The Dark Wife (21 page)

Hermes approached me, and I sighed.

“My mother?”
I asked him, steeling myself against his reply. For the most part, I had quelled my longings for green, for trees, for the meadows I had loved with all my heart, but my mother… I would never stop longing for her. Part of me missed her, but all of me loved her.

“No word,” Hermes said. “Demeter has…disappeared.”

I paled.

Before I could question him, he grabbed my elbow firmly, swallowed, his face devoid of mirth. “Something bad is going to happen here, Persephone. Are you prepared for it?”

Stomach tied in knots, my heart twisting, worried for my mother, for Hades, Pallas, myself, I nodded. “Whatever happens, we’ll endure.”

“How can you know that?” His flashing eyes searched my face. “You are not omnipotent. You’re immortal, but you can be killed—here, Persephone. Especially here.”

“I trust,” I whispered, biting my lip.

“In what?”

I drew a deep breath, stared unseeing at his face, shame and exhilaration branding me with a hot red flush.

“Myself, Hermes,” I told him, defiant, and my voice shook, but it didn’t matter, because I spoke the truth. “I trust in myself.”

His mouth curved upward; I recognized in his impish expression the god I had first met on Mount Olympus, the god who had dared me to rebel.

“Then you have all you need,” he smiled, and with a bow, he winked at me, and flickered.

One moment, he was standing beside me, waving, and in the next, he was gone.

My hair fluttered in a sudden breeze.

The Underworld is stagnant, lifeless. Nothing moves here, save for the walking dead and the river…but now, as I joined Pallas at the edge of the bank, a chill wind gusted, and it hadn’t come from the water—it came from behind us, from the plains of the Underworld itself.

I turned, surprised, to face it. It had been so long since I had felt the wind. I clasped Pallas’ hand, but her fingers were slack, and when I looked at her, perplexed, she was stricken, and more transparent than ever before.

“It is an ill wind that blows in the Underworld,” she whispered to me, fear quaking in her eyes.

“Dark talk has turned you sour.” I smiled at her
weakly
. My stomach hadn’t settled from the news about my mother, and I trembled inwardly at the thought of the portended horrors to come.

“Let’s go visit the horses—they always cheer you up.”

“Not today, Persephone,” she muttered. “I must return to the village. I have to try—”

“Pallas, it does no good, for them or for you.” My words sounded harsher than I’d intended, and she flinched, took a step backward. “Come with me,” I urged her. “Forget about sad things for a little while.”

She gazed at me as if I had gone mad. “Hades doesn’t forget things, Persephone. Every day, she goes to the Elysian Fields, and she does what she can, whatever she can. What do
you
do?”

The accusation shredded me, digging deep into my heart with poison-tipped claws.

I couldn’t speak. I was stung—most of all, because I realized her words were valid.

I did nothing. It was true.

Spent, discouraged, she turned to go.

I could have called out to her, asked her to wait, but I didn’t.
Couldn’t.
I sat down on the edge of the riverbank, careless of my nearness to the teeming waters, and I watched her walk away from me.

As I sat there by myself, long after she’d gone, I began to feel angry. I hadn’t asked for my fate, my birthright. I had chosen to leave the forest, yes. That was my doing. And Hades had never asked for anything from me, though she had saved me, perhaps saved my immortal life.

But everyone else, everyone I had ever known, wanted things from me, things I didn’t feel capable of giving. Hermes believed I was going to do something great. Gaea had told me that I would change things. And Pallas…she thought I was lazy, uncaring, but the truth was simpler than that.

What if the only thing I wanted to do was live in the palace, quietly, learning every curve and secret of Hades’ body, and of her heart? I wasn’t complicated by nature. I had never desired power or possessions or fame. I just wanted to
be.
 
And to be left alone.

Sullen, I rubbed at my eyes, gazed at my hands in my lap, sighed.

I had never asked for any of this. But I had it, nevertheless.

Perhaps that was the cost of immortality.

Hades had never asked to be the goddess of the Underworld, but she was, and she carried out her duties faithfully, unfailingly.

Suddenly I felt very selfish, like a child throwing a tantrum.

Gaea told me I had everything within me that I needed. But I was so afraid. I was afraid of the dead, afraid of Zeus. I was afraid of a hundred million things.

Lost in my musings, I jumped, startled, when I heard the scream. I sat very still, the hair on my arms standing up, and I heard it again: a scream, a woman’s scream, originating from the direction of the village of the dead.

I stood, slowly, and gazed at the sprawl of dwellings, far distant. A dark shadow was spreading over the land, and I closed my eyes and opened them, feeling the earth spin beneath me.

It wasn’t a shadow; it was a gathering of the dead—thousands of them—their bodies pressed so tightly together that they looked like one dark rolling mass. Normally the dead were quite solitary; they stayed apart, minded only themselves, joining together only when something was happening, another riot or a summoning from Hades.

Another
scream,
and a shout. I thought I recognized the scream now, and dread coiled around my insides like a monster, a snake, squeezing.

Pallas.
Pallas was in danger.

I ran, tripping over the hem of my tunic, so I yanked it up, looked at the fistfuls of white in my hands—a lucid moment in my terror. I ran, and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t pull the air through me as the village of the dead drew closer and closer, the dead themselves closer still. They were moving toward me, roiling slowly, and they were silent, silent,
as
whisperless
as buried bodies, as they stared at me, hollow eyes unblinking.

Pallas screamed again, and I saw her, in front of them all, dragged along by a row of men and women, kicking and cursing and struggling against them, clawing at their arms, but there were too many, and she was losing strength, because I could barely see her. She looked like a ghost.

I skidded to a stop before the horrible, creeping shadow, my lungs burning. Pallas looked at me, eyes dull.

Her captors, all of the amassed dead, looked at me, too.

“What are you
doing
?” I shouted, drawing myself up to my full height. The skirt of my tunic billowed down around me as I released it. “What are you doing to her?”

“Taking her to the river Styx, where she belongs,” a woman barked, her stare defiant, her hands gripping Pallas’ arm. She looked surprisingly solid, real, and I recognized her, had encountered her before, though she hadn’t been as substantial then.

“You can’t do that,
Hageus
,” I said evenly, matching her fierce gaze with my own. “She’d be trapped forever in the river.”

“She deserves it, worse, for speaking the gospel of Hades.” She spit on the ground. “As do you,
goddess
Persephone.” The wrath in her voice startled me. Almost too late, I backed away from her companions’ grasping hands.

“You can’t—” I tripped on my hem as I moved from them, just out of reach.

“We will. And then we will drown Hades, too.” She sneered.
“The thing about you gods?
I’ve watched you. You’re a lot like us. You may not die, but I think you could be trapped in the river, like the mortals. I
know
it. You’ll be stuck there, and we’ll be free. And the Elysian Fields will be ours.” She laughed, arching her head back, mouth too wide in her thin, bitter face.

Spurred by her outburst, the dead raised their hands and cried out in one loud, chilling voice. There were no words that I could make out, just a grating, guttural sound. My skin crawled, and I backed away further still, shaking my head, balling my fists.

No, no, no. This was wrong, so wrong.

Gaea had saved me from the Styx. Would she do it again? Would she save Pallas and Hades? Would we three be lost there forever?

Hageus
stepped forward, holding out her hands, grinning like a madwoman. She
was
a madwoman. I didn’t know what to do, felt fear eating me from the inside out…

It was up to me now, I realized, in a brief moment of clarity, and I felt a strange peace descend upon me.

I had to do something, say something. I had to stop this. Change the flow. Change everything.

“She’s told you the
truth
!” I screamed.

My voice tore through the tension, ripped it open.

Hageus
paused. They all paused.

And they were all staring at me.

“The Elysian Fields is a place of torment and misery,” I said, breathless, the words spilling out faster than I could think. Better not to think.

“The heroes that Zeus has favored sit beneath the sun, in an endless field of wheat—yes!—but it is
no
a haven. It is a prison. They sit, and they contemplate the horrific acts they’ve committed. They are captives of their memories. They dwell on their guilt, reliving it all, again and again, remembering the murders and rapes they carried out because Zeus asked it of them, because they wanted this eternal reward.”

I strode before
Hageus
and glared at her pointedly. “It is no reward. There is no escape. Every day, Hades goes to the fields, and she tries to offer comfort. And she succeeds, sometimes, for a moment.
But only for a moment.
There is no peace there. And the beauty of the landscape is a cruel joke.” My voice was shaking, with fear but, also, with passion. I closed my eyes, opened them again, and recoiled inwardly from my next words: “Let me show you.”

Pallas’s head jerked up, and then she was shaking it hard, back and forth, mouthing the word “no” over and over.

I knew her thoughts. I thought them, too.

If I took the villagers to the Elysian Fields, they would have access to Hades. Right now, she was safe.
Hidden away, unaware.

But if I led them there, let them in… We would be powerless to stop them if they mobbed us. We would be at their mercy.

It was a chance.
A choice.

My heart urged me not to back down, and I listened to it.

“You must see…” My voice rasped, cracked, so I tried again, shaking, but standing firm. “You will
see,
when I show you, that all Pallas has told you, all I have told you is true. Hades—” Tears formed in the corners of my eyes, and I let them fall, because they were tears for her. “Hades is a kind, just goddess. She wants nothing more than for everyone in her kingdom, all of you, to be content, at peace. She does what she can—she pushes herself to the breaking point—to ensure that.” I narrowed my eyes at
Hageus
, at the people surrounding her, and I promised them, “You will see.”

“Show us!” someone cried out, and then another; the words rose up in a chorus, deafening me with its urgent pitch.

Pallas regarded me with heavy lids.