Page 75 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

“Addison…”

“Adonis,” he corrects. “My name is Adonis, Persephone.”

“Adonis.” I swallow hard, forcing the name to my lips. It sounds in a breath between us that he savours with eyes that flutter closed, as though he is tasting the sound.

“I spent my time in the Vale of Mourning. I’ve accepted that the love I felt for you was never meant to be. I’ve seen that you were always tied to him—that I never had a chance. I pulled a leaf, and I lost you all over again. I suffered the hurt and returned to the Vale of Mourning. I made it farther into the Forest of Lost Dreams. I walked past the Elm of Lost Dreams without reaching for a single whispering leaf. And yet you are here.”

He looks so lost. So uncertain. So defeated in this moment.

He peers down into his empty palms, as though he might see a quivering leaf there. My heart weeps. I can’t help myself as I pull his hand between mine, holding tight.

“Adonis, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you wasted your lives loving me when I couldn’t love you back. Not the way you deserved.”

He blinks, his face changing as he falls to his knees before me. His hands come to my waist, and he captures me against him. He buries his face into my belly even as I push my palms into his shoulders. Through the thin gauze of my deep red gown, the color reminiscent to the spilled juice of a pomegranate seed, I feel the warmth of his tears.

“I don’t care that you can’t love me like I love you. I need you. One last time.” He looks up at me with the bluest eyes. They are the color of sorrow, and I swear they spear my heart like an arrow dipped in agony. “Please.”

Before I can answer, the wind of this terrible land picks up. The wispy fabric of my gown wraps around him, twisting him in the ribbons of a deep red that now makes me think of the blood that oozes from the open wound that is his heart.

I realize now that Hades was right when he told me I can’t come here. That I can’t see Adonis.

I realize the mistake I’ve made in this journey I never should have taken. He is a healing soul, his wounds gaping wide and oozing.

I am salt in that wound.

“I’m so sorry.” I’m shoving at him now, fighting against the hands that claw at me. Hot tears threaten to fall in sync with his as I cry out, “Stop. Adonis, stop.”

The gentle need in his touch transforms into a violent hunger. The thin gauze of my gown tears in his hungry grip as a wildness overtakes his eyes. “I’ll pay in the Vale of Mourning if I can have just this one last time with you, Persephone. I love you. I need you. Just one more time.” He’s babbling now, fightingagainst the hands I try to free myself with. “You’re not real, I know. I know you’re not real. Not real. Not real.”

He's shaking with the same unhinged sorrow that touched the woman before him. The woman he’d warned me of. The woman lost to the dreams that never couldbein life. The dreams that haunt her now in death. Dreams she must battle and accept as a thing never meant to be before she can find eternallifein this place.

True fear needles my spine when Adonis hooks me around the ankles, and I fall to my back. Even the blades of grass whisper a song of lost dreams, taunting.

I scream, but it’s only one more in a sea of screams that now sound loud in the surrounding forest. They mingle with the echoes of torment that ride the waves of burst bubbles from the boiling river in which this treacherous land is bordered.

Terror, truer than any other I’ve ever felt spreads like fire inside my body. Adonis lowers his body between my kicking legs, desperate for a closeness I refuse to give him.

“Why do you fight me? This is my dream,” he whimpers. “My last dream.”

Oh, God, he doesn’t know this is real.He can’t feel the difference between dream and reality.

He’s going to hurt me.

I do the only thing I can do.

I pray to my God. I pray to my soul mate.

Hades, God, please help me.

A flash of green moves overhead. Cold skin cuffs my wrists, and I am pulled violently from beneath my mad-with-grief friend.

Against the being who grabs me, I stumble to my feet. An arm wraps around my waist, adorned in twisting vines of green.Minthe, thank God.

I sob.

I am able to pull in a deep breath of scalding air as the leaves overhead quiver with a renewed violence, as though they can taste the soul on the brink of relapse.

He stares at me there on his knees, his hands cupped together as though in a broken prayer. He’s staring at me, his face slack as though he’s coming to the realization that perhaps I never was real. That now, like every time before, I am an apparition, no different from this love that consumed him in past lives as it consumes him now.

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