All Our Pretty Songs

are selfish. He smiles, tilts my chin up. Kisses me again, a kiss that is softer, sadder. Goodbye.

“I love you, too.” He reaches into his pocket. “Take this.” He hands me his knife. “You’ll need it, where you’re going.”

“But—”

“Take it.”

“I’ll give it back. Someday.” Someday soon, I think, but I know better.

He looks at me. Dark eyes, dark hair, the pulse at his throat, the smell of his skin. The worn fabric of his shirt, his scuffed boots. Pebbles beneath me, the sound of waves. Wind in my hair. His hand in my hand. Ink on skin. The taste of peaches. The Fool. The Lovers. Death. I touch his wrist, his hip, underneath his shirt to feel the heat of his skin and the line of muscle there. Memorizing. I will never love anyone like this again. Hold the thought in my palm like a stone. Let it fall. He takes my hand from his waist, brings my knuckles to his mouth. Closes his eyes. We stand like that for a moment, and then he releases me.

“Tell me you are choosing this,” I say. Tell me you are choosing this over me.

“I am choosing this. I chose this a long time ago.”

I can’t look at Jack anymore or I will fall apart. Minos waits behind us, watching.

“Minos,” I say. “I want to see Aurora.”

When he speaks at last his voice is in my head and not in the world, a voice as old and dry as dust. You do not know what you are asking for, child.

“Try me,” I say. I look at Jack one last time. Drinking him in.

“I love you,” he says again. “Now go.”

I turn away from him and follow Minos into the dark.

There is no time in hell. We walk for what could be hours or days. It’s still too hot, but the noise dies down and I’m alone with Minos and my own breath, the crunch of my footsteps on what I think is stone. We are in some kind of tunnel, heading down. The angle of the floor is steep enough in places to nearly trip me up. There is no light of any kind. Minos is as silent as always, but something has changed, in the dark, between the two of us.

“Tell me who you are,” I say after we have been walking for a long time. “I know there’s someone there. Tell me who you are.”

I was a king. In a different time. Now I am a gatekeeper.

“You collect people.”

I collect beautiful things.

“For who?”

The nights are long, here. We’re still walking. We’ll be walking forever, I think, down and down and down. We’ll be walking still when the world ends and the stars crash into the earth and the moon spins off through an empty sky. I think I am tired, I think I am tired beyond tired, but if I stop moving I won’t start again, so I put one foot after the other, following him down. My throat is dry, sweat a salt crust on my skin. There’s a blister puffing up on one heel. I lick cracked lips, cough, keep walking. If he thinks this is enough of a test, he has never met the likes of me before. I won’t ask him how long it takes to get there. I will not let the terror of the dark get hold of me. If this is a test, I will fucking pass it. I will pass any test this creepy skeleton in a crappy suit can give me. Let them turn me into stone or water or flowers. I came here for my lover and the girl who is my sister, and they were mine before anyone else tried to take them from me, before this bony motherfucker showed up on my stoop and let loose all the old things better left at rest. Jack I will let go; Jack is on his own, now. But I will die before I leave Aurora down here. Take your bacchanal, take your bloody-limbed girls, take your witches and your three-headed dog, and leave me and my love alone. Down, down, down, and further down. Every story I’ve ever heard about Minos’s kind coming to life in my head. Persephone trapped in the underworld, Andromeda strapped to a rock. Medusa with her snaky head. The fates, the harpies. Arachne cursed into a spider’s body, forever spinning because she loved herself too well.

Why are you here? Why here, of all places, this city, this time? I wonder.

We are everywhere. The voice in my head is his. I didn’t know he could hear me, could see inside.

“All I want is what’s mine.” My tongue is so dry I can hardly shape the words.

What belongs to you is not for you to decide, child.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “That’s what you think, asshole.”

Far greater heroes than you have come under the earth and not returned.

“I’m not a hero,” I say. “I’m a bitch.”

And then I can feel it: The air is changing. We’re coming out of the tunnel into the forest of bone trees. I know where we are. I’ve been here every night for months. The river is ahead. I can hear the dog howling. Bare white trees, thorny vines. Things moving between the branches. We do not walk long before the trees stop, the line of the wood’s edge as sharp as if it has been cleaved away. We walk through the white trunks until we reach the place where they end and the river is in front of us. Minos stops.

If you cross this river, you will not return.

“People have.”

Once. In all the history of time.

“I’ll chance it.” Shrug. I want to cut off his arm and feed it to him. I follow him to the edge of the water and stop. The far bank is shrouded in darkness. He motions with one bony hand and a boat glides out of the darkness toward us, cowl-draped ferryman at the helm. There’s no way out but through. Minos steps into the boat, surprisingly graceful for someone so tall, and offers me his hand. I laugh out loud, take it. Hold tight. Take the first step. The second. The boat doesn’t rock. I’m in. I know you’re supposed to pay the ferryman but I don’t have any gold coins. I find Cass’s crystal in my pocket, hand it over. The ferryman takes it, pale hand gleaming in the dark. I can’t see his face under the brown hood. He makes a fist around the crystal, and then it’s gone.

It takes a long time to cross the river. The water is thick as oil and I am careful to keep my hands inside the low edges of the boat. A dank fog rises off the water. Looking too hard at the current makes me dizzy. Instead I stare at my knees, the place where the fabric is fraying and I can see a patch of skin. I think of Jack’s hand there, of kissing him over the tarot cards, of Aurora laughing, blowing smoke out my window, drinking Dr Pepper in my bed. I think of the most ordinary things I can imagine. Puppies, why not? The godawful still life I am working on in art class. Cass blowing her brown hair out of her eyes while she measures herbs. Raoul putting Oscar Wilde on my head, Raoul laughing, Raoul bringing me hot chocolate with chilies in it. I think of Jack, not the musician but the person who is barely not a boy, smiling at me with his joker’s smile. Telling me to draw him pictures of kittens and sailboats, ridiculous things. Down here in the dark there is no light but the light I bring with me, and I will not fail. I will not fail. Do you hear me, Aurora, I am coming for you. I am coming. I’m not the kind of girl they’re looking for in hell. I’m not pretty; I don’t play instruments; half the time I can barely draw. But I’m the girl they’ll never forget, because I’m the girl who’ll win.

At last I can make out the other side through the heavy dark. The ferryman poles the boat toward a smooth place where the bank flattens out. Dark sand, slick with the same oil that sheens the surface of the water. I catch one foot on the gunwale as I’m getting out, almost tip into the water, catch myself at the last minute, one hand inches from the surface. Something tells me I don’t want to get wet. I can feel Minos’s eyes on my back. “I’m fine,” I say, to no one but myself. Minos is moving past me, not waiting. I have to half-run to keep up with him. But I remember how fast he moved in the warehouse. This time, for whatever reason, he is letting me follow.

We are standing on the edge of a vast bone-white plain that glows with an unholy light of its own under the empty sky. So Death’s great city welcomed armies of the dead. But there are no armies here, only me and the hot blood in my human veins. Ahead of us stands a palace. There’s no other word for it: looming, massive, rising out of the white rock like a tumor. Black stone walls, grease-shined like the river. I can see hundreds of doors all around it, and all of them are open. Locks don’t matter, here. My stomach knots, and I can’t catch my breath. This is more than anything I bargained for. This is not a place I should be, not a place anyone from my time or my world should ever have to see. Minos does not turn around, but he pauses. I can feel