Memory Game (Hound of Hades Book 2), page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Up Next: Ghost Town
More Books by Zoe Cannon
About the Author
Memory Game
Hound of Hades: Book 2
Zoe Cannon
© 2020 Zoe Cannon
http://www.zoecannon.com
All rights reserved
Cover by Fiona Jayde Media
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Chapter 1
“Holy shit,” one of my new coworkers breathed from a few paces away. “Take a look at this.”
I picked my way across the broken rock to him, trying not to appear too interested. He was squinting at one of the walls, or the remains of it, although I guess you couldn’t really call it a wall anymore when it was lying in pieces on the ground. The piece he had found showed an intricately carved scene of a spirit passing through the gates of the underworld. I only knew because of all the time I had spent looking at it, back when I was stuck in this place for training for an entire year and staring at the walls was what passed for entertainment. The only part left intact was the left side of the gate, with the three-headed dog Cerberus lurking in the background. If I hadn’t known what the full image had been, the fragment might have looked a little like a wolf howling at the moon. Or maybe a sea monster eyeing a tasty ship, if you were looking at it upside down like the man who had spoken.
He knelt to run a finger across the letters engraved at the bottom. “What language is this?”
It was Greek. I shrugged. “You got me. Come on, let’s get all this cleared out so we can get lunch.”
The man—I was pretty sure his name was Gordon—looked up at me in disbelief. “We’re surrounded by what could be the greatest historical mystery of our time, and you’re thinking about lunch?”
“I’m thinking about getting paid. And so should you.”
One of Gordon’s friends, a man with a perpetually perplexed expression and arms hairy enough that I hadn’t entirely ruled out the possibility that he was part gorilla, shook his head. “Don’t you have any romance in your soul, Mal?”
I raised an eyebrow. “This from the man who challenged me to a farting contest yesterday?” Nothing says “one of the guys” like having someone bet you twenty bucks you couldn’t beat his record for longest single sustained fart. They had been skeptical of me when I had first shown up, but over the past few weeks I had proved myself by showing I could work as hard and as long as the rest of them. That wasn’t entirely accurate, of course. I could have worked twice as hard and twice as long as the rest of them, and that’s if I wasn’t putting all my effort into it. But while nothing I can do physically is outside the normal human range—no leaping tall buildings in a single bound for me—I’m still at the upper end of that range, and that’s not something I like to show off around people who might start asking questions. And these guys were asking too many questions as it was.
“I’ve never claimed to be the most poetic guy around,” Gorilla Man conceded. “But come on. Look at all this.” He pointed to the wall fragment, as if I didn’t already know the image by heart. “Doesn’t it make you wonder about… life? This stuff is straight out of a history textbook, and it was hidden underneath that graveyard. No one even suspected. Who put it there? Why? And what else do you think is hidden right under our feet while we’re going about our daily lives?”
He had just given me a perfect demonstration of the questions I didn’t want anyone asking. But even as strong and as fast as I was, I couldn’t get rid of all this stuff before anyone else got a look at it. The more rubble we cleared away, the more fragments like this one we revealed, and the more questions people asked. And unless I could figure out a solution fast—something more efficient than hauling rocks along with the rest of the crew—it was about to get a whole lot worse.
Someone else slowed down to examine the fragment as he walked by. “I think it’s some kind of cult.”
“I think it’s from some ancient expedition no one ever knew about.” Gorilla Man scratched his head. “Anyone else watch that documentary about how there’s all this evidence that the Celts came over here in the sixth century? Like that, except with the Greeks. That’s Greek, isn’t it?”
Gordon leaned in even closer to the fragment until I thought he might lick the thing. “No. You guys have it all wrong. Look closer. That creature there—he’s not human. And if you turn it this way—” He rotated the fragment sideways. “This is the spaceship, see? What we’ve found here is a sign of alien activity on Earth, from so long ago that this place was buried by thousands of years of… of… whatever it’s called when the land moves around and forms mountains and stuff.”
If these guys and their theories were all I had to worry about, I would be able to sleep well at night. But remember when I said things were about to get a lot worse?
Lew Cifnek, my new boss as of two weeks ago, strode over to us with a scowl on his face. “Quit chatting. And be careful with that. The film crew is going to want all of this intact.”
Yeah. A team of archaeologists had flown in from LA last month to study this place, but when one of them broke his leg on a bit of unstable rock, the city closed down the site. But they hadn’t turned around and gone home; that would have made things too easy. They were just waiting for us to finish clearing the place out and declare it safe before they swarmed over it like maggots on meat.
That would have been bad enough. But then the makers of the “Buried Treasures” documentary series had seen dollar signs flashing in front of their eyes and decided to get in on the action. They had made a deal with the archaeology team, where they would come in and film the entire process, and the archaeologists would, I assumed, get paid handsomely for allowing them access. Everything in here was about to make its way onto TV sets across the world—accompanied by the archaeology team’s best theories about this place. And if they were half as good as their jobs as I was at mine, they would be able to figure out enough to get the world asking the questions that everyone in both the mortal and divine realms wanted to avoid.
Of course, I wasn’t feeling very good at my job right about now. Covering all this up had been my responsibility. You can see how well I was doing at that.
Cifnek was still shooting us all his patented get-back-to-work glare. I made sure to get out of his line of sight before searching for other wall fragments. I spotted one showing the same three-headed dog gnawing on a bone—adorable, even if that bone probably belonged to one of the citizens of Hades’s realm—and accidentally-on-purpose dropped it hard enough to shatter it. Which took some doing. This place was built to last. Unfortunately, it wasn’t built to withstand explosives.
Behind me, I could still hear Gordon chattering on about aliens. I rolled my eyes. Although I supposed it wasn’t really fair of me to make fun of him for not having all the information. I was the only one here who knew what this place really was—or rather, what it had been. And as for the alien thing, I had firsthand experience with creatures a lot stranger than little green men.
This was the former temple of Hades, the god of the underworld—one of the underworlds, at least. The new temple was in my apartment. Long story. I wasn’t the person responsible for what had happened to the old one, but if I had moved a little faster, or been a little smarter, I might have been able to stop it in time. I thought about that a lot these days, usually when I was supposed to be sleeping. Not that I’d had any time for sleep in the past month.
We had lost a lot when the temple was destroyed. Hades lost a big chunk of his influence over the city, enough that it was a minor miracle that none of his enemies had swooped in to try and take over yet. And that wasn’t even getting into the deaths. Two of us had survived. The rest? Gone. People Hades had needed to help him hold on to his territory. People I cared about.
I tried not to think about any of that too hard—it was too late to do anything about it. But if the truth about the temple got out, we were going to lose a whole lot more. And by “we,” I meant all of us—not just Hades and those of us who served him, but every god, every Guardian, and every one of the Marked throughout the world.
Once upon a time, all the gods stuck to their own territory, and aside from a bit of infighting now and again, things were pretty peaceful. The gods never squabbled about which areas of the globe, and which t
Some of the gods have humanity’s best interests at heart. Some don’t. Hades is one of the good guys. Unfortunately, he’s never been one of the popular kids, either with humans or with his fellow divinities. He and Persephone share New York City, along with a constantly-shifting array of minor gods they’ve brought into their alliance, but the surrounding area all belongs to Zeus and his crew—Ra, Ganesh, Freya, maybe a couple of others. And they… well, let’s just say they aren’t the good guys.
But even though the gods have different opinions on things like whether to protect humans or punish them for their disloyalty, there’s one thing they’ve all agreed on from the beginning: secrecy is paramount. Everyone knows how dangerous we humans can get when we’re scared, and what’s scarier than a bunch of gods fighting their wars all around you? Plus, every worshipper makes a god that much stronger—and no one wants to worship a god who can be defeated. And even the strongest god can be defeated if the tide turns against them.
A select few humans know about all this. The gods can’t act directly in the mortal world—or rather, they can, but it wouldn’t end well for anyone involved. Sure, they help us humans out—or the opposite, depending on how bitter they are about their original followers abandoning them—in various ways, depending on their sphere of influence. Hades, for example, was able to create an afterlife for anyone who dies within city limits. But for anything less subtle than a good harvest or a place to go when we die… well, they pretty much only have one setting, and that’s “big and apocalyptic.” For more precise work, they need precise tools—and that’s us. The Guardians are priests and priestesses by another name; they spend their days praying and chanting and walking in circles and a whole bunch of boring stuff I don’t completely understand. They have the ability to channel their god’s power into the mortal world—in other words, to do what most people call magic. Then there are the Marked, who are the hands of the gods in the mortal world, fighting their wars on the physical plane. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since Hades raised me from the dead five years ago and made me an offer.
And that was why I was standing in the ruins of the temple wearing a hard hat, with visions of film crews and angry gods dancing in my head.
Usually the way I solve Hades’s problems is much simpler. But usually I’m working against other Marked. Under most circumstances, the gods tend to frown on shooting the civilians in their territory—and even when they don’t, I do. So there I was, lifting rocks.
Plus, I needed the paycheck.
I hauled a few big pieces of rock to the debris removal crew. Nothing incriminating, nothing I needed to destroy. I had to do what I could to make sure next week’s team didn’t find anything useful down here, but I also needed Cifnek to see me doing actual work. Once he passed by again with an approving nod, I went back to where I had found that other fragment. It didn’t take me long to spot another carved bit. I tried not to look at this one too closely—it depicted Hades himself, and I’d had a couple too many close encounters with him to feel comfortable looking even a carved version of him in the eye. Divine power isn’t all pretty paintings and fuzzy feelings. Trust me, you don’t want to talk to a god in person if you can help it. Not unless you’re a Guardian, anyway. I turned the carved side away from me as I lifted it and—
Stopped where I was, because Gordon was walking up to me, eyes wide as he pointed to what I was holding.
“You found another one!” He poked the image of Hades directly in the gut. “Who’s this freaky-looking guy? You think he’s one of the aliens?”
Now, I’m hardly the most reverent person out there. My involvement with the gods begins and ends with my missions. But I believe in what Hades stands for—the cycle of life and death, endings and new beginnings, peace at the end of a life well-lived. And not being a dick to humanity just because you’ve got divine power—that part is kind of important too.
And like I said, I’ve talked to Hades a couple of times. They weren’t exactly high points in my life, but he did something good for me, that last time. Something he didn’t have to do.
As much as I liked to roll my eyes at people who talked about their god of choice in hushed tones and thanked them for everything from getting a good parking space to teaching them a life lesson by not getting them a good parking space, something about Gordon’s gesture just… wasn’t right.
I turned away, almost knocking him over with the chunk of wall. “I don’t have time for this.”
“What’s biting your balls?” Gordon muttered from behind me.
I looked over my shoulder as I walked away. He was still watching me. And as long as he was watching me, I couldn’t destroy this fragment, and if I couldn’t destroy it, I couldn’t do what I had come here to—
Who was I kidding? It didn’t matter how much of this stuff I managed to sabotage. There would still be enough left for the team to get a clear idea of the basics—a temple of an ancient Greek god, built only twenty years ago, hidden under a Manhattan cemetery. I had been kidding myself when I had thought getting this job might let me change that.
And it wasn’t as if anyone else was going to step in and fix this problem. It was up to me. Persephone’s people were on it too—and Ahti and Tridamos, two of the newer and more eager deities in Hades’s alliance, although they didn’t have the power to do much. But it was Hades’s temple, and Hades’s responsibility.
And I was the only Marked of Hades left.
Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. Supposedly there were two more out there, but they were both on the other side of the world and I had no idea how to contact either of them. So for all intents and purposes, it was just me. And I had nothing.
I hurled the piece of stone in my hands at a nearby rubble pile, this time out of frustration rather than any deliberate attempt at destruction. It didn’t shatter like the last one did—like I said, that takes effort. But it did split down the middle, leaving the image of Hades broken and ruined.
“Garwood! What do you think you’re doing?”
It took me a couple of seconds to figure out that he was talking to me. I hadn’t been able to get my old identity back—as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Mallory Keyne had been dead and buried for ten years—but I had recently gotten my hands on a new name, and a new life story to go with it. Cifnek knew me as Mallory Garwood, and that was who he was yelling for as he marched toward me with murder in his eyes. Or at least severance without pay.
“I see you doing something like that again, and you’re out. That piece of rock that you let slip out of your hands while you were daydreaming about your lunch break is worth more than ten of you.”
At least he hadn’t suspected that I had thrown it. Probably because it would have been impossible for a normal human.
“You can’t afford to get sloppy with this stuff. If the archaeologists aren’t happy, the film crew won’t be happy, and if the film crew isn’t happy the city won’t be happy, and if the city isn’t happy then we don’t get paid. Not that you’ll be getting paid at all if I catch you being that careless again.”
I opened my mouth to apologize, but before I could get that far, my phone started ringing, a cheap tinny sound that said “this phone is so old it shouldn’t even be working anymore.”
He scowled in the direction of my pocket. “Do you have a phone in there?”
I couldn’t exactly say no. Unfortunately, I also couldn’t claim I hadn’t known about the “no phones in the pit” rule, after the ten-minute lecture he had given about it on my first day. “I must have forgotten to take it out.”
