Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (21 page)

Chapter Seventeen

S
OPHIE JOLTED AWAKE IN THE
middle of the night, shaking and sweating. Her glance took in the angular shadows of the sidewalk lights that cut in around the edges of the window shades, and the lumpy shape of Melissa sleeping across the room. Sophie pulled in a breath, trying to relax.

The dream flashed through her mind, still brighter and more real than anything in this room.

Walking through the Underworld at Hades’ side, both of them ghosts. Gazing sadly at the trees she had cultivated and now couldn’t touch or tend. Turning to look at her husband, who looked young as ever, his curls black and his dark eyes large and beautiful as they regarded her. Though the recent memory of some kind of awful violence hovered in their minds, they didn’t speak of it. Instead they kept saying to each other, “As long as she’s all right,” and “If only we knew what happened to her.”

Who was “she”?

Sophie closed her eyes and ran her wrist across her forehead, wiping off the sweat. God, he did look like Adrian then. Not so much as to be an identical twin, but enough to be a brother.

She pulled her cell phone from where it lay under her pillow, warmed from her head. After their conversation yesterday, she had spent the afternoon running every test and procedure she could find online for debugging and removing spyware from a phone. She hadn’t found any suspicious programs or bits of hardware, so it could have been a waste of time, but it eased her mind about the safety of texting Adrian, at least for now.

Lying on her side to face the wall, she tapped in a message to him, heedless of it being 2:38 a.m.

I’ve gotten to just after Persephone’s life. Us in the Underworld as souls. That means her life is next, huh? God, I’m shaking.

He’d likely be asleep and not answer till morning, which was fine. She felt better for having sent word to one of the only people who would understand and not think her crazy.

But as she closed her eyes again, hand folded around the cell phone, it buzzed in answer.

Yes, then that’s next. Ready? Wow, now I’m shaking too.

Sophie smiled.
Don’t you sleep?
, she texted.

Yeah, but I’m on standby for you
, he answered.
This is important stuff.

She shifted into a more comfortable texting position on her side.
What happens if you force yourself to stay awake? Could you?

Like anyone else, we get grumpy and weak and kind of mental
, he typed
. Not important right now. Sleep! Dream! Or just start remembering if you can.

I’ll try
, she responded, and obediently closed her eyes.

She didn’t expect to be able to sleep at all with her mind bouncing around like it was on caffeine, so she concentrated on remembering. Thinking of Persephone. Reaching for that extraordinary life. Trying to start at the beginning so it would make sense.

And she must have fallen asleep after all, because then she was there. Greece. Sun on white stones. Sparkling blue sea. The ground rumbling and her mother shrieking for her.

P
ERSEPHONE WAS FOUR
years old when the earthquake hit. Sophie’s memories of the event and the few years after it were patchy, the way anyone’s memories of early childhood were. But she put together the important points easily enough.

Her mother Demeter, face and voice distorted in panic, pulled Persephone out from beneath the fallen stones of the house where they’d been visiting someone. Sobbing, she clasped Persephone to her chest, then whisked her to a soft patch of earth to examine her injuries.

Persephone’s head and leg both pulsated with pain and were bleeding heavily. Demeter dressed her wounds in wet leaves and strips of cloth. From the bustle and shouts around them, Persephone gathered that houses had fallen on lots of people. Men and women, including her aunts and uncles, the other immortals, were digging into the rubble to rescue people.

Holding Persephone in one arm, Demeter leaped onto a horse and they galloped off, following the road along the coast. Persephone endured the ride in a storm of agony, her leg throbbing and her head thundering. Finally they stopped at the magnificent stone house where the immortals lived together. It must have been built stronger than average, for it still stood, only a few flowerpots overturned.

In one of the rooms, her uncle Apollo helped set Persephone’s broken leg and, with gentle probing of his hands, ascertained that her skull hadn’t been damaged. Demeter washed Persephone’s wounds and rewrapped them. She fed Persephone a warm drink of herb-steeped water, and soon the girl fell asleep.

The earthquake was Persephone’s earliest clear memory, but even by then she was aware that hers was an unusual childhood. Growing up as a mortal girl in a household of immortals made Persephone a curiosity. The women and men calling themselves her aunts and uncles were kind, wise, lively, and astonishingly strong. They never got sick, the way she sometimes did, and none of them had any scars like the ones the falling stones left upon the side of her face or her leg. The break in her leg bones had been serious, and left her with a limp. But her elders always assisted her, carrying things for her or scooping her up to ride upon their backs if she got tired. Her weight was nothing to them, even to the slightest of the women, little Hestia.

Persephone wondered often about who her father was. While she was little, her mother said he was someone who no longer lived here. Then when Persephone was seven or eight, Demeter explained to her, “Zeus is truly your father, but he already has a wife and can’t act as a father to you.”

“Oh,” Persephone said. “I sort of hoped Poseidon was my father.” Even at her young age, she could see the careless way Zeus treated women, and the irritation it caused Hera and plenty of other people. But Poseidon, who visited sometimes, treated Demeter tenderly, and was always willing to tell Persephone tales of ocean adventures.

Demeter only hugged her and said, “I think Poseidon would be happy to have you as his daughter. But he has his wife and their daughters to take care of. You’re doing all right without a father, though, aren’t you?”

Persephone couldn’t deny it. She agreed, and that was more or less the last they spoke of it.

The mortal people who lived nearby sometimes dropped to the ground in a low bow before them, and brought them gifts. They called Demeter and her fellow immortals “gods” and “goddesses.” Persephone accepted this, as she could see their strength firsthand, and that made them much more real and believable than the gods from the old stories people told.

On the whole she felt perfectly safe and happy among them, and after the earthquake, nothing dramatic happened until a day when she was eight years old. It was mid-day, and she was sitting drowsily on the front step in the sun, thinking of going inside for a nap. Then her uncle Hades jogged up to the house. She seldom saw him, as he was usually off somewhere thinking with his eyes closed. But today he’d clearly been more active. He was barefoot and shining with sweat, and his white tunic was splotched with dried mud, obscuring the purple geometric embroidery on its hem.

“Did you fall in the river?” Persephone asked.

Stopping to catch his breath, hands on his thighs, he shook his head. “I fell much farther.”

“Where are your sandals?”

“They broke yesterday, so I left them. I’ve run a long way.”

“Why would you run when it’s so hot outside? I hope a wild boar was chasing you. I can’t think of any other good reason.”

He laughed, reaching out to pinch her ear gently. “Is your mother around? Let’s fetch her and anyone else in the house. They have to hear this.”

Demeter, Athena, Hermes, and Zeus were in at the time, and they came out when Persephone and Hades called for them. They clamored to know where Hades had been, as no one had seen him for at least three days.

To Persephone, his explanation sounded like something out of the stories Hermes made up to amuse her, and the others doubted him at first too. But the more he explained, the more they listened in seriousness.

In one of his trances several days ago, he had slipped into some other place, one that looked like the regular world but with no living people, nor towns nor anything else built by humans. Only animals lived there—strange, different animals—and, more importantly, the ghosts of people. The ghosts all flew fast, going the same direction, so Hades followed them. All night and day he ran, walked, climbed over hills, and splashed across rivers, guided by the stream of souls.

He came to the opening of a cave within a seaside mountain. All the ghosts were flying down into the cave’s mouth, a thick swarm of them. He dropped rocks in and heard them splash far below, so to jump in would have meant a serious fall. He braided vines into a rope, and lowered himself in. What he found below was an underground river that led into a huge cavern full of grassy hills and pale flowers and trees that all somehow lived without the light of the sun. There the dead of all the world strolled and talked, sometimes alongside the souls of their pets.

Hades explored for at least a day, learning what he could from the souls who spoke the languages he knew. The dead told him that if the amount of evil a person committed in life outweighed the amount of good they did, then their soul was confined to a solitary cell in a cavern below this one, a darker realm lit by eerie fires, where they were beset by guilt and loneliness. But even those souls were released after a time, and then they, like the more virtuous souls, could linger here in the fields as long as they liked. When they were ready to be reborn, they followed the river downstream. Once reborn, they would remember nothing about the Underworld until they died again. For Hades, a living person, to enter this realm, was unheard of. The souls all regarded him as some kind of hero—or god.

“My rope vine had broken, so I couldn’t climb back up the entrance when I was ready to leave,” he explained. “So I went downstream too. The bank disappeared just past the cavern. I had to swim—or rather, get carried along through the tunnels. The river ended up shooting out the side of the mountain as a waterfall.” He laughed. “I fell a long way and landed in the sea. It probably would have killed a mortal.”

“But you were still in this spirit world?” asked Athena.

“Yes. The souls coming downstream with me all vanished. They got reborn, I suppose. I don’t know how that works. But I swam to shore, sat and meditated again, and managed to slip back into this world.”

The adults pelted him with questions, leaving Persephone no chance to ask any, though she had lots of them: What color were the ghost animals—green like the human ghosts, or a different color? How fast could the spirits go? Faster than a horse? Did the ghosts look scary, forever bearing any bloody wounds that killed them, or did they look normal?

What the others wanted to know was where the cave was located, whether he could carry things with him other than the clothes on his back when he switched to that realm, and whether he could do this switching trick again right before their eyes.

He said he had managed it a few more times, going back and forth, and it got a little easier each time, so he’d try to show them. They moved into the garden in their central courtyard, where Hades could sit without disturbance. He set himself on the ground in the shade. They brought him a cage containing a dove to see if he could bring a living creature along—something he hadn’t tried yet. Then Persephone and the others withdrew to the edges of the courtyard to watch.

It happened quickly. Breathing deep with eyes closed, he was there one moment, then he winked out of sight. They all rushed to the spot and confirmed it: he was gone, as was the cage with the dove.

“Back here,” he called.

They turned to see him standing a few paces away, holding the cage, where the dove still fluttered and cooed.

“Teach us how,” Hermes commanded.

“I will, I will.”

“Take me this time,” said a number of them at once, pushing forward—Persephone included.

“Not you.” Demeter pushed her back.

“I want to see the spirit world,” she protested.

“Not until we know it’s safe, transferring back and forth.”

“The dove is fine.”

Demeter took the cage from Hades and frowned into it. “It’s a bird. Who knows whether its mind is still sound, or ever was?”

While Persephone pouted, Hermes leaped into Hades’ arms, drawing up his legs and clinging to Hades’ neck as if he were a maiden being carried. Everyone laughed, and Hades dumped him on the ground. Hermes stood, undaunted. “Seriously, bring me.”

“Fine,” Hades said. “No loss if
you’re
damaged.”

And though it made them laugh and therefore took them a while to settle down, Hades sat with Hermes encircled in his arms, and soon vanished once again, taking his friend along with him.

It took them a long moment to reappear, and when they did, Hermes was in the middle of protesting.

“—want to explore more!”

“They’re going to worry,” said Hades, “and will want to see us again first. We’ll go back later.”