River of Shadows (Underworld Gods #1)

“You get any big storms here?” I whisper to her as she looks around. Whispering seems appropriate in this place.

Her expressive face looks incredulous. “Yes. Depending on Death’s mood.”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t know his moods control the weather in Tuonela?” she asks so solemnly that I feel like a real idiot.

I decide to embrace my mortal idiot status. “I did not. In fact, I don’t know much.”

She looks me up and down with those innocent eyes. “I can see that,” she says, but it’s hard to take offense. She starts walking again and I’m right behind her, the dead forest giving me the creeps.

“That’s why it’s always cloudy,” she goes on. “Because he’s always in a foul mood. The only time the sky clears is when he’s either happy, which is never, when he’s drunk, which is sometimes, or when he’s asleep. Hence why you can usually see the moon and stars and planets at night. There are a few times each year where we’ll get a few days of sunshine and clear nights in a row, but my father says that’s when Death is on a bender. I believe that’s a mortal term that means drinking alcohol for too many days in a row and acting foolish.”

“Sounds lovely,” I mumble.

“Who? Death or my father?”

“I was being sarcastic,” I quickly point out. “About Death. I’m sure your father truly is a lovely man. Um, I mean God.”

She shoots me a charming smile over her shoulder. “Thank you. He is. And your father must be too, if you’re going after him. I would do the same.” She pauses. “And Death, well, everyone has an opinion about him. He does rule this land after all, and the other Gods don’t always agree with him. But I think he’s just misunderstood.”

My brows go up. “You think Death is misunderstood?”

She nods. “Yes. He’s just doing his job. And to hear my father talk about it, things were much worse here before Death came along. People had died, of course, but there was no proper afterlife. They called it Kaaos. There was no justice, no rhyme or reason to anything, just pain.” She shivers, her red hair rippling down her back. “The Old Gods just wanted the mortals to suffer.”

Telly suddenly stops and I nearly run into her back. She slowly holds her finger to her lips and holds still. I do the same, trying not to breathe, listening.

Then I hear it.

In the distance, behind the charred trees, is a sound that can only be described as both giggling and snarling. Gurgling, maybe, but with sinister tones. Either way it makes every single hair on my body stand on end, my bones vibrating with uneasiness.

“Hiisi,” Telly says in a low voice. Then she raises her chin and yells into the forest, “Come out, come out, I know you’re there. I have a mortal under my protection, so there’s no use trying anything.”

The gurgling noise gets high-pitched and at any moment I expect Gollum to come out from behind the cedars.

Instead, a small sickly green creature with large black eyes, no nose, and a line of teeth comes crawling out on all fours, ram-like horns curling back from a bald head. So it’s not Gollum, but it’s pretty damn close. For a brief moment I’m wondering if Tolkien actually did stumble upon Tuonela at some point, but then the creature hisses at us and my mind goes blank with fear.

“I’m Goddess of the Forest,” Telly says to me, not taking her eyes off the creature. “But this is the Hiisi, and this part of the forest is allotted to them. I don’t interfere with their games and torture, and they leave my family alone. They know we can take it all back from them at any moment.”

The Hiisi thing lets out a snarl and comes bounding toward us, only to stop a few feet away. At this close distance, it’s a lot more disgusting than I originally thought, with its skin peeling away in slices like the cedar trunks, black fungus collecting on its long fingers and toes, and a row of branches poking out of its spine. Gooey centipedes slither from its ears to its mouth to its eyes and then back again and it takes everything in me not to vomit up the corned beef from last night.

Telly doesn’t seem bothered. She crosses her arms. “We shall be out of your way in a moment, if only you’d tell us if you’ve seen a mortal. A shaman, to be more precise.”

The Hiisi opens its mouth and big, thick black flies come crawling out, taking flight and coming right for us.

Before I can both scream and run, Telly puts her palm out flat and the flies land in it. Then she makes a fist over them and opens her palm and tiny little glowing pink dragonflies fly off into the sky, having been transformed.

“Well?” Telly asks, impatiently.

The Hiisi snarls something else, saliva going everywhere, then eventually nods its gruesome head in the direction we were walking.

“I see,” Telly says gravely. She eyes me with trepidation. “The Hiisi says that Rasmus went that way.”

“Was he alone?” I ask.

Telly looks back to the Hiisi but it just shakes its head before turning its back to us and scampering away into the forest.

“Come on, we better hurry if we want to save your friend.”

We keep walking. Along the way there are groves of roses where metallic gold bees swarm, sweet-water marshes where silver loons dive for sparkling fish, white deer with their fawns resting in meadows of roses, and large black owls swooping above the willows, but for all the fantastical, beautiful sights, all I can think about is getting Rasmus back. I can’t rescue my father without him. I don’t know the way to Shadow’s End, I don’t know what will kill you here and what won’t. I like Telly a lot, but I don’t know how loyal she is, or if she can even leave the forest.

I’m pondering all of this in a flurry of agonizing thoughts, the grip on my sword growing tighter and tighter, when suddenly the forest begins to open up. The green fades to brown, the leaves are dying on the branches and in front of us appears a long flat desert beneath an oppressively low cloud-covered sky. All is silent except for a chilling wail that sounds from the distance. It’s both human and not, and I’m pretty sure it’s not Rasmus.

Telly and I come to a stop by a few fallen willows, their leaves dead, the water gone long ago. Beyond this point there is nothing.

“Where are we now?” I ask her.

“The Liekki? Plains,” she says. “And as far as I will go.”

I knew this was coming. “You can’t leave the forest?”

“I can,” she says slowly. “But I don’t think it’s wise. I would be no use in this situation. You’re the one that they want, the one they’ve been waiting for.”

I blink at her. “The one that who’s been waiting for?”

She points out at the desert. “Death.”

I stare again. It’s so dry and desolate out there that I can’t imagine a single living thing ever setting foot on it, and the way that the sun glows through the mist, creating a land of orange haze, is strangely disturbing. Seems a place that death would lurk at every corner, literally and figuratively.

But then the mist starts to clear a little, as if helping with a dramatic entrance, and I can see shadowy figures emerging from the orange haze, three men on horseback and one man on foot.