Page 19 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

This time, he laughs. “I am that.”

I can’t help it, I smile too. There’s just something about this laughter he shares with me that feels so rare, I am incapable of remaining unaffected.

His laughter dies and he admits quietly, “When I first took you, you weren’t especially happy about it.”

I consider what I know of the myth of Hades and Persephone. The way he stole her from her mother. The pomegranate seeds. The other women. The nymphs. The affairs…

The rape.

“Will you tell me about it?”

“I’ve already explained I was not the God of,” he clears his throat, “Composure that I am today. I’ve also explained why that is. The darkness I lived with, and the eternity in which it had been all I’d known. The hunger that burned inside me to once again feel life.”

“Yes. I understand.”

He hesitates. I wait. He speaks, “Your abduction was not a gentle thing, Persephone.” He sounds so agonized by the truth of our past. I want only to sooth him. To absolve him of these sins. “You fought me, screamed and begged.” He shudders. “At this time, I possessed the power to portal myself in and out of the Underworld at will. It was the first time I’d attempted to portal out, however, and happenstance had it, I appeared right where you were.”

“You were so beautiful, there in the garden on your knees. You looked up at me with that halo of white gold hair, and eyes of the finest emerald green. It was as though an arrow struck me clean through the heart. Obsession like I’d never known it rippedlike a hurricane through my being, washing everything that was notyouaway.”

“Hades…” The way he’s looking at me now, with burning obsession—is this how he’d looked at her—at me—then?

I’ve already given him my heart, and even I am afraid. How she—howI—must have felt. I can only imagine.

“I reached for you, and you screamed. I pulled you up from your knees, and you fought against me. The scent of you, floral with the heady undertones of wheat burning in a summer field—I knew immediately who you were. Who you belonged to. Perhaps it’s partly what drove me to steal you away in that moment. Fear that she would come. That Demeter would take you from me.” His eyes shutter then, pain scoring his face. “If I’d known the way the Earthly realm would fight to keep you, I may not have forced the descent into the Underworld as I did. But I did. I pulled you down, kicking and screaming. The other girls in the garden cried out for you, a symphony of feminine injustice—the first of its kind—even as I pulled you deeper into the earth. Earthly talons cut into your flesh, spilling your blood. Roots and rock and earth—they all tried to keep you from me. To save you. But the Earthly realm was no match for the obsession that drove me deeper.”

I feel it happen. The slipping of my mind from this time into another, ancient reality. My vision blurs. I think I might even cry out. Starlight winks in and out of existence and the sounds of merriment from the city below cut in and out as though I’m attempting to secure a radio channel out of range. There is static.

And then there is nothing. Nothing but fear.

And pain. There is pain.

I am unable to screambeyond the suffocating scent of wet earth that threatens to invade my lungs. Sloppy fists of earth and stone connect with my flesh as gnarly fingers of twisted roots cut into my body, spilling pebbles of blood the starving earth lapsup as he pulls me deeper and deeper. The sound of hooves split against the earth like the crack of my father’s thunder. Snorts of hot breath remind me of angry penned bulls as they spill from the four horses drenched in black so rich they’d gleamed blue under the hot sun that bore down on the field in the moments before—before…

Before he took me. Before he threw me into the carved bone chariot of glistening onyx.

I know whoheis. The God of Death.

Everyone knows who he is.

But no one has seen him. No one even dares to whisper his name, lest he make his dreaded appearance into the land of the living. A reaper. A thing of death. A monster.

An outcast.

My mother’s brother.

Hades.

He’s far bigger than I imagined. He is far bigger than me. His hands, like vices, grip me painfully as he pulls me deeper into the darkness. From my realm into his.

Only, I am not dead.

Or perhaps he means for me to be.

Terror pumps blood through my heart faster. Waves of it surge through the organ so painfully, I fear it may burst.

And then the earth simply gives way. Hades grunts a primitive sound of victory, only giving credence to the beast that he is. His hands circle my waist, so massive I feel his fingertips connect at the line of my spine as he shoves me against his broad chest. Fresh earth sticks to the flesh that is slick with sweat, but beneath the scent of soil is something deeper and darker. Woodsmoke billowing into the darkest night, the flame hot enough to burn. And something else. Something far darker. Something far deeper. Something decadent and rich and terrible.

I claw at his chest as the chariot of onyx simply vanishes. We fall through what feels like an ocean of space. He is the only solid thing around me, and yet I try my hardest to break away. Even if it means I fall to my own end—I try.

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