Page 64 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

I have never known a revulsion quite like the one I feel now as I look upon Hecate as she harbors the wretched soul of a dethroned God.

I can’t help myself as I hiss, “They don’t even know your name.” Uranus stiffens. I continue even as Hades’ arms pulse around me in a warning against the words I let spill. “The people who live today, they feast on the stories of the Gods of Ancient Greece. We’re taught about the Gods in school. We know their names and stories, but never once before Hades, had I heard the name Uranus.” It’s not true, I’d heard his name in a passing, pointless kind of way. But this despicable God who sees merit in the consumption of sacred human life with the sole purpose to amass his own power…no. Just no.

“You are a forgotten thing of history. There is no more purpose to your existence, to your legend. You provide no meaning for life as it is today.”

“Your insolence, child,” Uranus warns as Hecate’s head shifts to an odd angle. “It is comical, considering.”

“Consideringwhat?”

“Of whom you come from.” The grin that stretches Hecate’s face is pure male aggression.

I square my shoulders even as Hades grows stone still behind me. “I am Persephone, born first of Demeter and Zeus. I know very well who I come from.”

Uranus laughs, as though I’ve told the joke of the centuries. It dies on a tail of eerie rumbling that rises from the deep soul restrained in Hecate’s chest. “My story, child, is not finished. In fact, it’s only just begun.”

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

Hades

I knowwhere this is going even as Persephone bravely challenges, “I’m listening.”

“When my son betrayed me, desiring my power for his own?—”

She interrupts, “Apple didn’t fall far from the tree, did it?”

“Watch your tongue, girl, lest you lose it,” Uranus growls his warning.

“What?” she bravely taunts. “You can steal the power of another God, but you can’t hack it when it’s done to you?”

With my lips pressed to the shell of her ear, I murmur, “Stop.”

Persephone stiffens in my arms, but I hear the snap of her teeth as she closes her mouth. Uranus is seething. Even I can see the play of his ire where it leeches from the flesh Hecate has loaned to imprison him for this discussion.

I’d come here to learn of the way he’d been attached to Atlantis, but now I have an entirely new question. That beinghow, considering his castration, he could be the father of my little spitfire of a goddess.

Because Uranus is her true sire, of that I am now certain. He had been in possession of the souls of both Aether and Chaos at the time of her conception, explaining how she came to be in possession of their gifts. In her previous life, the flashes of light I would catch in her power were so fast and bright, it had been easy enough to believe the lie we’d been fed, that she was the child of Zeus. That it was his lightening she claimed.

Now, though—she possesses the light of all life without a doubt. Under her skin is the power of the sun. It radiates from the depths of her soul and through her eyes as the sun might peer down through the blue of a cloudless sky.

But I had been so certain that light had been the light of Hyperion, if a little brighter.

I’d been certain, even after I’d drank from him in the truest test of truth, and he had assured me he had never lain with Demeter.

“How did you do it?” I demand low, but I know he hears me even over the howl of the wind. “How did you sire her?”

Hecate’s face splits in a monstrous grin. “Ah! Not so daft, after all, Hadeeees. It only took how many centuries for you to figure it out.”

“You were castrated at the time of her conception. In fact, you didn’t have a corporal body at all.” I tell him, ignoring Persephone’s sharply horrified inhale and the little ‘no’ that follows.

Uranus laughs. “Yes, child. You are my daughter.” Hecate’s nostrils flare with his deep inhale. “I can smell it even now. You are mine.”

A rumble of protest forms in my chest at his claim, broken by Persephone’s, “Impossible.”

She shakes her head, denial already setting in.

“I will tell you everything, for a price.”

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