Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls (Gods of Myth #3)

Chapter 15

Chapter

Fifteen

H ades

Alastor’s eyes are wild as he watches his Queen slide from his back. Her movements are jerky and rough. She fights me even as I try to help her.

I’m not sure she can see me right now. Her eyes are unfocused, wild. She is the only one privy to this scene that plays out in her mind.

Even though I can’t see it myself, I have a feeling I know what she sees. I know the horror that plays out in her mind now—and I could rip the Moirai apart for this.

They have bestowed upon my fragile wife absolutely no mercy.

When she falls to her knees at the bank of the River Lethe, I fall to my own behind her. I spread my legs on either side of her tiny body, looping my arms around her waist as she plunges her hands into the icy depths, loosing a sob that spears my chest like a blade intent to carve the very heart that beats exclusively for her inside my chest.

A sob hitches inside her chest and her small body bucks against mine. The sound she makes, a keening cry between sharp sucks of air is one of the worst sounds I’ve heard in all my centuries.

For her, for this woman, my heart is cleaved wide.

I don’t know how long we stay like this, how long she cries tears into the Lethe, I simply hold her through it. We’re on the wrong side of the Lethe to keep this shattering a secret. Her sorrow spills into the ether of the Underworld for all who care to listen.

It is no surprise to me when Thanatos, then Hypnos arrives on the scene. They both live close on opposing sides of the River Lethe, but both have homes with a view of the Obsidian Falls that spill over the Black Mountains. It is over these mountains that the dark waters of the River Erebus is purified of its secrets within the Pool of Lethe before spilling, crystal clear, over the blue apatite pebbles that line the bed of the River Lethe.

Thanatos stands still and tall, like the reaper so many fear him to be. Thinner and taller than his brother, the angles of his face are sharper, more pointed. He stares down the blade of his sharp nose at the crumbling woman in my arms. If not for the swirling darkness in his eyes, inherited from his mother, Nyx, I would think he was unaffected by this scene.

But I know otherwise. Thanatos had loved Persephone like a sister. Just as I’d searched for her cloaked soul, her essence stripped by the Lethe during her vicious murder, Thanatos had searched. For centuries, we roamed the lands of the Underworld, unsuccessful.

Long, pale, thin fingers curl into fists. It is the only movement he dares loose. Even his chest is still, his breath caught.

Hypnos, born of the same mother, is Thanatos’ opposite. With skin black as midnight and unnerving eyes bright as starlight, they share only in their height. But where Thanatos is so lean he seems thin, Hypnos is fuller, wider. He moves in the way of dreams, slow and sensuous and perilously discrete.

He leans against the pillar of the blue stone bridge he’d crossed, one booted foot slung carelessly across his ankle, covered arms crossed over his chest. The black leather jacket, long enough to graze his kneecaps as he walks, catches the mist of the ravenous river.

They both watch, both livid with the need for vengeance, as my Queen falls apart under the assault of her memories. Memories that should have been devoured by these rushing waters.

Neither turn to leave or even move as they breathe, their gazes locked on her until she finally, finally pulls her hands from the river where they’d dove as though to try and caress something that was not there. To catch memories long since torn from her into the net of her fingers.

She sits back on her haunches, her body falling into the curve of my chest. I wrap her shivering form in my arms as she sucks ravaged breaths into her lungs.

As though exhausted, the back of her head falls into the nook of my shoulder. Her lips are parted, stained a deep blood red. I didn’t notice as it happened, too consumed by the spill of her ravaged sobs, but the golden blonde of her hair is completely gone. All that remains now is the stain of a deep, dark red. A slash of it sticks to her chest, held there by the mist of the Lethe or her own sweat, I’m not sure. In her lap, wrists upturned, her hands sit limply. And her skin is so pale. Deathly pale.

And still, she is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever beheld.

She is the keeper of my heart and soul.

I am hers.

“Persephone?” My voice sounds rough as it falls to break the sounds of the rushing Lethe. “Talk to me, little goddess.”

In my arms, against the wall of my chest, she finds the energy to flinch.

Inside my chest, my heart stills.

Her eyes flutter open, and as I suspected, the bright green I’ve come to know has been overtaken by threads of malachite. The faintest flush of red blooms in her cheeks as she draws in a deep breath. Her tongue pokes out to wet the deep paint of her lips and she shudders.

“I remember...”

I stiffen. Darkness rolls like shadows in the night from the brothers who stand sentry over this scene.

I hesitate to ask, but I need to know. “Everything?”

She lets her head fall back against my chest again, as though the effort to lift it simply takes too much. “I remember my death.”