Memory Game (Hound of Hades Book 2), page 6
“I’ve got this,” I told her. “She’ll be okay.” I wished I could believe that myself.
With one last concerned look in Lissa’s direction, Kimmy walked out the door.
I fixed Lissa with my sternest look. “If you don’t wake up, I’m going to have to find some way to contact Hades, and you know how much I don’t want to do that. And he’ll refuse to tell me anything, because this is Guardian business, and then I will have scared myself into next week talking to a god for nothing. But I’ll do it anyway, because I don’t see any other options here, unless by some miracle you happen to wake up right now. So wake up!”
Lissa blinked. For the first time since I had walked in the door, she looked at me with something like real awareness.
I blinked too. I hadn’t actually expected that to work. “Are you back with us?”
Lissa’s brow wrinkled in a frown of confusion. “Mal? What are you doing home?”
I almost started laughing as relief washed over me. She was awake. She was talking. That meant that if the dead were using her for a gate, she would know—and she wasn’t panicking, which was a good sign.
I still had a chance to save her.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“My head hurts.” She tried to sit up, and winced. “Everything hurts.”
I gave her a peace sign. “How many fingers am I holding up.”
“Two.”
“Who’s the president?”
She looked up at me helplessly. “George Washington?”
I let that one slide. Some things could be better explained by having spent the past five years literally underground and by… well… being Lissa than by any kind of lasting head injury. “What happened?”
“At first it didn’t feel like anything. Maybe a tap on the shoulder—someone trying to get my attention.” She tapped her own shoulder to demonstrate. “Then I went cold all over for a second, and just when I realized something was wrong, all of a sudden it was like my head was going to burst. Like something else was in there, and it was trying to break out.” She looked down at her lap. “It’s starting, isn’t it? The dead are trying to come through.”
I wanted to tell her no, but she deserved more than that from me. “I can’t think of a better explanation.” Listening to her description, my stomach had grown heavier and heavier, until it weighed as much as those chunks of rubble in the old temple. Lissa was right. It was starting.
I asked her the question I knew I had to ask. “Did any of them make it through?”
Lissa shook her head. “I held them back. I could feel it in me—the place where they were trying to break out. It’s the same place I go when I talk to Hades. I was able to hold it closed until they gave up. That’s when I woke up and saw you.”
I let out a long, slow breath of relief.
“If this keeps happening…” Lissa twisted her hands together. “I don’t know how many times I’ll be able to hold them off. Or what it will do to me even if I can. I could feel my body giving out while they were trying to push through. Physical bodies aren’t meant for this kind of thing.” She looked up at me, her eyes close to panic. “I’m the only Guardian left, Mal. If this kills me, the temple won’t be able to hold together.”
Of course that was what she was worried about. Not the fact that dying meant not being alive anymore—never feeling the sun on your face, or getting squeezed so hard in a hug that you could practically feel your ribs bending, or tasting that perfect cheeseburger. But then, Lissa spent most of her time dealing with the underworld. The line between life and death was probably more than a little squishy to her by now.
“Can you avoid Hades’s realm for now?” I asked.
She gave me the look I deserved. “Not if you want Hades to have any power over the city.”
“So ask Hades for a solution. He told you how to create the new temple in the first place.”
Lissa shook her head. “Hades gives me instructions, and channels power through me, and we… commune. But it’s not like talking to a human. Taking in all that information, in that much detail, was almost too much for me—and that was when I hadn’t been doing everything by myself for a month. If I try something like that again right now, it will kill me.” Her normally timid voice echoed with rock-solid certainty. “Or burn me out. Either way, I won’t be any use to Hades anymore.”
I shuddered. Burnout is what happens when a Guardian channels too much of a god’s power at once, or for too long a time. It leaves them alive, for some definitions of alive, but there’s no one home anymore. It’s always sounded like a fate worse than death to me. One more reason to be glad I’m not a Guardian. All I need to worry about is a bullet to the head, and that can’t be much worse the second time around.
“What if you call up a Guardian of Osiris? There has to be one in Hades’s realm somewhere.” I was reaching now, I knew.
Lissa shook her head, wincing at the movement. “Even if they died in the city, Osiris would have traded them back to his realm.”
Right. I should have known that sounded too easy. I searched for another solution to offer, and came up empty. But we still had time to find something. At least I thought we did. “Do you know how long you have before something like this happens again?”
Lissa was quiet for a moment, her gaze unfocused as she used her inner senses to try to find an answer to the question. “There’s no way to tell,” she finally said. “But my guess is soon.”
“How soon?”
“The next couple of days.”
So in the next couple of days I had to both do that favor for Mnemosyne and find a cure for Lissa. No problem. I had fought off an army so Lissa could finish creating the new temple; I could do this.
At least that was what I was going to keep telling myself.
“I’ll get the information you need,” I told her. I didn’t let any of my doubt creep into my voice.
But even Lissa had enough common sense to see through me. “You can’t do it in time.”
“I will.”
“Mal…” She reached out and grabbed my hand. “I know what you’ll have to do if I can’t hold them back. I—”
I didn’t let her finish that sentence. Whether she was going to beg me to find another way or tell me it was okay and she understood, I didn’t want to hear it. “I’ll get the information,” I repeated. “I have an idea.”
And to my own surprise, I did.
Chapter 7
I knocked on the door, three hard-but-polite taps. When no one answered in the next five seconds, I banged on the fake wood like I was a vacuum-cleaner salesman with a quota to make. I glared at the new lock. If Bastian hadn’t replaced it, I could have been inside by now.
As I reached out to knock a third time—or maybe break the door down—it swung open. If Bastian was at all fazed by my impatience, he didn’t show it. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon,” he said mildly.
I pushed my way inside and closed the door behind me. “I need your help.”
“Is that all I get? No hello? No ‘How was your day?’”
I gave him my best death stare. And I’d been working for an underworld god for five years; I had some good ones. “This is serious.”
The teasing smile faded from his face. “What’s going on?”
He swept the papers off both kitchen chairs and took one, patting the other in invitation. I didn’t take it. “Does Humanity Ascendant have any information on Osiris? Specifically his recent history?”
“He lost control of the Midwest thirteen years ago when Tlaloc launched a surprise attack on his temple, right? One of our researchers was able to obtain a fair amount of information about that period, although most of it was secondhand.”
He made it sound so easy. But I had seen the room that housed Humanity Ascendant’s files on the various gods. It was bigger than my parents’ house, and trust me, that’s saying something. However they got their information, they had it down to an art form by now.
That file room had practically made me drool, when I first saw it. Control of that information would give any god enough of an advantage to take half the world before the other gods had time to blink. But right now, I would hand over the whole thing to Zeus if Bastian gave me this one scrap. “They had an issue with their temple about a year before he lost his territory. I need you to find out how they solved it.”
Bastian raised an eyebrow. “That’s very specific.”
I didn’t want to give away any more information on Hades’s vulnerabilities than I had to. Bastian had helped me save the temple, but he had done it because it had helped his cause as well as mine. His own interests had come first then, and they would come first now—any information I gave him would go right into one of those files for Humanity Ascendant to use against us later. But if I didn’t tell him, there might not be a later.
“It’s Lissa,” I said. “The dead are trying to use her as a way out of Hades’s realm. A Guardian of Osiris had this problem, and solved it, and I need to know how.”
Bastian’s posture changed subtly. I couldn’t have said exactly what shifted, whether it was something about the way he was holding himself or the set of his jaw or just the feel of the tension in the room, but this was no longer two friends/rivals/whatever-we-were chatting in his kitchen. Now he was a Humanity Ascendant researcher consulting with a Marked of Hades as he asked, “How much of a risk to the city does this present? How many spirits could potentially make it through, and what kind of damage could they do?”
“It depends on how soon I manage to shut the gate down.”
“Then you do have a way to shut it down.”
“Not an acceptable way.”
He waited.
“They can’t cross over to the mortal world if the Guardian they’re trying to use isn’t in the mortal world anymore. If I want to shut it down, I have to kill her.” I took a long breath. “Which is why I’m going to make sure it doesn’t get that far.”
“And this Guardian, the one in Chicago… he was the only Guardian left at that point, am I right? Just like Lissa.”
I gave an impatient nod. “I’m sure your files can tell you all that.”
“She’s under too much strain, trying to maintain the temple on her own. The dead are sensing weakness in her.”
“Again, I’m sure it’s in the files. Along with the information I need.”
“This solution you’re looking for won’t work by cutting her off from the underworld.” He had that faraway tone he got when he was thinking too fast for the rest of us to catch up. He turned to a blank page in the closest notebook and started drawing. “That means it has to work by strengthening her or the temple, allowing her to hold the temple by herself with no strain. Eliminating the weakness.”
“I don’t know why you’re asking me all this. You’re the one who plays with magic—you probably know more about how Guardians work than I do. If that’s how you say it works, then sure, that’s how it works.”
Bastian stared down at whatever he was drawing in the notebook. I leaned close enough to peer at the page, half-expecting him to be designing some solution of his own that I could take straight home to Lissa. But the page was filled with intricate squiggles that even I could tell were meaningless.
He focused on the page, not looking at me. Almost as if he were avoiding me.
“Can you do it or not?” Fear made my voice come out harsher than I meant it.
Finally, he set his pen down. “I want to help you.”
No one says “I want to help you” with that look on their face when they actually plan on helping you. “So then help me.”
“We worked together. That doesn’t make us allies.” He was still wearing that awful expression, that “please believe that I care about you even though I’m about to fuck you over” expression. “You’re asking me to strengthen a god. It may help the city against the immediate threat, but in the future, this strength will turn Hades’s temple into a threat of its own. How much less likely will Hades be to surrender when he knows a single Guardian can hold his temple alone if need be? And if this solution allows one Guardian to do the work of dozens, what happens when Hades has a full complement of Guardians again?”
I couldn’t believe this. “You told me how to fight your people when they tried to stop Lissa from creating the new temple. Now all of a sudden you can’t risk doing anything that would risk making Hades stronger?”
“You know why I did that. If the faction that destroyed the old temple had succeeded in taking the city for themselves, they would have put my people as well as yours in danger.”
The worst part was, I did know. Like I had known I shouldn’t let myself trust him. And yet some part of me must not have gotten the message, because here I was asking him to help save Lissa’s life, as if he had any reason to care whether she lived or died. She was just a Guardian of Hades, right? Just another willing slave of the gods. Just another enemy whose death would make things that much easier for him.
“If our positions were reversed—if it were someone from Humanity Ascendant in danger—you would ask me to do it.”
“I would,” said Bastian. “And I would expect you to refuse.”
I didn’t want to think about whether or not I would say no. I didn’t want to turn this into something where it all boiled down to the most logical move. Knight takes pawn. Marked kills Guardian. Humanity Ascendant gets to check off one more minor victory on the whiteboard in their compound.
“Without that information, she dies.”
“And I hate that it has to be that way.” The emotion in his voice was genuine, which somehow made it worse.
“You don’t hate it enough to save her.”
“I told you from the beginning that we weren’t on the same side.”
“And yet you still thought it was a good idea to ask me out on a date.” How much time had I wasted wondering if I should have taken him up on that invitation? Right now I couldn’t imagine why I had ever wanted to accept.
“If the dead do turn into a threat, I’ll direct as much of our strength as possible toward helping to contain it.”
“Great consolation prize. But that won’t help Lissa.”
Bastian looked down at the useless doodles in front of him. “How is she now?” he asked quietly.
“No. You don’t get to do that. You either care about her or you don’t.” I knew it wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever got to be that simple. I didn’t care.
“I hope she pulls through.”
“As long as it doesn’t make Hades any stronger,” I said bitterly. “And as long as you can say you had nothing to do with it.”
He let out a low sigh. I could hear the regret in it. But I didn’t care how much regret he felt if he wasn’t going to change his answer. “I’m sorry, Mal.”
“Fuck you.” I wouldn’t think about what I would do in his position. I wouldn’t think about the fact that a longtime friend of his had died in the attack on Hades’s temple, and that if I could go back and save that person I’d make his death as painful as possible instead. I didn’t care about any of that. After everything I had done to save her life, Lissa was going to die, and I would be the one to kill her.
He stood and took a step toward me, I assume because he had a death wish. “I had hoped we would never encounter this sort of problem. That our interests would always align. I knew better, but I still hoped.”
So had I. And right now I hated myself for it. “Our interests still align in all the ways that matter.” I gave the words a bitter edge. “I’ll help you with the temple issue—you don’t need to worry about that. Mnemosyne is handling it, assuming this mission goes—”
I stopped midsentence. Bastian had gone stiff, his foot half-lifted as he prepared to take another step, his mouth frozen into a cold line.
Slowly, he set his foot down. “Mnemosyne.” I had never heard someone pack that much hatred into one word before. Or heard anyone talk about Mnemosyne with that much emotion behind it.
“You know her?” I asked, startled out of my anger by his bizarre reaction.
“We have a history,” he said shortly.
“Wait.” The pieces were starting to come together in my mind, except it looked like someone had mixed two puzzles into the same box, because what I was seeing didn’t make any sense. “The god you have a connection with is Mnemosyne?” How? And more importantly, why?
“No.”
I waited for the rest. It didn’t come.
“What business do you have with Mnemosyne?” he asked instead. He said her name in the tone most people reserve for serial killers and politicians.
“I’m doing her a favor in exchange for her altering the memories of any civilians connected with the old temple,” I said. “With any luck, in a couple of days we won’t need to worry about the ruins anymore.”
Bastian waited so long to respond that I thought maybe he hadn’t understood. I was about to explain it to him again when he spoke. “I’ll get you the information you need.”
“About Osiris?” I had to make sure we were both talking about the same thing, because if there was a path that led from Mnemosyne to a complete reversal of Bastian’s position, I didn’t see it.
Bastian nodded. “On one condition. You get me into Mnemosyne’s temple.”
I needed that information. Lissa needed that information. And some god with a sick sense of humor had to be in charge of this conversation right now, because I couldn’t accept. “No. I can’t help you work against another god.” Even if she couldn’t be trusted. Even if I kind of wished I would see that Marked of hers again just so I could give her the punch in the face she so desperately needed. Even if the fluidity of the gods’ alliances and rivalries meant she and Hades might be at each other’s throats in a year, or five years, or ten.
