Page 57 of The Unseen Hour

“Come on. Let’s get back to work.”

I watched the fading smoke.

“What she said about stopping Charon’s coup—does that have anything to do with Charon’s own plans for his centennial hour?”

Orion grimaced, his arm tightening around me.

“You can’t say, can you?”

He shook his head, the movement jerky.

“Just this. If we can help Death, it would be best for us all, and anyone in Emrys we care about.”

As we approached the Meadow, he slowly relaxed again, but I could tell it hurt him. Whatever Charon did, whatever power the god had to force him to stay silent, it was a kind of torture.

I would have helped Death anyway, for myself and my father, but I wanted to help her even more for Orion.

Charon had tormented the Head Shade for a lifetime, and if I could manage it, he would face consequences equal to the crime.

With a god on our side, it might just be possible.

By mid-February, according to my tally of the days, we’d searched a good portion of the Shades. When we stopped to rest, we would talk, or read. Orion had noticed how much I loved the books in his home and had taken to bringing one along in his pack with our food.

The more time we spent together, the more Orion opened up. I’d seen a reduction in his somber expressions, and he’d begun sharing his experience without my prodding or carefully navigating around the conversation.

“I only met Death a couple of decades ago. As you can imagine, I was thrilled to have someone else to talk to. I even asked her to take me with her,” he admitted.

Two competing emotions shot through me. Wanting Death, wanting to end the solitary existence he’d had here … I could understand it, even if I hated it. I only wished he’d had someone here with him sooner. There was a smaller part of me, though, that felt a pang of jealousy. Ridiculous. I had no claim on Orion, and he hadn’t even been speaking of the god in a romantic way.

“She said no?”

“She said she wasn’t able to. The gods have their own rules, or laws. Whether they are bound by them physically, or they just adhere to them, they’ve not bothered to tell me. But she was here looking into the hour and wanted my help dismantling that. I was only too happy to offer it. In exchange, she said once it was over the Shades could all be freed.”

“And Charon doesn’t suspect the two of you?”

“Death thinks he’s too prideful, lulled into a false sense of security. At first, the Unseen Hour was as much a secret as Charon hoped. Somehow, with his fog and his freezing of time, I think he kept its existence concealed from her and the other gods. Maybe the other deities just weren’t that watchful of what happened in Rayus. She’s never told me how she was tipped off, but I’ve got to imagine that eventually the number of souls not entering her realm as expected would have raised an alarm.”

“And have you met any of the other gods? Are they helping as well?” I scooted closer, taking a piece of fruit from him.

“No, and Death only speaks of them in vague terms. It’s difficult to discern if she has favorites, but she most certainly wants to stop Charon. The whole Unseen Hour, and all the collected Shades, are meant to rival her and her power in some way, but she found out before Charon could act. Charon has his own plans for this hundredth hour, but there’s no way Death will stand by, not when she’s at risk.”

He tensed up for a moment, then took a breath and relaxed. I guessed that last bit was something Charon had tried to keep silent. Maybe if Death had reiterated it, that made it easier for him to share without whatever painful consequences Charon caused?

“Is he trying … to overthrow Death, or take her place?”

I’d done what I could over the past several weeks to take the things Orion could tell me and collect them. Small clues and puzzle pieces.

He grimaced, giving a curt nod.

I gasped.

“He can’t do that!” From my brief encounter with Death, and what I’d been told about Charon, I could only imagine him exerting his influence outside the bounds of his hour. To have that sort of terror as the norm year-round?

Unfathomable. And we couldn’t allow it to happen.

Orion bit into a crisp vegetable as vibrantly orange as a carrot but much sharper in taste.

“And how do you help Death?” I asked, hoping that topic wouldn’t cause him any discomfort.