Chapter 14 Hades
HADES
Dreams started a little bit less than a year ago. But when you've been living for more than five thousand years it felt like they started just yesterday. I feared closing my eyes because I knew I would see her again.
I feared this was my punishment as my insides decayed, reliving that day over and over again.
The same heartbreak.
The same pain.
My Persephone standing on the cliffs, clutching her middle as she bled, looking at me with all the love she felt, telling me she would find me. She would always find me.
"In another life," she whispered the last time before she fell. Before the dark seas surrounding this eternal prison of ours swallowed her body, taking her from me. Destroying the happiness I thought I had finally found.
But in the dream, she wasn't Persephone anymore. She wasn't the Goddess that stole my heart on a sunny day. She wasn't the woman who held my soul in her hands. Instead silver eyes looked at me, piercing through my very soul, through this decaying heart left behind to wither and die with time.
For so many years I stopped living. I stopped caring about anything and anyone, until that first dream. Until the nameless woman stood in front of me, dying over and fucking over again, leaving me behind, unable to stop it from happening. Unable to ask her anything.
I thought my mind had finally snapped, my disease spreading from my body to my mind, finally bringing me to the sweet ending I so desperately craved.
But she was here. I knew the moment she stepped on this island.
Her energy, her… power, called to me, yet I didn't know this woman in front of me.
But the same silver eyes stared back at me with questions in them I couldn't answer.
And the same silver hair danced on the wind as she stepped away from the cliffs and toward me, her hands trembling at her sides as she perused me just as I perused her.
My chest tightened at the sight of the scar on her left eyebrow, wishing to know how she got it. I wanted to know everything about this woman in front of me, yet I had no idea why. My heart, my soul, only ever belonged to one person.
But now… Now I couldn't look away from this witch, this enchantress sent here to tempt me, to make me forget about the one I loved the most. And I promised.
I promised to the skies, to the Fates, to the destiny that fucked us over I would never love another. I could never love another person like I loved Persephone. We were written in the stars, our souls meant to become one for eternity, and no one else could ever come close to that.
But this… feeling. This wickedness passing through my bloodstream, as the scent of vanilla and fresh apples reached some quiet part of my soul the closer the silver-eyed woman came, awakened the need, the desire, to touch her.
To claim her. To make her scream my name while others listened, jealous of us. Jealous of what we had.
My own knees protested as I forced myself to stay rooted in place, unable to trust my body right now. Unable to trust my instincts, because they all screamed the same thing.
She's back.
The soul of my soul, the only reason to breathe, to live, to exist in this wicked world, was back. She felt like her. She felt like my Persephone, but she wasn't her.
Those light eyes held a darkness Persephone never had.
A grief I could recognize almost instantly, rolling off of her in waves strong enough to suffocate everything and everyone around them.
Those were not the lips I once kissed. Hers was not the body I worshipped.
The silver hair cascading down her shoulders was not the one I touched, played with, and braided.
But it was her.
It had to be her.
Every step she took, every new inhale, sent a new wave of energy passing through the island. Through me, through the trees on my left, whispering her name. Begging her to come back. To touch them and give them the energy only Persephone could give.
Was this just another trick my brothers created to torture me? Was she just a figment of my imagination, so desperate to feel something, anything but the constant void spreading through my body, rotting me from the inside out?
"Who are you?" I repeated again, hating the flinch on her face at the sound of the coldness in my tone. But she couldn't be who I was waiting for. She couldn't be.
Lifetimes have passed since I gave up on ever seeing her again, forever trapped on this island, in this eternal tomb Demeter had created from her own flesh and blood.
Lifetimes in which Persephone's soul lived in the bodies of mortal women, dying over and over and over again, while I rotted here, begging for something, anything, to change.
Begging to go to them, to these faceless women I could see in the dreams, in the memories.
And each time, each lifetime, each life ended in misery, in tears, only leaving me with a heartbreak I knew too fucking well.
So who was she and how was she here? She was no one from the island. But she wasn't mortal.
This woman in front of me had power humming underneath her skin, waiting to be unleashed. Waiting to be free. The shadows in her eyes sharpened the longer she stared at me, but she never replied to my question. She didn't try to come closer either, and I both hated and loved the distance.
I took a step backward. She took a step forward, then two, then three, until those silver eyes stared up at me, the top of her head barely reaching my shoulders.
Her lips parted as those icy eyes skimmed over my face, coming back to my eyes after every perusal, drinking me in as if she were seeing me for the first time in her life.
"Who are you, stranger?" she suddenly asked as her head tilted to the side, more questions popping up in her eyes as her lips pressed together.
"Why were you at the docks this morning?
" She saw me? How could she have seen me?
"But that's not the point." She took one more step forward, our chests almost touching, our energies fusing, buzzing, exploding around us.
She could feel it too, I could sense that much, but she wasn't aware of her power. Or if she was, she had no idea how to pull it forward. She had no idea how to wield it, and sometimes that was more dangerous than being aware of what you were capable of.
That darkness I sensed in her eyes, that bitterness brimming somewhere deep inside her, was more apparent the closer she got. She was a predator, a lioness in a forest full of gazelles, just waiting to attack, and she had no idea. Not even a clue what kind of a weapon she carried.
Was that why her soul called out to me? This dark energy living inside her was probably why I felt such a pull. Why I felt the need to touch her and the need to also run away. She couldn't be the one the sisters had told me about. She couldn't be the one who would end my suffering.
She just couldn't. After thousands and thousands of years without my soulmate, while my own soul bled, ripped away from the one it belonged to, I've learned to live with the pain.
I learned to live with the knowledge we would never be together, never again.
Not in this life and probably not in the next one.
"Are you going to answer or are you going to keep staring at me?" she asked, the defiance, the rage in her eyes sparking the fire from the ashes of my own soul, and I didn't know what to do with it. "So?"
My hand lifted of its own volition, begging to touch her, to see if she was real, this fiery Goddess standing in front of me.
I was torn between the need to run from her and the need to find out what she was.
I was torn between the desire to claim the full lips begging to be kissed and the desire to go back to my house and remember why I only ever allowed myself to touch Persephone.
But the longer I stood in front of this woman, the less I thought of the one I lost. The less I thought of the pain that followed her death, her eternal ending, and I knew I needed to get away from her. Far, far away.
"I'm Hayden," I said, looking down at her, wishing I could see the thoughts swirling behind her eyes. "Hayden Raev."
"Hayden." She rolled the name given to me by the locals on her tongue, as if she wanted to taste it.
But I was a fool for allowing myself to seek her out when I felt her again, her energy erratically jumping all over the place.
"And what are you, Hayden?" she asked, accentuating my name as if she didn't believe it was the real one.
But more than that, it was her question that made me stop and think.
"You're not one of the monsters or mythical creatures, or you have a stronger glamour than the rest. But I can see them.
" She looked around me, her eyes tracing something.
"I can see them touching you. I can hear them in my ears, begging me to remember, but I don't know what I'm supposed to remember.
The same way you've been asking me to remember in every single one of my dreams."
I recoiled, taking a step back from her. She's been dreaming of me, too? But in my nightmares, in every single one of them, we never spoke. We never touched. I begged her to come back to me. I begged her to stay with me, but each time she fell over those cliffs—these same fucking cliffs.
She could see my shadows, the curse that followed me from the Underworld the moment we got locked in this place.
She could hear them, the voices of the damned.
The voices that wouldn't, couldn't, quiet down no matter what I tried.
She could probably even hear their cries if she tried hard enough, and I didn't know what to do with that information.
"Impossible," I murmured, staring at her as if I was seeing her for the first time. It was only then I noticed the red around her eyes and the puffiness in her face. It was only then I could feel her pain as if it were my own slamming into my soul.
Suffocating.
Relentless.
Craving for violence.