Daywalker chronicles com.., p.14
Daywalker Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 14
Carmilla shrugged. “Not a big deal. You’ll certainly churn the rumor mill. Especially now that you’ve showed up with me rather than Zoey. There’s no telling what conspiracies folks might come up with. Especially since the infamous count is coming with us.”
Dracula tilted his head. “I’m no stranger to conspiracies. I’ve made the front cover of Weekly World News three times now.”
We made our way through the crowd, down a tunnel that looked like an entrance to the subway in New York City. No, I’d never been to New York, but I’d seen it in the movies. We weren’t heading for a subway system but to the River Styx, the mystical body of water where the boatman ferried souls into the afterlife. I knew the boatman. The old boatman, Charon, had been killed in the middle of a civil war among the gods. Roy was the new boatman. Zoey and I met him the first time we went to Hades. He was a good ol’ boy, a hillbilly whose only aspiration in life was to spend as much time as he could fishing. When a new boatman was needed, and the reapers made him the offer, he practically jumped at the opportunity. He had an updated boat, a fishing boat with blue sparkled paint and an outboard motor. When he wasn’t working, he was fishing. The thing about being the only boatman, though, was that people don’t ever take a vacation from dying. He was the Head and Shoulders of the underworld—always working. That didn’t mean he didn’t find time to cast a line from time to time.
Carmilla took us to the front of the line and dropped us off with the boatman, then headed back to the back of the line. She said she didn’t want to give the impression she got special line-cutting privileges because she was dating the Grim Reaper, the lord of the underworld.
“All aboard!” Roy called as Dracula and I climbed into this boat from the dock. I had to widen my feet to steady myself. It was a fishing boat, not a pontoon boat, and it rocked when you stepped in. Dracula nearly fell on his ass.
“All aboard? Are you a conductor or something?”
Roy shrugged. “Works for boats as well as trains. Where to? Off to Olympus to hang with the gods?”
I shook my head. “Nope. We have to see Athena in Hades.”
Roy tilted his head. “All right. Well, let me gather a few hell-bound souls from the reapers and we’ll be on our way.”
Roy had a crystal that he used to teleport souls across the River Styx. The reapers approached, touched the tip of the scythes to the crystal, and deposited their souls into it. He could take quite a few at a time. He’d have to make a trip to Hades and Olympus regardless. There was no way to know which souls were destined for which place. I wasn’t sure how it worked, but the few times I’d seen it work when the boatman brought the crystal to either realm the souls were called from the crystal to their eternal resting place.
Roy fired up his engine and, with a loud “yee-haw,” took us through a mist so thick that we couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of us. Roy made this trip dozens of times every day. He knew exactly where we were.
He slowed his boat and the roar of his outboard motor reduced to a purr, as he pulled up to a rickety dock on the edge of hell.
I raised an eyebrow. “You can’t take us straight to Athena’s castle?”
“Those tributaries are closed,” Roy explained. “It’s the dock for everyone, even visitors.”
I snorted. “I guess Carmilla warned us we’d have to do this the hard way.”
Dracula and I disembarked the boat. Climbing from a rocking fishing boat to a dock that looked like it might have been constructed of wormwood was mildly unnerving. I’d never taken a dip in the River Styx, but I knew it was infested with piranha. Roy had caught more than a few of those buggers in his day. He knew how to handle them—when they were at the end of his line. I didn’t want to test my luck with the flesh-eating fish if I slipped into the river. Besides, being in the underworld without sunlight, I wasn’t as resilient as I was in the light of the day.
At the end of the dock, where it met the shore, was some kind of veil. It reflected the water of a clear spring on a sunny day. The light that illuminated the water-like veil had a red hue to it.
“I guess we walk through and begin our tour of our personal hells.”
Dracula nodded. “Let’s get it over with.”
We stepped through the portal. It took a whole two seconds to realize that we were going to go through my personal hell first.
Yes, we were back in my high school. No, we weren’t in my calculus class. I thrived in math and science. We were in gym class, sophomore year.
I gulped. I knew it wasn’t her. She wasn’t dead. Last I heard, she was in the burger-and-fries business. Her just deserts for being a bitch and a bully in high school. She was the pretty girl who all the boys used to fawn over, who thought she was better than me, especially.
Leslie Williams. That’s the form the demon, or the apparition, who’d taken the place of my torturer assumed. I touched my head. Yup, my hair was in pigtails. I was wearing the white sneakers I had when I was sixteen. I ran my tongue across my teeth. The braces were back.
I didn’t take gym in my junior or senior years. I didn’t have to. All those credits were satisfied. I was what you’d call a late bloomer. At sixteen, I was awkward. I’d always had a pretty face. Not a lot of boys noticed—but one did. It just so happened that the only guy who took an interest in me, a nice-looking guy named Chris, was the one guy that Leslie wanted. He wasn’t shallow like a lot of guys. His dad had been a football star. Chris played on the team. But he was more interested in art and theater. We were on the debate team together. When he asked me to the sophomore year homecoming dance, Leslie decided I was public enemy number one, and for a solid year, she made my life a nightmare. Especially in gym class.
It was a basketball day, and I was assigned to Leslie’s team. Lucky me. I remembered that day.
Leslie was on the girls’ basketball team, and she knew how to play. She was stuck with me. Dracula was standing at the edge of the room in short shorts and form-fitting polo. A whistle hung from his neck. Of course he’d take the role of our gym teacher. From the look on his face, he was disoriented, unsure of what he was supposed to do.
I knew one thing. When I was sixteen, I was shy. I mistakenly thought that if I ignored Leslie, if I didn’t respond to her torments, she’d get bored and quit. She never did.
My vampirism wasn’t active in this personal hell. I didn’t have that advantage. If I did, I would have drained the bitch dry. In this version of personal hell, all I had was what I had when I was sixteen—and my more recent memories.
Since high school, while Leslie had been flipping burgers, I had been kicking supernatural ass at the side of Zoey Grimm. I saved the world. Leslie delivered value meals to hungry customers. She wasn’t the badass chick I used to fear. She was pretty but insecure. That’s the profile of most bullies. At their core, they’re scared kids who feel that the only way they can maintain their social status is by putting other people down.
Carmilla told me this was temporary. I had to get through my personal hell before I could get to Athena. That meant standing up to my former bully. She wasn’t a vampire. She wasn’t a threat in the least. She’d never had a hand in saving the world.
Something hit my head. The basketball bounced off my noggin and to the floor.
“Come on!” Leslie groaned. “Can’t you catch?”
I turned to Leslie and narrowed my eyes. I walked right up to her. “Can’t you?”
I clenched my fist and clocked her in the jaw, and she hit the ground.
“Bitch!”
I smiled. “I am. Don’t fuck with me.”
Leslie rubbed her chin. I extended my hand and helped her up. She turned away from me.
“Suck it up,” I told her. “You want to play this game or not?”
Leslie sighed. “Whatever.”
It was a two-on-two game. I didn’t remember the names of the other girls. I recognized them, but they’d never been my friends and I’d attended a big school.
I didn’t remember how the game turned out. I don’t think we won in real life. I did recall the basketball hitting me upside the head. Several times. That wasn’t going to happen now.
Leslie stood there with her arms crossed. Dracula watched from a distance. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe he couldn’t intervene. This hell wasn’t drawn from his memory, it was from mine.
Without Leslie’s help, we weren’t going to win the match. I sucked at sports. Always had. Basketball was my worst.
The other two girls scored three times straight. I hit nothing but net—under the rim. It didn’t count.
I glared at Leslie. “You going to play or not?”
Leslie grunted and held out her hands. I passed her the ball. She dribbled around the other girls without a problem and laid it up for two.
I smiled. “Nice shot.”
Leslie huffed. The other team took the ball, but Leslie stole it from them and hit a three-pointer. The other team got the ball again and took a shot. They missed. I took the rebound. I had to dribble to the backcourt because we were playing half-court ball. I wasn’t any good, but I remembered that much.
Leslie was hardly trying. This was her thing. She didn’t need to try. I passed her the ball. She barely caught it. It was my fault. My toss was off the mark. She took another shot and scored.
We eventually took the lead and won. I approached Leslie afterward. “You’re pretty good. Sorry about that punch. You had it coming.”
Leslie rubbed her jaw. “I guess I did.”
“Truce?” I asked.
Leslie nodded. “I guess.”
That was the best I was going to get. I’d take it. We returned to the locker room. Problem. I didn’t remember what locker I had. That was several years ago. It didn’t matter. I hoped this whole thing was over.
Leslie didn’t say two words to me as she changed. We weren’t going to be friends, but I’d stood up to my bully.
I left the locker room, and Dracula was waiting for me.
“Are we done here?” Dracula asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope so.”
“Let’s leave through the exit and find out.”
Dracula and I headed to the exit and he opened the door. There was another rippling veil covering the exit. We stepped through.
We were standing in a field, surrounded by rabbits.
“What the hell?” I asked.
Dracula sighed. “This is my hell. I’m terrified of rabbits.”
“Bunnies frighten you?”
“Look at them,” he insisted. “Giant ears. Little gnawing teeth. Oversized feet.”
“This is your hell, buddy. If we’re going to get out of here, you have to face it.”
One of the rabbits jumped out of the crowd and, flashing giant vampire-like fangs, latched itself to Dracula’s arm.
He shrieked and shook his arm like a whip. The bunny went flying into the tall grass surrounding us. “I told you! These things are evil!”
“These aren’t real bunnies. Rabbits don’t have fangs in real life,” I assured him.
“How do you know there aren’t vampire bunnies?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“It’s possible. Most people don’t think human vampires exist. Who’s to say there’s no such thing?”
“I can’t do this for you. This is your hell. We have to get past them.”
“But they’re all around us! There are hundreds of those little devils.”
“Either face your fear and run past them or let them close in on us. Do you want to be at the bottom of a hundred-bunny pileup?”
Dracula rubbed his arm where the rabbit had bitten him. “For the love of all things decent.”
“This is hell,” I reasoned. “There’s nothing decent here. Not a lot of love, either.”
He ran his fingers through his usually slicked-back hair, leaving it looking like he’d just had a run-in with an electrical socket. “Here goes nothing.”
He took off through the crowd of rabbits, flailing his arms over his head. I don’t think I could scream with such a high pitch if I tried. The rabbits dove after him as he ran. I followed behind. The rabbits didn’t bother me. This wasn’t my hell.
When Dracula reached the end of the field, he ran straight through another watery veil. I jumped through after him.
We appeared on a dock in front of Athena’s crystal palace. I grabbed Dracula by the arm. “Watch yourself. Athena is roomies with a Gorgon. If her snake hair is loose, you’ll turn to stone the second you see her.”
“A Gorgon? Which one?”
“Euryale. She was one of Medusa’s immortal sisters. After we tangled with your darker self and the sisters in Kansas City, she decided to stay with Athena. She liked it here.”
“Makes sense,” Dracula reasoned. “Didn’t Athena create the gorgons?”
I nodded. “A long time ago. Even by your ancient standards.”
“Well, we either go to the Scholomance by way of the Gorgon and Athena, or we go back to Romania. We’d never make it back before the benefit.”
“Of course, the only way to do that is if we allow the Gorgon to petrify us. It will send our spirits to the void where Athena can manifest the Scholomance.”
Dracula nodded. “All right. Let’s go get stoned.”
I smirked. I don’t think Dracula even realized what he was saying. But when you’re in hell, you take your laughs wherever you can find them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I pressed open the two twenty-foot doors that formed the entrance to Athena’s castle. The Greek goddess hadn’t always been the queen of hell. She tried to usurp the throne of Olympus, and, long story short, this was her new assignment. Hell’s original ruler, Hades, had aspirations of his own and was now languishing somewhere in the void, bound to a prison that suited him.
So, Athena renovated hell to something more of her liking. As horrifying as passing through our personal hells could have been, it was nothing compared to hellfire, brimstone, and demonic torture racks.
I was about eighty-five percent sure we could trust Athena. She liked her new role. She’d been a goddess of battle and strategy before, and she still had those skills. As the acting devil, she was also the mistress of the Scholomance. There wasn’t a deity whose help was more befitting of the situation we were facing in New Orleans.
Classical music was echoing through the halls of the castle.
“I believe that’s A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy, composed by Franz Liszt in the eighteen fifties.”
I snorted. “How you know that is beyond me.”
“At least Athena has a sense of humor.”
“What’s funny about a symphony?”
Dracula grinned. “Have you ever read Dante’s Inferno? As the queen of hell, she chose this symphony because it was fitting.”
I looked around. I didn’t see the goddess or the Gorgon. “It would be funnier if she was blasting a little Highway to Hell.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“It’s not a symphony. AC/DC. A classic, but not classical.”
The symphony went silent. Then, Highway to Hell started to play.
I laughed. “Athena, you’re here somewhere. You’re listening to us.”
The music shut off and Athena appeared in a flash of light in front of us. She was a beautiful goddess. She had fine features, was a few inches taller than me, and had an unblemished complexion. She looked like the “after” picture of a Mary Kay makeover. Too flawless to be real.
“My prized pupils of the Scholomance! Welcome back to hell. Do you like what I’ve done with the place?”
Dracula huffed. “Not so much.”
Athena grinned. “Did little bunny foo-foo bop you on the head?”
Dracula diverted his gaze. “Shut up.”
I snickered. “We need to go back to the Scholomance. Nothing we learned before seems to work. We need to learn more.”
“We need to become masters of the path of light,” Dracula added. “We’re facing not only Sorina and her sisters, who stole my dark power, but the sons of Van Helsing.”
“Ahh!” Athena smiled widely. “A Van Helsing passed through the trials ages ago.”
“How do you know that?” Dracula asked. “I was a master of the Scholomance and didn’t know it.”
Athena shrugged. “I have the yearbooks in my library.”
I snorted. “The Scholomance has a yearbook?”
“It’s a school of a sort,” Athena pointed out. “Of course there’s a yearbook. It’s more like a record than what you’re thinking. After I claimed hell, the records of the Scholomance fell into my care.”
“Fascinating. We still need to figure out how to use the path of light to thwart the sisters and Van Helsings. The sisters first. But after the Van Helsings help us deal with them, they’ll be every bit as big a threat to us.”
Athena looked at Dracula. “How much do you remember about the dark path?”
Dracula shrugged. “I remember everything. My essence was divided, but my memory remains intact.”
“The dark path is to the light as an object is to its reflection. It looks very much alike but is also its opposite.”
Dracula scratched the back of his head. “I’m not sure I understand. My old magic doesn’t work anymore.”
“You’re probably trying to do everything backward.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The path of darkness can allow you to turn into a creature of the night, a nocturnal bat. The path of light can turn you into a morning songbird.”
“Really?” I asked. “Not nearly as intimidating as a bat, but flight could be handy.”
Dracula squinted his eyes. “Doesn’t work.”
“That’s because you’re doing it wrong. It’s like if you are right-handed and started writing with your left. It wouldn’t be easy. You’d have to do things in a different way. Eventually, you’d pick it up, but it would take practice.”
Dracula shook his head. “If I tried to write with my non-dominant hand, I could at least scribble something halfway legible. I can’t use any of my old powers in the least.”
