Such Sweet Sorrow by Jenny Trout Page A

would not wish such horror on anyone, let alone his love.
    For a brief moment, he imagined Juliet running the same, fearsome corridor, and he felt her beside him. She awaited him, and that lent him the strength to continue, though his breath was ragged and his limbs weary. For Juliet, he could run across the earth without stopping.
    His next step did not land, nor the one after that, and he tumbled, his still pounding heart floating into his throat. The fall was endless, through a darkness so encompassing he couldn’t tell which direction he’d come from or where he was going. He might have landed on his head and broken his neck, if not for happy circumstance. They had fallen into blackness, and it was blackness they landed upon, hard, though not as hard as he might have expected.
    Hamlet lay motionless a few feet from him, unmoving but for the heaving of his chest. One hand lay limp there, and he lifted a few fingers as if testing that they still functioned. “Ah. Here we are.”
    Though every bone was certainly broken, Romeo forced himself to his knees. “The shade!”
    “Would have gotten us by now, if he wished to.” Hamlet didn’t even bother to open his eyes. “You saw what they were doing back there.”
    “Preying on helpless victims?” Romeo stared into the darkness above, certain it would sprout claws and teeth at any moment.
    “They were sorting them,” Hamlet replied calmly. “You were the one who introduced the idea of Purgatory. You were wrong, though. It was Sheol. I saw it written on the arch as I passed through it.”
    “Sheol?” Romeo did not like the taste of the word on his tongue.
    “From the Old Testament. You could call it Hades, or Tartarus, if those are more familiar. An underworld. We have entered the realm of the wicked dead.”
    “Does it matter what this place is called? It’s hell, no matter where we are!” Romeo raked a hand through his hair. His legs trembled from fear as well as exhaustion, and he fell heavily to his side, gasping. He’d wanted to undertake this quest. He desperately wished to find Juliet. To save her and build the life they had hoped for. He’d just never imagined it would be so difficult.
    It’s as though you don’t want to find her , he scolded himself. It wasn’t that, not at all. He wanted to find Juliet more than anything. He’d been living in a nightmare world since she’d died, but when he compared it to the nightmares of the world he currently stood in, he began to doubt. Perhaps Juliet was better off dead than living. If they escaped, she would be left with the memories of these horrors. He hadn’t even found her yet, and he’d gotten her into a terrible predicament.
    “The shades are sorting the souls, sending them where they belong. They seem mainly concerned with that central area.” Hamlet pushed himself up, groaning as he did.
    “How do you know that?” Romeo snapped. “Did you read it off another arch?”
    Hamlet titled his head, and a loud pop issued from the vicinity of his neck. “It’s not chasing us anymore, is it?”
    Once again, the prince was irritatingly correct. But Romeo preferred smug knowledge to none at all. Without Hamlet, Romeo would have been lost.
    “And only one pursued us. The other two stayed behind. I think you just made that one mad with your sword nonsense.” Hamlet got to his feet and gazed into the vast blackness like a man looking for a ship on the horizon.
    “I don’t suppose there’s a particular direction we should go in?” Romeo asked, failing to keep his annoyance from his words.
    Hamlet turned to him and indicated straight ahead. “That’s as good as any, I would think. How about you, are you able to make the journey?”
    The question set Romeo back. His weakness would have been obvious to a child, but he would never have expected a prince to worry about his well-being. “I’m as able as you. Well, perhaps not as able as you, but I am able. For Juliet, I am able.”
    Hamlet clapped him