“They’ll kill our friends,” I reminded him.
Lotus chuckled. “Listen to your little mate, because we care nothing for mortals. I can flick my fingers and make them disappear.”
“Gods have rules,” Connor said suddenly. “You don’t just get to create anarchy like this.”
Lotus laughed again, but it was darker. “The rules are kind of on a … hiatus, you could say. The council is deciding what path to take, and they’re distracted.”
“What about the mother of all?” Connor pushed. “You all know she will return, and you can’t stand against her. She stopped you last time … what’s to say she won’t do it again.”
Lotus scoffed. “She won’t. She has not been seen in ten thousand years. I’m pretty sure she drained herself completely to enact the spell over this land. She will never recover from that. Her worship is not strong enough these days. She all but killed herself to stop us.”
Basically, we were on our own.
Reaching down, I pulled a knife from my boot—I was no Girl Scout but I was prepared—and sliced it across my hand. I pressed that against the door, hoping Asher and Connor would follow.
Despite Connor arguing with Lotus just before, I still had the sneaking suspicion that there was a part of him that wanted to see what would happen with her plan. Lotus was his mother, after all, and he’d spent his entire life searching for her. Trying to free her.
To free Atlantis.
As he sliced his hand, I tried not to let those suspicions fester. I should be just as suspect about Asher, but I wasn’t, for many fucked-up reasons. Dude owned my heart, and I was hoping like hell my instincts couldn’t be that off.
When the three of us had our bloody hands pressed against the door—the two guys leaning over my ducked head—there was this moment when the world stopped. I was pretty sure I meant that literally, because everything froze and time had no meaning as the worlds realigned themselves. Earth was not the only world in this realm. There was Faerie, some demon purgatory, and now we were going to enter the underworld.
“Did you know that this entrance is called the Stairway to Hell?” Lotus said, and that was when I knew the pause in time was over. “It was rumored that most who enter do not return. The few who do speak of grotesque faces, hands grabbing at them, and a red splash of evil that coated their minds and turned them to mush.”
Was she for real?This was the worst timing for a story like that. We were literally standing in the damn stairway.
No one answered her, although I was pretty sure Sonaris made a rumbling pissed-off sound from the back of our group. Light spilled across the door and I yanked my hand back. Asher did the same, moving between me and the glow.
47
Now, if someone asked me to describe the doorway to the underworld, I probably would have mentioned fire and demons and maniacal laughter as a background soundtrack. The reality was far different from this. The door opened silently, and I could not tell where it went, but it seemed to slide into the wall and was gone.
Behind it was a long, very stark white hallway.
It was so white it was almost clinical. The only thing separating it from a hospital was the padded velvet material on the walls. “Swanky,” I said, half joking. It actually did look pretty fancy. “Looks like Draconis has been updating the décor.”
“Shut up, child,” Lotus snapped. “Draconis does not have that sort of power, not in this part of the underworld.”
“And this is where the Hellbringers are?” I asked, not really seeing god killers living here in the winner-of-OCD-overclean land.
“Yes,” Sonaris said. “And the Atlanteans.”
It was like the moment he said that, I could feel them——a collective energy that was somewhere in the underworld. My first instinct was to get to them; I needed to save my people. They had been damned because of the gods, because of me. I couldn’t live with that on my conscience.
“Let them move a little further in, then we make a break for it, back to the door,” Asher murmured. “We can lock them down here, since we’re the only ones that can access this realm.”
The moment he said that, though, more bodies crowded inside. Draconis, looking a little worse for wear, plus their other two god cronies. Galindra sailed in seconds later, gold sprinkling off her in wafts.
She looked mega pissed, and she was scarily scary.
“We’re trapped,” Connor said softly, and thankfully no one noticed us conspiring, too distracted by the newcomers. “Not to mention, I don’t think the doorway will stay locked this time. The mother of all did it, and we can’t replicate her power.”
There was so much I still didn’t understand. So. Freaking. Much. But that would be something to worry about tomorrow. Right now, I needed to get us out of here alive.
So, I did the only thing I could think of. Pushing past Lotus, I started sprinting along the long, white velvet hallway. It was so bright in here that my eyes ached, and I couldn’t see a single sign of what illuminated it. I was running in the opposite direction of the exit, but I had to get those gods moving away from there if we wanted to have a chance at escaping.
“Maddi!” Asher shouted, and I had zero doubts he would be right behind me.
