“I don’t understand why I could hear her so clearly here.” I shook my head in confusion.

Strike slid forward out of the water. He was big, but maybe only half my size when I shifted forms. “The underworld crosses barriers that are in place in the land of the living. Just like you would not hear my voice if we went back to the other side.”

I looked up at him. “Why can’t I shift?”

“That is one of the rules here. You are stripped of the most deadly strengths that have been bestowed on you. The shifting, the venom. You cannot use them here. Same with the vampire. Stripped of his abilities and pushed back to being only a human. You retain things you were born with.”

“Well, shit,” Remo breathed. I had to agree with him. Except . . .

“I still have my strength.” I looked up.

“Then it must be something you had before,” Strike said. “You would have had to have been born with it for it to remain.”

I glanced at Remo, and he nodded. “The warlock blood. It obviously runs stronger in you than you realized.”

A blessing rather than a curse this time. “Strike, you can help us get to Hades, then?”

He bobbed his head once. “I can take you partway. When we get to Cerberus, there is nothing I can do there; you must pass him on your own.” He slithered ahead of us, and I got a good look at the patterning on his back. He was colored like an anaconda, shades of black, green, and brown. I hurried to catch up to him, not really wanting to be left behind in the underworld. Remo was right with me and slid a hand into mine. We walked through the underworld, as if we were on some sort of weird date with a large snake as a chaperone. I snorted to myself, and Remo lifted an eyebrow at me. “You cannot find this funny.”

“Weirdest date I’ve ever had,” I said.

Remo barked a laugh, and even Strike shook his head. “You think this is a date?”

“Probably our last one. Might as well make it memorable.” I pushed the words out past the pain that hovered with them. I had a job to do, this was not the time to be moping about my love life or lack thereof.

Strike took us around the edge of the swamp and past a fast-flowing river. “We have to get to the other side.” He flicked his tongue in the direction of the far side of the river.

I looked the water over. There were a lot of logs in the water, so many that I paused. “Could we not hop the logjam?”

“You really think those are logsssss?” Strike hissed the last bit at me. “Everything in here is either going to try and kill you, torture you, or hold you down until something bigger and badder can come along and torture or kill you.”

“Crocodiles?”

“Not exactly,” Strike said. “Throw something at them, then you’ll see.”

I stared out at the water, bent, and picked up a loose stone and threw it out at the logs. The “log” I hit snapped open a mouth that was . . . all mouth. There was no body I could see, just a gaping maw with row upon row of teeth that glittered with water and pieces of flesh. It snapped closed with a crash like thunder, the water rippling around it. There were no eyes, no nose that I could see, just a mouth designed for death. A giant crocodilian mouth that was so well hidden I had no idea how it couldn’t have caught thousands of people. I took a step back from the water. “Maybe in my Drakaina form.”

“Well, of course, but that is why you aren’t allowed to shift. If you want to see Hades, then you have to want it badly enough to actually fight your way through to him. He’s kind of a recluse, you know.” Strike led the way once more, his body slithering easily through the soft dirt and mud.

Beside me, Remo blew out a breath. “I have not feared for my life in a great many years.”

“You’re welcome?” I queried with a half smile, and he shook his head.

“I look forward to getting back to the other side, where I am not weak as a newborn kitten,” he grumbled, and I took his hand once more. If not for the occasional creature we came across, it would have seemed like just a very dark and gothic stroll. Weird but not terrible. Or maybe it was just that I was with Remo. I glanced at him, knowing that was the answer. Damn him, he even made the underworld seem like a place I wanted to be, as long as it was with him.

More than once I looked down at the flower still somehow stuck in my leather jacket. The bud had opened a little, a few of the petals showing a deeper pink within their folds.

We approached a section that was nothing like what we’d seen before. A glimmering gold glow surrounded the bush and trees to our right, and in the center of it, a bridge arced over a patch of rushing white rapids into a meadow.

“What is that place?”

“You can’t go there, not if you want to go back to the land of the living.” Strike slowed and stared into the meadow. “That is the place souls go before they make the final pass.”

“Like limbo,” Remo said.

I stared into the meadow. There was great beauty within it, and a sense of peace flowed out around it, beckoning me.

But all of that was secondary to what I was seeing: a figure I knew as well as I knew my own, one I thought I would never see again. I let go of Remo and was running for the bridge as I screamed for her.

“MOM!”

She turned, a swirl of skirts around her body as she faced me. It looked like her wedding gown to me. Maybe when you died you got to wear something that brought you joy? A part of me hoped that was the case. Her eyes lit up and she smiled, her whole face aglow with happiness. Happy, she was happy.