Crown of Crimson (Underworld Gods 2)

He puts his hand around my neck and pulls me to him.

Chapter 20

Hanna

“The Hall of Skulls”

The first time I realized I was different, I must have been two years old. It’s probably one of my earliest memories. Scientists say that it’s nearly impossible for anyone to remember being that young because of how the brain develops, and that if they do remember something it was probably influenced by someone else. If you tell someone a specific event happened at a young age, painting it out, chances are that person will go on believing it happened, eventually seeing it happen in their minds like a memory.

Maybe that’s the case with me. I suppose it doesn’t matter in the end.

I was sitting in a stroller while my mother pushed me around a grocery store. I remember the lights were bright, the ceiling was low, the people in the narrow aisles were pale and stern-faced. I’d thought them all mad at the time but later I realized they were just Finnish.

My mother had left me alone for a moment to go back and get something. I was in the produce aisle, next to a tower of cabbages. Finns love their cabbages. My mother not so much, but my father loved his cabbage soup. Funny how I remember that. That even though she hated it, she still made it for him. She must have really loved him.

Anyway, I remember staring at them, their purple shapes, and thinking I wanted to see them all topple to the ground, bounce around the store like bowling balls. There was no one around and yet one rolled off the top and onto the floor.

I smiled. A distinct feeling of a smile. Like someone had done that just for me, though I couldn’t be sure who. But I wanted more. I wasn’t satisfied with the one.

So another toppled, hitting the linoleum floor with a splat. Then another one.

Soon all of them were rolling off the shelf and onto the floor.

By then, this had attracted attention so everyone had gathered around. I remember them looking bewildered.

Then my mother came and saw it and assumed I did it.

Of course, I kind of did. I was sitting in the low stroller, there’s no way that I could have reached up and knocked them off, but it didn’t matter because she knew.

She yelled at me, told me I was bad, that I was a wicked child and that if I ever did that again, she would drop me off at the church for good, a place, she had assured me, that my father would never step into. At the time I didn’t understand the concept of church so all I knew was it was a place that I would never see my father again.

I’m thinking of this now because I’m trying desperately to marry together my two realities. Me, as just your basic bitch posting selfies on Instagram from Venice Beach, and me as your not-so basic bitch Goddess, currently the Queen of Tuonela.

It’s been two weeks since I found out my mother is a Goddess, since I saw Vipunen without my mask, since I had a threesome with Death and his Shadow Self (which I guess isn’t technically a threesome if it’s two of the same person, but I still had two dicks in me, so I don’t know what you’d call that).

I’ve been busy continuing my training.

Death has been busy, planning for war.

Everyone—meaning myself, Kalma, Sarvi, and Death—feel that time is running out. In a land where time feels infinite, there is this definitive feeling of things happening sooner rather than later.

But since we don’t want an uprising and aren’t about to instigate a war, our job is to hold fort. Death is currently interrogating his ranks, going through his Deadhands to see who is fit for battle, who is on our side. I don’t know how he figures it out, but he says he has a way of filtering through the loyal ones. He thinks by holding a few more Bone Matches, we can recruit even more members of the army, those that are strong and can be generals and pledge allegiance to him and so on.

I’m excited for my first Bone Match. I want to see Tuonen again, get a feel for my stepson, as weird as that is to say. I want to see what Inmost looks like. I want to enter the City of Death and get a tour of the afterlife, the Golden Mean and Amaranthus. I want people to look at me like I’m their queen. Because I am. But we’re still a few weeks off from the first match.

“Hanna,” Death calls to me from his Hall of Skulls.

That’s right. The Hall of Skulls. At first, I was surprised at the small size of Death’s closet because of how well-dressed he always is, you know, in that leather-clad medieval rockstar Viking way he has. Then I discovered the Hall of Skulls, which is just an extension of his closet, a long creepy-as-fuck corridor lined with skull masks. I thought I had a lot of shoes back home, his collection of masks put me to shame.