Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
P ersephone
It feels like a lifetime ago that I stood before this painting. It had hooked me then. Gripped me with those wicked talons that stretch from the starved limbs of a rootless tree, swimming in an eternity of nothing. I remember thinking I preferred a tragic kind of romance to the violent sweeps of paint across canvas. Remember thinking that although this piece wasn’t the kind that usually drew me in, that there was a depthless beauty to the agonizing torment of the gore each brushstroke depicted. A hypnotic kind of draw I was, and still am, helpless to resist.
I take a step closer, peering into the burst of pale flesh and ebony bone swirling in a galaxy of suffering.
Again, I feel watched by eyes that are without body. The impossible darkness appears to shift as though sentient, in a violent wind. It is faceless, and yet familiarity sparks within me.
It edges on recognition. A complex web of knowing far too intricate to untangle. It plucks at the chords deep within me, pulling at my own threads of ancient recognition.
And yet something inside me quivers, rejecting the thing that watches from the depths of the enchanted canvas. The prison in which the soul of a Primordial God is bound.
Pebbles of uncertain awareness rise on my skin. A quickening of dark foreboding flutters the organ inside my chest. I am divided. Torn by an impulse to move nearer even as I feel compelled to flee.
A dull shuffling breaks my trance. I whirl to find Hecate and Hades. They both watch me with equal wariness. In Hades’ eyes I see worry for me. But in Hecate’s I think I see something else. Something curious and touched with suspicion. She is not suspicious of me, I don’t think. Her suspicion is rather of the thread of familiarity that pulses between me and the Primordial being within the painting.
Drawing breath into my lungs, I ask the thought that has plagued me since I learned of the Titan’s prisons. “How is this possible? That something so massive—so powerful—is trapped within a canvas?”
“Magic.” Hecate moves to close the distance between us. Her eyes, so dark there is little distinction between the dark of her irises and the black of her pupils, do not drift from the swirling torment of paint on canvas. “Magic is everywhere, clinging to everything and everyone. It is abundant, if one knows to use it.”
“And you do?”
She wets her lips, painted black. “Of course.”
I can’t help but study the Goddess. Her beauty is sharp and lethal, gothic. I’ve never been drawn to gothic beauty, but hers is undeniable. The fluid way she moves is enchanting and somehow frightening. Harrowingly compelling.
Tearing my gaze from Hecate, I feel Hades watching me as I look back to the painting. That same familiar pull tugs at me even as the piece within me repels its nearness.
Confliction at its finest.
“So, is this how we talk to him, then?”
Hecate’s lips lift in a slow, catlike smile, but it’s Hades who speaks. “No.”
I look to him when he takes his place on my other side. “Then how?”
“We enter the prison, little goddess.”
My lips fall open. He can’t mean…?
“You mean in the painting?”
Hades dips his chin once.
I gape for a solid minute, fear steeping. “How?”
“My dear friend, magic.” Hecate strokes the painting, clucking her tongue in a way that is both eerie and endearing. “He is angry.” Her eyes shift to Hades. “This may take some time.”
“But can you do it?”
She blinks slowly, the fan of thick black lashes sweeping the arc of high, sharp cheekbones. She says in her slow, to-the-point, way, “I can do anything.”
Hades nods to the painting, and Hecate’s black smile stretches. Her raven hair shifts around her body as though riding a breeze only she can feel. She steps toward the canvas that hangs inconspicuously here in the Tower of Pluto, in a realm on the cusp of devastation simply by harboring the prisons of these violent creatures.
I am captivated by the way she moves, her hips swaying as she drifts closer, the pale snow white of her flesh peeking from the cut-outs of black gauze that drape from shoulder to her middle finger, where the fabric is fastened to a ring on each hand. A black leather belt adorned with runes of silver cinches her tiny waist before her hips flare under the translucent cover of her wispy skirt.
In the week she worked in preparation for this moment, she has filled out. When I first saw Hecate, she’d been far gaunter than she is now. Hades had explained that her form is slowly returning to its former state now that I have returned to the Underworld. Apparently, the realm feeds on me. On the power my soul harbours to sustain all that it is.
While I had been gone, Hades and the Gods of the Underworld had sacrificed their own power to sustain the realm. For each of the Gods, the sacrifice had shown itself differently. For Hades, he had been weak of form. Tired. Unable to portal with the ease he’d once been capable.
For Hecate, the realm had physically devoured her, wasting her away.
For Hypnos, it had drained him of reason, his dreams becoming senseless and varied, direction near impossible to decipher.
Thanatos had suffered a great weakness to his physical form, and had only recently been capable of wandering the Underworld in his greatly depleted corporal form. Even the souls who took solace in the Underworld had been touched by the hunger of the realm, their minds confused in the path they were to travel to their afterlife.
Now that I have returned, the Underworld is healing. However, the process is slower than Hades would like, that much is clear.
I can’t help but worry that maybe in this life, in this body, I do not possess the same power to sustain all that the Underworld is now.
I have kept my worry to myself, but it’s there. And every day it grows.
Hecate lifts her hand to the canvas, chanting words I cannot begin to understand, and yet my soul knows . She is melting the binds of the prison, decoding the enchantment she bestowed upon the canvas that contains the promise of destruction. I can almost hear the magical click, click, click, of a complex lock releasing.
The breath lodges in my lungs when the swirling paint truly begins to swirl . The limbs of the tree that roots to nothing claw toward us with their talons of inky darkness. The galaxy of flesh and bone of ebony begin to dance as though alive under the call of her chant, and something violent roars from the depths.
A chill erupts in the room, as though casting the space in a breath of frost. Pinpricks of trepidation rise on my flesh, fleeing down my spine as the hairs on the back of my neck rise. A scream claws to free itself from the confines of my throat and my body burns with the need to run. But I don’t move. I am rooted to the floor, unable to move.
Somehow, I manage a whimper. Hades touches my hand with his, the tip of his finger is a warmth to fight the frost that slowly crawls inside me.
“You can leave.” He wants me to leave.
I shake my head. It’s choppy, stilted, fractured—but I’m not leaving. I wouldn’t even if I thought I could.
“He is dangerous, little goddess.”
“I—” I manage through chattering teeth. The frost is crawling along the walls now, creeping over the floor. Can Hades see it? He seems so unperturbed. So blasé. I force the word past the fear in my throat. “Know.”
I think he’s going to try and convince me to leave, but to my relief, he doesn’t. He says nothing else, but his hand grips mine tightly as Hecate begins to move again, pushing her palm through the swirl of sentient paint and into the canvas. Her second hand joins, shoving into the painting to the elbow. There is strain in her body, as though she shoves against something within the painting—something that very well may be stronger than her.
Fear leaps in my heart before dropping stones of dread in my belly.
If that thing she fights is stronger than her, what happens to us? To the world?
“Hades?” His name is a scream in my mind that sounds now as little more than a whisper. He does not respond verbally, but offers me instead, a squeeze of his hand.
This can’t possibly be normal, right?
I mean, of course, this isn’t normal! This is insane. Bad.
If the last few weeks hadn’t happened, I’d check myself into a mental hospital and sign on the dotted line to throw away the key.
This. Is. Crazy.
And yet…
Hecate’s voice rises and she throws her body into her—what? Spell?
With a lurch—she’s gone. The whirling of the paint into that galaxy of torment snaps back into place as though it never moved at all.
“Hecate!” I shriek, suddenly able to move and darting for the canvas. My palm connects with the surface. Other than being impossibly cold, it is solid.
Hades’ hands land on my hips. “She will be fine.”
I whip to face him. “What do you mean? It—it ate her.”
I can’t even with this shit right now. I’m a reader. I’ve read books about kickass heroines capable of doing kickass things, because it’s the right thing to do. Excelling in battle even though they never fought a day in their lives, because it was what they were born to do.
This is not me.
I am not so lucky.
I am not that heroine.
Because right now, I’m a trembling mess. I’ve never known fear like I know it now. Never felt so weak as I feel right now. As I stand helplessly on the wrong side of a painting while a Goddess who, I think might be my friend, is battling a Primordial God because I want to speak to him .
“Persephone.” Hades’ hands move from my hips to my shoulders. “Breathe.” I suck in breath. “Now release.” His grin hitches on the command. He thinks I forgot how to breathe.
Perhaps I did.
I release the breath. “What is she doing?”
“She is containing the soul of Uranus.”
“Wh—what?”
“He is without flesh or form. When I defeated him, bringing him to Tartarus with the other Titans, the Crown of Souls decreed he be stripped of flesh and form, that he may never again possess the power of his Gods Form. All that remains of him is his immortal soul.”
“The Crown of Souls wanted him stripped of his form?”
“He was too powerful. His power is what bestowed him the title of King of Gods. His taste of this power meant he would never truly relinquish it.” Hades watches me carefully. “The Crown of Souls is never wrong.”
“But you stripped him of his form—how—how does that even happen?”
“It doesn’t.” Hades eyes bore into mine. “Not without the power of the Crown of Souls.”
“How is Hecate going to contain his soul?” My question is quickly forgotten as the canvas crackles and pops, reminding me of the chilling sound of standing on ice that is too thin.
Hades grips my face between his hands, forcing my wild eyes to his. “You do not have to do this, but if you are coming, we have to go now. Hecate will not be able to hold him for long.”
“I’m coming.”
With his hand in mine, Hades steps toward the canvas. And then he steps through it. My eyes slam closed as I am pulled into the depths of an icy prison of despair that claws at my heart and soul, threatening a deadly undoing.
The sound of cracking ice echoes behind me, a growl of ominous promise as polar wind lands like a whip across my skin.
I open my eyes and see horror.