Page 79 of As Darkness Fall
“Demons,” Fred replied quietly. “Different types.”
“What were they fighting?”
“Each other, by the looks of it,” Aaron said as the ferry bumped hard against the bodies in the water, pushing its way through with more force than the single pole the ferryman had could ever generate.
“Wait a minute,” I said nervously. “Are you telling me that the demons were defending hell from invaders?”
“It looks that way,” Aaron agreed.
I inched closer to Vir.
“This is bad, guys,” I said. “Really bad, isn’t it? What the hell is going on in…hell?”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Nobody corrected me on my language. Not now. We stood in silence. Nobody had an answer for me, which wasn’t surprising, but even if they did, the scene in front of us would have outweighed any words. I’d never seen anything like it, not outside of a movie. There were so many bodies. None of them moving.
The boat slowly pushed through the bodies, until at long last, it ran aground on the sandy shores of the far banks of the River Styx. For a long time, none of us moved. We just stared in shocked silence. Trying to process what we were seeing.
Someone had tried to invade hell. Well, not the capital-H hell, but the Underworld. One version of hell. A place that the dead wished they would avoid and these people had tried to force their way into. It made no sense.Whywould anyone want to come here of their own free will? And who were they? It was such an eclectic collection of soldiers, gathered from across thousands of years of human history. There was no link here; there couldn’t possibly be one.
Behind me, the sound of cloth rustling caught my attention. I spun around with the rest of the group, all of us nervous and on edge, weapons ready. The ferryman had moved. He was lifting a single hand from the pole. A long gnarled, gray digit slid from beneath his thick black robes. He pointed past us. Deeper into the Underworld.
“I think he wants us to get off the ride,” I whispered.
“Charon’s work never ends,” Fred agreed, and to my surprise, led the way without orders, dropping from the side of the boat.
He pushed some of the corpses floating in the water away from the boat, creating room for the rest of us. Vir went next, dropping gently, his massive wolf head swinging left and right as he surveyed the area.
“Clear,” he announced, turning back to me, lifting a hand to help me down.
I frowned down at him. “I’m not made of glass,” I rumbled, leaping down into the water, knees bending slightly to absorb the impact.
“That you are not,” Vir agreed. “But, then, that’s not why I offered.”
He didn’t elaborate, much to my frustration. Instead, he turned and led the way through the last foot or so of water to the sandy beach. The red was more intense on this side of the fog bank. Everything was closer to crimson, the bright red of fresh blood. Even the sky seemed to glow with it.
“Who do we think won?” I asked as we carefully picked our way along the shore, walking single file to disturb the fewest amount of corpses.
We might be in the land of the dead, where corpses weren’t really corpses, but I didn’t particularly feel like disturbing any of them either. It just felt wrong.
“I don’t know,” Vir answered. “The numbers look about even. Could be that nobody won, and everybody died.”
I chewed on that for a few moments. “What happens if you die…when you’re already dead? How does that work?”
“You cease to exist,” Fred rumbled. “Your soul is destroyed.”
“Oh,” I said in a tiny voice. “That’s, um, inconvenient.”
Fred snorted. “Yeah. That’s one way of putting it. So don’t die.”
“Working on it,” I said, unease creeping deep into my core as we threaded our way up the beach. “Really working on it.”
“Are you okay?” Aaron asked, turning his head to look at me.
As he did, his foot missed the next step, and he stumbled over the corpse of a warrior straight out of a Greek epic. Round shield, leather whatever-you-call-it that shields the upper thighs like a skirt. Bracers on the legs, spear in hand, he even had a red cloak.
“Easy,” I said, grabbing Aaron before he could fall.
