Persephone #2
“They’re alive.” My words fractured over another sob.
My knees threatened to give out on me, and it wasn’t until Hecate’s hands gently guided me back to the bed that I realized how close they’d come to letting me down under the gravity of my relief.
All the fear, my dread I’d harbored, the agony of not knowing for certain. “Thank the Fates.”
“Yes, they are.” Hecate wasn’t warm, just observant, steady as her hand brushed my shoulder in what I think was supposed to be a comforting gesture. Facts over fiction were a comfort, no matter how bluntly they were told. “As are you.”
“When do I go back to the mortal realm?”
“When the Morningstar is killed. Permanently, this time.”
“Tell me what you know, Hecate,” I beseeched her, tired of being kept in the shadows. My whole life, I was in Mother’s shadow. Now I stand in the shadow of the dead. “What is he? What does he want with me?”
Hecate’s eyes narrowed, not unkindly, but with focus, a sharpness unique to her.
“We don’t know,” she answered, “Which I personally find unsettling. He’s not a god, at least not in the way we are.
His motives usually make themselves obvious.
Power, vanity, worship, theatrics, they all fit him.
He’s always been predictable, which is I think why Zeus didn’t send him away.
Predictability is safe. Safe does not an enemy make.
” She glowered into her hands. “He has a habit of turning up where he isn’t wanted.
Like mold.” She sniffed with distaste. “Or Zeus.”
I blinked. Was that a joke? My frazzled nerves saw me snort a startled laugh.
“But this? This… fixation is new. I have lived long enough to see many forms of divine stupidity, and even I can’t fathom what his plans are.” Her eyes searched me, scanned me, unfocusing as if reading something around me, anything to glean insight.
“I didn’t do anything to him.” I didn’t know if I should apologize, if I should cry, or explain, or if I’d done something wrong. I didn’t understand that interaction in the garden. How we’d gone from relative pleasantry to…
I fought a shudder at the memory of his hands touching me.
“You didn’t have to,” Hecate said bluntly.
“Once he wants something, he bends the very cosmos to get it.” My breath grew shallow.
Hecate drew closer, not in a warm, comforting way, but like a lifeline, solid and grounding.
“It was so when he created his two realms out of nothing but empty, discarded pocket realms.”
“A pocket realm?”
“A shadow of a realm. As the moon exists, it casts a shadow. So too do realms. Each pocket realm is temporary, but he’s sustained his two for eons now with nothing but the force of his magic.”
I nodded, understanding. “So, what do we know of him?”
“Besides the delusions of grandeur?” She shook her head.
“Not nearly as much as we’d prefer. He’s been stealing souls.
Mortals who worship him grow more every mortal year, and those souls go to him, to those little vanity projects he calls Paradise and Hell.
” The disgust, the pure loathing in Hecate’s voice was loud and unmistakable.
“Hell is separate from the Underworld that he shoves the mortals who worship him but displease him. A realm of control and punishment. Those who don’t displease him are rewarded with the privilege of a lackluster after-existence, neither suffering nor quite at peace.
He has no dominion over death, just the delusion that he does.
Those that do please him go to his version of Paradise. ”
“Despicable!” I wouldn’t help my growing horror. His tone in the garden, his obvious contempt for mortals, for their choice. It made a sick sort of sense now. “How could anyone that calls themself a god do such monstrous things?”
“It’s the Morningstar.” Hecate’s reply was a verbal shrug. “All he does is weaponize suffering under a veil of charm and returned devotion.”
My throat tightened as I remembered. I remembered the feel of his long fingers digging into the sensitive skin of my throat. His voice when he dropped his mask—how it went from honey sweet to something darker, like velvet stretched thin over a bed of knives.
I tried to stop my thoughts, but even as I cast my mind to something else, anything else, his eyes haunted me, bringing me back to that moment.
Hecate’s cool touch grasped my hands, startling me to a gasp as reality and my mind fought for dominion. Where the present overlapped the past, where fear and safety warred, Hecate’s voice was a beacon, a guiding light. ”You’re safe, Persephone. Calm yourself. Breathe.”
I followed her voice back to the bedchamber, away from the gardens that still trapped part of my soul.
Until the garden fell away, each blink blurring the details of it, until only Hecate in the bedchamber remained. A sob gathered in my throat, but I refused to release it.
“You fear him.”
“Of course I do.” I didn’t mean to snap. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Good.” Hecate’s voice wasn’t gentle. Wasn’t kind. But her steady contact was reassuring all the same. Bolstering. “That fear you feel? It’s useful if you let it be. That blind panic though? That isn’t. Use your fear, but control it. Don’t let it spiral.”
Easy for her to say. But there was a steely glint in her gaze, something hardened and sharp that told me that perhaps she understood more than I’d expect. The glint of something once was malleable turned impenetrable.
“What do I do now?” I asked, looking down at my hands. “I’m trapped here while others, including my only family, fight a battle for me? To what end? And I have no magic? What is he even doing? What does he hope to accomplish?!”
If my outburst, my peppering her with questions, were frustrating to Hecate, she didn’t show it. She straightened until she looked as if she might crack, but still maintained the effortless elegance eons had afforded her.
“The Morningstar usually blusters about like the egomaniac he is. Setting things on fire, poaching some more souls, instilling primal fear in mortals, preaching some nonsense about destiny….” Her fingers drummed her arm.
“It was the way he looked at you as if you were the last ember of a dying star. Like you were his. Hungry. Obsessive. Its why Hades insisted he and Zeus commune with the Fates.” Her observations rang true with Hades’ and even Zeus’s stories.
The moment felt heavy, fueled by ill omens as if they circled me in the room, waiting for the chance to close in around me.
“Thus, why you’re here. The barriers around the Underworld are the strongest in existence.
Even he can’t reach you here.” Her voice turned mildly disgusted.
“It’s also why Hades is acting like someone kicked a puppy he doesn’t want to admit he adores.
” We both smiled. I even huffed a faint, bewildered laugh.
“He won’t stop, Persephone. But we won’t either. He’s annoyed the pantheon before, but attacking you? Attacking Zeus and Demeter? He goes too far. He has enemies in every realm, and a time will come where he won’t be able to come out from his miserable realm without risking his head.”
“Why are you helping me?” I asked, blinking up at her. “Not that I’m ungrateful!”
“Politics in the underworld are different than Olympus, Persephone,” Hecate said, her hair catching another breeze.
“But ultimately, Hades asked me to take care of you. Hades matters very much to me, and so I will heed his request.” Hecate nodded briskly once more and stood, cutting off the energy in the room and dragging my gaze upwards with her.
“Now, we still haven’t done your tour of House Hades.
And as I said previously,” she sniffed, “I do insist you bathe.”