Chapter 22 Seeds and Shadows #2
“Well then, I need to lie down,” I mumbled, collapsing sideways into the couch. I pressed a hand to my forehead as I could physically stop the avalanche of memory crashing over me.
“How long have you known?” I asked Luz, needing to understand the scope of secrets everyone had been keeping.
She sank onto the couch beside me, expression troubled. “I’ve always known on some level. Not in words, not fully. But the feeling’s been there for as long as I’ve had thoughts of my own.”
A small smile flickered across her face. “I didn’t remember clearly until recently. The day after Amy’s seizure, everything came flooding back. My fear for Amy, for you…” She shook her head. “It broke me.”
Kian nodded. “The closer you got to awakening, the more those connected to you started remembering too. It’s like when you woke up, you pulled the rest of them with you.”
“I had a dream that night,” Luz continued. “Our grove, the river Lethe, the day Hades left after I—” She stopped, swallowing hard. “After I died. I woke up crying, and I knew. I remembered everything. Who I’d been, who you were, what was coming.”
My throat closed. “Luz—”
“You’re my best friend,” she said, shrugging. “I swore I would always protect you, in every life, in every form. That’s never changed.”
A sob broke from my chest. I pulled her into another hug, both of us crying now.
“But we are going to have to talk about why you jumped into a river,” Luz muttered against my shoulder. “Idiota, you know you can’t swim. What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” I winced. “I barely remember going to the river, let alone walking into it.”
Luz shook her head, clinging tighter to me.
“And Amy?” I asked, pulling back to look at her. “Is she…?”
Luz’s expression crumbled. “She’s Artemis, Goddess of the Moon and the Hunt.”
The words knocked the air from my lungs.
“That’s why they targeted her,” Luz continued, voice thick. “She’s powerful. Even without remembering who she is, her divine essence is strong.”
“What are they doing to her?” I demanded.
Kian’s expression went cold. “Harvesting her divine energy. Slowly, keeping her alive but draining her essence bit by bit.”
My stomach turned. “How long does she have?”
“Longer than you’d think,” Kian said. “Artemis is resilient. Her body is fighting them. But she’s been in that coma for two days now, and her condition is deteriorating. If we can’t stop them soon…” He didn’t finish.
“How long? Weeks?” I pressed. “Months?”
“Maybe a month,” Luz said. “If we’re lucky. But Mel… she’s suffering. Even unconscious, she’s in pain. We can feel it.”
I felt sick. Amy was being slowly murdered for her power, and I’d had no idea; I had been sleeping off my own breakdown while she was dying.
“What about Xavier?” I asked, even though part of me already knew. “He changed so fast—”
“He is Ares,” Kian said, old tension in his voice. “The God of War.”
“He’s always had… feelings for you,” Luz added. “In past lives. He sees you as a prize to be won. A conquest. Something to take from—” She glanced at Kian. “His rival.”
My stomach churned. “So his feelings aren’t even real. It’s just divine jealousy?”
“His feelings are real to him,” Kian said.
“But they’re born from what he was, not who he is now.
Ares has always been… territorial about what he perceives as Hades’s possessions,” his brow furrowed.
“The supplements accelerated his awakening. When a mortal vessel housing a divine soul remembers too fast, it can fracture the psyche. His mind couldn’t handle the divine impulses flooding through him. ”
I thought of Xavier in that warehouse, how his eyes glowed with more than fever as he pinned me down.
“That’s why you couldn’t tell me the truth about who I was,” I breathed. “I could have ended up like Xavier.”
Kian’s silence was answer enough, his eyes darkening.
“Is he… will he be okay?” I asked.
“He’s in a coma, too. The seizure after I…” Kian paused, wincing. “His body couldn’t handle the strain of partial awakening combined with the conflict between his mortal and divine selves. He may wake up. He may not.”
Another person destroyed by this. Another life ruined.
“Leo…” I started, my mind reeling. “Leo said his name was in their files, too. Is he—?”
“Yes, Leo too,” Luz said. She offered a small, helpless smile. “He’s Hermes.”
“Should have seen that coming,” I muttered, dragging a hand over my face. “How many others are there? How many gods has Cyrus found?”
Kian and Luz exchanged a look.
“We don’t know for certain,” Kian admitted. “Some are reincarnated but haven’t awakened. Others are aware of what they are but trying to stay off Cyrus’s radar.”
“He’s been hunting the divine for thousands of years,” Luz added. “He doesn’t need to find everyone at once, just enough to harvest significant power.”
The word “harvest” made me want to vomit.
I pressed my hands against my face. “So what now? I just… what? Become Persephone again and magically fix everything?” I looked at them. “If I become Persephone again, will I still be me?”
“You’ll always be you,” Kian said, leaning forward. “Persephone isn’t someone else. She’s just… another version of you. You don’t lose Melanie to become Persephone, you just become more complete.”
“I’ve been both Leuce and Luz,” Luz added. “They’re not separate, they’re layers. You don’t lose one to gain the other.”
I wanted to believe them, but the thought of losing everything that made me Melanie terrified me more than dying did.
“And there’s something else you need to know,” Kian said. He looked like the words physically hurt. “About your curse. About why you die young.”
My chest tightened. “Tell me.”
“When you ate the pomegranate seeds, your soul was bound to the Underworld,” he explained.
“That bond is eternal. But Cyrus corrupted it, twisted it into a trap. Each life you live, the bond calls you home. Pulls you toward death, toward the Underworld. But the curse won’t let you enter.
So you’re caught in the Veil until you reincarnate.
You die young, over and over, because you can’t exist completely in either realm. ”
The room felt too small.
“It’s not always Cyrus who kills you,” Luz added gently. “Sometimes it’s accidents. Sometimes illness. Sometimes—” She looked at me with terrible sympathy. “Sometimes it’s just your body giving out because it can’t withstand the pull between worlds.”
My hands were shaking. “So I’m already dying.”
“You’re fighting it,” Kian corrected. “Every day you’re alive, you’re fighting the pull. But yes, the closer you get to twenty-five, the stronger it gets. The harder it is to resist.”
“I’m twenty-three,” I said, voice hollow. “I turn twenty-four in May.”
Silence crashed over us like a wave.
“How long?” I asked. “How long do I usually have after I awaken? After I remember everything like this?”
Kian’s hands gripped his knees so hard I thought he’d leave bruises. “We don’t know,” he said. “You’re the first to get this far. That might mean you have more time. Or—”
“I might have less,” I finished. My chest constricted. The room suddenly felt too small, too warm, too much, the weight of everything pressing in all at once.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs locked up, ribs squeezing tight. Black spots crowded my vision. I tried to breathe and couldn’t. Air wouldn’t come, wouldn’t fill my lungs, wouldn’t—
“Mel?” Luz’s voice sounded far away, muffled. “Do you need your inhaler?”
I nodded frantically, unable to speak. The panic was a living thing in my chest.
Kian was already moving. He returned seconds later with my bag, crouching in front of me and pressing my inhaler into my shaking hands.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured, one hand hovering near my shoulder but not touching, giving me space while staying close enough to help if I needed it. “Just breathe. One breath at a time.”
I took a shaking puff, medicine burning in my lungs. Another. Slowly, the vise around my chest loosened. Kian stayed crouched in front of me.
“Five things you can see,” he said softly.