Corrupted: A Hades and Persephone Romance

by Bella Klaus

  Rage burned through my veins. Rage and excitement and a touch of lust, but it wasn’t mine. My throat dried, and I remembered the erotic dream I once saw through Persephone’s point of view.

  Hades hadn’t sent it.

  Somehow, even back then, I had connected with Persephone. I pushed my magic to her surroundings, allowing the teleportation process to drag the rest of my body.

  She crouched on the ground with her back turned to me, her red hair a matted and tangled mess from behind. Mud-streaked arms stretched out to the floor. In each hand, she pinned down a dryad by the throat, who whimpered and cried and writhed within her grip.

  Tears streaked the childlike creatures’ faces, their delicate features twisted with agony.

  I clenched my teeth, rushed at her from behind, and grabbed her mass of hair.

  With an agonized howl, Persephone released their necks, her eyes blazing an inhuman green. Cold shock spread through my insides, turning my veins to sludge. Was she in control of the plants, or were they in control of her? From the looks of things, something other than a soul was animating her body.

  She bared brilliant white teeth and hissed, and spat a liquid that landed on my armor with a sizzle.

  “Hades,” I screamed out loud and through the bond.

  Vines leaped from Persephone’s tangled hair like snakes, winding around my neck, tighter than any imagined noose. I jumped back, my hands grasping at the garrote, trying to burn through them with my lightning.

  “Kora?” Hades’ voice filled my head.

  “She’s here,” I said. “Come.”

  Persephone rose from her crouch, leaving the dryads still lying on the ground. She advanced on me with her hands outstretched, her eyes unseeing. Vines wrapped around her body, forming a replica of my armor. Whatever intelligence lurked beneath those green eyes knew that we had once been the same.

  Or at least it knew that I was the one Persephone had twice failed to kill.

  I tore the vines from my neck, only for another set to snap back into place. “Bloody hell,” I screamed into my mind. “If you don’t show yourself this instant, I’m going to fry Persephone!”

  Behind her, the tallest of the dryads rolled onto her side and coughed.

  “You two.” My voice shook. “Find somewhere to run and hide.”

  The little creatures scrambled to their feet, took each other’s hands, and darted down a path of burning bushes.

  Persephone advanced toward me with shuffling steps, her plants still forming her armor. Huge green appendages sprouted from her back, no longer taking the shape of gingko leaves.

  I held out my crackling palm. “Stay back. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”

  Persephone roared.

  A dark figure swooped down, making Persephone’s head snap up. She hissed at Hades, materialized a brown ball into her hand, and flung it in his direction. Hades swerved, just as it exploded into a mass of sycamore seeds that flew toward him on transparent wings.

  Hades set them alight, and Persephone floated a dozen more and hurled them all at him with her magic.

  “Bloody hell,” I muttered. “What kind of plant warfare is this?”

  Persephone’s gaze snapped to mine, and she stared at me, her mouth slack and spilling strings of drool. I gulped, hoping she wasn’t thinking of turning me into one of her monstrous beanstalks.

  Pushing enough electricity through my fingers to jumpstart the dead, I snarled at her to stay back.

  She flinched, and snapped her head up to find that Hades was advancing on her from the sky, having already burned down her latest attack. With one almighty leap, she flew away from Hades only to swoop down into the fire and snatch the smaller of the dryads.

  “Shit.” I flared out my wings and jumped.

  Hades grabbed me from behind. “What are you doing?”

  “Going after Persephone.”

  “Not with your armor half melted.”

  I glanced down at my red leather, only to find it blackened, with holes deep enough to expose patches of skin. “Bloody hell.”

  “How did that happen?” Hades asked. “That leather is immune to hellfire.”

  “But not to acids.” There was no time to tell him about the plants that could produce corrosive substances like cashew fruit. Or about carnivorous leaves that digested small animals. “She’s taken a dryad. Please save her.”

  “Teleport back to the palace,” Hades said. “If Persephone is throwing acid, there’s no telling how permanent she can make the damage.”

  “There’s another dryad—”

  “Kora.” He gripped my arms. “You are the only thing that matters to me—more than the Fifth Faction, and more than the murderous shell of my first wife. Go to the palace, wash that acid off your body, and wait for me.”

  “But—”

  “That’s an order.” He teleported away.

  I clenched my teeth and said into the bond, “If you think you can give me orders like you do with Captain Caria—”

  “Kora,” he said in a voice sharper than a dagger. “Do not incite my wrath.”

  Shaking off a tremor, I materialized my lightning wings, making sure to equip them with as many fine strands as I could muster. They crackled with light, looking like a tapestry of white magic.

  I jumped, using the appendages to launch myself into the sky, and flew in the direction where I’d seen the dryad. The fire beneath me raged, and there was no sight of Persephone or Hades or anyone else.

  Since the wards of Persephone’s garden allowed nobody but her to enter, it was no surprise the other residents of Hell hadn’t come to apprehend her.

  A eucalyptus tree exploded with a boom louder than any crack of thunder.

  My heart jumped to the back of my throat, and I raised my arms to cover my face. White smoke and chunks of eucalyptus wood flew through the air, filling the garden with its unique scent.

  I kept my head low, flapping to keep myself airborne, and straining my senses for signs of the other dryad.

  As the smoke beneath me cleared, another tree fell to the ground with a creak, followed by a moan that sounded too defeated to have come from a plant. Retracting my wings, I lowered myself to the ground and waved the smoke from my path to find a small hand protruding from beneath the tree.

  I rolled it off to reveal the taller dryad lying face-down and unmoving in the dirt.

  “Are you alive?” I stretched out a trembling hand, skimming her warm skin with my fingers, but she didn’t move.

  My throat thickened. I couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. After rolling her to the side, I placed a hand on her little chest, which barely moved.

  “Please stay alive.” I scooped her into my arms and launched myself into the sky.

  Something wrapped around my ankle—a stringy tendril that tried to pull me back to the ground. I glanced down, finding a tulip-shaped flower surging from beneath the pile of burned vegetation.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “They’re back.”

  Its petals opened, revealing a two-foot-wide maw of sharp teeth. My heart lurched, and I flapped harder. The wretched thing was large enough to swallow us whole.

  When a vine the size of a tree trunk reared from beneath me, my blood turned to sludge. My mind conjured up the last place I had visited, and I teleported to my greenhouse.

  Warm water rained down on us. I hugged the dryad tighter and exhaled a relieved breath. If Hades hadn’t spent time making sure I could teleport, that plant would have devoured us both. I shuddered at the thought of becoming like Minthe, so consumed by the plant that it had reduced her body to a husk.

  A few heartbeats later, the little creature in my arms wheezed and coughed, her little hands grasping at her neck.

  I stared down at her face, which paled from a rich green to something closer to white. “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head and pointed at her mouth, her huge eyes bulging.

  “You can’t breathe?” I asked.

  “N
o,” she said with a gasp.

  My heart flipped. Why did I ever think a creature who had spent thousands of years in the world of the dead would survive the world of the living? I squeezed my eyes shut and teleported into one of the rooms in the palace.

  The dryad’s entire body relaxed in my arms, and she sucked in a deep breath. “Thank you.”

  “What happened?”

  Tears gathered in her eyes, and she convulsed in my arms with several hiccuping sobs. I bit down on my bottom lip, my heart aching. “You’re worried about your friend?”

  She nodded. “My sister.”

  I lowered her to the floor, took her hand, and walked her to one of the sofas. “Hades is chasing after Persephone. I told him to save your sister.”

  The dryad dipped her head. “Her Majesty was never this cruel to us.”

  “There’s something wrong with her mind,” I murmured, not knowing if such a childlike creature could understand the concept of souls. “How long have you been serving her?”

  “I don’t know.” She sniffled. “A very long time.”

  I patted her on the shoulder. “Let me see if I can contact Hades.”

  The dryad stared up at me, her eyes bright. “Please make sure he finds my sister.”

  I offered her a tight smile. “Hades?”

  “Kora?” he said. “Where the hell did you go?”

  “Greenhouse,” I replied. “Why?”

  “I followed your magic there, but you’d already gone.” His words slurred.

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  “She struck me with some kind of poison,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “In the palace.” I glanced at my surroundings. “Remember that room where I sat on your face—"

  Hades materialized, his armor torn, and carrying the smallest dryad over his shoulder. He swayed on his feet, his eyes unfocused.

  I scrambled off the sofa and rushed to his side. “What on earth happened?”

  “Persephone is even more powerful than I imagined.” Hades lowered the dryad to the marble floor, letting her sister wrap her arms around her neck. “Shit. When I looked into her eyes, there wasn’t a trace of anything I recognized.”

  “It was more like the intelligence of a plant,” I whispered.

  “A demonic one,” Hades muttered.

  “Where do you think it came from?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “But there’s one thing for certain. We need to extract it from Persephone’s body before it wreaks even more havoc.”

  As the little dryads hugged and cried on the rug, I pulled Hades to the sofa and made him sit. “You need some of that panacea plant. Have you called for a healer?”

  “Already on her way.” He gave me an absent nod and pointed in the vague direction of the rug where the dryads lay. “We need to put these two in the earth or they’ll never heal from their injuries.”

  I placed a hand on his cheek and winced at his clammy skin. “The only secure place I know is the greenhouse above the penthouse, and the living world doesn’t agree with them.”

  He slid off the sofa, knelt by the dryads, scooped them up with one arm, and held out a hand to me. “Come. I’ve just told the healers to meet us in the cacao orchard.”

  Hades transported us to a huge patch of land filled with dwarf cacao trees arranged in straight rows. Red and orange cacao pods hung from their branches, filling the air with the sweet scent of fruit.

  The old healer I had met on my first day in Hell stepped out from behind a tree, her brows rising to her horns. “Your Majesty?”

  “Help these two.” Hades deposited the dryads on the ground.

  I gaped at him, my mouth falling slack. “What about you?”

  “A few glasses of panacea water will negate the poison.” He rose to his feet and stepped back.

  The healer knelt beside the dryads and placed her palms on the ground, creating two small holes.

  I jogged around them and grabbed Hades’ arm. “Are you sure the water is all you need? When I got poisoned, you rubbed that plant over my skin.”

  He offered me a crooked smile. “Are you trying to get me naked?”

  Somewhere in his words was the admission that he could have given me the water when those plants had attacked, but he’d taken the opportunity to strip me of my clothes. His antics no longer mattered. Not when Persephone was out there on a rampage.

  Hades materialized a bottle of liquid, flipped off its top and placed it to his lips. He stared at me through unfocussed eyes. “Would Demeter really go as far as to corrupt Persephone’s body? How would she even have access to it?”

  “I don’t know, but she’s an expert at turning plants into weapons. She enhanced trees in St. James’s Park to attack those with Greek blood. One of them even tried to swallow me the day I teleported into the Living World.”

  He finished draining the bottle and winced. “If that’s true, Demeter has stooped to a new low.”

  “She once made a tree swallow an owl when she thought the owl was spying on us.”

  His features tightened. “So that’s what she did to Screech?”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “We need to stop her.”

  Hades nodded. “But first, we must capture Persephone. The time for gentle treatment has ended. Now we must apprehend her with force.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I spent the next several minutes kneeling on the orchard floor with a healer, helping her treat the dryads’ wounds. As a form of wood nymph, the little creatures needed to immerse themselves into the soil to draw sustenance from its power.

  They lay with their heads sticking out, and with magical bubbles over their faces to channel oxygen into their lungs. I swallowed hard, willing them to fight their injuries.

  “How long will it take them to heal?” I asked the healer.

  The old woman sprinkled magical dust over their foreheads, letting it sink into their skin before adding more. “Smoke inhalation and fire damage are pretty easy to fix, but I’m more concerned about the seeds I extracted from the little one.”

  My stomach clenched at the familiarity of her words. I turned to the smaller of the dryads who still hadn’t regained consciousness. “What have you found?”

  The healer flicked her wrist, and materialized something the size and shape of a sycamore seed. “Here’s one of them. I have no idea how or why she would have a handful in her belly, but these little parasites were draining her magic.”

  “Have you taken them all out?” I asked.

  “Only those that haven’t taken root.”

  “You can’t leave the others inside her,” I said.

  The healer frowned. “The roots have already burrowed into the lining of her stomach. Extracting them is delicate work on a being that’s half plant.”

  I swallowed hard. Dr. Atallus had succeeded in removing seeds from Dami, but she was all flesh and blood. “But you’re working on it?”

  “Of course, Your Majesty,” the healer replied. “Expect it done by the morning.”

  “You have an hour to complete your task,” Hades said from behind us.

  I turned to find him standing by the greenhouse door with his wings folded behind his back.

  The healer rose from where she knelt and bent into a low bow. “The situation is complicated—”

  “Then recruit others to help you,” Hades snapped. “I don’t care how many healers work on this dryad. You must remove every seed before they germinate.”

  “Yes, sire.” She bent so low that her head touched the soil.

  Hades turned to me with his arm outstretched. “Come.”

  After giving each dryad a pat on the head, I rose and walked across the greenhouse to where Hades stood. He pressed a kiss on my forehead and transported us to a familiar-looking tapestry. We were in his bedroom in St. James’s Park within the world of the living.

  My gaze immediately went to the right side of the canvas, where Zeus sat on his throne, surrounded by Mother, Zeus, Pos
eidon, and the coven.

  “Thanks for getting help for the dryads,” I murmured.

  He wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “I’ve worked out how Persephone created that monstrous beanstalk.”

  “The seeds in the dryad’s stomach?” I asked.

  He raised his brows. “You figured it out, too?”

  I nodded. “But I think they came from outside Hell.”

  “Explain,” he said with a frown.

  I told Hades how the cat doctor had found the foreign bodies inside Dami’s stomach. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but seeing it happen to someone else made me all the more suspicious that the coven was behind this latest spate of attacks.

  As I repeated what the doctor had told me about cats’ stomachs being too acidic for seeds to spout, Hades took me to the back of the room, where a round mirror hung in the ceiling above a huge circular bed. The scent of wood polish and leather filled my nostrils, mingling with the mahogany wood panels to create the sense of stepping into a 1970s bachelor pad.

  He pulled off my helmet, untwisted my bun, and ran his fingers through my curls. “Can we compare samples of the seeds?”

  “I’ll ask Dr. Atallus to send over the ones he extracted from Dami.”

  “Good.” Hades unbuckled a fastening at my neck and peeled the leather armor from my shoulders.

  “Why don’t you undress me with your magic?” I asked.

  He pressed a kiss on the tip of my nose. “Sometimes, a man just wants to take his time unwrapping such a delectable gift.”

  I ran my hands up his leather breastplate, looking for an opening. “Does that mean I get to unwrap mine?”

  A smirk curved his lips. “If you can materialize the fastenings.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, picturing seams forming across the leather. As soon as I opened them, thick zippers appeared down the front of his armor.

  “That’s a rather modern spin on a medieval classic.” He unhooked a series of fastenings around my back, and opened up the leather armor, letting the cool air swirl around my bare skin.

  “It’s all I could think of at the moment.” I reached up to his collar and pulled down the zipper, exposing his broad chest, tight abs and the beginning of a treasure trail.