Underworld Read Online Free PDF Page A

hoping to make it to the end of the day without you hating me.”
    “John,” I said. I got up and went to sit next to him on the couch. “You could never do anything to make me hate you. What is that?” I nodded at the device in his hands. “Can I have one?”
    “Definitely not,” he said flatly, putting it back in his pocket. “And I remember a time when you most definitely did hate me.” He stood up. He’d been intimidatingly tall in his bare feet, but in his work boots, he towered above me. “That’s why I’m not discussing my past … at least for now. Maybe later, when you …” He broke off whatever he’d been about to say, and finished instead with, “Maybe later.”
    I felt my heart sink, then chided myself for it. What had I thought, that John was some type of angel who’d gotten the job as a reward for good behavior? He’d certainly never displayed angelic-like behavior around me … except when he’d been saving my life.
    What did someone have to do to become a death deity, anyway? Something bad, obviously. But not so bad that they got sent straight to wherever it was truly evil people, like child murderers, ended up. From what I knew about John, being a death deity seemed to require a strong character, swift fists, a willingness to adhere to a certain set of principles, and a basic sense of telling right from wrong….
    But could it also require something I hadn’t considered? Something not so desirable?
    “You can’t have any worse skeletons in your closet than I do,” I said, with a forced note of cheeriness in my voice, watching him pull a fresh black shirt from a wicker hamper. “After all, you’ve met my grandmother.”
    He pulled the shirt over his head, so I couldn’t see his naked chest anymore, which was both a good and bad thing. But I also couldn’t see his expression as he replied, in a hard voice, “Be thankful everyone in my family is dead, so you’ll never have to meet them.”
    “Oh. I … I’m sorry,” I said. I’d forgotten the terrible price he’d had to pay for immortality … like watching everyone he’d ever loved grow old and die. “That … that must have been awful for you.”
    “No, it wasn’t,” he said, simply. His shirt on, he turned to look at me, and I was startled by the bleakness of his expression. “In a way, you’re lucky, Pierce. At least your grandmother is possessed by a Fury, so you know why she’s so hateful. There’s no explanation for why the people in my family were such monsters.”
    I was so shocked, I didn’t know how to respond. People aren’t supposed to say those kinds of things about their families.
    The important thing was to forgive, my father had once told me. Only then could we move forward….
    “Except my mother,” John added. From the same hamper he’d drawn the shirt, he pulled out a leather wristband, covered in some lethal-looking metal studs, and began to fasten it … a safety precaution of his profession, I supposed. Some departed souls needed more encouraging than others to move on. “She was the only one I … well, it doesn’t matter now. But she was the only one who ever cared. And so she was the only one I ever missed.”
    Oh, God . My mother. I hadn’t thought about it before, but suddenly the reality of my situation sank in: I was going to have to watch my mother get old and die.
    Although, even people who weren’t trapped in the Underworld had to face that burden … watching their parents age and inevitably die. The difference was, those people aged along with their parents. Together they enjoyed the holidays, went on vacations, helped one another through the hard times and celebrated the good.
    Was I ever going to get to do any of those things? Could lords of the Underworld and their consorts even have children? I was pretty sure I’d read that Hades and Persephone had never reproduced. How could they? Life couldn’t grow in a place of death. Even the plants in John’s garden, exotic as