Crown of Crimson (Underworld Gods 2)

“It is,” I admit. “She’s never seen a match.”

“Maybe…” she begins, then trails off.

I glance at her. “What?”

“Maybe you should think about, I don’t know, hiring someone else to take on the responsibility.”

I bring her to a stop at the bottom of the stairs.

“Responsibility?” I say with a shake of my head. “I know in the Upper World you have jobs that you can choose and get paid to do them, but it doesn’t work like that here.”

She raises her chin and meets my eye. Oh, she’s going to be a handful tonight. Fuck, I’m getting hard all over again.

“Why not?” she counters. “You’re a fucking God, Tuoni. You can do whatever you want.”

She’s not getting it. Mortals and their ideas.

“That’s not how it works.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not.”

“But why?”

I let out a growl of frustration. “Mortal woman. Listen to me. Things are a certain way because to knock them out of balance would destroy the natural order of things.”

She crosses her arms and cocks a brow. “Uh huh. And who told you that? Antero Vipunen?”

“Yes,” I say reluctantly.

“And the natural order of things, does that include your ex-wife demoness plotting your demise along with the Old Gods and the underground uprising? Is that part of the natural order of Tuonela?”

I open my mouth to counter her. Close it. Decide I have nothing intelligent to say. Damn, she’s constantly besting me.

“Why do you care what Lovia and Tuonen do?”

“Because…” She says the word like she’s been holding it in for too long, “Lovia is miserable.”

I’m taken aback. “Lovia?” Every time I think of my daughter, she’s always this flighty, smiling, girl. Yes, she has that wicked side, but she enjoys that, too. She doesn’t strike me as miserable in the slightest.

Alright. Perhaps now that I’ve thought about it for a minute, she does complain about ferrying the dead a lot.

“Yes,” Hanna says adamantly. “She hates her job. She wants to do…other things. She wants to quit.”

I bark out a laugh. “You don’t get to quit being a God.” Kids these days, always trying to shirk out of their responsibilities.

“It’s not about her quitting that, she knows she’s a Goddess of the Dead, through and through. But she has her own ambitions and they don’t revolve around the dead.”

I frown in concentration, trying to think about what her interests could possibly be. She’s always there when I’m watching a vintage movie from the Upper World. She likes to read any and all of the books I have lying around. She’s got a strange obsession with fashion. Her slang is all procured from the Upper World…

“I don’t understand. What are her own ambitions?”

“She likes to…travel.”

“Travel where?”

She chews on her lip for a moment, her eyes cagey as if she’s debating what she’s going to say next. “The Upper World.”

“Has she even been there?” I ask. Not that it’s impossible for her to get access, I just don’t know when she would have done so. She’s never said anything to me about it.

“Please don’t tell her I told you that,” she says, eyes huge. “She wanted me to talk to you about it. She just wants some time and space to figure herself out. She hoped that you could find someone else to take over her position.”

“Someone else? Doesn’t she realize the importance of her role? The reverence of it all, to be the one to meet the dead and bring them to the afterlife?”

“Then you do it.”

I narrow my eyes at her. “That’s not amusing.”

“See? You don’t want to do the job.”

“It’s not my job to do, Hanna.”

“Well, Lovia thinks someone else should do it. Think about it this way. Back in the Upper World, if I checked into a hotel that I was unsure of and the front desk clerk was a real bitch, it would sour my opinion of the whole hotel, maybe even the whole trip. That’s what people who arrive here are going to think. They’ve just fucking died, the one thing they’ve feared their whole entire short little lives. I don’t care that you’re the God of Death, you obviously have no idea how scary the idea of death is for a mortal. They live their whole lives around the concept, without ever knowing what really happens to them. So, they die, maybe there’s a white light, then they see a boat coming across the river, coming to take them to the afterlife which they know nothing about, and guess what? The person steering the boat doesn’t want to be there. She hates it. She’d rather be in France, eating brie and drinking two-euro bottles of wine underneath the Eiffel tower. No doubt the people on the boat are going to wish for the same thing.”

Hanna is out of breath by the time she finishes talking.

“Nice speech. Are you done?”