Ceridwen raced to Eve’s side, fingers sketching the air, and Conan Doyle felt the superheated air drop eighty degrees in an instant. The flames that had momentarily touched Eve’s flesh were snuffed and frost formed on her charred skin and scorched hair.
Danny tensed to spring, but Conan Doyle gestured for him to stay back. The demon obeyed, but with obvious reluctance.
Sweetblood smiled at Conan Doyle. "That’s right, Arthur. Call your pets to heel. As for it being enough, I concur. We’ve all gotten what we wanted. Or, at least, what we needed."
His gaze shifted and Conan Doyle glanced over to see what had drawn Sanguedolce’s attention. It was Gull, who sat on the stone floor of the cavern with a glass vial of blood held up in his fingers, staring at it as though it were the world’s largest diamond and he could study its facets.
Eve wasn’t so easily distracted. Her skin would heal, but she would still feel the pain. Enough so that she abandoned the colloquial jargon that was so much a part of her modern persona. "Hear me, o’ man," she snarled, baring fangs that gleamed in counterpoint to the blackness of her charred flesh. "There shall be a reckoning."
Sweetblood sneered. "Oh, yes. But you won’t even be on the battlefield by then, dear one. This is so far above you — "
"Shut the fuck up."
The words came from Danny, but it was clear from his tone that they were spoken not in anger, but in fear. All eyes turned to him. The demon boy had walked deeper into the tunnel, just past the place where the Forge of Hephaestus sat, burning. Now Danny turned to take them all in with a glance, his yellow eyes wide.
"Do you hear that?"
Conan Doyle narrowed his gaze, peering down into the tunnel. He could see nothing save the same orange glow that had greeted them upon their arrival here. But Eve had left off her rage at Lorenzo and she stepped past him to join Danny.
"Screaming," she said, her voice low. Then she turned toward Conan Doyle. "The ghosts are coming. The dead gods, the ones that are nothing but spirit now, they’re coming after us."
Behind him, Nigel Gull laughed. "Or perhaps they simply want out."
Conan Doyle swore under his breath. If the dead gods escaped the Underworld, there would be catastrophe and slaughter. The specters were bad enough, but he suspected that they would not come alone.
The Underworld was another realm, a twist of the fabric of reality away from the world of Conan Doyle’s birth. A barrier existed between dimensions, as it always did, but magick could open a portal or build a bridge. The portal between the Underworld and his own world was represented physically by two enormous stone doors, or gates.
He turned toward them now, glancing up at their height. "We’ve got to get them open. Now."
"No more voice of Orpheus," Danny muttered.
"We’ve wasted time," Conan Doyle snapped, glaring at Sanguedolce. "Come, Lorenzo. The gates must be opened, and then closed again once we are on the other side."
The cave floor trembled slightly beneath their feet. The distant wailing of anguished spirits came along the tunnel, audible at last to the rest of them, and growing louder by the moment. Sanguedolce turned and caressed the Forge of Hephaestus.
"Damn it, man! You didn’t come in here without an exit plan!"
The ground shook so violently that Conan Doyle staggered backward. Ceridwen steadied him and then leaned on him herself. The cave split, a crack splintering across the floor and widening moment by moment, each time with a sound not unlike the profound snapping that came up from deep ice melting.
Conan Doyle glanced down the tunnel again. Nothing was in sight yet, not monsters or resurrected gods, but it was a matter of moments, he knew.
"Come on!" Danny snarled.
Eve held on to him.
Sweetblood shrugged. "My magick could free us. That was my plan. But there is a faster way." He pointed at Ceridwen. In the gloom of the cave her own slim, angular features seemed almost ghostly. "She is tied to the elements, to nature. The gates are of this world, and of that. All she must do is commune with the elements of our own realm, and the doors will open for her."
Conan Doyle nodded, then spun on Ceridwen. "Go. Do it."
She shook her head, confused. The cave shook harder, debris and dust falling down from the roof above them. "I don’t know if… I’ve had to adjust to the nature of this place. I am not certain if — "
Nigel Gull choked his hoarse laughter again.
Eve rushed across to Ceridwen, grabbed her arm and propelled her the last few feet to the massive crack that went up toward the roof showing the seam between the doors. "Just fucking do it. No time for doubts, princess. Get us out of here."
The ground shook again and Eve went to her knees. Ceridwen braced herself against the stone gates, her hands on either side of the seam. Conan Doyle held his breath as he watched her trembling not from outside stimuli, but from within. Her eyes lit up with a familiar blue glow, and they began to change color. Green and fiery red and white-gray and at last, night-black.
Black mist leaked from the edges of her eyes. Purple-black energy began to glow around her hands, spreading up her arms. It was tainted magick, the same hideous shade as he had seen Gull wield from time to time, but this was the base elemental nature of this place. Ceridwen was in tune with it, sharing her nature with it.
She screamed in anguish and disgust and threw her head back, her eyes oily black, her mouth gaping open. The gates in front of her began to glow with that bruise-black energy.
"Ceri!" Conan Doyle shouted. He ran at her, reaching for her.
His wrist was caught in an iron grip and he spun, raising his free hand to attack, a spell coming to his lips. Then he saw that it was Danny who had grabbed him.
"We’ve got to get outta here and get the door closed from the other side," the boy said. "You know that. Maybe you should focus on keeping us alive in the meantime."
His fangs were longer, now, and the horns had grown during their time in the Underworld. Danny looked more the demon than ever, and yet in his voice he was still the boy, unsure of himself, trying his best to face up to the horrors that he had thrown himself into, to the truth of who and what he was. Conan Doyle had let his emotions interfere with rational thought for a moment, and he was ashamed of himself.
Ceridwen screamed again, but he turned his back on her.
"Come, then. Let’s buy her the time she needs."
With a crash, the ground shook again. Sweetblood stood beside the Forge, his entire body engulfed in a crimson flame, staring back along the tunnel. Eve grabbed Gull by his jacket and hauled him to his feet.
"Get up, asshole. We might need you."
Conan Doyle stood beside Danny and while Ceridwen was busy trying to get them out, the five of them rode the cracking, undulating stone floor of the cave and waited for the hordes of resurrected myths to attack. The shrieks of disembodied gods grew louder, whipping with the wind through the tunnel, and Conan Doyle narrowed his eyes as he realized that they weren’t just voices anymore.
He could see them.
Like heat distortion above the blacktop on a July day, they obscured the view of the far end of the tunnel, where it turned to the left and downward. The spirits had just appeared but they were swift, streaking toward the gates with malicious momentum. From this distance and in the gloom he could not make them out as distinct from one another. Instead they were a wave of spectral hatred, flowing upward.
The tunnel shook again. Debris showered down from above. A shard of rock struck Conan Doyle on his left cheek and cut him. He hissed with pain and put a hand to his face, glanced down a moment to see the blood on his hand, and only when he had looked up did he see the shadow that had begun to obscure the orange glow at the far end of the tunnel. A massive, skeletal hand and a battle-axe. The shadow moved and in a moment had blocked all light from that direction.