Page 2 of Hades and Persephone: Keeper of Sins

He's proud of the fact I want to go to school. That I have the desire to nourish my mind and enrich my life with a sustainable career. Even though he doesn’t love the fact archaeology in itself will take me away from home more often than I’d be there, I know he’s proud.

What he doesn’t love is that I’m aspiring, specifically, to study archaeologyinGreece. If it weren’t so difficult to find jobs within the art sector, I know he’d be waving that flag high and wide. Alas, a career in art is not easy, and the theory of the starving artist has left him with a sour taste on his tongue.

I know what he’s hoping. He’s hoping that I’ll go to Greece and explore enough of the country under the safety of a very expensive four-month programme in which I will be introduced to the career I think I so desperately want—and hate it. He’s hoping for itchy bug bites and sunburns and heat stroke. Nothing too harmful, of course, but an in general awful experience that will have me tucking tail and returning home.

He'd been so opposed to the idea of my summer in Greece, that after a lifetime of promises to aid me in my education, he’d flatly refused to invest inthis.

So, I’d dumped nearly my entire life savings from working nights in Mom’s flower shop into this experience. It left me with very little to see myself through the next four months in Greece. I will no doubt have to find a job, but that’s fine. That’s totally fine.

It only adds to the experience, right?

“You call as soon as you land,” Mom demands, andDad gives me a firm nod. The only thing he’s agreed to continue paying for is my cell phone, and the unlimited international minutes I’ll need to keep in daily contact with home.

“I will.”

Mom sniffles. “And make sure you wear a hat every day.” Her lips pull down in a pouty frown. “You’re so fair, you’re going to come back looking like crisped bacon.”

I don’t tell her she’s being dramatic, even though she is. “I’ll wear my hat.” I hurry to add when she opens her mouth, “And sunscreen.”

I hate sunscreen, but I wear it always. For Mom.

Her mouth clamps closed and with a slightly narrowed eye, and a cheeky grin Dad misses. She leans in to press a second kiss to my forehead. “I love you, Annie.”

“I love you, too.” I step from her embrace to Dad’s. He instantly wraps me in his bear hug. It’s the one I recall from my youth. The one that never changed, remaining constant always in a world that is ever-shifting.

“Love you, kiddo,” he murmurs gruffly into my fair hair. Emotion thickens his usually smooth voice, and his hug tightens, kiss deepening in my nearly white locks.

I have no idea where I got it, because both Mom and Dad have muddy-toned, brown hair. Mine is so blonde, it’s touching albino white. At least I haveDad’s green eyes and Mom’s full, pink lips. I might not share her hair color, but I did inherit her fall of uniform, smooth waves.

I know I’m theirs, not adopted. Despite my fair hair, I look too much like them to question the validity of my bloodline. I think, if I’d been adopted, they’d have found some way to return me for the stress I’d put them under as a young child facing a potential personality diagnosis of some sort or another.

But we don’t talk about the voice. We never talk about the voice. It’s like it never happened. Never was.

I haven’t told a soul about the fact I still hear him. Or that I hear him more often now than ever before. His calls for me growing more and more frequent, more insistent. The enraged anguish tugging the threads of my soul away from this place to another, far, far away land.

Sometimes, in the moments I’m struck by his call, stripped of sanity in the aftermath of my need to seek a way to respond to him, I think it’s why I’m going to Greece.

And that terrifies me.

Because if I’m following a voice no one else hears across the globe—then maybe I really am insane.

Chapter

Two

Persephone

The first thingI notice upon arriving in Greece is the scent of salty, somehow sandy, heat. You might think you can’t smell heat, but you can. There is a wafting plume of it that rises from the ancient stone land, swirling in the air from the creamy, sometimes shockingly white, buildings and cobbled stone. Under the heat, or maybe enriched by it, is the scent of fresh herbs.

Originally from Canada, and an Alberta farm girl at that, the city feels incredibly, hypnotically old. It’s nothing like the young country that birthed me, andyet, nowhere I’ve ever travelled has ever felt so much like coming home.

I inhale another big breath of heat and herbs deep into my lungs, and sigh. My body hums under the high, hot sun. My soul titters. Yes, mysoultitters.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced, my arrival into this country. This ancient place. I have yet to explore. To sink my hands into the earth or my feet into the sea. And yet I’ve never felt a sense of belonging such as this.

This place, this country, it is where my soul is meant to rest.

It’s a bizarre thought for a woman of nineteen to entertain. The resting place of my soul should have no bearing on my youthful desires. Yet the thought is there in the forefront of my mind. A realization I can’t deny.

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