Page 18 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

Chapter

Nine

Persephone

His words drawa kind of sharp buzzing to the surface of my flesh, as though I am a charged being in an electrically stimulated environment. They echo in my mind. An alluringly haunted melody composed from a time well before my existence.

“I had to have you.”

Or maybe it wasn’t before my existence. Maybe…

No. Some things are impossible. Some things…

“I had to have you.” I had to have you. I had to have you.

He whispers, as though he knows the words are on loop in my mind. “I had to have you, Persephone.”

I swallow so hard, it’s audible. I croak, “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“I don’t understand.” Or at the very least, understanding this feels impossible.

“You are the girl in the garden, reincarnated.”

“Reincarnated,” I laugh the word, but it’s an unhinged, unnerved sound entirely absent of humor.

“Is it so hard to believe?”

“Yes.”No.Visions assault me. Tricks of my mind flash images I’d blamed on insanity. “I don’t know.”

I don’t know what to think.

Hades’ voice is soft. The soothing lilt of it urges me to consider, to open myself to the possibility of yet another impossibility. To believe. “I loved you from the first moment I saw you in that garden. I never stopped loving you, Persephone. But I fell in love with you again the moment I saw you standing before my painting in the Tower of Pluto. I recognized you, immediately.”

“I look like her?”

“You look like you.”

I glare at him. “You know what I mean, Hades.” I force my eyes away and admit quietly, “I don’t feel like her.”

“But you are her, Persephone. She is you.” His hand moves from my jaw to the bare skin covering my breastbone. “Two lifetimes, two bodies, but one soul.”

Under his hot touch, goosebumps rise. “Do I look like I did?”

“There are very subtle differences,” he admits thoughtfully. “But you could pass as the same person. The differences are more in how you act. In who you are now from who you were then. I believe it is greatly owed to your life experiences and being brought up as a human rather than a goddess.”

My mind short-circuits at that. At the mention of being a goddess. Demeter’s child.

I shiver. Then I frown. “Say it’s all true…”

He chuckles at my reluctance to process this reality. “I’m listening.”

“How long ago did I first live?”

“Thousands of years have passed, Persephone. I am unable to give you an exact number of years, as you were first born to a time when time was not yet recorded as it is today.”

Heavens. I can’t grasp the magnitude of that. Of the time that has passed. Of just how truly ancient he is. “God, you’re old.”

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