And slowly, carefully, they made their way up, up, up – the air grew more and more comfortable, the smell of Harpy grew faint, the Underworld seemed a great distance behind them-and finally, eventually, Charlotte saw the light reflecting off a cool metallic wall. The door.
"We're here!" Charlotte breathed.
Zee sucked in his breath. "Think Hades left it unlocked?"
"Hope so," Charlotte said. "He promised."
Mr. Metos let out a small snort. But Charlotte reached out, grabbed the nondescript knob, and turned. The door opened.
Light. So much light. Charlotte, Zee, and Mr. Metos fell back a little into the tunnel, their eyes burning. "Great," Charlotte said, "I'm a bat."
But slowly, gradually, they moved out of the tunnel, through the door, and into the world.
It was the same. The corridor was the same. The world was the same. The Mall was open-daylight streamed in from everywhere. At the end of the long, nondescript corridor Charlotte saw a pair of women pass by, and then another, and then another. They were all older women, wearing tracksuits and sneakers.
"Mall walkers!" whispered Charlotte.
"What?" asked Zee and Mr. Metos simultaneously. "Never mind," said Charlotte.
It was morning in the Upperworld. Early. There was no telling how long they had been gone. They moved into the corridor, slowly adjusting to the light, while giddy mall walkers trotted past them.
Behind them the shadows came through the door. Only a fourth of the number that had come up with them emerged-the others had gone through other doors elsewhere. Except they were all the same door. Or something like that; it didn't matter. The shadows would find their way.
And then suddenly the group of shadows took off, and great black flashes moved through the air and were gone before anyone could blink.
"There goes your army," Charlotte whispered to Zee.
"I'll live," Zee grinned. It was a beautiful grin that stretched all the way to his ears, revealing straight white teeth. It was the sort of grin that made you want to grin too.
If the mall walkers noticed the bleeding man supported by two sooty, filthy kids and one ratty-looking cat with a tuxedo-pants sling heading for the doors, they didn't say. Perhaps their minds were on other things. Perhaps they were concentrating hard on their mall walking. Perhaps they saw groups like that all the time in the Mall. We can never know. All we know is Charlotte, Zee, and Mr. Metos stepped outside the great glass automatic Mall doors, surveyed the mostly empty parking lots, the great tangle of roads and freeway exits, the cars honking and buzzing by, and together took a great breath in, savoring the air. Charlotte had never taken such a beautiful breath.
"My car is here," Mr. Metos said. "I'll drive you home. Then I'm going to take a nice long nap and wait for my liver to regenerate."
Home, Charlotte thought. Then something occurred to her. She gasped and turned to Zee, panic in her eyes.
"What are we going to tell Mom and Dad?" she whispered urgently.
Zee shook his head and grinned again. "I'm sure you'll think of something."
EPILOGUE
THE PASSAGE INTO DEATH WAS SO SIMPLE, LIKE THE end of a breath. All Grandmother Winter knew was that at one moment her body and her soul were intertwined, and the next they were not. The body became a shell, no longer a part of Dalitso Winter.
Interesting, she thought.
She could no longer see, really, or hear-not in the way we always think of seeing and hearing. Her eyes and her ears were dead, gone, but she found she still knew everything about the room-Zachary's head was bowed by her side, with tears running down his cheeks; her daughter was leaning in to wrap her arms around her body; her son-in-law reached in to embrace the whole family. Grandmother Winter was aware of everything-the strange, sharp smell of the air, the cotton sheets about her body, the taste of lemons in the room, and her beloved family, so close and impossibly far away.
She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And she did love them so very much.
And Zachary. The taste of her last premonition would not leave her. Something was going to happen to her boy, something terrible. There was evil in the world, and it was going to come for him. She could not protect him, she could not warn him-she had not had the breath left. She could not say, "Find this man, he will help you"; all she could say, with her dying breath, was, "Metos," and hope that someday he would understand.
And now she was leaving them. For there was a presence beside her, something decidedly not human, something tall and thin and Immortal, and she could feel herself being drawn to him. He reached into her body-the shell that contained her-grabbed her soul and began to pull.
Like that, Grandmother Winter was out of her body, floating in the air, led by a messenger with winged feet. She scarcely had time to look about the room for one more glimpse of her family, her grandson, before he pulled her off. But she would be back. She had promised her grandson that she would be back, and Grandmother Winter always kept her promises.
Through the house the Messenger led her, out the door, and down the street. The world sped past. It was all wrong somehow, the light, the noise, the air. She did not belong here anymore.
She was a little surprised when they went into the bowling alley, but she didn't ask questions because the Messenger clearly wasn't answering them. They traveled through the bar, past the bowling lanes, through a wall, into a storage room filled with cracked bowling pins, and then through a nondescript door that read, NO ADMITTANCE.
Down they went, through wetness, through blackness, through coldness. It made Grandmother Winter slightly nervous, of course, that they were heading downward, but it did not seem prudent to panic.
And then suddenly there was light again. Well, not light exactly. But not darkness, either. They emerged from the tunnel and before her was grayness, a great, flickering grayness, like a fog lit by fire. The world was made of rock- a deep red rock that looked like nothing on Earth, craggy and cliffy and endless. They flew over a great expanse of rocky plain, and then the Messenger began to slow.
Below her was a great strip of light spreading out before the snakelike form of a river, which appeared to be steaming. No, not a strip of light, but rather lights, hundreds of lights. Bodies of light. Ah, she realized, they were the Dead. She was the Dead. They were all the same.
The Messenger dropped her off at the end of the line, slipped her a small coin, and flew off.
And there she stayed.
She was standing next to a form like hers, a creature of death and light, and behind her was the rocky terrain they had just come over. She could not see what lay ahead.
The being next to her spoke. "Hello. Long line, huh?"
Well, no, he hadn't spoken, not really, but his words appeared in her head. And she found, too, that she could not talk, per se, but she could project words to him.
"Quite," she agreed. "What is this place?"
"Greek Underworld," he shrugged. "Who knew?"
"Hmm," said Grandmother Winter. That was a surprise. "What are we waiting for?"
"To cross the Styx," he said.
"And what happens after that?"
"I don't know…"
This did not seem the time for further questions. She would wait, she would cross, and then she would set about getting back to her grandson.
She spent her first weeks in the Underworld learning about the way of things. The best way to do that was to be quiet and listen, and that's what she did. She learned about the Immortals and the Dead; she learned about the City and the Plains, about Hades and his Administration, about the absent Queen. She learned there were the official rules and then the way things were really done. And that, of course, was what she was most interested in.