Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (9 page)

But she had no idea what Adrian’s life had been like before all this, except that his mother had died when he was young. Maybe her life really was a walk in the park so far, in comparison.

“I’m taking her home,” Adrian promised the woman.

“Good.” The woman laid warm hands upon Sophie’s upper arms. “Don’t worry. We’re your friends. It will make sense eventually. Try to forget about all this in the meantime.”

Forget about this? The most bizarre, amazing thing that had ever happened to her? Not a chance. Still, something about the woman compelled reverent answers, so Sophie nodded and said, “I’ll try.”

The woman answered with a firm nod as if Sophie had spoken wisely. Then she turned and glared at Adrian. “
Now
, if you please.”

Chapter Six

G
IVEN HOW LONG SHE KNEW
the flight to be, Sophie was glad when Adrian suggested visiting the restroom first. He helped her across the river on the raft, then picked up a camping lantern sitting next to a tunnel, switched it on, and guided her into the passage. The tunnel descended via uneven steps in some places, turned a few times, ascended in more steps, and had several sub-tunnels branching off it along the way. Sometimes she caught the sound of trickling water, accompanied by a smell of wet rock, as if the river or one of its underground tributaries was near. In the lantern’s glow, the walls and floor sparkled and flashed in all colors. She realized the cave was studded with gems. For all she knew, those pebbles crunching under her shoes were literal diamonds in the rough.

Despite that attractive quality, the tunnels gave her the creeps. They were so dark, dark as only a cave could be. She already knew ghosts were down here, so what else lurked down these passages?

In a minute or two, they entered a room with modern furniture and a high ceiling, though not as high as the one above the spirit fields. A four-poster bed with dark blankets stood against the far wall. It looked fairly new and clean, not the moldering, dusty antique she might expect in a world of the dead.

While Sophie paused to look in curiosity at the bed, Adrian pointed toward the right. “Bathroom’s back there.”

She stepped that way, glancing again at the bed. “This is where you sleep?”

“Yeah, when I’m here. I, um, did put in plumbing, but no electricity yet. So grab one of the flashlights in the box by the door.”

Sophie walked to the “door,” which was actually a curtain, and picked up a button LED light from the cardboard box beside it. With a click, it came on, and she pushed through the curtain to find herself in a small dead-end tunnel. Toilet, sink, tub, and water heater all looked new and standard, thank goodness. She gladly made use of the first two, setting the light on the granite counter.

While washing her hands a minute later in the tap, she noticed a gleam of green on the wall, catching the light of the LED.

Thinking it might be an emerald, she dried her hands with the red towel sitting on the counter, and picked up the light to shine it at the green spark. She found it was a set of dog tags sitting on a tiny ledge. One of the tags was green and shaped like a diamond. The others displayed identification numbers and vaccination proofs, as dogs usually wore, but the green one said:

KIRI

Adrian Watts

18 Titan Street

Wellington

It carried a phone number as well, but the name and address were all Sophie could reliably commit to memory on the spot. She read the inscription over and over for half a minute, fingers tingling. Then she set the tags back on the ledge, careful not to let the metal clink audibly, and went out. She switched off the LED and dropped it in the box on her way to Adrian. He handed her the lantern and walked to the bathroom himself.

Watts. That perhaps explained “Watson” as an alias—”Watts-on,” Nikolaos had playfully pronounced it.

She wandered over to Kiri and petted the dog’s head, then combed her fingers through the thick fur at her neck. It was enough to verify that Kiri wore no collar, and thus no tags. Sophie wondered a little why they’d been removed, or whether maybe the tags didn’t belong to this dog. But mainly she wondered how fast she could get home, get online, and find out everything she could about Mr. Adrian Watts of 18 Titan Street, Wellington, New Zealand.

S
O SHE’D REFUSED
the pomegranate. Well. Adrian did have one trick up his sleeve, if he dared use it. As he emerged from his turn in the bathroom, his gaze traveled to the plastic crate of food by the bedchamber wall.

Impulse triumphed. He veered over there.

“Midnight snack?” Adrian pulled a pair of granola bars and two small juice bottles from the crate, and held them up. He tried to look aloof, not letting his eyes give anything away.

She studied the snacks, and shrugged, noncommittal.

He twisted the cap off a bottle and handed the juice to her, along with a granola bar.

“I think I could’ve handled the cap myself,” she remarked, but took it, read the label, and sniffed at the juice.

“Should be fresh.” He sipped from his own bottle, heart thumping. “Just bought it last week.”

He knew she was checking for copious amounts of alcohol or noticeable drugs. Her first sip was tiny, and she licked her lips and examined the label again before evidently deciding it was safe, and taking another drink.

Panic and remorse leaped up in his chest for a moment, and he almost knocked the bottle out of her hand. But it was too late. She’d swallowed it. Swallowed the juice he had doctored, at Nikolaos’ suggestion, pouring out half of it and replacing it with juice squeezed from the Underworld’s pomegranates. The tart cranberry-grape juice masked the taste; she’d never guess. Just as Niko predicted.

Adrian lowered his face, wiping a spilled drop off the outside of his bottle, his fingers trembling.

Would it even work, the juice alone? Did you have to eat the whole seed? They had no idea. But what had originally struck him as a clever if sneaky idea now seemed like a horrible date-rapist maneuver. Why did he ever listen to Niko? It was surely illegal, experimenting on someone without her consent.

“It isn’t a drug,” Niko had assured him. “It’s just fruit juice, which stirs up knowledge her soul already had.” Oh, he knew how to manipulate people, all right, that trickster.

The worst of it was, Adrian couldn’t help feeling elated.
Please let it work
, he begged, against all his better counsel.

He lifted his face. “Shall we get back, then?”

Biting off a corner of granola bar, she nodded.

He led her back through the tunnels and into the bus, and they launched upward through the cave mouth, into the bright sky. A minute or two and they were soaring over the Atlantic Ocean again.

The morning sun reflecting off the sea dazzled Adrian’s eyes as he guided the bus. Sophie squinted too, leaning back to stay beneath the shade of the rusty roof. Despite the brightness, the speed of the wind made the ride as cold as ever, so Adrian wore his heavy coat and Sophie had rewrapped the blanket around herself.

This time it was just the two of them for the transcontinental ride. Kiri awaited him back in the caverns, staying with Rhea, who was surely preparing further cutting remarks for him upon his return. But he barely cared. His mind whirled in a chaos of excitement and apprehension. He said nothing and waited for Sophie to speak first.

A few kilometers off the American coast, she finally did. “Since the souls can’t touch anything, how do you get the riding gear to stick to the horses?”

“A lot of plants from the cave have magical properties, not just the pomegranates. A couple of the right ones woven together can stick to souls.”

“Only horse souls? Or human souls too?”

Adrian focused on the hazy continental horizon. “Human too. If need be.”

“You said you’d only been going there for three years. Did you learn all this in that time, or do you know it from remembering
your
past lives?”

“Some of both.”

The coast swept in beneath them, then a row of green hills, growing darker as they left the sun behind and entered the shadow of the Earth again. It was still the middle of the night where she lived.

“The pomegranate myth,” she said. “Persephone and Hades. Does that have something to do with all this?”

Hearing her say the names sent a thrill through him. He tensed up. “How do you mean?”

“It’s a Greek myth. And Nikolaos is from Greece, and it looks like we crossed the Atlantic, so we might’ve been near Greece.”

Adrian only shrugged.

“Is there a good reason,” she demanded, “that you won’t tell me the most basic things?”

“There
is
a good reason. Namely, I want you to figure it out on your own so you won’t ever think I planted the ideas in your head. Power of suggestion, and such.”

“Well, how am I supposed to figure it out on my own?”

He shrugged. “Eating the seeds would’ve helped.”

Sitting back with an indignant snort, she hugged her blanket tighter. “Okay, so can you tell me this? Why send Nikolaos to get me? You’re the one who seemed to have this plan, the one who knew me from online. Why not grab me yourself?”

“I didn’t want to be seen near you. There are dangerous people who know who I am and what I look like. Plus I wanted it done fast, but I didn’t think I could pull it off. Niko’s good at tricking people, so he volunteered to help.”

“Even though you knew it would freak me out.”

“Yeah.”

“And even though you knew bringing me to the cave would make that woman mad.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Who was she? Your boss or something?”

“In a way.”

“This is sounding like a mob kind of thing. Only paranormal.”

Adrian pulled his smartphone from his pocket and tapped the GPS app. “There are certainly people who’d tell you we’re the bad guys.”

“This ‘opposition’? I still don’t understand who they—what are you doing?”

“Navigating.” Consulting the arrows and numbers on the screen, he twitched the reins and directed the horses to the northwest.

“You need GPS to get me home?”

Feeling sheepish, as if a real man would be able to steer by the stars and landmarks, he closed the app. “Yeah.”

“You didn’t use it on the way to that cave.”

“The horses can get there on their own. Spirits are like homing pigeons, and that’s home for them. But to get anywhere else, you have to navigate the old-fashioned way.”

“Or rather, the new-fashioned way.”

“Right.”

As they crossed the plains and traversed the Cascades, he slowed the horses with a pull on the reins. He checked the map again. Their destination was only twelve kilometers ahead now. He slowed the horses to barely fifty kilometers an hour. The blur of dark landforms around them resolved into the silhouettes of individual trees and lighter patches of meadow. The air warmed. Beside him, Sophie let the blanket slip down around her elbows.

Consulting the GPS, he guided the horses across a field and pulled them to a stop next to the stake. The orange flagging fluttered from its top in the breeze, catching enough light from the horses’ glow to be easily visible.

He stepped down from the bus and looked up. The stars and planets shone so thick and bright they nearly throbbed. The air smelled of the freshness of an Earth practically untouched by humans.

Sophie unwound the blanket and climbed out of the bus, immersed in checking her texts.

“Anyone missed you?” he asked.

“No. Thank goodness. I guess I’ll sneak back into the room and try not to wake up my roommate.”

“Okay. Listen…” He waited until she looked up from her phone. “It’s serious, this business of not telling anyone.”

Her phone’s screen dimmed automatically, the light dying from her face. “These people who are after you—are they a gang or something? And they’d really come after me?”

“They’re not a gang so much as a…a secret society. And I don’t know exactly what they’d do. Except that they’ve already killed one of us, and tried to kill me.”

Her breath hissed inward. “Who—why—”

“We go against their religion, I suppose you could say. They’re scared of us. They shouldn’t be, but they are.”

“So, wait, do they know you’re Kiwi Ade, online?”

“I expect they do.”

“Then why’d you go commenting openly on my posts? They could
already
know we know each other.” She sounded outraged, for which he couldn’t blame her.

“That’s true. But if you pretend you don’t know what I am or anything about this realm, then they shouldn’t have any cause to bother you.”

She sighed, glancing again at her phone. “Well, I don’t know what you are, that much is true.” She stayed quiet a few seconds. “Why was it so important to leave comments?” she echoed.