“Yeah?”
“They are.”
Susan froze as her old reporter self leaped to the forefront. “How do you mean?”
“I can’t say anything more on the phone, okay? In fact, I’m on a pay phone, and you don’t want to know how hard one of these things is to find nowadays. But I can’t take any chances. Can you come by work in about an hour to look for a cat?”
Screwing her face up, Susan let out a disgusted breath. “Ew! I’m deathly allergic to those things.”
“Trust me, it’ll be worth your wheezing and then some. Just be there.” The phone went dead.
Susan hung up as a thousand scenarios went through her head. She’d heard real panic in Angie’s voice. Real panic, and that wasn’t like her friend. This was a serious situation and Angie was scared.
Susan tapped the phone with her fingernail as her thoughts scattered into a million different directions. But they all came back to one single thing—this odd call just might be her own road back toward salvation and respectability.
Chapter two
In many parts of the world and in many religions, the concept of hell has long been one where the dead were punished for the evils they participated in or perpetrated while living.
In the Atlantean hell realm of Kalosis, there were wicked souls aplenty, but none of them were being punished for what they’d done while alive. Indeed, most of them had led calm, peaceful lives. As Urian—a Spathi Daimon who’d once called Kalosis home—so often said, “We’re not the damned, folks, we’re the categorically fucked.”
And it was true. Those here were all being punished not for their transgressions, but rather for something a long-forgotten queen in Atlantis had done centuries ago to strike back at her former lover. In one fit of anger against the Greek god Apollo, she’d sent her soldiers out to murder his child and mistress. By doing so, she’d damned all of her Apollite people not only to a life spent in darkness but to a life span of only twenty-seven years. A life that would end on their birthday as their body slowly, painfully deteriorated over a twenty-four-hour period until there was nothing left but a faint dust.