“I need you to say you want to go to the underworld. That you accept the consequences as they are.” Merlin took a step toward me. I held my ground, drawing myself up higher.

“I want to go to the underworld, and I accept the consequences as they are. Whatever they are.”

He flicked a look at Remo. “If you’re going, hang on to her and don’t let go, or you’ll get separated in the fall.”

Remo stepped beside me and took both my hands in his. We stood like a bride and groom, Merlin as the priest beside us.

“Oh, isn’t this sweet,” Merlin muttered. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who saw the imagery.

I held Remo’s hands, thinking that this could be the last time that I’d get to do this. That I’d hold his hands while he willingly touched me.

I turned my back a little to Merlin, which meant I caught only a glimmer of movement, the flash of gold and silver, the sudden piercing pain in my chest. My heart stuttered, and the Drakaina in me tried to roar forward, tried to shift, but there was nothing to shift, no body left as I went to my knees.

That dirty rotten . . . bastard. He’d tricked me, and this time I knew there was no coming back. The feather stuck out the front of my chest, right through my heart. Monster killing monster, even now.

CHAPTER 15

Voices roared around me as the final breaths slipped from my body.

“It’s the only damn way, you fool, and if you aren’t holding on to her when she takes her last breath, you will be left behind.”

Remo snarled, and then he was holding me, kissing my face. “I am a fool. Alena, I am a fool.”

There were no words left in me. I wanted to lift my hand and touch his face, wanted to say good-bye properly. The other girl, the one he’d lost . . . had he held her as she died? No, that was silly thinking, she’d died in the sun. He’d not seen her, not held her. At least I’d be able to give him this closure.

Merlin bent over me, his face fading in and out of my sight. “Hades can send you back, intact. But that’s the only way. Time to show if you are really a monster with guts or not, Alena. Make me proud to say we’re related.”

I closed my eyes, and the world around me dissolved. I was falling through space, a scream on my lips and then erupting out of me as what felt like tree branches slapped at me as I tumbled through space. I opened my eyes as a skeleton reached out and smacked my face with its bony fingers. I jerked, trying to get away from it, from the weight hanging from my right hand.

“Alena, stop, you’re slipping!”

I twisted in midair to look down at Remo. He stared up at me. “They’re dead, just like us. You don’t have to fear them.”

I shivered, and then we seemed to pick up speed. “Hang on!” he shouted as he disappeared into a black watery abyss that swallowed him whole, and me right after with barely a splash.

I held my breath as the water sucked me down in a big gulp. The liquid squeezed through my mouth, like it was fighting to get into me even while I tried to keep it out. I tugged Remo upward, kicking hard to get to the surface. The foul water that crept between my clamped lips tasted like things I didn’t want to think about for fear I’d gag and open my mouth.

The seconds ticked past as I swam hard for the surface. How far down had we gone? As the need for air grew, the frantic desire to let go of Remo rose with it, so I could use both arms to propel myself upward.

No, I wasn’t going to let him go. Not if I had any say in it, and even if it meant sucking in some nasty, foul water, I would hang on to him. We were dead, right? So the water couldn’t hurt me, not really. I relaxed everything but my hold on Remo and let the water buoy me up. My lungs burned like an oven with an oil fire out of control, and I was a split second from opening my mouth when my head finally broke the surface. I gasped for air, and Remo broke through the black water beside me. He sucked in a big breath.

A few moments passed while we both composed ourselves, and a thought tumbled to the front of my brain. I stared at him. “I thought you didn’t need to breathe?”

He shook his head and slicked back his hair with his free hand, drops of greasy black water trailing down his face. “You and me both.”

Oh, that couldn’t bode well for the underworld if Remo’s powers were no longer the same as before. Was that what Merlin had meant about Remo not coming with me?

What if that applied to me too and I couldn’t shift? I already knew I had, like, zero venom left in me. I reached with my tongue to the roof of my mouth to feel my fangs. Nothing, they weren’t there. “My fangs are gone,” I said.

Remo made a face that told me he was checking. “Mine too.”

Yeah, that was all kinds of bad. What, then, were we just human?

I glanced around, finally taking in what I was looking at and, more importantly, what was looking back at me. We were in the center of a still lake, and we were at least a hundred feet away from the shoreline on either side of us. To the front and back of us, though, I couldn’t see the end of the water. The place made me think of Orpheus once more, of the way he stood on the dock looking out.

Maybe in his madness he’d gone to a place he remembered from the underworld. I shivered.

“Maybe this is the River Styx?” I said more to myself than to Remo, but he answered me anyway.

“It would be moving,” he said.

“Maybe not. I don’t think the rules apply down here,” I said. The River Styx was infamous in Greek mythology. I suspected we were in it, but that didn’t mean it had to follow the same rules as the rivers we knew from the land of the living.