Page 9 of Taking Orders in the Underworld

“Hello, mother.”

Nyx, Goddess of Night, appeared before Nika in her traditional black robes, while the dark mist surrounding her settled as a crown on her head and wings at her back.

The angel of the night. That’s what Nika’s father, Erebus – his title that of literal darkness – called her mother. But there was a reason other creatures in the realm feared the things that happened at night. Her mother could beunforgiving.

That was one of Nika’s most vivid memories as a young spirit, her mother cursing at her older siblings for not doing their duties, for shirking them off, for not being a good reflection on her. Nika had more siblings than she knew what to do with. Luckily, most were off living their own lives, for their mother had tasked them all withsomethingto do. To be a child of Nyx was to be born with an immediate responsibility. Your life was not your own, but to be given in service for the good of the realms.

Nika had always gotten the impression that to do something other than your chosen task was to spit on the gift of life their mother – primordial that she was – had given them.

She had been the last Arae Nyx had birthed herself.

After the disappointment Nika had become, the Eriynes – like her aunty, Tisiphone – had been tasked with birthing future curse children. Apparently, Nyx did not want that burden any more.

“My child, you return.” Nyx opened her arms wide, the shadows of the night parting to make way for Nika to step into her mother’s embrace.

Unnerved at the show of affection, Nika stepped tentatively forward, her arms remaining at her sides, as Nyx’s shadows enveloped her. Her mother kissed her temple and sniffed her hair, then pulled back, a pinched look on her face.

“You smell like fire.”

“Well, I did have to walk through Phlegethon to get here.”

“Come, let us return home together. You can bathe. I have some of Hecate’s tinctures that will take that foul-smelling river right out.”

That was how Nika came to find herself in her old bedroom, one plush charcoal towel wrapped around her body, the other wrapped around her hair like a turban. She sat on the edge of her old bed and stared at the stone walls that had been replastered over – the carvings of days Nika had left behind in her childhood smoothed away. She had scratched in a line every day she had to wait until Nyx had deemed her ‘old enough’ to wander around the Underworld unsupervised during the sunlight hours. It had caused Nika’s now long nails to turn to stubs, her fingers a bleeding mess, to carve in all those lines day in and day out … but it had kept her sane.

She’d escaped to Asphodel Meadows the first chance she got.

Sighing, Nika rolled back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. She had forgotten this familiar weight that sat on her chest, the heaviness of expectation and disappointment that she was not the dutiful daughter Nyx had wanted.

She was not enthusiastic.

She was not proactive.

She was not what she should be.

Never words her mother had said to her, of course. Not faults that Nikaowned, in fact. For she was all of those things – it was just that she was all those things for a profession that was considereddistastefulto her family.

Ironic, really, given that everyone had to eat.

Now, she felt that disappointment shroud her once again.

“Nika! Supper!” her mother called.

She wasn’t even hungry.

“Coming.”

Sighing, Nika rolled back up to a seated position on the bed.

“I said, supper! Now, young lady!” came the screeched reply.

“I said I’m coming!” she screamed back. Punctuality was important in this house. As if Nika could forget.

Quickly dressing and combing out her towel-dried hair, Nika walked down the turret that led to the main dining hall, in the palace that her father had built for her mother, as legend had it, when Tartarus was formed in the rock. She found both of them waiting for her at the long dining table. It was a piece of polished rock that looked like it erupted from the floor itself, another thing Erebus had done for Nyx as a sign of his devotion.

Even the way he looked at her now, like he would do anything for her, made something in Nika’s chest curl uncomfortably tight.

“Is no one else in the family joining us for supper?”

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