In the Underworld everyone wanted his piece of the
pie. Osiris. Hades. Pluto. Sutekh—the überlord of chaos
and malevolence. A slew of lesser gods, demigods and
genies that populated all major and minor religions. The
place was divied up all neat and tidy, the same way
Topworld crime syndicates marked territory in human
cities.
But alliances were fragile, the balance determined
by territorial and volatile creatures. Tip the scale just
a little and a 6,000-year-old ceasefire could be over.
54
SINS OF THE HEART
Last week, someone had decided to try to tip the
scale.
That someone had butchered a soul reaper.
Seemed like every Topworld grunt had the word
out trying to find out who and how, and Roxy was
certain that the Underworld was buzzing even more. Of
course, the only way to know that for sure was to visit,
and you only got to visit if you were dead.
Bottom line was that mortals didn’t get a free pass
to go below, and high-power gods and demigods
couldn’t come up. Only a handful of beings could
travel between Topworld and the Underworld.
She wasn’t one of them.
But soul reapers were. They could go back and forth
at will. Which was exactly why this whole assignment
didn’t sit quite right.
“If the reaper’s dead, then his soul’s gone to the
Underworld,” Roxy had pointed out to Calliope last
