Last Daughter of the Gods - 8

I felt the temperature change in the air before I heard the knock. Death had finally come to my door. My Father was every bit as desperate as I had imagined.

"It's not locked," I answered as though I didn't have a care in the world.

The door opened slowly, spectrally, the cloaked figure of Thanatos slipping into the room like a terrifying shadow trailing frozen vapor. It was a pity really. He does so love to make an entrance, but it was wasted on me.

Two days earlier, I sat facing my kind benefactor on pins and needles. "Do you know why you have no siblings, Soma?" she had asked me. The answer changed everything. At some distant level I had always known. But hearing her say it aloud forced me to confront what I had long feared.

I suppose I should have pitied him the suffering and fear that kept that Him chaste for ten thousand years. But I could not.

It was all so damnably predictable. The oracle warned my parents that their union would produce a child who would betray and overthrow the king of Hell. So, what does he do? He impregnant's Mother anyway and then tries to kill me, like it was somehow my fault and not his.

To add insult to injury, He does everything in His power in the decades after to alienate and hurt me.

How dumb is that?

Now that death has come to kill the freak, Father can act surprised and shocked when the sad news reaches His and Mother's ears.

"I came to warn, you," my benefactor told me before she left, "and support you, if I can." She had her smartly dressed and deadly assistant stay behind. More on her later.

Anyone with sense fears Thanatos. He can kill slowly or with a gentle snap of his fingers. He stood there, his eyes glowing from within his hood, his wolfish teeth bared. His eyes bored into mine, daring me to blink and turn away while I gazed back all innocence and light.

"Did Daddy send you with a message?" I asked guilelessly.

His smile broadened but he remained silent. I smiled in return. "No matter," I answered myself, softly, "I have an offer for you." His smile disappeared. He was slow in realizing that I was not afraid. I had tried to mask the excitement I felt, but in spite of his arrogance he had begun to sniff it out.

"I'm starting a new venture, Hell Inc. I need a COO. Do you know what a COO is, Thanatos?"

Grinning again, he chuckled softly. "No man can buy me, least of all a woman, Goat Girl," he said disparagingly.

I smiled broadly. "It's really a generous offer ... far better than you deserve."

Leaning his head back, he laughed, its deep and spectral notes shaking the floor and probably scaring guests in the adjoining rooms. "You think you can defy Thanatos, little freak? I am a God. I can take your life with a word."

I leaned forward with a savage grin. "Then take it!" I spat.

Extending a claw-like hand he twisted it in the air as if reaching into my breast to pluck out my heart. But when it came back empty, his smile of triumph faded as he stared at his empty palm.

"Oopsie!"

Waving my arm in wide circles above the hotel floor, I chanted - “Wishing well, oh wishing well, I give thee a God instead of gifts of silver and gold; I pray you take him and make him do as he's told.”

Closing my eyes, I counted to five. Opening them the well appeared in the floor, smoke rising up from its depths.

Thanatos' face filled with the anguish that he had fed upon for untold millennia. "Soma," he pleaded.

"Queen Soma," I answered harshly. Reaching out my arms in the air, I drew him unwillingly forward with the force of my rage alone.

"Queen So...."

"Silence!" I screamed. "Beneath this well lies Tartarus. When you return to my Father, tell him I am coming to claim my just due. Tell him that if I do not see David at his side, healthy and whole, that his condemnation will rival the one with which Zeus punished Prometheus.

"A male voice, deep and sonorous as the old gods, commanded from the depths of the well. "Join us, little god. Tartarus welcomes you."

As Thanatos dropped with a shriek into its depths, I pulled a gold coin from my mouth and tossed it after him.

"Don't forget the coin for the ferryman," I yelled with a snicker.