I tucked Quoth’s limp body into the crook of my arm, tightened my grip on the wine bottle, and dove in after it.
Chapter Thirty
Freezing water enveloped me. The shock of it drove the air from my lungs. Pain surged across my temples as a migraine took firm hold. I opened my eyes, but it was pointless – green and orange squiggled in my vision, the last vestiges of my overstimulated retinas. I couldn’t see the way.
But I had no need of eyes down here. The invisible thread wound around my heart dragged me under. My foot brushed the wooden steps. My lungs burned, and I scrambled for the surface, desperate for a gulp of air. A current from somewhere unknown dragged me down, down, down, deeper than the seven feet of the cellar. So deep that I knew I had no hope of finding the surface again.
My fingers clawed for purchase, scraping along the stone walls but not able to find a grip. I slid away as my lungs squeezed and burned and froze. I had no feeling left in my body, the only sensation the cold clawing at my lungs and Quoth’s feathers tickling my skin.
Through the haze, I caught a glimpse of something. A light, maybe? A shape, so impossibly far away that I thought I imagined it. It was the last flood of oxygen to my brain giving me a hallucination of Morrie in the rectangle of light at the open cellar doorway, reaching his hand out toward me.
Then everything went black.
Chapter Thirty-One
My eyes fluttered open.
It made no difference whatsoever. I couldn’t see a bloody thing.
I heard water lapping nearby, and a sound that might’ve been distant thunder. I sat up, running my fingers over the surfaces around me, trying to get a sense of where I was. Sand trickled through my fingers, and my sodden clothes clung to my body.
My head pounded with pain as my eyes sought a single speck of light, some visual clue, but it was too dark. It was darker than dark.
Am I dead? Did I swim through a hole into the center of the world?
I cradled Quoth’s limp body to my chest, stroking his feathers, whispering all the things I wished I’d been able to tell him before he was lost to me.
The faintest wheeze escaped his nostrils, and a shuddering movement racked his chest. He was alive, but not for long. I brought his tiny body to my face and laid a kiss on his head.
“I wish…I wish I had a way to save you.”
I jumped as light burned across the horizon. A fire blazed on some far distant plane, not close enough to give off any heat, but the light – my eyes burned with the joy of it, to have finally some spark of brightness in the gloom.
A lone figure stood on the plains, silhouetted against the burning sky. He wore a flowing cloak made of midnight.
“Yo.” He waved at me. But he was still too far away and too cast in shadows for me to make out.
“I’m sorry,” I called back. “I need you to step closer. I can’t see in the shadows any longer.”
“Forgive me, Mina.” The figure stepped forward. In that single step he crossed hundreds of meters so that he appeared only a few feet in front of me in blazing, beautiful detail. He was a handsome, middle-aged man with wavy hair past his shoulders, a prominent nose, a strange outfit beneath the cloak including a brown doublet and little wool cap encircled by a wreath of laurel branches, and a kind, sad smile.
“Hades?” I waved. “Hi. I guess this means I’m dead? I’m—”
“An excellent guess, Mina. But no.” The man removed the wreath and placed it on my head. “And I’m not Hades. I’m Dante Alighieri.”
“The poet who wroteInferno?” I asked, confused.
“AndPurgatory. AndParadise. But I accept those poems weren’t nearly as much fun.” He bowed. “I know who you are, Mina Wilde. You’re the daughter of my friend, Homer. Welcome to my humble abode. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“You…have?” This was not the conversation I expected to have in the afterlife.
Dante laughed. “Your dad and me, we’re old drinking buddies. All the poets hang out together in the afterlife. No one else wants to talk to us. Homer doesn’t shut up about you, but at least you’re an interesting topic of conversation. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is keeping pace with Robert Burns. That man will drink even Lord Byron under the table, and it’s impossible to understand a word he says.”
I glanced around at the barren expanse. “Do you run the afterlife, then? It feels like I’m inside one of your poems.”
“Babe, I don’t just run the joint, Icreatedit. Your father helped with a few minor details. Like the rivers. He loves himself some rivers, does Homer. It’s probably a hangup from that whole ‘my mother’s a water-nymph who was ravished by Meles’ thing. But I came up with everything else. You should see the fields of torment – some really top-notch stuff.” Dante beat his chest proudly.
“Um, maybe some other time. I guess I don’t really understand why I’m here.HowI’m here. Am I dead?”
