Page 30 of Hades and Persephone: Threads of Fate

Growing nearer, I’m finally able to make out her words. “You were right! Annie, you were freaking right!” I have no idea what she’s talking about. “I’vebeen calling your phone and lighting you up with texts. What the hell, girl?”

“Hades took it,” I explain. “He wanted me to—um—rest.”

And I forgot to ask for it back before I left.Oops.

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter.” Willa catches my arm in her excited grip to drag me closer to the dig site. She bends low to speak into my ear, as though the words she has to deliver are pure gossip-gold meant just for us. “You’re not going to believe this.”

Her energy is starting to get to me, and I feel myself smiling, too. “Believe what? What happened?”

“You’ve been gone almost a week. Alothas happened.”

“Um…”It hasn’t been a week.I don’t get the chance to say as much before Willa is filling me in.

“After everything that happened with you last week, with the new temple base—” I tense, swallowing hard. She doesn’t seem to notice. “Ralph decided to use Ground Penetrating Radar to take a look into what might be down there andvoila—holy shit—because—you. Were.Right!”

I freeze, my heart slamming in my chest as I struggle to follow her excited words. “I was right?”

She can’t mean I was right about the stone not being the base of a temple, but the header to a very large mouth of stairs.It can’t be…

I can’t have been right. How could I be right?

“Yes! Keep up, Annie, you crazy brilliant bitch!”Willa is bouncing again, her excitement bursting from her very pores. “You were right about it not being a base. It’s an entrance, like you thought. The radar shows stairs, just like you claimed. We’ve had the whole team on this one since.”

“I was right…” I gasp. A warm breeze swirls around us, but I feel chilled to the bone. Dread like nothing else fills me as I recall the vision that had thrown me into unconsciousness. A vision that shouldn’t be real. Shouldn’t be possible.

It’s another trick of my disturbed mind.

Like the woman giving the wheat, the man in the sea, and the voice in my head…

They’re all fabrications of my twisted, untrustworthy mind.

Or maybe they aren’t.

“Are you sure?” The words come out breathlessly.

Willa nods excitedly. “I don’t know how you knew. Beth thinks there’s ancient magic inside the stone and somehow it transferred to you—gave you a glimpse of what it was.” She shakes her head in marvel. “Whatever it was—it’s cool as shit.And real!”

I can’t speak. It’s no problem, Willa speaks for me.

“Everyone wants to uncover the stairs and see where they lead now. Ralph says there’s no ancient texts depicting what this temple might be, but I think the ancients believed it would lead them to the Underworld, you know, because the stairs go down and all. Addison agrees with me. Beth thinks it’s anothertemple for Demeter, or maybe even Persephone. A place where she might have passed between the realms to fulfil her part of the deal Hades and Demeter made.”

“Deal?” My mind can’t quite catch up to all that she’s saying. I’m on a loop, replaying everything I saw in my frightening vision the last time I was on site.

“You know, the deal that she spends so many months up here with her mom, Demeter, and so many months in the Underworld with Hades, as his Queen.”

We’re getting closer to the spot now. Close enough that I can see the hoard of people clustering around the new tent that’s been erected while others pick away at centuries of packed earth and sand in a jittery attempt to reveal a set of wide, dark, looming stairs into a tunnel that leads...where?

Spotting us, Addison dusts his hands on his beige shorts. A lopsided grin tips his mouth, but it doesn’t meet his eyes. He studies me for a moment too long, breathing a sigh of warm air. “How are you feeling?”

“Good,” I croak, my eyes drifting between Addison, and the new site. “You?”

“I’ve been worried about you. I tried texting—calling.” He pushes his hand through golden hair. “I—I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

“Hades took her phone,” Willa explains. Addison’s eyes narrow. “He wanted to make sure she was resting after everything last week.”

“About that—” Addisontwists to flick his gaze toward the site. He looks back to me, a wrinkle of something between his brows. Concern, maybe. Suspicion, possibly. “How’d you know?”

I shrug, shaking my head. “I honestly don’t know.”

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