Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (10 page)

“I wanted to connect with you.” God, did that sound lame. But he kept on. “There was no way I
couldn’t
reach out to you, once I…” He forced himself to stop. Even the suggestion that they’d known each other in past lives, or that his compulsion to find her had anything to do with the pomegranates, could be enough to make her doubt the validity of the memories when they started streaming into her mind. “You’re probably right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have commented. But if you knew how lonely it was, hiding out over here…”

Now he sounded desperate and pathetic. Shut up, Adrian, just shut up.

Sophie cleared her throat. Her voice became meticulously tactful. “I have a boyfriend. I should have mentioned. I thought you knew.”

“No, I do know. You’ve said, on the blog. It’s fine.”

“I came because of Grandpop, and because I was curious. But in case you thought it was a date…”

“Well, it would be a pretty strange date, wouldn’t it.” He tried to laugh.

She agreed with a polite laugh of her own.

“Ready to go back, then?” he asked. “Last chance. I could whisk you away to Hawaii instead, if you’d like to sleep on a beach or something.”

He won a smirk from her. “No, thank you.”

“All right.” He gathered her close, letting himself breathe the sweet scent of her for a stolen second, then pulled her back into the living realm. The artificial glare of a streetlight seemed to light up the world after the dark star-studded realm of the spirits. They both swayed as the ground reshaped itself under their feet. When they’d caught their balance, he let her go.

She backed out of the concrete enclosure. “Thanks. It was…interesting, to say the least. But if I decide I can’t handle it again…well, I don’t know if it’s for me.”

Oh, it’s for you. More than you know.

Adrian nodded. “Get some sleep. You might have some interesting dreams.”

And rather than drag out the farewells—or allow himself to say anything pathetic again—he waved goodbye and vanished into the spirit realm.

Darkness washed down around him. His eyes adjusted, and the stars shone out again. Night birds and insects chirped in the grass and trees.

What if the juice worked?

Then Sophie would dream, and remember, and learn she’d been tricked. She’d be even more confused, scared, and angry than she already was. But one of the main things she would remember was him. Both of them, in living bodies and able to remember who they had been before—that hadn’t happened in thousands of years, because only lately had living people rediscovered the Underworld. He was one of the lucky souls, and he longed for Sophie to be another.

He leaned back against the bus, and checked his messages. Zoe had left him a voice mail an hour ago; merely, “Hey, wondering if there’s any news. Ring me.”

It was nearing midnight in New Zealand by now, but she sometimes stayed up late. She’d turn off her phone if she was asleep, so he called back.

She answered at once, sounding anxious. “Ade! How are you?” Zoe had tended to fret about him ever since he was attacked in February. Natural reaction, when your best friend tells you he’s been shot and needs to leave the country, perhaps the living world altogether.

“I’m good. You?”

“Fine. Did you meet her again?”

“Yep. It went…well, I guess.”

“And the pomegranate?”

“She turned it down. But I, um…” He shut his eyes. “Gave her some juice from it. She didn’t know that’s what it was, and she drank it.”

“
Adrian
.”

“I know. It was Niko’s idea. I don’t know why I listen to him.”

“Maybe because you’re dying for her to remember you.”

“Okay, a little.” Adrian looked out at the horizon, watching a soul streak by. “Ah, Z. When are you going to join us, eh?”

“Not till you’ve rounded up every last crackpot and nut-job who’s trying to kill you, and killed them yourself. Or at least locked them somewhere in that cave of yours.”

“You know that isn’t how I operate.”

“Some god of death you are.”

“That isn’t exactly my title, either.” He shifted his back against the cold rusty bus. “You’re probably smart to refuse. So was she. What have I done?”

“It was only the juice, you said? Maybe it won’t work.”

“Maybe. But if it does…when all that enters your mind, and builds up, it changes everything.”

“Which is
why
I refuse.”

“Okay, but it does change everything in a fun way, sometimes.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Yeah.” He lifted his face, and found a bright evening planet shining upon him between clouds. “But maybe now I’ll have someone to be crazy with.”

Chapter Seven

S
OPHIE CROSSED THE QUAD QUICKLY,
shivering as the breeze kicked up. Thunder rumbled in the distance, though the sky above was clear. The air smelled chilly, like dew on grass. Summer was giving way to fall, she thought, irrelevantly.

Or maybe it wasn’t irrelevant. The myth of Persephone had been on her mind. And when Persephone was kidnapped into the Underworld, her grieving mother Demeter ranged all over the Earth looking for her, and in doing so dropped her care of the world’s growing plants. She only let spring be reborn when Persephone was freed to rejoin her. And every year, when Persephone had to return to Hades, Demeter repeated her withdrawal of fertility in the Earth.

The myth explained the seasons. That was all Sophie had ever gotten from it as a child. Tonight Persephone’s story suggested a cavern full of other issues, deeper and grimmer.

The smart thing to do was clear: politely say, “No, thank you” to every invitation Adrian issued from now on, and take care of her regular life, like a grown-up. That was why she’d refused to eat the pomegranate—it could have been some kind of drug, which would perpetuate her falling for this hoax, if indeed the whole thing was a hoax.

But that spirit world seemed so real. Ignoring or forgetting it would be impossible.

In the dorm room, Melissa breathed in quiet snores. Sophie took her pajamas and toiletries to the bathroom to change. But upon returning and climbing into bed, she only lay wide awake.

Finally she sat up, bunching the pillow behind herself, and carefully drew her computer off the desk and onto her lap.

She got onto her blog and looked for the comments he had left as Kiwi Ade. But she couldn’t find them—every one of them had vanished. She hadn’t deleted them, so he must have.

Frustrated, she moved on to a search engine.

adrian watts wellington new zealand
, she typed. For good measure, she added
kiri
to the string.

It popped up within the first ten hits: a news story from five years ago. A Wellington paper had run an article titled
Assistance dogs go to school.

She clicked on it, and found that it discussed various students in Wellington who used service dogs to help in their disabilities. Near the end she discovered this paragraph:

Adrian Watts, 16, has been a paraplegic since an accident at age 5. He got his dog Kiri when he was 9, and “Life improved right away,” he says. “She picks things up for me if I drop them, helps carry my books and stuff, and opens nearly any kind of door, which can be really hard when you’re in a wheelchair. And she’s constant company. I can’t imagine life without her.”

They included a photo: a teenage boy in a wheelchair—sure looked like Adrian, though skinnier and younger—and a dog who resembled Kiri, her paws on his lap, licking his face. If he was sixteen five years ago, he was twenty-one now, which also seemed accurate.

Sophie re-read the article, piecing the big picture together. Clearly he wasn’t a paraplegic anymore, but it appeared he used to be.

“Your circumstances were different. There’s nothing wrong with her life,” the woman in the red dress had said to Adrian.

Did Adrian make some kind of magic deal, giving him superpowers and a cure for paralysis? And now perhaps he was in the crosshairs of someone dangerous because of it. But what did that have to do with past lives and pomegranates? And why was he living in the cave with the ghosts? Was that part of the deal? And again, why did he insist on bringing Sophie into it? Her blog posts couldn’t have been
that
fascinating.

None of it made any sense. She needed sleep. She closed the laptop and slipped it back onto the desk. Rain began tapping on the windows. Thunder rumbled again. The wind rustled branches outside the dorm.

She’d known her life was about to change when she arrived at college, but she hadn’t imagined it would veer straight into the surreal.

She clearly should avoid Adrian from now on. But how could a person go on with an ordinary life after an experience like this?

U
PON
A
DRIAN’S RETURN,
he found Rhea in the entrance cavern, sitting on a rock, running her bare foot over Kiri’s fur. The dog snoozed on the floor, next to the sandals Rhea had removed.

Adrian climbed out, adopting an expression of humility as he tied up the horses.

“Why would you disrupt her life that way? You know the dangers.”

Rhea’s question was gently spoken, but he felt the seriousness of the words. He’d tussled with the quandary a long time now himself.

He knelt beside Kiri, who lifted her head and licked his hand, her tail thumping the floor. “I wanted her to know before she got too deep into a regular life,” he said. “College, career, husband, kids. It’s better to start early if you can.”

“You only say that because
you
started early.”

“Maybe.” He eased down to sit upon the floor, picking grass seeds out of Kiri’s coat. “Um, I should tell you, Sophie did eat the pomegranate. Or at least drank some of the juice. I…kind of tricked her into it.”

Rhea pulled in a long and evidently furious breath.

Cutting in before she could expel it in the form of a tirade, he said, “Yes, it was horrible of me. But she could be an ally. She will be, I’m sure of it.”

Rhea stood and paced barefoot to the river’s edge, hands on hips. The passing souls flashed green light upon her figure. “Does she know she’s eaten it?”

“Not yet.”

“Well. You must be rather content.”

He didn’t dare say yes, but remained quiet, flicking aside the grass seeds and feeling the tumultuous happiness surface as a smile.

Rhea turned and saw it. She snorted and turned her back again. “Given who she was to you, I suppose I can’t remain angry.”

“Given who she was to us all, you could even be happy.”

“I will be, if she doesn’t run from us in horror. And if you keep her safe.” Rhea pivoted and gave him a warning stare. “Handle her carefully. Help her see the beauty. The rightness.”

Rightness
was a word Rhea liked to use to describe their unique condition, and he understood its appeal, given that the opposition was entirely convinced of the wrongness of people like Adrian, Rhea, and Niko. Honestly, he doubted their rightness at least once a day himself. Still, for the chance to have Sophie stay around forever…

“I’ll do my best,” he promised.

F
OUR HOURS OF
sleep was really not enough, Sophie observed in the morning, stumbling along to the communal bathroom to wait her turn at the showers. Her head ached from insufficient sleep and oppressive amounts of stress, not to mention weird dreams.

As she lathered up the soap, she reflected upon the dream she’d woken up from. In it, she had been in her thirties, married, and living in Germany in the mid-twentieth century. There was a man she felt drawn to, but he wasn’t her husband. She sat with him in a coffee shop with framed pictures of trains on the walls. They spoke German together, not that Sophie actually knew German. In the dream she did. And the man, though he didn’t look a whole lot like Adrian except around the eyes, seemed to be Adrian nonetheless. The only thing that made sense was that she’d be thinking of him in her dreams, given he was the man who “kidnapped” her last night.

As she sat in orientation meetings, the dream kept unfolding and strengthening in her head, presenting new details about the life of this last-century German dream-Sophie. Strange. Usually dreams faded until you couldn’t remember them by mid-morning.

So her Kiwi friend’s name was probably Adrian Watts, she mused while she jogged back to the dorms through a cool rain shower. She had that much on him.

In the last life it was Karl Hirrmann
, her mind helpfully added.

Wow. That was odd. Dreams didn’t usually invent entire names for their characters. She didn’t know her own German name from that dream.

Sure I do
, she thought.
I was Grete Sommer Meier.