Persephone
Chapter eighty-seven
“Leave me a moment to my wine and my sore feet,” Audenth slurred, sticking her feet out of her dress. “And my dignity! Don’t forget my dignity!”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I whispered conspiratorially, slouching in my seat beside her. “You, however, forgot your dignity the moment you challenged Cerberus to a drinking contest.”
“He cheated!” Audenth protested with a hiccup.
“Ale and spirits should affect dogs more than us! But that fucker has three heads. And you know my theory?” I cackled, shocked at her harsh language.
Audenth was sweet, shy. To hear her use such words added a thread of amusement, of lightness to the evening.
She glanced to Cerberus on the other side of me, all the tongues lolling out in a perfect depiction of innocence, his tail wagging so hard it was moving in a circular whip.
“Probably three livers too. Cheating hound.”
The air hummed, a whisper over my skin.
That was how I knew he approached—silent, graceful as always. Hades did not live for revelry, but the night bent around him, caving to him just the same. Every movement held a gravity, drawing all eyes to him.
“You’re staring, mighty king.” I batted my lashes.
“Only because you keep breaking every law of order tonight,” he whispered with a crooked brow, his demeanor only just enough to stave off the feeling of wrongdoing.
“Me?” I brought a hand to my heart, feigning innocence. “Whatever have I done?”
“You’ve completely undone the God of the Dead.” His attention wrought all eyes to us, whispers echoing about around us, finding a new crescendo in time with the music as Hades offered his hand. “Dance with me, little shadow, before I forget how to breathe.”
Taking his hand, a new melody formed in the air, like smoke tendrils floating on a breeze. Melancholy, though somehow soft and sweet, an echo of us that lingered between reverence and desire.
It was a fantasy come to life, the soft lights overhead, the crowd parting for us. Hades took my hand, twirling me once and making my head spin through the wine. His steady hand fit perfectly against mine as we began to step and sway around the room.
Each step was measured, deliberate. Each sway, each gentle squeeze of my hand was a promise that heated me from within. All around us, the Underworld watched on as life and death danced in unison. The torches surged, lighting the wickedness in his eyes as the music rose to a crescendo.
Breathe, I reminded myself. He talked about himself forgetting to breathe, but I was the one actively avoiding getting lost in his eyes.
“You wear every carnal thought on your face,” I whispered into his ear.
“Glad you got the message then.” His grin had adrenaline in my veins spiking through the alcohol. Below the surface of my skin, my heart thundered, rattling my ribs. “Why don’t you run?”
Breathless and flushed, I stepped back. “I’ll need a minute head start.”
The desire in his eyes echoed my own. “You get three, so you’d best hurry.”
He wasn’t even finished speaking when I turned and fled with a grin threatening to crack my face in half.
The labyrinth door yawned open before me, drawing my excitement ever higher. With this much of a start, I’d make it tough for him to gain on me. I passed through the mouth of obsidian shadow and emerald ivy, the cool air pebbling my skin.
The echo of the music clung to me, even out here. Behind me, laughter boomed out, the party in full swing. Ahead, an unnerving silence awaited. Nothing moved, and even the air felt damp and still.
“Three minutes,” I scoffed, stepping forward and ignoring my cloying instinct to turn around. “He should have let it just be one.”
I walked on, my teeth sinking into my lip. I told myself it was lust. Excitement.
Why was fear knocking in the back of my mind?
I looked at the maze with fresh eyes, scanning for any idiosyncrasy. Anything that showed that things were not as it should be, even with the party backdrop behind me. But of course, there was nothing.
A sound shattered my reverie, a low groan—like the ground breaking, erupting beneath my feet.
I startled. What kind of animal did that?
Cerberus didn’t dig holes in the yard, so it couldn’t be him.
I reached out on instinct, forgetting I couldn’t feel the wards anymore.
Not since they were sealed at last. Surely if the corruption were back, Hecate or Hades would have felt it.
I was with Hecate just this afternoon while we checked them.
She’d declared them clear. We were safe.
So why did alarm slicken my palms?
The wind picked up, colder than before, ripe with the sickly-sweet scent of rot. I stopped moving. Stopped breathing. Something was wrong. I turned, to back out of the maze, only for me to gasp when thorns met my back.
Someone else was controlling the maze.
“Hades?” I called out, my voice steadier than I could have hoped. Surely it had been three minutes. A torchlight vanished, shivering out of existence, as if the chill in the air had overpowered the flames.
No answer. Only the rhythmic drip, drip, drip of something up ahead. My throat tightened. A faint, inaudible whisper slid along the ivy walls, too wrong to ignore. The scent of greenery and moist dirt and leaves vanished altogether, morphing into desiccation and decay.
“Enough of this,” I snarled, drawing on my magic, feeling it rise to the surface but not come to my aid. My hands shot out to steady myself and anchor my racing heartbeat just as another torch light went out.
My lips parted on a gasp when somewhere in the shadows, something moved.
“You’re not funny, Hades.” I tried once again, with no response. Just more disembodied whispers.
I plodded quietly through the darkness, my own footfalls louder now than the receding sounds of the party I’d left behind.
“Find the way out, Persephone,” I whispered to myself as the dark closed in around me.
“Keep moving.” I was no stranger to darkness, but this wasn’t just darkness.
I could feel something lurking beneath, not dissimilar to a barracuda waiting patiently and still beneath water for its prey to calm before it struck.
My magic skimmed just below the surface of my skin.
I bristled, mourning my magic. Another firelight fizzled out of existence.
I shivered. Such little light persisted.
Something like freezing water chilled me to my soul and I knew something was wrong.
The mossy floor was damp and putrid in my face, but that didn’t keep my attention for long, before I heard my name whispering on the shadows, rattling the air.
Persephone….
I froze, goose flesh alighting over my arms. This was a trap. I turned to go back to the party only to find the path blocked, not by shadow or ivy but by stone. On the back lawn, there was no room for stone in the maze.
“What manner of trickery is this?” I scathed into the void. My knees rattled from the weight of keeping me going. I felt, rather than heard, the void laugh, the vibrations unsettling me further.
Per-seph-pho-ne….
Each syllable of my name was spaced out in a taunt, and I realized I could stand here until whatever was in this corridor got bored and came for me, or I could bring the fight to it.
Whatever it was. Fear begged me to run, but my mind saw there was no escape.
Every step was laced with the weight of inevitability, with the finality of a last breath.
Exhaustion painted every fiber of my being. Hades would be here soon, I told myself. I just needed to fight until he got here.
So, when someone grabbed my arm in with a freezing, vice-like grip, a sense of foreboding, of doom, engulfed me even as I struggled.
Wrestling me to the ground, the female being kneeled atop me, her body heavier than it looked.
She crushed me, and even as I struggled, I couldn’t move out from under her.
Her knees in my ribs choked my screams into near silent submission.
She was monstrous. An apparition that bled until most of her features blurred.
And glinting menacingly in the muted light, she grasped a bone saw.
She was more terrifying than death, she was the nightmare you were forced to endure in the afterlife.
Never taking the pressure off me, she rolled me face down, her hands ripping at my hair to keep me still.
Coils of blackened earth made manifest secured my arms. I thrashed, to no avail.
She controlled corruption the same way Hades controlled the shadows. The wards didn’t need to be corrupted any longer.
The mother of demons was here.
“What are you?” I raged while I battled her. She was terror in humanoid form. Her movements were disjointed, too quick, like a broken marionette with too few strings.
“Lilith.” Her voice came out a whispered hiss. She surprised me by answering so easily. “The first demon, forged into reality by the Morningstar himself. The mother of rot. Of corruption.”
You patch the wound, and still, it festers.
No.
Panic and nausea each warred in the pit of my stomach for dominance, neither ceding to the other.
“The Morningstar sent you,” I seethed while she tossed her head back and laughed. “You corrupted the barrier.”
“I wish I could take credit for that,” she crooned, almost seductively. “Imagine what your beloved Hades will say when he finds out that it’s been you the whole time.”
Time stopped, stretched, and faded away entirely as the world shrank into this tiny moment. There was no lie in her eyes. Only raw, menacing, sordid glee.
“You lie!” I flinched as her nails raked down my face, bloodying me to look like her. “I’d never betray him!”
“You’ve had dreams of the Morningstar, haven’t you?” She cocked her head, maniacal in her amusement. “Your magic was never supposed to work here. You do know that at least, right?”
“The realm accepted me!” I protested, running through everything we knew. But if that were the case, what of Zeus’s lightning? Athena’s magic? Poseidon’s? They all worked in the Underworld battle…
“The realm is bleeding. Hemorrhaging. And you are to blame.” She punctuated each word, each accusation like a punch to my gut.
“The magic from the mortal realm bled into the Underworld, allowing you to use your magic. The realm didn’t accept you.
It tried to warn you, and you were too stupid to realize. ”
“Realize what?” I snarled.
A pause. Her grin stretched impossibly wide to fit her small, heart shaped face. Not ugly, not beautiful, but terrible and macabre. Blood oozed from invisible cuts to her face, dripping to the ground.
“That this isn’t the first time we’ve met.
We met at your mortal dwelling. Remember that nightmare you had the night Hades brought you here?
That was me. I corrupted a piece of your soul.
That corruption you secretly carried spread silently, undetected throughout House Hades, rotting and thinning the wards enough that my corruption could take root. ”
You patch the wound, and still, it festers.
Infection springs from life.
No. No.
The words landed like a blow.
Hades and Hecate tried all this time to figure out where it was coming from. When all along—
—It was me.
I’m so sorry, I begged the Underworld. I’m so, so sorry. It pulsed beneath me; its message lost to me as blinding pain the likes of which I had never known erupted along my neck.
The first pass of the saw over the back of my neck was a raw, splitting agony like nothing I’d ever known. Hot and cold at the same time, blood pouring to the ground in geysers.
“Hades!” His name was almost choked out entirely by the gore. The sound was a wet thud followed by a gurgle.
“You want to know why I do it back to front?” Lilith asked me through my dull screams. “So, I can hear you scream until the very end. Then I will turn you over to watch the light die in your eyes.”
I didn’t have the energy to do anything other than scream, praying and crying and hoping for the sweet release that death would bring as geysers of my blood poured to the ground below me.
I’m sorry, Hades….
Please forgive me.