her bearings, a stone bridge arced over the water. It hadn’t been there before.

Because king of the Underworld isn’t bad enough. He has to bend the earth, too.

What had she gotten herself into?

Hades let her go. The rush of cold as he started over the bridge startled Kore. Between the sharp lines of his face and the ice of his eyes, she hadn’t expected him to be warm.

They made it to the opposite side, and Hades set out across the rocks. Far in the distance, Kore saw the outlines of buildings, huge things that stretched towards the sky. Dozens of them, all clustered together, and Kore wondered how many entities lived here that they needed so much room.

For a few minutes, Kore was content to walk in silence, the crunch of their shoes the only sound in the eerie half-dark. Then, the unnatural stillness crept under her skin, a lack of living things she’d never felt before. Not standing among the rows of the farm, or sitting in the woods counting the stars, or lying in the house listening to the breathing of dozens of girls.

She hurried to pull alongside Hades. “What’s the Asphodel gate?”

He noticed her straining to catch up with his longer strides and mercifully slowed. A deep breath went up through his nose and out again. “It’s the closest gate to here, through the Asphodel meadows. Have you heard of them?”

Mother had never told her any of the stories of the Underworld. They were immortal; what use could they have of knowing where dead things went?

Kore shook her head.

Sympathy crossed Hades’s expression, but Kore didn’t know if he meant it towards her or something else in his head. “It’s where most people will go after they die. It’s sort of a…middle ground. Not the paradise of Elysium, and not the pain of Tartarus. It’s as pleasant a place to live out eternity as any.”

The words meant nothing to Kore, but she found she liked the tone—soft and reflective and infinitely better than the strangled one he’d spoken with before. “Is it big?”

He nodded. “And getting bigger. Don’t worry, we won’t have to go through the whole thing. There’s a gate right inside that will lead us to the surface.”

“And then?”

“We call Hermes. He’ll be able to get in touch with Demeter. It’s the fastest way, if your mother really doesn’t carry a cell phone.”

“We don’t have much need for them on the farm.”

He didn’t answer, and they fell back into silence again. They walked over hills and took the bridges Hades constructed over the rivers. They aimed at a slant to those big buildings, which was a shame, because Kore would have liked to see them up close. She’d never known something constructed by hands like hers could exist in such large iterations.

Suddenly, Hades stopped walking. It happened so fast Kore strode past him for a few steps before realizing he no longer stood beside her.

She turned around to find his expression dark again.

“Everything okay?”

He nodded towards their left. Kore had to stand on tiptoe before she saw a shape bobbing far away down the river. If she squinted, she could barely make out a boat and two people sitting inside with another standing at the back, using a large pole to urge the craft forward.

Beside her, Hades looked as if he’d seen the Furies of the old stories.

“Is that a problem?” Kore asked.

“I didn’t expect anyone to be here this late. If they ask, you’re not a daughter of Demeter. You’re a nymph from the surface.”

His tone made Kore’s heart beat faster. “Can I wonder why?”

That muscle in his jaw clenched again. “Olympians aren’t allowed down here without special permission. There are some who would take a breach of the treaty as an act of war.”

For a moment, Kore thought he might be playing a joke on her, making fun of her ignorance. But his expression said he meant it, and when his eyes finally found her, the worry in them was real.

Kore could only nod in response.

The boat slid past them. Both people, two women, stared the whole excruciating minute it took for the boatman to pole them along. By the time they disappeared around a bend in the water, Hades stood taut as a spring beside her.

The silence stretched. Kore wished she had something to say to make him smile that same boyish grin from the kitchen, but she didn’t. After too long, Hades shook his head and continued walking, his steps faster than before.

Kore lengthened her strides to keep up with him. “Was that bad?”

“Don’t know yet. I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow.”

“I know the stories,” she said. “Surely it can’t be the end of the world if you’re seen with a random nymph walking at night.”

He laughed, a horrible, pained sound. “Oh, yes it can.”

Kore had no response. The girls back home had told her how the gods traded relationships as easy as breathing. Some of them had even related their encounters with Apollo and Zeus and Poseidon, detailed enough it had made her face hot and her toes curl. She’d never heard Hades’s name thrown around, sure, but he couldn’t be so different from the others, could he?

His expression said maybe he could.

They crossed another river, rounded a hill, and Kore finally saw where they’d been headed. Row after row of houses sat before them, settled on neat lanes. They had boxy constructions, pitched roofs and shallow porches and rectangular windows.

Hades noticed her staring. “Asphodel,” he said in explanation.

Kore could only continue to look.

“We should keep moving. Each of those houses has windows, and even though immortals don’t usually find themselves in this part of the realm, it’s better if we don’t linger.”

Kore nodded, only vaguely noticing herself stumbling after him, her head still cranked up to look at the houses. The faceless wall of construction stared back at her. Even if each house held only one person, which she doubted, then that would mean….

The math failed her. How many people had died in all the time she’d been alive? How many had found themselves here? Her head spun.

Hades loped down one of the rows. He turned down a lane, then another, until eventually they reached an open space, a kind of square with benches and knee-high fences and in the middle, a massive archway made of black stone.

Kore saw fog and little things shimmering, and remembered the barrier on the farm. The one she’d shoved through before she’d woken with the king of the Underworld offering her ambrosia and giving her clothes from his own wardrobe. What a story she’d have to tell the others.

Hades stopped before the gate. “Have you traveled using one of these before?”

If she could remember pushing through the farm’s barrier, then she supposed she had. Too bad that had been locked away from her, pushed behind some wall she couldn’t break down no matter what she tried.

“I don’t think so.”

“Hold your breath and keep moving,” Hades said. “It won’t feel pleasant, but you’ll be through it in a moment. I’ll be right behind you.”

Kore nodded, but her feet didn’t work. She felt her breathing spike, her heart crashing against her temples. Of all the things to be scared of, how was this the one that paralyzed her?

Before she could talk herself out of it, she reached for Hades’s hand. She slid their fingers together and gripped tight and hoped he wouldn’t let go.

Bewilderment overtook his expression, but once he saw her face, her eyes she knew had gone wide and her shoulders that may have been trembling, he softened. His fingers twisted with hers and he squeezed, then stepped through and let her follow.