closed eye mid-flight, sending it hurtling back.
Screeches tore the very air around us as it turned to lash out at Robin.
No!
With a shrill cry, I urged Amabel forward, and she exploded into a flying leap, her full momentum behind her horn as she jammed it through the horseman’s chest.
She snapped her head up, tearing the body off the demonic horse and into the air, with her horn impaling it, jutting out of its back.
The shrieks around us rose to a bone-shearing crescendo, making the trees shake like they were in a hurricane.
As Amabel tossed her head down, dislodging her horn, the skeletal horse collapsed into a heap of bones. But as the dullahan fell limply to the ground, it made one last dying grasp for me.
I heard Robin’s booming shout as I felt myself being pulled out from the world, the last sound in my ears his voice frantically calling my name.
The eyes of the trees watched me as I fell into the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I didn’t know how long I plummeted. But all the way, as I fell into nothingness, all I could think of was Robin.
At some point, the darkness parted, like clouds over the moon. This time there were no rivers or fields. I was in a dim hallway with dark, hewn, gem-studded walls, each faceted stone winking like a star in the subdued illumination.
I was starting to breathe in relief, thinking I wasn’t back in the Underworld, when I saw the Horned God. And he wasn’t alone. A three-headed woman was looming over him.
Then he pivoted and walked away from her. In my direction.
Looking around desperately, I phased into a column, exited behind it as the Horned God approached, thankfully with the woman trailing him and commanding his attention as all her heads continued talking urgently. His proximity still had a slew of disturbing sensations crashing into me like a breaker, leaving me cold and shaking.
Once they passed, against my better judgment, I followed them, hoping to find a way out of here. The stories about the living venturing into the Underworld always said there was a way in, and a way out.
Maybe I could also find the river where I’d found Ariane. I might be able to do something for her, even if she’d said she couldn’t come with me. I might be here to stay myself this time, but I had to try.
Now I trailed the nightmarish creatures, grateful that I didn’t have any footfalls, my insides turning inside out at their closeness. Besides the sheer power and menace emanating from them, their appearance shared the—wrongness of the headless horseman. A human form with one truly disturbing deviation. No head, three heads, or a dead animal’s head.
Then I was close enough to hear what they were saying.
“But can’t you go up to investigate?” the three mouths of the woman spoke at once, creating an eerie chorus.
“Certainly,” the Horned God rumbled, his voice like distant thunder, making my knees knock together with terror. “I’ll pop to the surface and question the first unsuspecting human about his whereabouts.”
“Could any of his…natural children have banded together to confront him?” said the left head, before the others alternated with a question each as she followed him around a corner. “Could they have done something to him? Is it even possible?”
The Horned God didn’t answer as they crossed into a cavern of gigantic proportions. An incandescent blue river ran through its middle, with the ghosts of people in ancient clothes wandering along. Some had more modern attire, resembling Campanian farmers. I followed them until they exited into an open space that had a sky above. How was there a sky in the Underworld?
I soon forgot this inexplicable occurrence as they led me into an orchard teeming with silvery trees that stood like a uniformed army, heavy with ruby-red fruit that reminded me of pomegranates.
The Horned God snatched a large one off a branch, snapped it in half with such effortlessness, I wondered if he harvested souls by snapping necks and ending lives himself. He bared the garnet-like seeds that shimmered within, and its juice flowed out like blood over his pale hand.
One of his hounds approached him, gleaming eyes as red, and he offered it the fruit. The hound’s jaws gaped, and it wolfed it down in one bite.
When the Horned God spoke again, his voice in this open space was like a raging sea, almost making me drop to my knees. “Something that had never happened before is happening