“He’s the god of the dead,” Thanatos said. “He’d sleep like a baby here.”

“And so would you, I suppose?”

He kept his eyes on the window. Not exactly a denial, but no admission, either.

“Having second thoughts about facing him?” Calypso asked Cassandra.

“No,” Cassandra snapped. But the place had her rattled. From the dead cat and friends on the stoop to the taxidermied butler to the cavalcade of heads, she would have liked to smash everything and run screaming, even if she would likely die of bubonic plague, yellow fever, and botulism before she made it out the door. “But Calypso, maybe you should go. This isn’t exactly the safest place.”

Calypso smiled and nudged her shoulder, as though that was the silliest suggestion in the world. “I’ll stay with you. You know that.”

Cassandra glanced into a shadowy corner at what looked to be the entire mummified corpse of a woman, and couldn’t help being relieved. Having Calypso there was comforting as a soft breeze. But she wished even more for the warmth of Aidan’s hands.

Calypso turned to Thanatos.

“How long do you think, until Hades comes home?” she asked.

Thanatos shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s still underneath. I should’ve drunk the rest of Megaera’s blood. Maybe then I would’ve been able to pinpoint him.”

“It would have put you on your ass for days. What use would you have been to me then?” Cassandra grumbled. She looked away. She sounded cold, like Athena.

“What use will I be to you now?” he asked. “I said I’d bring you here. And here you are.”

“But … you’re not leaving?”

He smiled. “One minute a murderess and the next a frightened girl. I don’t know how you manage to pull off so many things at once.” The smile faded, and he looked at her in that way he had, as though he could see the future better than she could. “I don’t know how much longer you’ll be able to.”

“It will be dark soon,” Calypso said. “I’m going to gather more candles.”

It was probably too much to hope for something with batteries. A camping lantern or, hell, some extravagant electric chandelier. Cassandra approached Hades’ king-sized, white-blanketed bed and ran her hand across it.

“How likely am I to catch hepatitis if I sit on this?”

Thanatos smiled. He went to the bed and sat. Cassandra sat on the side opposite.

“You’ve been vaccinated, right?” he asked, and she chuckled nervously.

“Asshole.”

They talked quietly, with one eye each trained on the setting sun. The other they kept on Calypso, who set lit candles around them until the room looked less like a lab at the CDC and more like the apse of a church. It was almost pretty, if they ignored the way the firelight lit the gaunt cheeks of the formaldehyde-soaked heads.

Time passed. The candles burned down by half, and Cassandra’s eyes grew heavy. She thought it monstrous that Hades slept in the same room as his shelves of death, but the bed was so soft. Thanatos touched her arm.

“I’ll stay awake if you sleep,” he said.

“Mm,” Cassandra muttered. She couldn’t stay awake forever. Who knew how long it would be before Hades returned.

“What was that?” Calypso asked suddenly.

“What was what?”

Cassandra hadn’t heard a thing. But both Thanatos and Calypso sat upright and stared through the candles to the shadows near the stairs. Cassandra trained her ears in the same direction. There it was: a papery whisper, like old parchment rubbing together.

It might have been nothing more than air moving through the building and stirring the pages of an open book. It might have been the sound of the tarps covering the collapsed walls. But it wasn’t. It was too deliberate.

Cassandra rose off the bed quietly. Thanatos stood with her, and Calypso, too, but Cassandra held her hand out in front of Calypso’s chest.

Cassandra’s eyes tracked over the floating heads, the preserved digestive tracts in sealed plastic. But the noise wasn’t coming from them. The flickering candlelight only made them appear to move. She walked through the rows of shelves, heat flowing to her fingertips. Fear lent itself to anger with comforting ease.

Whatever it was whispered again. A meatier sound this time, and closer. Not paper rubbing together, but leather. She should have brought a candle. But Thanatos was beside her, and his preternatural eyes could see where hers couldn’t. She looked deep into the far corner, toward the preserved, shriveled corpse of the woman.