Chapter 17 Liar #2
But I couldn’t help thinking about how he had helped me before. With the rabbit, the water, the clothes. He’d bargained to keep me out of the Lake for three extra days. I was being stupid to dream, so stupid, but maybe, just maybe, he’d been lying to the Vizeking just now, instead of me…
My heart lifted.
Then Hades said, “I thought that you would like to see your land one more time. That you would rather see this, before it happens, than the darkness.”
My heart dropped again. Crushed once more by the Prince, and by my own traitorous hope.
“Oh, wow,” I said sarcastically. “Thank you.”
“This,” Hades said unhappily, “is the one time I would not say you should thank me.” He released my arm, lay down on the permanently dewy grass, and grasped my ankle to pin me in place. He stared at the blue sky and sighed. “You don’t understand. I don’t know how to make you understand.”
“Sure I understand. You want your father to love you more than you want me to live.”
Silence.
And with that, all the fight went out of me.
I wanted to hate him. I did hate him. But I had done the same thing. I had loved my mother so much that I had sacrificed myself. I could hardly blame Hades for loving his father so much that he would sacrifice me, too.
And with that realization came another: Even with Hades’s lie and my impending death, nothing had changed.
Three days ago, when I had agreed to stay here, I had not been trying to save my own life. My life had been gone the instant Hades laid his hands on me. Any moments when I had dared to believe otherwise were moments I had been lying to myself.
I had not stayed in the underworld to save my life. I had stayed to build the reservoir.
I had stayed because Hades had promised — he’d promised — that if I did this thing for him, he would figure out a way to run water to Limer. To my mother.
And according to him, he had never lied to me.
“You didn’t mean what you said about letting me go,” I said. “But did you mean what you said about running pipes to the village?”
His voice was so quiet, it was almost silent. “Yes.”
I lay down next to him. His fingers uncurled from my ankle. They bunched in the silky violet fabric of my dress. He clung to me with one hand like I could save him from drowning. I stared at the sky. I was never going to see it again.
I tried to tell myself that after all, I had always wanted to get away from Limer. To see something different. To be someone special.
And I had done that. For one precious moment, when I’d moved through the pipe-shaft in Hades’s arms and breathed the mist from the white waterfall, I had been someone special. I had done something that no one else could do. How ridiculous of me, how hubristic, to expect to keep going after that.
Besides, death came for all of us in time.
It had come for my father when he was only in his thirties, as hale a farmhand as you ever met.
It was better for me to go out like this than like that.
Better to be sacrificed to a hungry god, under the hands of a handsome prince, than to shrivel in my little village, coughing up blood, while everyone I loved left me behind.
At least this way, I got to do the leaving.
Without looking at him, I asked Hades, “How many hours are left until the end of the third day?”
“Six,” Hades said.
“That’s enough time,” I said. “We’ll finish the pipeline.
You’ll sacrifice me to the Monarch.” My voice broke.
I almost stopped talking, abruptly on the verge of tears.
But I plowed ahead. “You will uphold your end of our bargain. You will extend the pipeline to Limer. You will get water to my people and my mother.” It wasn’t a question.
I could feel Hades’s stillness beside me.
Eventually, he asked throatily, “Is that what you want to do?”
No! I want to live! I almost screamed. But I swallowed and said flatly, “Yes.”
“Because I didn’t only bring you up here so you could see the sky,” he said. “I thought… I thought that, before it… happens… you might like to see your mother.”
Now it was my turn to fall still.
“There’s just enough time. Three hours there, and three hours back.”
I couldn’t answer.
“I would take you,” Hades offered quietly. “If you wanted to go.”
Of course I fucking wanted to go. I wanted to touch her face. I wanted to tell her I hadn’t left her. That I had always done my best. That I loved her. That I would die for her.
That I was about to, in fact.
But the only way my best would be good enough was if I stayed in the underworld.
“No,” I said, ignoring the way my chest hurt. “No. There’s no time.”
Another silence.
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” Hades said. His hand was still tangled in my dress. He turned to me and fisted his other hand in the fabric so that both his hands pressed against my thighs through the silk. I swallowed. I said tartly,
“And you hope you never do again, I’m sure.”
“I don’t think I could,” Hades said. He sounded vaguely dazed at this, almost annoyed. “I don’t think there is anyone else like you, Persephone.”
“That’s enough.” I couldn’t do this right now. I was about to die. I couldn’t have his lips so close, his eyes so wide, his breath ghosting my skin like it had in front of the waterfall when he’d kissed me. Kissed me. Kissed me.
He was saying, “Did Elke tell you how long we live? We godlings typically live to be something like five hundred years old. I am very, very young.”
“And you act it.”
“But that means I will live another four hundred and seventy-four years, and I will never meet a woman who can compare to you. You possess a strength that my people do not know. A curiosity, a cleverness, an intelligence.”
“For gods’ sake, Hades —”
“But that’s the least of it. You are good, goddess. Don’t get me wrong, you’re also sharp — intolerably so sometimes — but you wield your sharpness in the name of goodness. We godlings are not evil, we’re really not, even though you humans think we are.”
“I don’t —”
“Yes, you do. That’s not the point. What I’m saying is, we’re not bad, but we’re not…
good at being good to each other. We have our rituals and our beloveds, but it wouldn’t occur to us to cry over each other’s deaths, even if we wanted to.
I would never have been able to articulate it before, but I think I have been trying to be good for as long as I can remember.
I think that’s why I kidnapped you. See how fucked up I am, that I was trying to be a good person and kidnapping an innocent woman was the best I could do?
But I didn’t know what goodness looked like until I saw you risking your life to gather those herbs. ”
I swallowed. “You’re not being fair. Your people love you.”
“They love you more,” he said, smiling dryly.
“Oh yeah? They’re going to be pretty fucking ticked off when you kill me, then.”
The smile dropped off his face. “Yes. They will.”
We lay face-to-face in the warm damp grass. His hair fell into his eyes, one strand of it clinging to his cheek. His body threw off more heat than the sun.
Do it, some part of me whispered. Do it now.
Do what?
Kiss him, you fucking moron. Look at him. He wants it.
He abducted me!
But he did want it. I could tell from the vein beating fast in the side of his neck. The way he’d gazed at me, before, in that white silk negligée. The catch in his voice when he said the word goodness.
And everything he’d done to me aside… I wanted it, too.
I liked him. I liked that he thought I was good.
I liked that he thought I was smart. And I liked his devotion to his people, his devotion to his servant, his devotion even to a family that didn’t want him.
His thoughtfulness, his curiosity, the way he really listened and wanted to understand when I explained a problem and its solution to him.
The way he laughed. The way I could, against all odds, make him laugh.
And I was going to die.
I shifted forward. It only took an inch. I placed my open lips against his. Did not press. Did not move my tongue. Did not even graze his teeth.
Hades breathed in my exhale.
We lay sandwiched between the cool grass and the hot blanket of the sun.
When Hades exhaled, I inhaled. Took his breath deep into my lungs. Heat pulsed between my legs.
Not even a hair’s breadth separated our lips.
Hades murmured, “There’s something else you need to know.”
I could hardly speak. My hands were inching across his stomach.
I felt wild. I wanted to touch his bare skin.
I wanted him to hike my skirt up the rest of the way and push his fingers into me, no ceremony, no mercy.
Catch his tongue in my mouth while he did it.
His hands quivered desperately in my skirt.
It was already up around my thighs. I pressed my legs against his.
A breathy moan kicked out of him like he’d been punched.
“Stop,” he mumbled, but he didn’t let go of me.
“You wouldn’t want to touch me if you knew this. ”
How could he tell me anything worse than he already had?
He was going to kill me, and even so, I could not imagine not wanting to touch him.
Maybe it was only my own fear, the thoughts of death hurtling down on me like the rockslide, but in the scant time I had left, I wanted to touch him so bad.
My fingers slipped under the hem of his tunic of their own accord.
His hard, hot abs pulsed under my palms. I traced the hairs on his skin. I wanted to lick him.
Hades shivered. “The Lake,” he moaned against my lips.
His hands were creeping, creeping, creeping.
A few more centimeters and he’d be grabbing my thighs like he did when he picked me up.
Somehow we had moved closer together. My breasts beneath the corset were crushed against the flat muscles of chest. His mouth was fully on mine now.
One dart of my tongue and I would taste him.
“The Lake,” he managed to say again. His tongue shaped the words against my teeth. I almost sobbed with desperation. “The Lake isn’t going to kill you. That’s not what it does.”
I wanted him so desperately, I couldn’t even process what he was saying. I mumbled, unthinking, “You said that being drowned in the Lake would feed me to the Monarch. That my soul would travel up the waterfall and into the Monarch’s teeth.”
“It will. But that doesn’t mean the process will kill you. The Lake has a different power. Those drowned in its waters are… resurrected.”
My heart skipped a beat. With difficulty I pulled away from him, searching his face. “Wait. I’m not going to die?”
“No,” said Hades miserably.
I sat up all the way. “Then what’s the big deal?
Are you saying I’m going to be immortal?
That doesn’t make sense. If you can just resurrect people, why didn’t you do it to Mackr?
Or his brother?” Unless — “But maybe it doesn’t heal, and that’s the problem?
Their bodies would still be all fucked up? Is that it?”
“No, no, the Lake heals. If you can call it that. Persephone, you don’t understand.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” I snapped. “Do you know what we humans would give to be immortal? I could have my father back. Everyone could have everyone back.”
“No! The resurrection — the immortality — it’s part of a horrible trade with the Monarch.
Anything that powerful requires a sacrifice.
In exchange for eternal life, the Monarch eats your soul.
And the thing that’s left in your body, powering it…
it isn’t you. It looks like you, maybe even feels like you, but it’s something far, far worse.
You’re gone, Persephone. Only the life in your body remains. ”
I raised my eyebrows skeptically. It still didn’t sound so bad. Better than death, at any rate. “Does the sacrifice have to be the tribute’s soul? Could someone give up something else?”
“Ye-es,” he said reluctantly. “Once, someone resurrected his daughter by cutting off his own hands. But he was executed afterward, he and his daughter both.”
“How did they execute the daughter if she was immortal?”
“They burned her alive. And even after the burning was complete, the ashes continued to twitch.”
Dear gods.
“Persephone, feeding a person’s soul to the Monarch is the worst thing you can do to them.
Resurrection used to be a capital punishment until my father abolished it for being too cruel.
Do you understand? My father, a person who has not bothered with his own son in six years, thought this was beyond the pale. ”
I still didn’t get it, but Hades’s intensity was chilling. “Why are you telling me this? Why not just let me believe I was going to get drowned like normal?”
“Because for the tributes, there’s something else.”
“Oh, great!”
“No, it’s a good thing. It is a gift. A true gift, this time, not a trade. It’s a gift from the Monarch’s human wife. The tributes are eaten and resurrected, but then, instead of having to be awake, they are put to sleep. In the cocoons.”
That made a void open up in my chest. “Asleep? For how long?”
“Forever. The oldest of them has been asleep for a thousand years.”
My blood iced over.
Hades closed his eyes. His face, which just a moment ago had been so hot and close to me, now seemed as far and remote as a frozen wasteland.
“This is why I am telling you. After you are drowned in the Lake, and put to sleep…
you should never be conscious again. You should not know what has befallen you.
This will be a mercy. But if you ever do wake up, I want you to know: I will visit you at the Lake every day.
“You will not be able to perceive me. You will float in the darkness, unable to speak to me, or touch me, or hear me, or see me. But I will be there with you. I swear it on my life and on the life of the King. If any part of you is ever awake in there — and I hope to the Monarch it’s not — then I want you to know that you will never be alone. I’ll make sure of it.”