Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (8 page)

A sickening dread curled in her belly. “Hell?” she said softly.

“Not as bad as that,” he assured. “It isn’t sheer torture, as far as I gather. But…it’s lonely and they aren’t contented like the souls here are, and they can’t leave. Not till the—the cave, I suppose, decides they’ve served their time.” He nodded toward the river. “Then they can walk away, and leave, with the rest.”

She swallowed against her dry throat. “How long? How long do they have to stay there?” She thought of Hitler, of mass murderers, of people who kept kids locked in basements for years to torture them…how did the universe pick a sentence for that?

“I don’t know how the place decides.” Adrian kept his eyes lowered, his brows tensed and grim. He picked a blue flower and batted it absently against his palm. “I’m glad it’s not me who has to decide, I’ll tell you that. But from talking to the souls, it seems it’s related to however long you lived, or maybe it’s however long you were hurting people, or maybe some combination of that plus something, I don’t know, but there’s some sort of formula for how long you have to stay out of the living world.”

Sophie found she was shivering, already fearing the afterlife, even as she stood in the middle of it and saw that most of it was harmless. “How bad do you have to be? I mean, for smaller stuff, for saying something mean, or lying, or…”

Adrian sent her a reassuring glance. “You don’t go there for that. Everyone’s done those. And the system seems to account for how much good you’ve done as well, to balance out the bad things. In any case,
you
can breathe easy; you’re fine. There’s a line drawn, and you’re far on the good side of it. You always are.”

She tried to smile. “How do you know I always am?”

He only looked away. “Well.” He was silent a little while, then glanced at her again, and lifted his eyebrows. “Ready for today’s last big decision?”

Only one more? She could handle that. “Sure.”

Adrian led her over the hills and turned onto a path that twisted down into a valley. A grove of black trees lay far ahead. The souls watched Adrian and Sophie, and even drew close to reach out and let their hands pass through Sophie’s arm. After the encounter with Grandpop, she found it more moving than spooky.

As she observed them in return, she noticed some of them holding hands. At least upon death you and your fellow departed could still touch each other, even if you couldn’t touch the world of the living.

“Grandpop seemed to have an idea why you brought me here,” she said as they drew closer to the dark forest. “Am I going to find out soon?”

“Some of it. If you choose.”

“That’s my decision? Whether or not to learn what I’m doing here?”

“Partly. It’s more complicated than that.” He entered the grove.

Sophie followed. A whisper of wind, smelling of dank rock, swished through her hair and rustled the leaves. She shivered and folded her arms. Kiri slowed down to sniff the ground. Dead leaves crackled under Sophie’s shoes as she walked. Branches thick with black foliage and red fruit formed a low ceiling over their heads. The souls didn’t enter this grove much, she noticed—they seemed to prefer the open spaces—and without their glow the forest was dark.

Adrian switched on a tiny key-ring flashlight, sending a wedge of bright LED light onto the tree trunks and the ground. “The number of flashlights I’ve had to buy since coming down here,” he murmured.

“You don’t
live
down here, though?”

“Um. I kind of do.”

“Why?”

“It’s headquarters, for me.”

“You’re, what, some kind of messenger between the dead and the living?”

“That’s part of it.”

Adrian stopped and shone the light up into the canopy, as if searching for something.

She looked up too. The red fruits might have been apples, though she couldn’t get a close enough look to be sure.

Reaching up, he plucked one off the tree. The branch whipped back. “This, Sophie, is your big decision.” Adrian regarded her, his dark gaze barely straying from her face as he sank his thumbnail into the flower-like protrusion at the bottom of the fruit.

Not apples. Pomegranates. As soon as she recognized the fruit, another Greek myth snapped into place in her head: Persephone, kidnapped by Hades and brought to the Underworld, was tricked into eating a few pomegranate seeds, and therefore had to return to the land of the dead for part of every year even after she was rescued and brought above ground by her mother Demeter.

The recollection of the myth gave her a chill. She stared at the pomegranate in the hand of a man who’d brought her to an underground land of the dead.

Adrian ripped open the fruit, and held out a ragged quarter of it to her. Ruby-red seeds studded its interior.

She looked up into Adrian’s eyes. They were imploring, sad, hopeful. Keeping her gaze upon his, she took the piece of fruit and cupped it in her palm. A single drop of juice ran down her fingers.

“Will you eat some?” he asked her.

“What happens if I do? Do I get trapped here for half of every year?”

He blinked and hesitated. “No. It unlocks your mind. It makes you remember everything you used to know about this place—and about me, and about your past lives. You gain the knowledge you’d have if you were one of the souls, only without dying.”

Her hands went cold with apprehension and sharp curiosity. “Is that what happened to you three years ago? When you first came here, with someone else? They fed you one of these pomegranates?”

“Yeah. She offered it to me, and I accepted, and it started everything off.”

Sophie wondered who “she” was, but that question could wait. She eyed the dark, shining seeds. “Is this what gave you your super-abilities?”

“Not really. That’s a different story. Part of which you’ll know, if you eat it.”

She tilted the piece of pomegranate back and forth on her palm, trying to reason out what he was after. “Why not bring me the pomegranate at the dorm? Make friends with me, offer me a piece of fruit one day, like a normal person?”

“Lots of reasons. Most important being, the magic only works here. Eating it outside the cave wouldn’t do anything.”

She continued holding the piece of fruit. “Okay. I still don’t see why you’re doing this to me.”

“But you
will
see, if you eat it.”

“What if you’re trying to poison me?”

“I’m not. Here, I’ll eat some too. See?” He tore off a small section from the fruit, bit into the array of seeds with a crunch, and wiped at his mouth with his sleeve.

“But you have super-strength. Maybe you’re immune to it while I wouldn’t be.”

“If I wanted to kill you, I’d have let you fall out of the bus. Or let the lion eat you. I promise, I’m not out to hurt you.”

Sophie looked at the pomegranate again, touching her lips with her tongue. She hadn’t eaten since dinner, and that was hours ago, and she
was
hungry. But a hallucinogenic snack wasn’t what she’d had in mind. Then again, she did want to know all the answers he kept withholding. She loosened a few of the seeds and let them roll into her other palm. “Will it hurt?” she asked.

“Physically, no,” Adrian said. “But unlocking all that information in your brain—well, it does send a lot of ripples through your life.”

Sophie stared at the plump red seeds in her fingers. She swallowed the saliva gathering under her tongue. Then she overturned her hand and let the fruit and its seeds drop onto the ground. “No. I’m not eating it.”

He groaned, and for a moment turned into an impatient adolescent. “Come on. Seriously?”

His derision only fortified her stubbornness. She dusted off her hands. “I came down here to see Grandpop, not take drugs.”

Adrian sighed, glaring off into the forest. “But all those questions you had, this would start answering them.” He thrust the remaining piece at her.

“I think I better go back to the regular world. You
will
take me back, right?”

He stared at her a few seconds, then dropped the rest of the pomegranate on the ground. “Right. Fine.” He wheeled around, and tromped forward on the path. “This way.”

Sophie followed him out of the grove. That was it? That was the whole big decision? Saying yes or no to a mouthful of pomegranate seeds? She began suspecting she’d fallen victim to an elaborate hoax put together by someone who was a little too obsessed with the Persephone myth.

She followed Adrian out of the forest and back into the grassy fields. After a few minutes of stony silence, he started to look calmer again, so she ventured a question.

“How does anything grow down here? Does it ever get sun?”

“No sun. This place just has its own…magic, I suppose is the word.”

Considering she got here via flying ghost horses, and was surrounded by millions of glowing dead humans, she was willing to accept magic as an answer. Provided it wasn’t all some sort of hallucinogenic hoax.

“What was the language you spoke when you asked the other souls to find Grandpop?” she asked.

“The language of the Underworld.” Immediately he closed his mouth and darted a glance at her, as if he hadn’t meant to say that. Then he added, “It’s a Tower of Babel down here. People from all over the world. So the way they communicate is with one language everyone knows. Everyone dead, anyway.”

“And you.”

“Yeah.”

She filed away the word “Underworld” in her head. Interesting. That matched Greek mythology too.

A little tributary stream, no wider than her hand, tumbled along the base of a valley. Sophie stepped over it, following Kiri and Adrian. She glanced over her shoulder at the stream, and bumped into Adrian, who had stopped.

He stood frowning, head turned as if listening to something far off.

“What?” said Sophie.

Adrian sighed after a moment. “It’s only…I’m afraid I’m in for a lecture.”

“A lecture?”

“Adrian!” called a woman, somewhere beyond the hill. Her voice echoed in the cave, and the souls whispered in a ripple of quietly interested remarks. Kiri gave an excited yelp, and bounded away in the direction of the voice.

“Adrian!” The voice was closer, and soon was followed by the woman herself, striding angrily over the crest of the hill. Kiri circled her, tongue hanging out, as if herding one of her favorite cows into the pasture.

The woman was tall and leanly muscular, and her long sheath-style red dress flapped against her bare legs as she approached.

“I know, I’m sorry,” Adrian said by way of greeting.

The woman stopped to infuse him with a look of serious exasperation, which was a powerful expression on an already striking face. Sophie guessed she was perhaps thirty, but it was hard to say. Tightly spiraling dark brown hair made a cloud around her face and shoulders. She was brown-skinned, darker than Sophie by a few shades, making her look properly African.

She turned to Sophie, and her gaze softened into compassion. “What has he shown you?” Her accent was fairly strong, though whether it was from Africa or Europe or elsewhere, Sophie couldn’t gauge.

Sophie glanced in hesitation at Adrian. “Well…my grandfather’s soul. And the pomegranates.”

“Did you eat one?”

“No.”

“Good.” Hands on hips, the woman turned to glare at Adrian. “Now? So soon? Like this?”

“I was about to return her,” Adrian said.

“What ever made you think this was wise?” The woman exhaled through her nose, and turned again to Sophie. “My dear, I am sorry. He was wrong to do this to you.”

“It’s okay.” Sophie wasn’t sure what else to say.

“He will return you at once. We will do our best to protect you against the opposition, as Adrian calls them, but I hope it won’t be a problem.”

Sophie cleared her throat. “Um, I don’t really understand who that is. The opposition.”

“If we are lucky, you won’t have to worry about it,” the woman said. “Not if you go about your normal life, the way you should at your age.” She directed the last statement at Adrian, though seemingly it still referred to Sophie.

“I was her age when you found me,” he defended.

Sophie’s ears perked up. So this was the person who’d brought Adrian here and fed him the pomegranate?

“Your circumstances were different,” the woman said. “There’s nothing wrong with her life.”

Sophie could have argued the point. Her mom, in all likelihood, was involved with another man. Also, the family needed money, what with the farmhouse’s dilapidated condition, Liam’s frequent doctor bills for broken limbs due to skateboarding injuries, her mother’s tuition for the M.B.A. she was pursuing, and now Sophie’s own tuition. The fruit stand had never brought in much profit, but it was all her parents had done for the last couple of decades, and was all they wanted to do. Even the M.B.A. was intended only to improve the family business.

In addition, Sophie needed to find a job and balance it with her classes, settle into dorm life and make new friends, and decide what to do about Jacob now that they were forty miles apart.