Not that it would matter, because I’d be dead.
“You’re a fucking monster,” I spat, anger finally boiling over like I inevitably knew it would from the moment Hades had appeared. Just looking at him made me feel capable of murder. “If this is some joke and you’re messing with my mind, I hope you’re still laughing while you rot in a jail cell.”
A malicious smile twisted his lips. “Would it be easier if I pushed you? Consider it a favor, the first of many that you will beg from me before we’re finished. I won’t even ask for anything in return. This time.”
I backed away from him as he took a menacing step forward, which brought me that much closer to the edge. “Don’t touch me.”
“I cannot until you ask it of me. Or beg.” He held up the handkerchief, my blood staining part of it a dull red. “For now, I have only your blood because you’ve gifted it to me. The rest will come in time.”
A shiver worked over me, of fear and dark desire. My body was outside of my conscious control, reacting in ways that made no sense to my mind. “Just stay back.”
“Time passes as you deliberate, and it will continue to do so. You have so little of it to waste.”
I looked down at the cool stones dangling from my neck. The highest most one had already turned from milky white to pale pink, shifting the barest shade darker with each beat of my heart.
“It isn’t fair you started the clock before I’ve even entered the underworld.”
My words seemed to amuse him. “Nothing is ever fair. It simply is what it is. There is no more time to waste on dithering, either jump or forfeit.”
“I’m not forfeiting shit.”
I had to assume at this point that my mouth couldn’t get me in any more trouble. There wasn’t much he could do to me that he hadn’t already. My friends were gone, and I was about to jump off the tallest building in Los Angeles. Fuck biting my tongue.
The edge seemed to shift away and closer as I took shuffling steps toward it. That was as likely to be a result of the blood rushing to my head as it was to be magic.
My vision blurred, and I forced myself to take deep breaths before I passed out. I doubted it would count as a willing sacrifice if I tripped and fell over the side.
It was only as I stared into the distant lights of the Hollywood sign that I understood this was a test. Not of my resolve, but of my belief. Even as Hades stood before me in all of his glorious and terrifying cruelty, I hadn’t believed it could be true.
I was trying to remember if I’d taken my medication, even as a face too alien and perfect to be real glared down at me.
If I jumped, it was because I believed this was real. The only alternative to belief was death.
My gaze moved to him as I turned, so my back faced the skyline. I didn’t want to see what came next. The view from up here would have been heartbreakingly beautiful if I saw it under any other circumstances. But I didn’t want it to be the last thing that met my gaze before I died.
Hades’s features were carved in cold marble, but with even less warmth than forbidding stone. His smirk said more than any words could, but he spoke them anyway.
“What are you waiting for?”
When I was in middle school, they made us do these trust exercises in gym class, where we would fall into each other’s arms. The reasons for it were unclear then, and even less so now. My classmates tittered as they stood behind me, the girl they mocked for being small and strange and quiet. Even as the teacher urged me forward, I knew without a shadow of doubt, that they would let me fall.
And they did.
A deepest fear fulfilled hurt worse than the pain, even as I had to be taken to the nurse so my dislocated shoulder could be placed in a sling. The other girls had been roundly chastised and given detention, but they weren’t really to blame. It was my fault for trusting them when I knew them to be unworthy of it, like feeding a wild animal and thinking it won’t maul you when it’s done. I had been certain they would let me hit the floor, and I had fallen into their arms anyway.
The sensation was the same now. Forced to trust that some unseen force would save me from destruction, even as I knew with every fiber of my being that it wanted to see me destroyed.
But now, just as then, I had no choice.
My heels met empty air as I took the smallest step backward, one more and there would be no more ground beneath my feet. Blood rushed to my head so loudly that I could hear it pounding in my ears, drowning out the wind that had picked up even higher. We seemed high enough to touch the clouds, but tonight was the clearest it had been in weeks. Not a cloud in the sky. If I turned back to look, there would be nothing but empty air to obscure my view to the street below.
Eyes like shards of jagged glass were pinned to mine. His gaze—that normally gave nothing away—watched me with visible anticipation. There was a hunger there more frightening than the deadly drop behind me. And it wasn’t my body that he craved, at least not only that.
He wanted to watch me plummet.
And with no more thought to the consequences, I let my body tip backward into the embrace of empty air.
I felt myself falling. And falling more. Falling further than seemed possible, even though I’d never seen anything plummet from such a great height. Wind whipped around me, growing colder until it froze the breath in my lungs. I tried to take a breath, and it caught in my throat, depriving me of precious oxygen. My lungs burned with the failed effort to breathe, and my vision blurred as suffocation set in.
The air itself moved so fast around me that my lungs couldn’t breathe it in.
I was drowning.
And dying.
My last thought before I passed out was that I preferred to die this way—suffocating—than by hitting the ground.
Then everything turned to black.
This hurt too much to be a dream.
I came awake lying face-up on a mound of scrubby grass and dirt, staring up at a sky streaked with angry reds and yellows. My body felt like it would if I had plummeted a thousand feet through the air and hit the ground but somehow survived. I groaned, wondering if every organ inside of me had burst open at the impact.
There was no visible damage as I got to my feet, despite the ache that drove deeper than my bones. Every moment I breathed in and out was the slightest bit easier than the last as I took in my surroundings.
Nothing was the way I imagined it.
If my paintings and sculptures were something at all close to what this place could be, then what I saw now was its photonegative. Darker and stranger than anything I’d ever encountered before.
Desolation surrounded me. Wizened trees with no leaves and spindly branches dotted the landscape along a path of broken stones, their edges razor sharp. I breathed in air tainted with dust that dried my mouth and made me cough. For a moment, I wondered how any living thing could survive in a place like this, even something like Hades.
Ahead of me was a forest that seemed to grow all wrong. The trees twisted together until it was impossible to see through them, their trunks practically touching. From here, I couldn’t see the entrance, but beyond the wall of trees, a winding path had been cut through the forest.
“Tarturus.”
“The abyss where souls are tormented for eternity. There are some that believe the old guys are also imprisoned here, but that is probably a myth. You’ll find it more pleasant than you expect,” Hades said from behind me, mockery in his voice. “The path is laid out clearly for you. Traversing it is what will present the challenge.”