by Molly Ringle
“I don’t know, I just figured I’d stay…” Sophie glanced at her parents.
But they motioned her off. “You should go,” her mom said. “I would if I could.”
She said it matter-of-factly, but the thought was so poignant that tears stung Sophie’s eyes, and she was on the verge of planting her feet in the cave soil and refusing to budge.
Then her dad added, “Heck yeah. You and Liam go have fun, then come back and tell us what you saw.”
When they put it like that, she couldn’t argue, especially with Tab, Liam, and Zoe beckoning to her eagerly. So she followed her friends and brother out, though all the while she was thinking how it was her first New Year’s since her parents died. Then soon it would be her dad’s first birthday (in early February) since they died, then her first Valentine’s Day since they died, then her own first birthday (March 21) since they died…how long would this accounting go on? The first full year? Longer?
Niko was out somewhere, as was Freya. They left the dog Rosie in the Underworld, since she seemed content to hang around with Mom and Dad and Pumpkin’s souls, and anyway it was awkward to bring her on a spirit horse. Sophie climbed onto a horse behind Tab, and Liam onto one behind Zoe, and they darted up into the chilly, starry night.
They switched over outside a Greek village in the living world, a little seaside town relatively unfrequented by tourists, where consequently few residents spoke English, and native customs stayed strongly in force. Adrian, Zoe, and the other immortals ventured here occasionally to buy food or supplies. So Zoe knew her way, and led the others down to the square in the middle of the village.
Lights framed the awnings of taverns, and were strung across the narrow streets from roof to roof or balcony to balcony. Music rang everywhere too, most of it live: singers, acoustic guitars, accordions, and what sounded like a clarinet. Kids ran around with sparklers—at which Sophie relapsed into worry. Not only was fire on her list of triggers, but what if a kid got burned? Or accidentally set something on fire? At the idea of one of these sweet little white-painted houses going up in flames, she went cold with anxiety.
But then she caught sight of Liam grinning as some cute teenaged Greek girl raced up and pushed a slice of cake into his hands on a paper napkin. The girl handed out slices all around, and tried a few languages on them before guessing correctly, “English?”
“Yes!” they all chorused.
“Happy New Year,” Zoe added.
“Happy New Year,” the girl echoed, in a heavy accent that reminded Sophie of Niko’s fake accent that first day she had met him. Then the girl spoke in a burst of lovely Greek syllables, which presumably meant the same thing in Greek.
By the time they had all tried, failed, tried again, and finally succeeded at pronouncing the Greek “Happy New Year,” Sophie was smiling again.
The girl raced off down the street to hand out more cake. Sophie and her friends nibbled their slices. It turned out to be like pound cake, dense and lightly sweet. It had coconut sprinkled on top, which Sophie chewed with pleasure. She probably hadn’t eaten coconut in months. My first taste of coconut since they died, she thought, but at least the thought was wry this time.
They found a spot to sit on the hood of an old red car parked near the square. An elderly man insisted with hand-waving gestures that they sit upon it, as the curbs and sidewalk chairs and balconies were already filled with people.
The countdown in Greek began at midnight, then everyone burst into cheers and embraces. Sophie smiled, accepting a high-five from a young local man who danced past with his friends. Tab smacked a kiss onto Sophie’s cheek and Liam’s, and Sophie returned it, though her thoughts traveled with sadness to Adrian. If she hadn’t been such a mess and driven him away, he would be getting his proper New Year’s kiss from her. Maybe sometime within this new year, she could repay him with sincere passion. Was that her wish? Should she even make a wish? Were there gods out there yet, above these puny immortals, who would take wishes and twist them cruelly the way they always did in myths and fairy tales?
The explosion blew her out of her brooding. It was right overhead, no higher than the buildings, and showered sparks down almost into their hair. Some people shrieked, and most cheered, but Sophie couldn’t breathe. Panic clamped around her like a suffocating hand. Just a firework, just a firework, she thought, looking around in alarm, but her heart wouldn’t slow down; the cold nausea wouldn’t subside. Another sizzle of flame hissed nearby, and another and another, and three new shells exploded above: blue, purple, white. Someone set off a string of firecrackers down the street. It sounded like machine gun fire. A boom thundered from the hillside—one of those mini-dynamites some people liked to set off, probably, but what if it wasn’t? Goddess, what had she been thinking, stepping into the living world? This would be a perfect occasion to shoot or bomb someone without anyone realizing what was going on until too late.
Beside her, Liam was looking around uneasily too. Her flight instinct kicked in. Sophie twisted and slid off the hood of the car, pulling him with her. She set off running, shoving through the crowd, knocking people aside.
“What, what is it, what’s happening?” Liam begged. But he ran with her. He had as much reason to freak out as she did.
“I don’t know—it’s too much—we just have to…” She raced out of the square, along the street they had arrived from, and up the slope, back into the darkness of the hillside.
Tabitha and Zoe, however, being immortals, got in front of them in short order and stopped them. They barely even looked out of breath, though Sophie felt about to faint between the effects of running uphill and being in a full panic attack.
“Whoa, girl. Hey.” Tabitha drew her in and hugged her. “Where you think you’re going, huh?”
Sophie trembled against Tab’s soft, warm steadiness. “Switch us, please, can you switch us?”
“Sure, no prob.” The world wobbled. The sounds of singing and fireworks evaporated into quiet. The sea sighed, over and over, down at the base of the cliffs.
Beside them, Zoe had embraced Liam and switched him into the spirit realm too.
After a few deep breaths, Sophie pulled away from Tab and slumped down onto a rock. “I’m sorry,” she said, gazing at the dark shapes of the scrub. “The explosions…”
“Totally understandable,” Zoe said. “Ugh, I should’ve realized. Bad night to come out in the world.”
“It was my idea,” Tab said. “I am such a moron. I’m sorry, you guys. Are you okay?”
Liam laughed shakily. “Hey, I’m cool. I just thought Sophie saw some Thanatos dude in the crowd or something.”
“The fireworks didn’t get to you?” Zoe asked him anxiously.
“Well,” he admitted, “a little. I guess.”
Tab sat beside Sophie, sharing the rock, and rubbed Sophie’s shoulders. “You are going to conquer this, babe. I know you are.”
Sophie managed a smile. As the others remarked about how the cake was pretty good, and tried to repeat how to say “Happy New Year” in Greek, Sophie gazed at the moonlight scattered over the Mediterranean.
Secretly, and to her surprise, she found herself comforted by her freak-out. It clearly wasn’t just Adrian who set off that reaction in her. It was other things like fire or explosions too. He was just one feature of what happened, not the whole of her problem. In fact, quite likely, he was part of what would make her life whole again. She just had a lot of healing to do first.
And she had to pray Thanatos didn’t obliterate him before her healing was done.
***
Nikolaos strolled up to Liam in the fields on New Year’s Day. Liam had braided together a rope of Underworld willow and ivy, and though it was uneven and ugly, it totally worked: it glommed onto the souls of the spirit dogs who liked hanging around Rosie. He was entertaining himself now by hitching four of them together and trying to get them to run like a dog-sled team, pulling him on his skateboard.
“Now that’s innov
ation,” Niko remarked.
Liam hopped off the skateboard and tugged the dogs to a stop. “They aren’t that good a team yet. And it’s hella bumpy trying to roll on this stuff.” He thumped his sneaker sole against the grass-covered rock of the Underworld.
Niko approached and picked up Liam’s skateboard to examine it. Raindrops glittered on his fleece coat and snowboarder hat. “This the board you saved from home?”
“Yeah. Most of the stuff in the garage wasn’t…too burnt.” Liam dropped his gaze to the willow rope, and picked a leaf off it.
“Good. I wonder that Adrian hasn’t tried pulling his bus with spirit dogs instead of horses. Maybe because it would make Kiri jealous.”
“Plus Hades’ chariot is supposed to have black horses. Not dogs.”
“True. Adrian’s a stickler for tradition in some cases. Speaking of the old days…” Niko set down the skateboard and took his phone out. “Our girls tell me you’ve got to the Amphitrite memories.”
“The start of them anyhow.”
“And you’re curious who she is now. Well.” Niko turned his phone’s screen to Liam.
Liam peered at the photo. Excitement bloomed in his chest. An Asian girl, older than him but not way older, sat on a bus or a train or something. She was reading her phone screen. She was Japanese maybe—she wore one of those school uniforms with navy jacket, plaid skirt that stopped above the knee, and dark socks. She had long straight black hair with shaggy bangs, and what looked like a really cute face, though it was hard to tell in a smallish photo from the side like this.
Liam’s head felt a bit floaty. He looked up at Niko. “Who is she?”
“So far I don’t know. I can’t speak or read Japanese, other than konnichiwa and arigato, which rather complicates this particular stalking adventure. But I tracked her and got near her, at least.” Niko nodded to the picture. “Boarded a train with her, and managed to snap this picture. This was in Yokosuka, on Tokyo Bay.” Niko smiled. “She lives by the sea. Appropriately.”
“How old is she, you think?”
“High school is my guess. Sixteen maybe? I’m sure a little more stalking and we could find out, along with her name and such. But for now I thought you’d like to see this.”
Liam couldn’t take his eyes off her. “That’s awesome.” Then a sort of hilarious despair crossed his mood, and he grimaced up at Niko. “Sixteen? Dude, she’d never even look at me.”
Niko clapped his hand on Liam’s shoulder. “Well, what do you think the immortality fruit does to a boy? Makes him a man. She’ll look then. And by then, you’ll be able to sense her yourself. You can go and say konnichiwa.”
Liam studied the girl again. “Konnichiwa,” he echoed. He looked eagerly at Niko. “Send me this pic, okay?”
Chapter Sixteen
Stepping back into the living world soon shook Hekate’s courage further, for Thanatos struck again. Worse yet, they targeted two of the gentlest immortals, Hestia and Hephaestus. The cult swarmed into a feast at a clifftop temple where the two were being honored, slayed dozens of mortals, and managed to kill Hestia before the locals drove them off. Meanwhile Hephaestus only survived by throwing himself off the cliff. He switched realms and spent the night in agony on the rocks while his broken legs healed themselves.
Once again the immortals dealt swift and lethal vengeance, but this time without Hekate’s magical assistance. The cold strength of hands and weapons sufficed, after Hermes and Artemis tracked down the cult members who had fled the scene. Hekate, in fact, didn’t even come along. She spent three days in the Underworld, trembling in revived trauma, helplessly watching Hestia’s soul drift around with the souls of her parents and grandmother.
Then she asked herself if this was helping the world, and knew she must return to her justice missions. Which she did, though fear accompanied her like a fist in her chest for the next month.
In as many islands, towns, and countries as she could reliably reach, in places where she could communicate with the people, she brought word from the murdered to their surviving friends.
She wished she could help people in more of the world. As her parents had found before her from talking to the dead, the world was far larger than anyone realized. Like them, she tried to sketch a map to work out where all these different lands lay, based on what the souls could tell her. But she had to give up. No one knew the geography of the whole world. All she could conclude was that, yes, there were lands beyond every ocean, and no, she did not have the courage to fly all the way across and investigate them. Even if she did, she couldn’t deliver justice there, since she didn’t speak those languages. The souls could have taught them to her, but that would take intensive months of study for each language, nowhere near as easy as the instinctual ability that the pomegranate memories gave her for the languages she’d spoken in past lives.
She did heal people sometimes, too. Her mother and grandmother had taught her several methods and plants to assist in all kinds of ailments, plus she had the stamina to stay long at a bedside and prop up or carry patients if need be. So on her journeys to other villages, she often asked around when her justice errands were finished to see if anyone needed a temporary nurse or midwife, and gave the exhausted family a night off. Soothing and sponging and encouraging these suffering people, she felt soothed herself. At least this was a service to humanity that did nothing but good. And it showed mortals that these mysterious messengers from the Underworld were not out to hurt them; quite the contrary.
She still heard hostile whispers in most places she visited. Sometimes Thanatos was behind the sentiments—its name was shouted at her in defiance. The story of the murderers counter-murdered by mysterious beasts—her own handiwork—had traveled far indeed, and become even more fearsome in the retelling. Even in places Thanatos hadn’t penetrated yet, people naturally mistrusted an outsider with uncanny knowledge from the dead. Hekate kept tranquil, pursued her errands, and more often than not, won the citizens over.
What she really wished for was some more established way to spread the truth about herself and the other immortals. Her mind mulled it over, and kept coming back to the priests and priestesses who were already friendly with them—but then what? More festivals? More temples? She wasn’t sure.
Spending more time far afield did mean seeing Dionysos less. It soon became their custom to meet only twice a month, once at the new moon and once just after the full, when he had finished presiding over the Dionysia. He showed up reliably in the Underworld at those times, and she stayed home those nights to await him.
In the days between, other immortals often accompanied her on her outings to ensure she was safe. Sometimes it was Rhea, Artemis, or Apollo, but most often it was Hermes.
“I love to travel anyway,” he said one day as they walked toward a city in Kypros. “Might as well throw some killers to the executioners while I’m at it.”
Though he spoke lightly, he studied the far mountains with a steely set to his eyes. It was now almost a year since her parents had been killed, and though the intensity of her grief had diminished, the sadness had never left her, nor had the fury against their enemies. Her friends felt much the same, evidently. But her mind still recoiled, just as her magic had done, at the thought of the blood she had shed in retaliation.
“I haven’t forgiven myself yet for the massacre,” Hekate confessed. She dropped her gaze to her sandals on the dusty path. “I don’t even like catching people for these executioners, even though it’s justice. I do it so they don’t hurt anyone else, and so the victims’ families can know what happened and find peace. But I don’t enjoy it.”
“Love, you showed great restraint. If other people had the power to direct wild animals against their enemies, the world would have become a slaughterhouse long ago. The rest of us, your accomplices…well, perhaps sometimes deep in the night we don’t forgive ourselves either. Yet if we had another chance we wouldn’t have done it differently. Bastards deserved what they got.”
&n
bsp; She smiled. “Is it wrong to say I’m glad you’re all in it with me?”
Hermes slung his arm around her. “We’d follow you into hell. In fact, we do. Regularly.”
***
“I don’t know anything anymore, Dad.” Sophie pressed the heels of her hands against the rock she sat upon. “What I’m supposed to do, what our future’s supposed to look like—mine and Liam’s. We can’t walk away from all this entirely, because, well, you guys are here now.”
Terry was seated beside her on the bench-like cave formation at a bend in the river. The black water gurgled past in front of them. “Sweetie, we’d be delighted if you both got back into school, and took on the world again. Don’t worry about us. You know we’re fine here.”
“Maybe you’re fine, but it makes me feel better to see you, so I have to keep ties with this realm. Still, all this immortal stuff—” She waved her hand up the river. “I mean, look at it. It’s all death and violence these days. I want to stop Thanatos—who wouldn’t?—but I can’t get on board with that mood. I wanted a life of, like, gardens. Fruits, vegetables, flowers.”
“I hear you. But you know, gardens are pretty important down here too. These folks wouldn’t be immortal if it weren’t for those fruits.”
“Yeah. And that was one of my plans, at first. Get Persephone’s gardens back into shape, use the plants to help people somehow. But now it doesn’t seem important compared to what everyone else is doing.”
“Course it’s important. Gardens are always going to be important. People need to eat. Maybe if you called it a ‘victory garden.’”
Sophie smiled. “Keep calm and grow magic pomegranates?”
“Exactly. Bringing a little bit of spring into the Underworld, putting some life back into death—isn’t that Persephone’s whole thing?”
“Well, you can look at the myth that way. In reality it was…” She shrugged, since her dad, being Demeter’s soul, knew already. Still, her mind completed the thought. Persephone marrying Hades, in the actual past, hadn’t been about life mating with death, or seasons being invented by emotional gods. It was a love story, a man and a woman. Simple as that.