PART ONE

  HADES

  CHAPTER ONE

  BUSINESS CASUAL

  An out-of-service sign hung from the elevator door. Someone had taped it there haphazardly, the card so uneven Hades had to tilt his head to read it. It had to be a joke. A jest, from one brother to the other. Zeus, still living the same punch-drunk golden existence the rest of them had grown out of centuries ago.

  But no—there, across the gilded foyer, a pantsuited nymph strode across the tile inlay. She walked like she had somewhere to go, a smart leather purse in one hand and the other scrolling through a phone. She headed straight for a side hallway bearing a scripted overhead sign: Stairway.

  Hades glanced back at the call button, the painted arrow pointing upward only to mock him. With a long sigh, he turned and headed for the alcove, too.

  When he arrived on the seventy-second floor, sweat beaded under his arms, the prickle unwelcome in the stuffy recycled air. He considered removing his suit jacket, but he’d gone through the trouble to put it on in the first place, and he wouldn’t take it off only to showcase dark armpits. He could already hear Zeus’s dry quip: I didn’t know two-tone came back on the runways this season.

  Hades studied the ornate hallway where he’d been dumped. Gold sconces held electric lights, their soft yellow glow absurd against the midmorning sun streaming through the windows. The wallpaper could have been mirror-finished for how well it bounced the light around.

  With a sinking in his chest, Hades realized he didn’t recognize the wing. A closed door to his right held a little plaque with the words Conference Room etched into it. To his left, the hallway dead-ended with a stunning view of downtown Manhattan, buildings so tall they made his head spin. Trees, presumably, covered the ground below, so tiny they could have been weeds on a grassy lawn.

  Hades’s stomach flipped and he took a healthy step sideways. He turned his attention towards the tile and the way it stretched out before him, leading who-knew-where. Surely the seventy-second floor couldn’t be large enough to get lost. His brother’s office had to be here somewhere, right?

  Hades started walking, past the conference room, past two more sets of closed doors. He took a right, then turned around when that ended in more doors. Backtracked and turned left, stumbling into a sort of atrium that opened suddenly onto views only birds should see. Hades stopped short and considered returning to the stairwell and its mercifully windowless existence.

  “Sir? Can I help you?”

  A desk to his right, and behind it, a boy, a young man, something in between, standing from his chair. Hades tried to reach for the sturdy wood in a casual way, and not at all in a gesture that screamed how much he did not belong in his brother’s realm above the clouds.

  “Are you looking for someone?” the boy tried again. He smiled, straight teeth and dimples almost as blinding as the wallpaper.

  He’d found Zeus’s office.

  “I have an appointment,” he told the receptionist.

  The boy nodded. “The 9 o’clock?”

  “That’s me.”

  “You’re late.”

  Hades checked his watch. He’d arrived early, knowing this building could put Daedalus’s labyrinth to shame. Now, after the elevator and the stairwell and the wandering, the minute hand had ticked past twelve and crawled nearer to three.

  The boy stared at him, like he waited for Hades to apologize.

  “Your elevator is out of service,” Hades said instead.

  The boy made a face. He leaned forward to type something into the computer. “Lucky for you, he’s still ready for you. Would you like some water or tea?”

  Hades wanted something much stronger than water or tea. But he shook his head and followed as the boy opened a set of massive double doors set in the wall like they’d been carved from it.

  If the walk through the building had been extravagant, Hades could have gagged on the office. Zeus had upgraded since the last time Hades had called on him, putting in leather couches and a dark wooden table for a seating area, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of titles Hades doubted had ever been read, and the starring attraction: the biggest, heaviest desk Hades had ever seen. How it didn’t go falling through the layers of man-made construction boggled him.

  Zeus spread his hands in welcome as Hades walked the absurdly long carpet runner. Despite the decade since their last meeting, he hadn’t aged a day; his bronze curls still shone with divine light, his blue eyes still sharp as a sudden summer chill. He’d toned down the beard in the modern age, cutting the grizzly patch to a tame red stubble that hugged a stern jaw.

  Hades didn’t bother questioning how expensive Zeus’s well-fitting suit had been. He knew his brother’s tastes, and at least the lean cut and the silk looked good on him. One thing that had always been true—Zeus wore wealth like he’d been born to it.

  For now, Zeus grinned and walked around the ridiculous desk to clasp Hades in a burly hug. They cuffed shoulders and shook in the ways of old, hand to forearm.

  “I hope the stairs weren’t too harrowing.” Zeus’s thunderclap voice boomed in the cavernous room. “I barely made it up myself. Building contractors say it won’t be fixed until Thursday.”

  Hades wondered if his brother really had climbed every last stair, or if he didn’t have a hidden elevator so he could sit at his desk and laugh at the miserable lesser-thans tottering up after him.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Instead of asking, Hades smiled politely and took the chair Zeus offered.

  Zeus followed into his own seat, nodding to the boy still hovering near the bookcases. “Thank you, Jonah. We’ll start with water before we move to something a little stronger.”

  Hades pretended not to see the wink Zeus shot his way. He cleared his throat. “I don’t have much time for pleasantries. Water will do just fine.”

  Zeus grinned and made no move to stop Jonah, presumably on his way to get beverages. “Same old buzzkill, I see. Modernity hasn’t loosened you up any, eh?”

  Hades bit back a groan. Modernity. The new age could see itself out on the very same stinking, growling, heaving machinery it had been driven in on. He missed pillars and arches and cool marble floors. He missed close, quiet parlors and free-flowing conversation. Stars, he would have taken masquerade parties over the new millennium, and he’d hated the Renaissance.

  But here he sat despite his protests, holding a briefcase with a computer and a tablet and wearing a scratchy, starchy suit. He might as well accept it.

  Zeus sighed at Hades’s continued silence. “Always in a rush. What can I do for you, then?”

  Hades set the case down and withdrew the tablet. He turned it on, thumbed through the applications for the slides he’d made only last night, and set it on the desk between them. Zeus leaned forward, his eyes tracing the angry red line climbing at a stark angle toward the upper right corner of the graph.

  “The dead are getting out of control,” Hades said without preamble. “The old ways are gone, and most have nothing for the crossing. They crowd the North Bank, shuffling along, tearing apart anything they can find.”

  Zeus raised one red eyebrow. He swiped a finger across the screen and brought up a new chart, this one overlaid upon a rough sketch of the river and its shores. He looked at it for a long moment.

  Finally, he raised his head with the same menacing expression of dark of storm clouds. “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I know what you’re going to ask. Tell me, where would I get the room? Break a chunk from the ocean floor? Pull it from the stars? Neither you nor I can make more space, Hades.”

  “You have no choice. If you don’t, the dead will spill over, and where will they go but here?”

  Zeus’s mouth tightened in response. His eyes flicked to the door.

  “I know how much you like your human pets,” Hades pressed. “Would you see them dragged beneath a horde of the dead, knowing you could have stopped it?”

  If gods could growl, Zeus would have done so. “Be careful, little brother.”

  “And you, O great and mighty king.” Hades spit the words. “The mortals are not mine to save, you’ll remember. If you’d like to usher in the next mass extinction, all you have to do is ask. I can always use the soldiers.”

  Zeus’s lip curled. His fists clenched on the table, the room dimming around him. Hades’s ears popped. Thunder rumbled outside, low and sinister.

  When Hades didn’t break, when he barely even blinked, his brother finally sighed. The light streamed back in, and Hades opened his jaw to ease the pressure in his ears.

  “You never did fall for that,” Zeus muttered, straightening his suit.

  “I’m not Mother.” Hades reached for the tablet, pulling up the graph again. “And I don’t live up here. Perhaps if I did, you’d get the shaking little bird you so desperately crave.”

  Zeus glowered. “I meant what I said. I can’t break you off a piece of rock and give it to you. Neither of us possess the power to expand your realm.”

  His realm. The mandate he’d neither asked for nor enjoyed, and yet there it was, strapped to him since the war.

  Hades smoothed his tie, resisting the urge to twist it in his fingers. “It’s not the actual realm that needs expanding. Once the dead are in, I can find places for them. It’s the beaches that are the problem.”

  Zeus pondered that as he thumbed through the slides. Once the silence had grown thick and stale, he finally leaned forward. “How many gates are there now?”

  “Seven.”

  “Such a lovely number. Nice and round.”

  “Nine is a lucky number, too.”

  Zeus paused long enough to sigh though his nose. Then he slammed his hands on his desk, the sound loud and sudden enough to make Hades flinch.

  That, at least, got him laughing.

  “I’m due to meet Hephaestus on Monday,” Zeus said between chuckles. “I’ll need to speak with him about this before I can give you an answer. He’s going to be the one making the gate, after all.”

  Hades paused, looking at his brother’s outstretched hand. “Can I trust you not to forget?”

  Zeus at least had the decency to look offended.

  Hades shook. “Monday. Let me know what he says.”

  Zeus grinned and reached for the intercom on his desk. “Jonah, we’ll take those drinks now.”

  Hades tried to protest, but Zeus either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Jonah walked in with a tray carrying a carafe of pale brown liquid and two glasses, and that was that. Hades couldn’t very well turn down a gift once it had made its appearance, unless he wanted to see a real glimpse of his brother’s power.

  #

  Booted footsteps signaled Charon’s approach. Hades felt more than saw the ferryman stop by his side, facing too towards the river. When the man spoke, his voice grated like rock on slate. “The last souls have boarded. We depart on your word, Lord Hades.”

  Hades couldn’t help a glance over his shoulder. He’d watched as the boat loaded the corpses ready to cross into his kingdom, had counted how many Charon turned away. At two hundred, he’d decided the number didn’t matter.

  Gaunt faces stared back at Hades, their eyes hollow. Hundreds of them stood on the beach, sallow green skin luminous in the near-permanent twilight. He wondered how long some of them had been there.

  “So many are left.”

  Charon shook his hooded head. “So many cannot pay.”

  “There’s nothing I can do?”

  “No unless you have something they can take for the crossing.”

  Hades considered asking for an exception. A loan. Something until he could consult his bank statements, but he knew better. The mandates were older than the both of them, and Hades had learned the hard way that no crown, however large, would allow him to change it.

  He dipped his fingers into his pockets and rooted around. The well-worn linen yielded a quarter, a silver yen piece, and two golden drachmas. “Will these do?”

  Charon reached a yellow-nailed hand and tested the coins one by one. “Four souls. No more.”

  Hades didn’t know how to consider the faces turned to him with something like hope. He couldn’t guess which would pass the Fates’ tests and which would end up on a request slip to Tartarus, so he walked blindly to the four dead closest to him and shoved the coins into their spindly, waiting hands.

  A ripple spread through the crowd. Those nearest him shuffled forward, hand reaching for him even as he held his own empty ones up, bodies pressing nearer though he had nothing else to give them.

  “That’s all,” Hades pleaded. “Maybe I can arrange with your families to have something sent down for you. I’m sure an exception can be made for that.”

  The dead didn’t seem to hear, crowding him, forcing Hades backwards towards the edge of the water. A gnarled claw grasped the lapel of his suit, another brushed his sleeve. Hades lurched away, his shoes skidding on the rocks.

  Something gripped his jacket and yanked sideways. He stumbled hard into skeletal bodies, fleshless fingers curling into his skin, clinging to his arms, groping desperately for his pockets.

  A memory rose within him, trapped beneath a Titan’s weight with the power singing in his veins all but useless. Hades reacted now the way he wished he could have then, the shock wave bursting from his skin enough to send copper blooming on his tongue.

  The dead fell away, and Hades landed on the loose rocks of the shore, breathing hard. Heaping piles of bones and rags sprawled around him, limbs canted in disturbing angles. He watched as, joint by creaking joint, they began picking themselves up, pulling themselves forward on broken, impossible arms. They advanced with the clatter of pebbles.

  Hades scrambled to his feet. He retreated to the safety of the ferry, where Charon watched him with eyes that betrayed nothing.

  “A noble deed sir,” the boatman said, “but the dead are not ones for gratitude.”

  Phantom nails dragging against his chest, gnarled limbs that gripped him and wouldn’t let go. The want to take every last one of them into Elysium, to release them into the fields of paradise and bid them peace, made it hard to breathe.

  But wishes couldn’t run kingdoms, so Hades walked on shaky legs to the boat’s prow. He gripped the railing all the way to the far shore.