River of Shadows (Underworld Gods #1)

Tears automatically stream down my face as I stare down at my father’s lifeless body. It’s him, it’s really him. From his white beard, to his hooked nose which he always used to call his beak, to the stubborn crease between his white brows, like he’s frowning his way through death…

“Papa,” I say again, the word coming out raw and broken and I feel like the grief I thought I knew, the grief I thought I was making friends with, that was setting like cement, has changed once again. It’s deeper now, potent, and ripping my soul apart into tiny little pieces that will never come back together.

I want to touch him but I’m afraid he’ll be cold, that he won’t feel like him. I lean over his face, trying to memorize the details. It had been so long since I’d seen him and yet he looks the exact same. Like he hasn’t aged at all. Like he’s not even dead, just resting, just sleeping.

“I love you,” I whisper to him, and the tears fall from my face, splashing onto his skin. “I’m sorry I never said it enough. I should have said it more. I should have called more, I should have been more present, I should have been with you as soon as I was able to and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I kept putting it off. Putting you last. I thought we had more time. I really thought we had more time and we…we don’t. We didn’t. Now you’re gone. You’re gone.”

More tears fall from my eyes, landing on his face. With shaking hands, I reach to wipe it off his cheek but before I do, his skin seems to move beneath the droplet. I pause, staring wide-eyed. His skin seems to warp and shimmer, becoming translucent, and I swear I can see something underneath.

Something moving.

Something like…another face.

I shake my head, as if trying to right it, because I have to be hallucinating again, I have to be.

But then something shifts, and my father’s nose appears to disintegrate before my eyes, turning black, like it’s rotting off.

His eyes open.

He stares right at me.

A scream chokes inside my throat.

Because it’s not my father’s eyes.

These are Rasmus’ eyes.

“Run!” Rasmus’s voice comes out through my father’s open mouth, now turning black like rotting sludge, his teeth falling out.

I scream. Pure panic courses through me and I turn to run, because it feels like the only thing to do. This isn’t my father, I don’t know what this is, but I have to get far, far away from here.

But Noora is right there behind me, her body pressed against mine, and she’s grabbing me in a chokehold before I can even turn, her arm pressing in hard against my windpipe.

I can’t breathe. I start to struggle. For an older lady, she has the strength of a beast, and her smell is becoming even more pungent, and for a moment I feel this sensation to give up, almost like there’s another voice inside me, one that doesn’t belong to me, telling me it’s all over.

But then I manage to push through it and I remember who I am and what I can do, and all my training comes flooding back. It’s basic self-defense and I’m jabbing my elbow back, striking her where I can. It doesn’t loosen her grip as much as I hoped, but she does let out a groan, shifting, and I take the opportunity to quickly widen my stance and flip her over my head.

She goes summersaulting over on top of the casket, knocking it off the stand, and for a moment I’m horrified as my father’s body starts to slide out, but that horror stops when I realize it’s now Rasmus, scrambling to his feet.

“Run outside!” he yells at me, trying to push off Noora who is trying to drag him down.

I whip around and see Eero coming at me. He’s a big man and his eyes are so black that there’s no iris, and I don’t know if it’s my mind or something else that’s making me believe he has claws on his outstretched hands and horns starting to poke through his hair, but I drop low and spin forward off my hands, sliding under him as he tries to make a grab for me.

Claws just scrape along the back of my scalp, slicing off a strand of hair, and then I’m up again and running out of the room, through the lounge, past the dining room. I want to scream in horror, scream for help, but I don’t think anyone is going to help me now.

As I round the bend to the lobby, I can feel Eero’s presence behind me, getting closer and closer, but I don’t dare turn around and look. I’m almost at the front doors when I suddenly feel a flash of intense cold at my back, as if a door opened behind me, and in the reflection of the glass I see a white wall, as if the air in the lobby frosted over.

My hands strike the door and I push it open and I keep running, the sub-zero temperatures causing my breath to freeze in my lungs, my eyes to burn. Thankfully I’m wearing boots, but I’m just in a sweater, my coat left back in my room, and I’ll freeze to death soon if I don’t find shelter or someone to help me.

My first thought is of the cars in the parking lot, maybe I’ll get lucky and find the keys in one of them, drive off to safety, wherever that is. Fuck, I don’t even know where I really am.

I reach into my pocket to grab my phone to see if I have enough reception to call the police—no bars—and hear the hotel door slam shut behind me and suddenly Rasmus is at my side, grabbing my arm and pulling me along into the knee-high snow, away from the parking lot.

“This way,” he says, his legs moving preternaturally fast.

I look over my shoulder at the hotel, expecting Eero and Noora to come running out after us, but there’s no one there.

“What happened in there?” I cry out.

“I stopped them,” he says gruffly.

How? I want to ask. Did he kill them? I try to pull back and slow down, pointing at the parking lot. “Where are we going, shouldn’t we try and steal a car?”

He shakes his head firmly and continues to pull me along. I’m nearly stumbling as I go, the snow getting higher and higher, filling my boots. “We wouldn’t get very far,” he says. “I have to take you to see your father.”

“I don’t understand!” I’d tear my hair out if the adrenaline wasn’t propelling me forward. “Where is he? Why were you in the casket? What were they trying to do to me?”

“Plenty of time to answer those questions later,” he says. He glances over his shoulder and frowns. “They’ll be out any minute now.”

I guess he didn’t kill them. I look behind me again but immediately eat shit, falling right into a snowbank, snow sinking into my sweater and jeans. Rasmus hooks his arms under me and pulls me up like I weigh nothing at all.

“Almost there,” he says. “You can do it.”

My mind seems to empty out, the cold finally getting to me. I have this vague sensation that I’ll die soon if I don’t get inside somewhere, if I don’t get warm, and that death wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

“Fight it!” Rasmus barks at me. “Don’t let them in your head!”

Don’t let who in my head? I don’t even know who we’re running from. I don’t even know where I am. Who I am.

My sight starts to turn gray at the edges.

“Fuck,” Rasmus says. “Hold on.”

The lights from the hotel fade away, like they’re being snuffed out, and everything is turning black. I’m falling for a moment and then I’m being lifted up in the air. Carried. I hear the rasp of Rasmus’ breath in the cold air, his legs as they plow through the snow.

Then, somewhere in the distance I hear. “Rasmus! Hanna!”

The voice doesn’t even sound human. It’s sinister and macabre and strikes fear in the deepest part of my soul.

Hanna. That’s my name. I’m Hanna.

I’m…trying to survive.

I gasp, as if just being pulled from drowning, and open my eyes to find myself being placed on a low, two-person sleigh, blankets piled high around me.

A sleigh attached to a fucking reindeer.

I stare at the animal for a moment and it turns its head, staring right back at me with brown liquid eyes, as if wondering who I am.

Holy shit.

“Sulo!” Rasmus says to the reindeer as he pulls up several blankets and animal hides from behind me and starts draping them over me. “Go!”