Chapter 19 #2
“And if I don’t choose?” Her voice might have been small, but it was still sharp. Hush blanketed the room. Even the torches in Hecate’s shadow stopped flickering.
“You will,” Hecate said as if there were no other options. “Or everything begins to unravel.”
Irina stared at both of us, fury rising like a tide. “You speak like I’m a prize. A pedestal for gods and monsters to prop their empires on. I’m not yours. I’m not hers. I’m?—”
“You’ve never been your own,” Hecate said, while her voice was not unkind, I wanted to destroy her for saying it aloud.
It was worse, because it was true. Irina flinched.
“Not yet,” Hecate added “But you could be. If you can remember the first time.”
What? That revelation tangled around me. I had traced Irina through every incarnation from Kore to Persephone to élise, Louisa, and every other name she’d borne across centuries. Followed her soul prints, anchored nodes, rebuilt Thanatek from ashes just to catch the glint of her light again.
But this? This didn’t match any tale or tether I knew or had seen. Before Kore? Before she was born ?
“What do you mean, the first time?” Irina asked even as her hand found mine again. The feel of her gripping me grounded me, draining away some of the fear and the loathing. “The descent? The Underworld.”
Hecate focused on her folly. Her hands were empty of the torch and the dagger. The gravity in her gaze was enough to seal the truth of her words.
“No,” she said softly. “I mean the first time you were taken .”
Silence fell.
My heart kicked once. Wrong .
Irina blinked and there was no mistaking the cloud of confusion wreathing her. “You mean you? You took me—back then—at the gates?”
“No,” Hecate said once more. “ She did.”
Reality cracked around me at the revelation.
“I don’t understand,” Irina said, tears coating the anger in her voice even as she shook her head. “Who?”
“Demeter,” I whispered and it tasted like ash in my mouth. Of course, the goddess of the harvest, of the earth—the mother .
Irina jerked as though she’d been struck. “That’s not—she’s Persephone’s, I mean Kore’s mother. My mother, right? She mourned me? She searched…”
“She mourned what she feared to lose,” the crone corrected. “Not you. Never you. What you represent . The cycle. The freedom. The capacity to move between.”
“I know she raised you,” I began, desperate to comfort the hurt in Irina’s eyes. This was so much to take in. I struggled with it myself. She’d always been Demeter’s child. Or so I had always believed.
“She hid her,” Hecate snapped. “Wrapped her in spring, in sweetness, in safety. Only it had nothing to do with safety. It was containment. ”
“Stop,” Irina ordered, her voice cracking as she pulled away from both of this. She pressed her hands to her head like covering her ears would keep the truth out. “You’re twisting it.”
“I kept this secret,” Hecate said gently, “because you weren’t ready. Not in the Underworld. Not the first spring you returned. Not in Thessaloniki. Not in Paris. Not in Berlin.”
Irina turned to me, eyes wide and pleading. “Did you know?”
I shook my head. No. I’d never suspected Demeter. Yet, my love had been stolen twice . I pocketed that for the moment and focused on Irina. She needed comfort not fury.
“No,” I swore. “There’s no record…”
“There wouldn’t be,” Hecate said, waving off my concern even as she solidified the fact that I couldn’t have known. “It happened before there were records. Before names had edges. Before you claimed the Underworld as your dominion.”
“You were not born of Demeter.” Hecate looked only at Irina, the weight of lifetimes passing in her breath.
“She took you. Created the idea of you, the shell of a daughter to bind a prophecy she could no longer fulfill herself. Zeus lent his name and some of his power, but it was her will. You came into being as Kore, because she needed you to be Kore. Gentle. Contained. Obedient. A thing that bloomed only for her.”
“She loved me?” Pain filled those words, pain that turned the statement into a question. Her eyes begged me to confirm it for her.
“She wanted you,” Hecate corrected, unrelenting. “Love? Love allows you to choose. When you did, when you stayed in the Underworld for part of the year, when you refused to belong only to her—she took you again.”
Raw fury spiraled out of me. I’d never suspected Demeter.
Not once. She’d grieved or so I thought.
She’d grieved when Persephone first came to me.
Then accepted the deal, only when Persephone disappeared the second time, she’d grieved again and then raged at me.
Blamed me. I kept my distance to keep from hurting her with my presence while I hunted.
And all this time…
“Over and over,” Hecate said, this time as much to me as to my love. “In every life since. She has found you, reshaped you, rewrote the script. She couldn’t stop you from returning, she couldn’t bind you utterly to herself, but she could make you forget why you ever left.”
My breath caught. The anger, a living fire, burned ice cold in my being. That was why I could never catch her. Why the tether frayed each time she bloomed and why death passed her but did not claim her.
“She hid the moment,” I said quietly, as furious with myself for having allowed my sympathy to blind me to the danger as anything else.
“The true one,” Hecate said on a sigh. I could almost feel the apology she didn’t offer under the words. “The moment Irina—Kore—stepped into shadow not out of fear, but of desire. Not because she was taken, but because she chose to go. For knowledge. For power. For love.”
“The moment she left,” I whispered. “That wasn’t forced either.”
“No,” the crone said. “It never was. The descent, the return, the balance. None of that was theft. It was Persephone’s consent. Demeter couldn’t accept that. Because it meant you had outgrown her.”
Irina’s breath came in sharp, hard pants like she couldn’t get enough air. Her hands clenched at her sides. She turned away, then back again. The short, staccato steps did not take her far before she came back. “You’re saying that my mother?—”
“She was never your mother.” Hecate gave no quarter here. No softness. No allowance to ascribe other motives to Demeter’s actions. “She is and has only ever been, your captor.”
Irina’s tears froze on her cheeks. She didn’t fall. She stood straighter. For the first time in thousands of years, I saw her eyes glow with that same impossible light we’d only managed to glimpse in the Paris fragment.
Not Kore. Not Persephone.
Both.
All.
“I want to remember.” It was a command. A demand. She would not be denied.
If the crone took issue with her tone, she did not show it, for all she did was incline her head. “Then go to the place she first found you. The place she took you.”
“Where?” Irina and I both demanded in the same breath.
“I don’t know,” Hecate said. “But you will.”
The air shifted and the shadows began to unravel. The light in the room returned to normal as the torches flickered out.
“But remember this,” Hecate said, nearly gone but her voice drifted through like fog. “When you find that first memory, don’t look away from it. Don’t let anything distract you. Love let you be taken, but it was for love that you left.”
Then she was gone, leaving me, a shaken Irina, a shivering dog, and the echo of a beginning too old for language.
We would make this right.
Then I would end Demeter.