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

Chapter 16

Chapter

Sixteen

P ersephone

I’d dreamed of my death before I’d known of my connection to the Goddess Persephone. It’s still hard for me to connect myself to her. In my mind, I continue to be a completely other entity to the Goddess who came before me.

Reincarnation feels so— impossible . Implausible. I just can’t convince my mind to wrap around the idea. Perhaps it has something to do with the engrained beliefs of my upbringing. I can’t be sure. All I know is there is a large chunk of my mind that is still in denial to everything I’ve been shown. To the truth of a history I’ve always believed was nothing more than rich myth.

“You remember your death?” My eyes drift to the two men who’d joined us before locking on the pale one.

He stands so still; he could be carved of stone. In fact, he kind of looks as though he is carved of stone. He’s so pale; his skin is tinted with hues of gray. Even his hair is colorless, but his eyes are black as night. Bottomless.

I swallow hard. My throat is painfully dry and so raw it burns. “Yes.”

I frown, because although my dream had been informative, this had been something else. Something more. I saw not only my death, but the memories that had flashed before my end. I may not know everything, not yet, but I’d been given more pieces to the complex puzzle that was my past life.

“What do you remember?” Hades asks behind me. His voice is smooth, but there is an undercurrent of rage in the depths. I can’t help myself as I twist in his hold to peer up at him.

With just one look at his face, a few pieces of that complex puzzle click into place. Horror is a whip that lashes viciously into the wounded organ of my heart.

His words echo in my mind. The hunger is a consequence I must bear.

The whip drops again across my heart. I will work endlessly to feed it. And if I am not enough…

Another whip falls. I’m bleeding internally now. I will see to it that you never carry the weight of the burden that is mine to carry.

My heart cleaves in two. There is no pain I will not suffer for you, little goddess. There is nothing I will not stand witness to, if it brings you relief. There is no torment I would not bear if it meant you find the pleasure you crave.

The pieces of my puzzle snap into place click after click, with fall after fall of a vicious whip. Demeter’s cruel voice overtakes the sad echo of Hades’ desperate acceptance of the worst kind of betrayal. Does he see you yet, my daughter?

“Have you slept with the golden boy in front of him?” I flinch at a memory I’d much rather forget. “Does he watch, calmly, as you share your body with another?”

Just as I’d wanted to cry then, I want to sob now. “Yes.”

“And what did I tell you, dear daughter?”

“That if he could watch me with another, he did not love me.”

Flashes of her malicious tutelage ride the echo of this agonizing memory, giving me glimpses into the manipulation that soured my ancient relationship with this ageless God. Whispers play loudly in my mind now. They are clearly a mockery of motherly affection, but I had been innocent to the danger of them so long ago.

Her whispers of a need for jealousy, her dark advice to seduce man, after man—to invite my husband to watch in the hope that he would break and prove the obsession that had driven him to take me from the garden of flowers, to ravage me in the Underworld, had not waned.

To drive him to a breaking point that never came. And Demeter knew it would never come. She knew Hades. She knows Hades.

And somehow, I’d been her naive little puppet, my optimistic heart bursting with hope each time I lay with a new man that it would be the time he fought for me .

Only, he never did.

And I don’t understand why. I don’t understand how Demeter knew he would never ‘prove’ his love for me.

Are times truly so different now that I would have believed the way to win my husband’s heart had been to sleep with other men? To light the flames of his jealousy so much that he would snap and…what? Claim me? But how? He’d already claimed me.

He’d stolen me to the Underworld, invading my body with force entirely absent of consciousness—driven by the loneliness they had forced him to suffer. He’d roamed a land echoing with the devastating lullaby of souls infected with sorrow while a backdrop of torment whispered a promise of madness.

They had made him and yet…

He’d never snapped as Demeter had told me he should. I might not remember everything of my past life—but I know with a confidence that is soul-deep, Hades never invaded my body against my will after that first time of desperate madness.

His patience with me had stretched beyond anything my own mind could fathom.

My heart broke for him, for the pieces of this puzzle that fell so tragically together—and the holes I was still missing.

I need answers.

I have too many questions.

“Persephone?” Hades calls again. “Talk to me. What do you remember?”

“I remember dying.”

“You saw your death?” The paler of the two men moves for the first time, taking long, lethal steps toward me. There is urgency in his voice when he commands, “Tell me. Tell me how it happened.”

Hades makes a low noise of threat behind me, and the dark man with starlight in his eyes pushes off the blue crystal bridge. He ambles toward me until he’s lowered to his haunches before me. “I’m Hypnos, God of Sleep and Dreams. The idiot is my brother, Thanatos, God of Death.”

“Death?” I frown. “But Hades is?—”

Hypnos cuts me off, “Hades is the God of the Underworld. Because of that, he is, technically God of the Dead and Death. But Thanatos is—well, he is the personification of death. You can think of him like a reaper. When a soul dies, it is him they first see. He transports souls.”

“I thought that was what Hermes did?” I’m so confused.

“He did. It’s how they met, actually.” Hypnos’ starlight eyes are fastened so intently on me, I can barely breathe. “But Hermes is the Messenger God. He’s clever, a little tricky. Sometimes problematic. But Thanatos loved him. Like I said, he’s an idiot.”

I don’t know what to make of Hypnos. I really don’t, and I’m so confused.

“Hypnos,” Hades warns.

“Right. To the point.” He dips his chin, but I have a feeling it’s more to hide a smirk than it is in subservience to his king. Hades huffs a sigh, confirming my suspicion. “Please excuse Thanatos his abruptness. As the God of Death, when you passed, he should have been notified. He should have been there for your transition. To guide your soul in the Underworld. He should have been with you, but he never felt your death. It wasn’t until much later that he found out you’d died at all. And then, he’d been unable to find your soul. He searched alongside Hades for centuries, seeking your eternal soul. Blaming himself for how he could have missed the call of your soul for his in death.”

My eyes lift from Hypnos to Thanatos. There is a slight tremor to the stillness of his stance. Even his lips are pale, as one might appear lying in a coffin. The color of life never touched him when his soul was graced with animation, and yet there is an undeniable edge of attraction that clings to him. In the back of my mind, a little voice whispers the word ‘vampire’ even though I know there is no such thing.

“So—” I frown as I continue to process Hypnos’ words. “So, no one ever found my soul when I died?”

It’s Hades who answers, his voice deathly sober. “No.”

“Is that normal?” I can’t help myself from asking, even though I suspect I already know the answer. It’s not normal. Souls don’t go ‘missing’ in the Underworld.

“No,” Thanatos speaks for the first time since Hypnos came to the rescue of his mini outburst. “It’s not normal at all.”

My eyes slide to the dark pits of his, and hold. One would think I’d be uncomfortable looking into these dark expanses, but I don’t. I feel oddly at ease under the study of Death. I feel just as oddly drawn to the mysterious confidence that emanates from Hypnos.

“I don’t understand,” I murmur. “Surely, you’ve missed a few souls in death. You’re just one you and people die every second of every?—”

Thanatos interrupts me with a step closer. “I was born of Nyx, created in her womb alongside Hypnos.”

I gape between the brothers. “You’re twins?”

Hypnos winks. “I got the looks.”

And the charm.

Thanatos doesn’t pay his brother any mind. “When we were birthed, I held the power of Death and Hypnos the power of Dreams. Unlike Hypnos, who was full and intact, my own soul emerged from Nyx fractured. My soul has always hovered a moment from whole, but it has allowed me to spare pieces of myself while remaining where I am, my corporeal body intact. There is never a moment where a shard of my soul is not with another, guiding them as they pass between the realms. I am with them until they arrive in Souls Landing. The process of constantly lending out pieces of my soul is taxing, but familiar. It is how I know that every soul calls out for a guide. The need to do so is natural, engraved upon creation. And yet you did not.”

He studies me as pebbles rise on my skin. He continues, “Not only did you fail to call for a guide, but I was never able to find you. To locate the very specific scent of your soul, which is exclusive to you. It was as though the river stole your life, and the essence of your very creation. Stripped your soul of all that it was and had ever been, so much that you had become an untethered soul lost to a realm of torment—” He snaps his mouth closed, jaw clenching as he grinds his molars. “It was the way of the souls before you . Before you created a realm of After life .”

“Okay…”

“What I want to know, Persephone—” Thanatos lowers to a knee before me. He leans forward, as though to peer into the secrets that lie behind my eyes. The secrets even I am not privy to. “Is if Demeter did anything, said anything, that would shed answers on why it was I could not find you. How I could not scent you.”

“I don’t know—” My mind slides unwillingly back to that vision of terror—to the Goddess who’d birthed my eternal soul. A shiver quakes, pushing to the surface, and Hades tightens his hold around me.

“Little Goddess,” Hades murmurs soothingly.

“She wanted—” I gasp. “She wanted me to kill Hades.”

Behind me, Hades is impossibly stiff.

Hypnos tips his head to the side, but the starlight in his dancing eyes cuts straight through me. “Did she say how you were to do that?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“I am assuming, that because she killed you, you refused,” Hypnos presses.

This time I nod. The word is barely a whisper. “Yes.”

“Demeter wants me dead,” Hades’ rough voice spills over my bare shoulders, drawing another rise of pebbles on my skin. “If I were to die?—”

I twist in his arms when he cuts off. “What? What happens if you die?”

His eyes darken, his jaw hardens. “If I die, the binds of Tartarus will shatter.”

“What does that mean?”

Thanatos is the one who finally answers when the silence becomes too great to bear. “If the binds of Tartarus shatter, all hell will, literally, break loose.”