Chapter 3
Something warm was pressed to her lips.
Blunt and alive.
A divine libation that tasted of the sea.
Brine so sweet and full of vigor she couldn’t help the smile that spread across her lips.
She drank.
Greedily.
With reckless abandon. Allowing herself to be fed, she was limp.
Paralysed, anchored to the sands from the weight of her chains as ambrosia washed over her tongue and sweet currents drifted all around her.
Caressing her hair, toying with the rags still clinging to her chilled skin.
Playful now, as if it wasn’t that very same current that had killed her.
He tilted her head back, repositioning that vessel behind her teeth. Driving it deeper, one strong hand wrapped around her nape, moving her into a position of servitude so she might accept more.
A tiny sound escaped her, then. The barest whisper of life still clinging to her mortal shell, she tried to refuse. Tried to gag and reject even as he pried her jaws apart and forced it deeper.
It was too hot. Too vibrant.
Too… much.
“Swallow.”
It was a word spoken through the sea. Echoing all around her—through her blood.
A thing not heard, but felt.
It was a command she could not ignore, for he pressed the nozzle into her throat and pumped that glorious brew straight down into her stomach. Forcing her to drink the sea dry. Filling her belly with breath and warmth until she bulged with it.
Swollen and full.
When he’d fed her all there was to give, he pulled the spigot from her throat and ran thick fingers over her lips.
Caressing. Almost… gentle. Tender, just for a moment before those fingers grew cruel.
Tangling in her loose tresses, finding a firm grip against her scalp, he hauled her up from the sands of the sea floor and began to swim. Moving as if he were the ocean itself.
Pure, raw power rippled all around her. Every movement sent a current roaring behind him. Each heave of muscle moved the Aegean and parted the sea.
Towing Kore by her hair with one hand, she was weightless in his wake. She felt no pain—not even from her crushed legs and pelvis.
There was only… a glowing.
A cauldron of bubbling warmth in her belly that pressed against the walls of her abdomen, sloshing against her spine and organs, where she was bursting at the seams.
It filled her with ambrosia. Saturated her lungs with life and freed her from the pain of drowning, of being crushed by the full weight of the deep. But she wasn’t breathing. Not really. She was… suspended.
Because she was already gone.
Hades himself had come to escort her to judgment, for surely only one of divine blood might swim with such effortless speed? Such elegant, powerful grace.
Kore didn’t fear death, and she already knew suffering.
Already, she was intimate with the anguish of loss. And there was something… beautiful to be found in surrender. Something akin to freedom in trusting her devotion to the divine.
Clumsy, desperate for a glimpse of the Unseen One, Kore tried to lift her eyelids when something rough and sharp brushed against her cold skin. Tried to watch that which was forbidden from mortal eyes, to witness the moment the veil was lifted and the next great journey began.
All she could muster was a flicker. A tiny twitch of heavy lids that allowed her a hint of iron chains trailing behind, reaching down into the deepest dark. Fluttering rags that whispered and danced around slack limbs as the current twisted and thrashed around her.
In her peripheral, a flash of sparkling color undulated to her left in time with his mighty, sweeping kicks. A mirage she couldn’t quite grasp with the barest hint she’d seen from the corner of her dead eyes.
But she saw the blood.
A slow trickle oozing from torn flesh, she watched a swirl of crimson even as it was washed away. Her skin cleaner than it had been in… weeks. Purified by the very waves that had killed her.
Her lids fell closed. Stinging. Too heavy to fight the blackness for another moment, she succumbed to the rhythm he set.
Hypnotized by the flashes of beautiful glittering color, by the pulse of seawater thrust aside with every heaving kick.
Listening to the song of the ocean as it sang a dirge for the countless lost.
The forsaken.
When he broke the surface, the night struck her with a cold slap.
She blinked.
Head lolling, breath still in her chest, she was dazed. Staring at a sliver of the moon hanging high in the dark sky above. An endless void speckled with countless stars.
A wave sent her rolling, and her eyes fell upon a shore. Close. Closer than she’d imagined possible, for this wasn’t the Aegean sea, but a river. The waters tasted sweet and fresh, almost absent the salty tang of the Aegean.
Kore frowned, for this was not the path she had expected Hades to take to reach the realm of the dead. Every scripture she had ever read mentioned the entrance was located in Cumae… but… what might one mortal really know of such things, even if she’d been a priestess of Apollo?
She’d died at the bottom of the Aegean with hate in her heart, absent any coin to pay Charon to ferry her across the Styx.
An improper burial, her last thoughts were vindictive.
Filled with loathing for those who’d dare tarnish holy women.
She’d been deeply pleased those men had suffered and failed before they’d been swallowed by the sea.
She’d died impure.
Dread bubbled behind her frozen heart, then. Enough to make her thrash against the unyielding grip in her hair. Trying to beg forgiveness. To plead with the Dark One to absolve her of such petty, ugly thoughts.
Ready to throw herself on his mighty bident, to bleed for him and prove herself worthy of everlasting peace.
Squirming, she tried to draw breath and found her lungs stiff. Too full. Refusing to expand, deep under the thrall of whatever he’d pumped down her throat.
He took no notice and didn’t slow.
Ignoring her weak thrashing, swimming ever forward, he made light work of the river.
Charging headlong into the current without pause.
All through the night, he dragged Kore in his glittering, mysterious wake until the moon slipped behind the distant trees and the sun threatened to poke through the gloom.
And still, she couldn’t twist far enough to see what was forbidden to her.
She felt only the scrape of rough flesh rubbing against hers as he powered through the current. Saw only the sparkle of a fabric so pretty, she’d never even imagined such a thing might be possible.
Hours dragged by, but still, she was all but frozen. Her lungs stiff and quiet. Her legs and arms fluttering in the current as he moved them through the night and into the morning.
Numb from scalp to toes, she hardly felt it when her chains caught at something on the river bottom.
Couldn’t make a sound when she was jerked from his merciless grip and plunged beneath the shallow waters once more.
But she could see.
Pinned to the sea floor, tethered by those accursed chains chaffing her wrists raw, Kore spun with a violent twist.
For a moment, she couldn’t make sense of the shadows. Saw only swirling water frothed by titanic effort as he reversed course to reclaim what had been wrenched from his control.
There was an instant held immobile.
A split second of pause that saw him lit by the dim glow of the distant sun. A halo of silvery, watery light that showed him for what he really was.
And then her gaze was drawn away.
Rejecting what her eyes so clearly saw, she looked instead to the spear in his right hand.
For clutched in that mighty grip, she saw his spear and knew the truth. That what she had assumed was Hades’ mighty bident bore not two…
… but three prongs…