Page 70 of Hades and Persephone: Threads of Fate

“You want me to destroy the Underworld?” Even if I had the power, which I don’t, I couldn’t. This realm has become my home. The souls may as well be my children, this land that sprouts life my infant. To destroy it—I could never.

“No.” Mother shakes her head. “I want you to destroy Hades.”

“I—” I am struck by the horror of her words. “Never. I could never.”

“He does not love you.” The words rattle as they spill into the space between us. She’s angry. The kind of angry that sparks famine. I’ve seen it before.

Still, I whisper, “But I love him.”

There is a pause between us that is so quiet, it’s eerie. Even the Lethe whispers where moments ago it sang, as though it senses it will soon feast on a buffet of secrets. Secrets it will use to sustain the Garden of Silence.

“You disappoint me,” she seethes, and then her hands are around my throat, squeezing. The splitting scream she lets free, deafens me.

I can’t move, can’t think as her lovely face twists into the beastly Goddess void of mercy. The black wings of a terrible bird split from her back to lift me from my feet. I’ve seen this beast before, countless times. But her shriek has never been so loud. Never so angry. So deadly. It crawls over my body like a cold winter wind, caging me in a cyclone of devastation. It is the call of a reaper wrapping its talons around my eternal soul.

I’ve watched from the impenetrable safety of stone temples as the very cyclone of her scream has torn through fields of wheat, cutting down crops. I’ve watched the people beg and weep and pray, but shehears nothing through the vicious screams of her immortal Goddess.

My mother is beauty and devastation. She offers the sustenance of life as easily as she rips it away with her screaming storm winds.

And she is a fickle, fickle Goddess.

For the first time, I am the sole focus of her ire. And it is excruciating.

Warm liquid leaks from my ears, spilling from my eyes. I think I’m crying until I pull my hands away and see red. Blood.

My mouth parts to beg for mercy, but no sound spills. Bubbles of bloody pleas pop from where they burst between my parted lips to splatter the gown she wears, marring it red.

Roughly cut blue apatite stones shred my knees, whispering promises of the ultimate freedom as my blood spills over the Garden of Silence. I can’t hope to fight her power. And I know no one will come to save me. No one knows I’m here. And even though her screams could shatter glass and burst organs like a pincushion stabbed one too many times—no one will hear her beyond the Garden of Silence.

The everlasting night of the Underworld flashes in my sight as I am thrown into the Lethe. Desperate for air, I inhale before I remember the devastation that even a taste of the river can reap. Water surges over my dry tongue to soothe the bloody walls of my throat, but before I can spit it out, my mother launches herwretched form into the shallow water, straddling me even as I buck and fight. I claw and scream as water flows, a river into my body. Under the water, I see her hideous face distort into a twist of hateful rage.

I have no air.

She screams words that penetrate even the rushing of the water. “You’ve disappointed me, my daughter. But you will do better next time. I vow it.”

The river continues to flow into my body, filling my belly, my lungs, until I am certain I will burst.

My body bucks.

Hades’ face flashes in my mind.

My heart weeps, and then it ruptures.

Chapter

Thirty-Two

Persephone

My eyes flyopen as a scream splits the night. For a moment, my disjointed mind can’t make sense of the wet figure that hovers above me, big hands pinning my body down.

I thrash and buck and scream and sob. My hands fly, nails catching skin. I gnash my teeth and kick my feet.

“Persephone!” A deep voice, so devastatingly familiar, breaks through the screaming echo in my mind and I sob. My body falls to the bed, spent.

Devastation floods me like the river Lethe in mynightmare, and I weep.

“Persephone.” Hades gathers me in his arms, against his broad, warm chest. His wet chest. Wet like the monster who’d delivered me my end—the monster I’d called Mother—in my nightmare.

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