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I’d stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and marveled at the sheer scale of the place, and how small it made bystanders feel in contrast. The Grand Canyon was a fancy ditch compared to the insanity that was the underworld.
Black cave walls rose around us on every side, smoked with charcoal from the constantly burning firestorm overhead. Beneath us, the ground was littered with tens of millions of bones, stacked up on each other the way I imagined a dragon would pile stores of gold coins. A narrow path led away from the temple towards a pass between the black cliffs.
It was the only road out.
Leo shuffled next to me, jamming his hands deep into his pockets and surveying the scene in front of us. The air was eerily still, with nothing even approaching a breeze to lift the heavy weight of the heat off us. I was already sweating, and we’d been outside only a minute or two.
“You know what I was going to do yesterday?” he asked. “Before you showed up in my bedroom?”
“No.” I wouldn’t hazard a guess. I was pretty sure this wasn’t what he had in mind for a fun night out, though.
“I was going to do my laundry. There’s a place a couple blocks from the apartment, next to a coffee shop. The girl who works at the coffee place gives me free refills. I would have washed my shirts and flirted with the coffee girl, and maybe see if there were some loose pockets around the Quarter.”
“Sounds nice.”
He nodded. “What would you be doing if we weren’t here?”
I wanted to shout at him, to shake him and tell him this was serious and we didn’t have time for games of what if. But at the same time there was a soothing sense of rightness in wondering what I’d be doing if I wasn’t trapped in an eternal hellscape with a guy I barely knew.
“If I wasn’t working, I’d be reading a romance novel at a Chinese food restaurant.” I thought about the night in Whitefish when my plans to do just that had been horribly derailed by the arrival of Cade.
Leo glanced at me and smiled lightly. “You’d be banging the bad-luck priest.”
I blushed. “Shut up.”
He elbowed me playfully, and the whole conversation was so absurd I forgot for a brief second what the stakes were. “Don’t worry, kid. If we manage this, he may get lucky yet.”
This only managed to make me blush more furiously, effectively ruining any opportunity I had to deny my blossoming feelings towards Cade. Not that I wanted to tell Leo he was right, but gods help me, if I did manage to get us out of this alive, I was going to defy the no-sex rule of the temple like no tomorrow.
If we got out.
I scanned the endlessly bleak horizon and sucked in a breath through my nose. The underworld smelled of sulfur and ash, with a lingering stink of doom. I coughed, and my hand immediately went to my ribs. Breathing in this much hot, rancid air couldn’t be good for me. I worried the tar holding my wound closed might melt from the heat and leave me unable to continue.
“Let’s just be grateful Cade isn’t here,” I reminded him. “I think we could use all the luck we’ve got right now.”
Bleakly, I made my way down the steps to the ground, small bone fragments crunching below my feet like gravel. Leo followed behind, his heavy boots making a loud grinding noise, each footfall echoing with crunch-pop sounds that were vaguely obscene.
This whole place set my nerves on end.
“So, maybe this isn’t the ideal time to ask this, but…you have a plan, right?” He came up beside me, the road barely wide enough for us to walk abreast.
I didn’t look at him, keeping my gaze locked on the path ahead, expecting something to lunge out at us at any moment. “Sure.”
“Care to share it?” As he spoke, Leo stripped off his button-down shirt, exposing his muscular arms, displayed to great effect by the short-sleeved T-shirt he wore underneath. Dude was so built he could probably crush my skull between his biceps.
“Easy. Like Hades said. We get out.” I made a gesture of walking my fingers.
“I was kind of hoping you’d have something a bit more specific.”
“First we follow this creepy bone road.”
Leo grimaced. “And then?”
I stopped so I could face him directly. “And then we hope really hard that whatever is at the end of the road doesn’t kill us. If it doesn’t, we keep going, and we keep going, and we do that until we get out or we die. End of plan.”
Leo brushed his huge hands through his curly hair, scratching his scalp thoughtfully. For the first time since we’d left the temple he looked genuinely worried. Good. For once his expression matched the bottomless feeling of fear gnawing away at my guts.
“That’s certainly a kind of plan.”
