GREECE 986
I WOULD LOVE CALLIOPE until the sun devoured the earth; that much I knew.
The air around the amphitheatre was smudged with dust and haze, my fingers sticky from dates and nectarine juice, my blood slow and sleepy from the wine, and Calliope’s laughing head on my shoulder was the most sweet and perfect thing in all the land. We had been to watch a new comedy about a peasant from Thessaly, and she was alight with it, with the feeling of tapping into the great current of human art.
‘Have you any new ideas for your own play?’ I asked as we stumbled home through the Athenian streets, for Calliope had been penning a tragedy for as long as I had known her. She would ink the story on any surface she could find – parchment and papyrus, shards of pottery and rags of fabric, even carving it into segments of peeled tree bark, her mind iridescent as the sky’s bright ether.
And still she would not reveal the plot.
‘Indeed.’ She smiled, her eyes as honey, desire poured upon her lovely face. Strolling down the arcaded street woven with vines, we passed our favourite marble fountain – admiring the curve of Aphrodite’s sumptuous hips, the invitation of her outstretched palm – before entering the cool stone atrium of our communal building. ‘I was thinking that perhaps my hero could, instead of falling for …’
Her eyes snapped wide and afraid, gripping my hand to the bone, and a kind of primal dread pooled in my lungs. ‘Daphne, I –’
Right as we crossed the threshold to our small abode, Calliope, my love, my light, collapsed suddenly and completely as a slain steed, a cruel froth foaming at her wine-red mouth, her limbs shuddering and smacking against the ground like a crazed puppet, her eyes devoured by their own bloodied whites.
‘ Calliope! ’ I screamed, ferocious, terror-stricken.
Still she seized.
I was known in my family for a level head in grave circumstances, but the visceral panic bucking in my chest was impossible to bridle. I fell to my knees beside her, resting an ear on her soft chest, her whole body writhing, black hair fanned out behind her like a mourning wreath, and everything in me roared in agony as I felt the final beat of her heart against my cheek.
A cheek she had kissed not a moment earlier.
Finally, stillness.
Awful, terrible, impossible stillness.
A pain in my ribs so keen it folded me in two.
No. We were but nineteen years old. We had a whole life ahead of us.
How? Why?
No.
Disbelieving, I buried my face in her gentle stomach, pleading with whatever gods would listen to save her, save her, please, I would do anything, I would give anything.
But the glinting gold icon hung over the hearth was silent.
Unbreathing, I clawed at my face. It had happened so fast. How had it happened so fast? This could not be real. It was a nightmare from which I must surely, surely awake.
The cacophony of the nearby agora rang out in the soaring night. The sounds of laughter and barter, toasts raised and trades sealed, the meeting of old friends and the making of new, and it all seemed so impossibly distant, as though such joviality and mirth must surely exist on another plane of reality. For how could such happiness swell mere yards away when my love lay dead?
Did they not know? Could they not feel it, this seismic shift, this earth-shattering loss, this great before and after of my life?
Shhhhlick.
A sudden, almost imperceptible shift in the atmosphere, something dark and strange entering my immediate orbit.
A subhuman sound at the door we had not closed.
The raw dread in my lungs dropped a dozen degrees.
‘That took rather longer than expected,’ drawled a cold, empty voice, its vowels echoing and cavernous. ‘The vial was tipped at the amphitheatre. I have been following ever since.’
My teary gaze snapped up.
There stood a tall, skeletal woman with skin so pink and new it was as though she had been born mere moments ago. Sheets of white-blonde hair brushed the ground, and coal-black embers burned in her irises.
Breathing ragged, I stared at the stranger, deeply furious and deeply afraid.
‘You poisoned her. Calliope.’ Each word was a puncture wound. ‘Why?’
She shrugged, the dark fabric of her gown shifting. ‘I saw the love you shared and knew it could be exploited.’
It took a moment for the casual cruelty of the statement to land.
This woman had killed the love of my life for sport.
Everything in me screamed for me to throw myself at her, to wrestle her to the ground and smash her head against the marble slabs until her broken eyes burst in their sockets like overripe apricots. But there was something so unnerving about her, a body of still water, a sinister sea serpent coiled below its glassy surface. My limbs would not move.
‘Get out,’ I snarled, low, animalistic. ‘Leave. Before I stab you in the chest.’
‘That would not achieve very much.’ She strode past the place where Calliope lay, her skirts gliding inhumanly along the floor, and took a seat in our best chair. My grandfather’s heirloom, made of sweet chestnut and carved with friezes of leaves and flowers. ‘And besides, I believe you rather need me to make you a deal.’
Understanding rolled through me like a clap of thunder.
It could not be. She could not be.
I had heard the stories, but …
‘You are the devil,’ I whispered.
Her silence was charged as the sky before rain.
Hideous hope took seed in my chest, laying roots in the pooled dread, the whole thing monstrous and wrong.
‘Then you have the power to save her,’ I croaked, suddenly shivering to the bone. ‘You can bring her back to life, for a price. And I will pay it. Anything.’
She waved a dismissive hand, her elegant fingers not the cloven hooves one might expect, though her nails wound around themselves in hideous black helixes. ‘Necromancy is beyond my scope, child. I can heal the sick, and mend broken hearts, and make kings of the poor. I can smite and spite and ruin, just as I can empower and enrich and ensnare. I can wield Cupid’s bow, and take aim with his arrows. I can end wars and part tides, just as I can bring forth bountiful harvests and plentiful rain. Drought and famine and plague cower at my feet. But no, I cannot raise the dead, for their souls have already been reaped.’
The grotesque hope in me withered. ‘Then there is nothing you can do for me.’
‘Is there not?’ Her eyebrows quirked in amusement. ‘Perhaps you simply lack imagination.’
‘I know not what you mean.’ I turned away from her, back to Calliope, whose perfect heart was already growing cold. Whose soul had, if this devil could be believed, already been reaped. She was lost to me now, forever, and the pain of the realization left me breathless.
How could a mind so iridescent ever die?
How could such honeyed eyes ever cease to shine?
The devil’s silken voice filled the room once more. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation, child?’
Something in me stilled; a deer sensing a nearby archer. ‘I do not.’
‘Perhaps it would be wise to start.’ She paused, the moment laden with significance.
Slowly her meaning dawned on me. ‘We can be together in our next life.’
The devil grinned, wide and uncanny, her mouth a gaping maw. ‘You can be together in infinite lives.’
My heart thumped anew. ‘You have the power to do that?’
‘As previously established, my powers are almost entirely unfettered.’
A stone lodged in my throat. I laced my fingers through Calliope’s, tears slicking down my salt-crusted cheeks. My bones ached with the sudden loss of her, my lungs wrung out like dishrags, the disbelief settling into something entirely more devastating.
‘What do you ask in return?’ I muttered hoarsely, the words arid. ‘I know the devil does not bargain for nothing.’
She leaned forward, a wolfish hunger in her stare. ‘You will spend seven days and seven nights upon burning coals, feeding me with your suffering. And then, for the rest of eternity, you will serve me, as too will your beloved.’
‘So we will be devils.’ That seemed less unbearable than being apart from Calliope, which I did recognize as an extraordinarily sapphic way to think.
‘Indeed.’
I studied this beastly devil like an ancient text, peering between the lines for hidden meaning, for traps and ruses disguised as opportunities. ‘Can devils even love at all?’
‘A good question.’ She nodded appraisingly, and I loathed myself for the flicker of pride. ‘You are not one to be easily tricked. No, devils cannot love. But I will ensure enough of your human hearts remains that the time with your beloved is meaningful.’
‘So I shall die too.’ I thought of my mother, my brother, the life I had here, but it all paled next to the loss of Calliope. They would survive without me. I would not without my beloved. ‘Now. Tonight.’
‘Indeed,’ the devil repeated, every muscle and sinew in her body taut with anticipation.
‘And then we will be born … elsewhere? As different people? You won’t make us trees? Or locusts?’
‘Another astute question – such a fierce mind, even in times of great sorrow. Yes, you will be spawned as human beings, in reasonably close proximity. If your love is as true as you believe it to be, you will find each other. There will be complications.’ A grinding bark of laughter. ‘Oh, the hardships you will face. Because the suffering will sustain me, you see? I feed not just on souls, but on pain. Emotional, physical – it does not matter to me. Either you will turn eighteen and reap, and I will be fed, or you will suffer, and I will also be fed. The tether binding us together will be like an artery, pain flowing always towards me.’
‘What kind of hardships?’ My voice was coarse with hatred, fists clenching and unclenching at my sides.
The devil tapped her bottom lip with a grotesque fingernail. ‘That depends upon how fiendishly inventive I can be. Perhaps in your next incarnation … yes. You will return to the Underrealm with me, and I will raise you as my own. I will make your love –’ a scathing gesture towards Calliope – ‘a lowly mortal commoner, and have you reap them. And they will always remember that as your beginning, always bear that scar of resentment. A terrible foundation for a relationship.’ She gave a shudder of delight, as though the thought had just stroked her somewhere intimate.
‘Will I remember this deal at all?’
She considered this. ‘No. There is too much comfort in the why . Nothing tortures the human mind quite like the unknown.’
‘But you promise that we will be together,’ I said fiercely, relinquishing myself to that monstrous hope. ‘In the next life.’
‘And the next. And the next. And the next. As, too, you will be devils.’
So there it was. Live without Calliope, or live with her forever as a devil.
Even with the promise of a week on searing coals, it was barely a question.
I took in a last breath of dusty Athenian air.
‘Then we have a deal.’