by Skyler Andra
All I wanted was a cup of tea to soothe my shock. The humming fluorescent lights of the police station shined down on everything in an unreal gleam. The events of tonight were too much to take in. I stared at the floor in front of me, counting the specks in the linoleum tiles to pass time until dawn.
After everything that had gone down, I thought that I would never sleep again. Whenever I closed my eyes, I replayed the shot ringing out and Laura’s face the moment I dragged Delly from her body. I felt what Laura had felt as I tried desperately to save her. Underneath that calm, I knew there was a wild knot of confusion, fear, and misery.
What in the world was I?
Hades had called Persephone a goddess of the springtime, and I guessed I could see the similarities between us. All my life, I’d loved flowers and plants. In winter, I felt so tired and dull. The stunt with the plants in Elusiswell, that was indicative of some spring goddess stuff. If that was all it was, I would have been fine.
However, there was more. Looking back, I realized how ridiculous I was to think that it was only chance that allowed me to see the dead. When I thought about how much I’d taken for granted, I flinched.
I thought of my dream, the one where I’d dug through the earth and finally had come up with not a mask, but a skull. Even in a place as well-lit and heavily populated as the police station, the memory still made me shudder.
Was it my subconscious trying to warn me about what was within me? Some kind of message from the goddess herself? The very one I felt beginning to stir inside me? A terrifying prospect. What would I be when she finally woke up? Would I have to go live underground with Hades? The thought had a certain draw to it, but I also knew that it was impossible after everything that had happened tonight.
My chest stung. I mean, where was the Lord of the Dead? He’d left me to face the authorities by myself. Talk about a coward. On top of that, he’d kept the extent of my powers a secret.
“You’re free to go,” the desk sergeant finally told me.
I stared at him for a long time before his words finally registered.
In a haze, I stood, gathered my belongings, and walked out of the police station into the grey haze between day and night. The sun hovered below the horizon, but night hadn’t given way yet. For a moment, I stood on the curb looking around at the small town I had been brought to. I didn’t know where I was. I pulled up my phone. According to the search engine, there was a train station up ahead. I had plenty of cash in the bank to catch a ride back to my apartment.
I could do whatever I wanted with the money I had. The thought made me sick. How could I touch it after what had happened? I could just let it sit forever. Not touch a cent. The thought was all I had to starve off the nausea rising from the back of my throat. After everything that had occurred to put that money in front of me. After a woman had diedat my hand.
At last Hades made his appearance, a few blocks later. His car pulled into one of the drives ahead. He exited the vehicle, looking utterly perfect in his suit, not a hair out of place.
For my part, I’d spent three hours giving my statement. I’d been ordered to stay in town, but I wasn’t planning to follow their orders.
The Lord of the Dead strode toward me, stopping in front of me. His arms were rigid by his sides, as if he was at a loss as to what to do.
“Where have you been?” I snapped. “How could you leave me like that?”
“I had to take Delly to the Underworld to process her,” he said.
“You never took them before,” I countered. “You sent them there and stayed here. Why leave me?”
“Because…” He sounded unsure of how to explain himself. “Autumn, we have a great deal to talk about.” Yes, just like all the other great deal of things he hadn’t told me about.
I walked around him, not wanting to talk or even look at him after he’d failed to help me, leaving me at the mercy of the authorities. “Maybe you have some talking to do. But it’s not going to be with me.”
“Autumn, please.” He took my arm gently, using his grip to force me back to him.
It was the wrong gesture at exactly the wrong time. Suddenly, everything that I’d been holding in came out. I spun around to face him.
“You lied to me!”
He stared blankly at me. “You must know that there was no way for me to tell you–”
“Oh, I would say that it’s pretty simple to open your mouth and talk.”
A cold fog came over his eyes. Their depth and expression disappeared. He didn’t resemble the man who would smile at me or one who would kiss me. No. He looked incredibly remote and strange. Like some alien thing detached from humanity, something that simply did its duty and at the end of the day, genuinely didn’t care if the mere mortals in its life lived or died.
“You may not speak to me like that,” he started, but I cut him off. Stepping in close to him, I watched a flitter of surprise pass across his eyes. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.
“No!” I snapped. “Given what I know about all of this? I’m actually one of the people in the world who can. I may not be a god in my own right, but I have one sleeping inside me. One that you didn’t even see fit to tell me about, until I manifested the flowers in Greece.”
“There are reasons–”
“No! No there aren’t. Hades, we slept together. I don’t know where you come from, but that means something to me.”
“It means something to me, too.”
“But it doesn’t, not anymore,” I argued, causing hurt and outrage to stretch over his expression.
He reached his hands up to cup the sides of my face, examining me minutely as if there were some kind answers there.
“Of course it does! How could you think that?” he replied with uncertainty.
“Stop,” I growled, and he fell away from me.
Hades looked at a complete loss. I held up my hand.
“You didn’t care about Laura dying,” I argued. “Didn’t want to help her or me. What about striking a deal?”
“There is a limit to what I can do,” he said, then sighed.
I didn’t believe him anymore. His credibility went out the window when he decided to hide things from me for so long. He had refused to tell me about my true nature until it had expressed itself. He knew of the goddess’ potential for destruction and even feared it, had tried to run from it. That was what my dream had tried to tell me. Why hadn’t he warned me about what I could do?
“I have fulfilled my end of the bargain as far as I am concerned,” I said. “If there are more dead people to be found, deduct it from my pay. As of right now, I’m out. I can’t work with you. I can’t have you hiding things from me. Important things about who I am.”
“You can’t leave me,” he repeated.
I stared at him, taking his words in.
“Of course I can,” I said matter-of-factly. “What year are you living in? I’m not property to be traded for a horse and tent and back again.”’
“I never said you were.”
“No, but you implied it.” I shook my head hard.
Before I could move, Laura appeared beside me, looking confused.
She asked me why I was with the man who had not saved her. Poor thing. I didn’t know where to send her. Hades had said that she belonged to another afterlife and refused to take her. Getting her to go to whatever underworld she was supposed to be in wasn’t exactly my job.
“I’m leaving,” I said, not wanting to stick around any longer. “I am going to get on a train. I’m going to figure things out. You are not a part of this and I hope I never see you again.”
He flinched as if he had been struck, and I pressed harder on that sore sport to my own advantage.
“I don’t know what I can do against a god,” I added softly. “All I know is that if you cared at all for me, if you ever actually meant even a tenth of what you said, you’ll leave me alone.”
In response, he swept me into his arms, kissing me hard
on the lips. For a moment, just a moment, everything was all right. I was safe with him. We were together. All of the pleasure and sweetness threatened to overwhelm me, convince me to change my mind, but before I could do something silly like forgive him, I remembered what had happened just a few hours earlier. I remembered how he had abandoned me, left me, and gave up hope on Laura.
The kiss made my insides churn, so I pushed him away. In doing so, it felt like my heart was being ripped in half, but it had to be done. I wobbled on my feet, slightly shocked that I was somehow still standing.
“No.” I managed to stuff back the tears and raise my voice. “No! Don’t touch me like that. It’s over.”
I turned and walked away, the train station sign coming up on my left. It took everything I had to not look back. Somehow I managed it. I tried to remind myself of all those platitudes of comfort, things you needed to hear when your life breaks apart in some kind of final and awful way. When you leave someone who might have been the love of your life.
Laura wandered beside me, a look of absolute misery on her face. I bet she felt even worse than I did. She was dead; I had killed her, and Hades refused to save her soul. As we walked together, she faded away. I smiled briefly, hoping she ended up where she needed to go.
In a few minutes, I arrived at the train station. A train traveling back home departed in ten minutes. Holding back tears, I bought my ticket at the counter. In the end, I couldn’t drive them back. I sniffled and hid my face.
Seated in the train car, I sat with my head tilted back against the headrest so I could stare out the window and watch the sky outside lighten and soften as autumn rains began to fall.
Deep inside me, something stirred. The word soon rose to the forefront of my mind.
Please, I thought, unsure of who or what I was addressing. Please, no more.
***
Six Months Later
I’d ended up in Las Vegas somehow. It wasn’t exactly by choice, hiding from the God of the Underworld and all, but I didn’t mind it. A friend from the community garden that I volunteered at had agreed to sublet my apartment. I even offered it rent-free for six months, if she agreed to look after my plants. Looking back, I must have been a little scary when I told her how to care for them and emphasized how important they were to me. Her eyes had grown to the size of saucers, and she’d nodded while telling me she would remember my instructions.
The desert seemed like a strange place for the avatar of a springtime goddess to end up, but I found that it suited me. Sure, it was hot as hell and dry, but there was plenty of plant lifeif you knew where to look. The local nursery was happy to find someone with actual experience.
As for the dormant goddess inside me, she seemed to have gone quietfor the moment. Sometimes, when I was grafting a lemon tree or taking care of fresh new bulbs, I’d feel some foreign part of me stretching out and yawning, gearing up to awaken. Thinking of her was always a little risky, as it brought up memories of Hades, and I couldn’t go there.
At night, I put off going to bed as long as I could, wanting to avoid dreaming of him. The frightening nightmares of skulls and dirt were bad enough, but the new ones were interspersed with him—each one telling me how he needed my help.
He would call for me, but I could never hear him properly. The silence between us was the worst. There was a place in the world where he was meant to be and that wasn’t here.
Sometimes, when I was sitting up late at night in my new apartment that felt bizarrely like the one I’d left behind, I wondered what would happen if I tried calling to him, if I tried praying, like a person would to a god. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
Every time I closed my eyes, I thought about that woman in the dinerher dying. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much Hades withheld from me about my powers. It made me so furious, but also left me blanketed in a sorrow so deep that I didn’t even know what to do with it.
I wanted to tell myself that it was normal to feel like this way after your first real breakup, but there hadn’t been anything normal about my life since I’d met Hades in the funeral parlor. I went to sleep, wanting him. I woke up, crying because there was something in me that missed him so much that my entire being ached.
Rinse, repeat. My life was an endless cycle of torture…
Until one day in June. I had gotten off my shift early and returned home to find a man waiting for me at my doorstep. Tall and thin, but well-muscled, he was pale enough that I hoped he’d remembered some sunscreen. His cheekbones were so sharp, they could have cut butter.
Unlike me, he hadn’t broken out in a visible sweat despite the oppressive Vegas heat. Not many people lounged on doorsteps in my neighborhood when the temperature scaled the thermometer. Especially not anyone in designer clothes or playing on a phone that cost eight hundred dollars.
When I paused in the open hallway, he looked up, pocketed his phone, and smiled. It was a smile that you’d trust right away, even though it held an edge of mischief. I found myself smiling in return.
“You must be Autumn Rankin,” he said, his green eyes sparkling.
Okay. Who the hell was this? I took a careful step backward.
“Hey, hey, don’t be scared,” he assured me, holding out a hand while inching toward me like a man trying to coax a scared dog. “I’m like you. An avatar. My name is Mads.”
I straightened. Hades had never told me how to get in contact with the other avatars. I’d wanted to reach out to find out more about myself and them, but it wasn’t like there was a Facebook group titled Godly Avatars or anything. Still, Mads had found me without any avatar directory. I wanted to know how.
“Yeah, tell me exactly why that shouldn’t scare me,” I cautiously replied.
Mads gave me a sympathetic look as he shoved his hands into his pockets. His being didn’t scream ‘someone dangerous,’ but I’d gotten a little more cautious in the last few months—after all the dead souls, the Underworld, and Hades business.
“Hades said that you would be nervous,” Mads said. “And I can see that that was probably an understatement.”
Hearing his name sent a thrill down my spine, along with a feeling of grief so great that my legs wobbled, and I crashed into the wall.
Mads rushed to my side to steady me. “He did a number on you, huh?”
“What do you know about it?” I asked, not sure how much I liked the idea of him knowing so much about me or my personal life.
“Nothing.” Mads offered me a small smile and shook his head. “That’s not why I came.”
“Why did you come?”
“You’re not the only avatar, you know.”
“You’re the first I’ve met…”
He gave me a curious look at that, but before I could question him, he nodded. “Well, I’m the avatar of Hermes. You know, thieves, messengers, commerce, your all-purpose trickster god and jack of all trades. I have a proposal for you.”
“Go on,” I said cautiously.
“How would you feel about meeting the family?” he asked. His smile turned into a wicked grin. “I mean, we don’t really get along,” he added. “Ares is a hot head. Hera’s a real bitch. Zeus is a manipulative jerk. Basically, we’re human manifestations of our gods. But, boy, is it fun to mess with them.”
I laughed. “You make it sound so inviting.”
He leaned against a doorframe as I stood back up.
“They’ll want to meet you, sooner or later.”
I bit my lip, considering the offer. Maybe the avatars could give me more insight on what I was and who resided within me. Help me learn more about my powers. Or more importantly, teach me to control the whole pluck-a-soul-out-of-someone’s-body gig. I never wanted to do that ever again.
“All right, Mads,” I accepted. “Let’s go.
The End of Book 1
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About
the Author
Never say never. That's Skyler's attitude, and she fills her heroines and heroes with that same philosophy. Skyler is an Aussie who loves traveling and her goal is to one day visit every country in the world. When she's not writing, she's snuggling with a good book and her furbabies. At heart she's a gaming nerd, Pilates and martial arts enthusiast.
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Are you curious to read the other novels by Skyler?
Operation Cupid completed series
Battlefield Love
Quicksilver Love
Awakened Love
Stupid Cupid - a short story
Operation Hades
Lady of the Underworld - coming Oct 29th 2019. Preorder here https://books2read.com/u/mBOQyA
Lord of the Underworld - coming early 2020.
Operation Osiris
Novella exclusive to the Prophecy of Magic boxset available here https://books2read.com/prophecyofmagic-ey.
Guild of Shadows series
Darkfire
Wildfire
Crossfire - coming late 2019.
Hearthfire - available by signing up to my newsletter http://eepurl.com/dCOqkb
Hellfire - coming early 2020
Guild of Guardians - a Guild of Shadows spin off
Witch Hunt - novella available in the Tales Out of School box set (all free!).
Fire & Shadow Series - sexy angels!
Fall From Grace
Fall From Darkness
Dark Reflections series (part of the Haven Realm Universe)
Born into Darkness - a Snow White retelling