by Eris Adderly
“I was told this was a courtship, Clymenus,” she said from behind closed eyelids. Her backside shifted against his groin. “Or is my obedience not sufficient?”
For the love of— Is she … is she goading me?
“Shall we find out?”
His hand rose to her nape. Fingers splayed up into her hair; made a fist near the scalp. She gasped at his pull but didn’t struggle, and green eyes searched the ceiling for reason as he branded the hollow beneath her jaw with lips and tongue and teeth.
The undone right side of her chiton beckoned. A dark hand slipped past linen to find a ripe swell of pale flesh. At the cup of an assaying palm came a plaintive sound and furrowed brow. At a thumb’s brush over a nipple: a whimper. An arch of her back. It would be nothing. He would only have to lift and carry her to the cushions, lay her back …
Damn your eyes, stay with your plan!
Yes, one thing at a time. And already such things, why be greedy? A breast was a lovely distraction, but not the goal.
Grey fabric hid his sliding palm as it moved past ribs and soft belly to the crease where her thigh and hip met as one. From there he traced a path to her pleasure and dipped a pair of fingers into the heat of his own weakness.
She was soaked, swollen. Thighs smearing his knuckles in it. The throb of his cock demanded he do heedless things.
“Hades.” It came on a ragged breath this time, the downfall of his whispered name. A plea, but not for him to stop.
Test her. Do it.
He let go her hair. Yes. It was time to measure her response to his … ‘other’ inclinations.
“What happened to ‘Lord’ Hades, hm?” He found her left wrist in a fierce grip. “Too many distractions?” Spring green eyes flew open and he hauled her arm behind her back, trapping it between them.
Again, she could have balked. Could have yanked her arm away in livid protest. It wouldn’t have been the first such reaction he’d seen.
But Persephone slid her right knee over the top of his, leaning back into his threats, defying their execution. Against his assumptions, his casual restraint had opened her further. He wouldn’t waste the gift.
The strokes he painted between her legs were an art begotten of devotion and greed. Unlikely bedmates to tease out her desperate sounds, to map out the unspoken wants.
He found her entrance slick with need and curled the tip of a finger to sate it. Her moan hummed under his mouth on her throat, and he made it two, knuckles twinning in a curve, to push her.
Dusky lids fluttered and she tilted her hips, parted her thighs. Eyes born pale of Olympos turned to lock with Underworld black as he worked at razing her wits, at stealing those soft, soft sounds. It was only the beginning.
Oh, what we will make together, you and I.
As though privy to his thoughts—impossible—she raised her mouth to his, demanding. Was it only their second kiss? Now, with his hand beneath her linens, fingers wet with her lust? The nudge of her jaw, her tongue insisted, urging him to roughness. Hades obliged, bruising, taxing with teeth.
To the edge and back. Now.
He withdrew buried fingers in favor of a more obvious treasure. When he grazed it between fingertips, her gasp tore their kiss as he’d done the earth at Nysa. Panting and closed eyes met his worrying of her little pearl.
“Please.”
The single word had him marble hard, and aching. From stubborn pride across the room to senseless and begging under his touch, it was more than he’d hoped for. More than he could tolerate.
“Please?” he said, toying as her brows drew together in frustrated effort.
You are cruel, Polydegmon.
True, but a small cruelty would prove its worth.
“Please, Lord.” The titles came back as she squirmed, entreating with her hips.
Hades withdrew his hand, straightening the linen over her lap. Upturned eyes searched his, lips parted in question.
“My Lord, what—”
“Tomorrow,” he said, drawing a nail under her chin.
Her features were as flushed with red as her breath was heavy with need. “Tomorrow?” she said. “You intend to leave me like this?”
He traced dark nails, glossed in her surrender, along the swell of her lower lip. “Leave you like what?” The fingers slid into her mouth. “Like you’re not the immortal in power?” He couldn’t hold back a predatory smile.
Persephone held his eyes and beaded the seam of his fingers with a slow lap of her tongue, a cynical lament for the pleasure he’d forsake by taking his leave. The spiteful move had him crackling with unspent glee.
She wishes to play against, it seems, and not just play along.
When had he given up searching for a partner like this? But Hades outpaced himself—a single interlude was but a season. They had years to explore before the story was whole.
On impulse, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers, internal appeals to reason doing no good at all. Was it possible he’d gotten the better end of Aphrodite’s bargain?
He would see. Tomorrow.
He shook off the fog of desire and raised his palms once more. From oblivion, the stone floor rose with a rumble, restoring itself between the bench and the platform. The chamber might have never yawned in a jagged pit, for all the difference visible now. Aside from, of course, the rugs, most of which had gone missing.
Hades rose from the bench, hauling a disoriented Persephone with him by her upper arms. She stood with her back to his chest and he brushed a final light kiss over her cheek before stepping away from temptation.
In three long strides, he was on the other side of the room, a basalt doorway forming at his will. He turned to the goddess, her face aglow with furious want, unforgettably denied.
“Enjoy your last night in this room,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll try something a bit more … fitting.” She opened her mouth, perhaps to fling some barb, but Hades held fast to his edge.
“Good night, Persephone.” He turned then and left her standing, the stone growing shut at his back. It was a necessary barrier indeed, if he were to compose himself at all.
*
Demeter shifted her jaw and scowled out over the agora in front of her temple in Thebes. To the passing sons and daughters of Man, scurrying here and there on their mundane little errands, she appeared as nothing more than another old woman, come to leave her offerings for the Lady of the Earth.
Not one rumor, one sneeze. Athenai, Messenia, Tegea; she had scoured their places of offering all to no avail. None of the mortals she’d questioned in her gnarled body had a word to say about Persephone.
The goddess stepped from under the temple’s eaves and squinted into the bright noon light. Broad, limestone steps moved away under her feet in descent and the sun painted the square in a shimmering heat that made her eyes water.
Someone had to have seen.
Her daughter couldn’t have mastered the art of disguising her appearance; she hadn’t nearly enough experience. If Persephone had run off—a far preferable reason for her absence than any of the possible alternatives—there would have been signs of her passing. An immortal on this plane would not go unnoticed. There would have been a swell of offerings, a rise in fervor at the sighting of a goddess, however brief.
Demeter made a noise of frustration, startling a scrawny boy as he jogged past her out of the temple. The youth eyed the crone he saw over his shoulder before dodging off into the square, the glare of sunlight watering her mortal eyes as she followed his bouncing path.
And then the Goddess of the Fruitful earth swore a violent oath.
A woman herded a tiny girl away, cutting the guised immortal a disapproving eye as she went, but a wash of cold epiphany prickling her skin was the only thing holding Demeter’s attention now.
Yes. Someone had seen. Hadn’t they.
Shadows followed the bodies of men as they busied themselves about the agora. They arced transient echoes from dawn to dusk at the foot of each beast, t
ree, and building. At the noon hour, they pooled at their smallest, hiding from the face of the sun.
The Sun.
Helios.
Nothing that moved on the earth could escape the blazing eyes of Helios. The titan’s daily course showed him gods and men, alike. And he was infallibly honest.
He will know. He will know and he will tell me.
His chariot straddled the midheaven now. She had half a day to reach his evening palace at the River Okeanos.
Her steps carried her from the temple and away from Thebes at a pace only an immortal could set. Helios would quit his resting place at dawn, but Demeter was determined to have answers well before then.
Her own chariot awaited on the deathless plane, and her lips came into a hard line as she goaded her cattle to a westward trot.
Pray, Daughter, this is some foolish misunderstanding. Whoever has done this will surely need it.
*
IV Restraint
Persephone found it difficult to discern direction in the Underworld without Helios’s chariot arcing high overhead, but it was simple enough to see Hades was leading her somewhere far from the chamber in which she’d spent the past three days. Somewhere ‘a bit more fitting’ was the only inkling he allowed as to their destination, and she couldn’t decide whether this was ominous or thrilling. The backs of her arms prickled, either way.
The god who thought to ‘court’ her for a wife—an ephemeral excuse, they both knew—set a leisurely pace through the halls and hollows of his unusual palace. His right hand rested at the base of her neck as they walked, a warning against bolting or other foolish choices, or a reminder, perhaps, of her promise to obey. Both were effective. Both summoned thoughts of where that same hand had been.
Her fury that night had been as bright and blinding as the house of Hades was not. How dare he leave her that way!
Yet the greater outrage Persephone reserved for herself, for allowing the fiend to draw her along to that point. The moment the rock had grumbled closed in his wake, she’d thrown her frustrated body to the cushions and taken the matter into her own hands.
And he’ll never hear how you breathed his name in those final throes, will he?
She grimaced even now, as the corridor around them became a bridge underfoot, spanning an abyss between outcroppings of the structure. When she hazarded a sideways glance, he was ready with one of those smiles.
Beast! Is this it now? Is this the problem with immortals?
In her excursions to the mortal plane, she had been the aggressor. The seductress. Here she was something else, something that taxed her nerves.
Here, she was prey.
Was this what her mother understood? Why she’d been so determined in her protection? The way his face had been there, waiting when she closed her eyes. When her fingers had tried to recreate the intensity of his strokes, that dark gaze had come searing into her thoughts. That smirking mouth, the drape of hair over his shoulder … What further sordid things might he have done? The very idea had brought her climax exploding from the one direction she’d failed to anticipate, destroying with it a whole field of assumptions at once.
The Lord of the Dead was neither cold nor repulsive. She did not abhor his attentions.
She could not control her responses in his presence.
A thumb brushed over the nape of her neck and she barely avoided a gasp at the interruption of her thoughts.
He was driving her to distraction.
“Is the third realm so unnerving, Green One?”
She blinked into the cavern surrounding the stone bridge. “No, I was only wondering”—anything! Now!— “about those lights.” She nodded to the irregular smattering of glowing shapes piercing the blackness far, far overhead.
“Ah yes,” he said, pausing to follow her eyes, “the lakes.”
“Lakes?” Yes, encourage him.
“Mortals call them ‘bottomless’,” he said, shifting his touch to her shoulder, “and invent all manner of wild tales.” Hades cast her a sideways eye and his mouth twitched in the shadow of a grin. “If they only knew.”
Persephone stopped to stare, shepherding hand be damned. “Those are lakes of the mortal plane?”
“Some of their lakes, not all of them.”
“But … where is the water?”
He made some nebulous gesture with his free left hand. “The mortal and deathless realms come together in odd ways,” he said. “For them, they are lakes. Here, perhaps you would call them paráthyra. Windows.”
She eyed the faraway, shifting lights, their blurred edges eerie; so many misshapen lanterns hung above nothing.
“Is it so literal, then?” she said. “Is your domain truly under the earth?”
“Odd ways,” he said again with a shrug. “Insofar as we’d like to mark the passage of time down here, it is.”
Her brows came together, not understanding.
“Did you begin to wonder how many days had passed in that chamber?” he asked. She nodded. “I discovered for myself when I first claimed this throne how a lack of measured daylight begins to drive a mind mad. You would assume such things would have no effect on immortals, and you would be wrong. But”—he cast an eye to the unlikely portals—“I was able to come to an agreement with Tethys.”
“Why not Poseidon?”
“I don’t bargain with the other two lords.” For an instant, his voice turned grave and it was a sound that made Persephone swallow, but casual grace returned with the same speed. “But no matter. I only needed a few lakes, and our dear Tethys was happy to oblige.”
Persephone had only crossed paths with the titaness once, and the ancient water mother had exuded nothing but nurturing love and care in every direction. What deal could such an immortal need to make with the Lord of the Dead?
“And those?” She pointed down now, to a lit pair of tiny orbs, ruddy and flickering above the vast cavern floor. “Another of your bargains?”
“Oh, no,” he said, “no bargain. The distance plays tricks on your eyes, but those lights spring from Enodia. The Underworld is her home, as well, though I find it best if you don’t—”
“Hekate?”
“—speak her name,” Hades finished in disappointment.
The stone on the bridge ahead of them shimmered, as if under a sweltering heat. Red as Hephaistos’s forge, the same twin lights whorled to life from the void not three paces from where they stood, large now, and free-floating. Nothingness condensed between them, and out of the black stepped the Goddess of the Crossroads.
Persephone’s stomach lurched and, without thought, she shrank to Hades’s side for protection. The god had no qualms about circling her waist with a possessive arm.
“Enodia,” said Hades. What was that in his voice? Irritation? Uncertainty?
Hekate held up a hand and Persephone steeled herself to tolerate the motion. “I havve not come ffor you, Polydegmon,” she said. “Though you could havve told me of thiss developmennt.”
It took all of her will to make her eyes linger on the three faces of Hekate. A first so frightening it might silver mortal hair overnight preceded a second so beautiful it made Persephone’s bones ache. A third, no words could describe, save they bend and shear away from the agony of effort. Each of the three slipped and slid, one becoming another, sometimes two or all at once in sickening impossibility.
The Underworld goddess stepped in their direction, the golden-red orbs floating with her.
The twin torches. So the rumors are true, if skewed.
“You havve come a long wway,” said Hekate, approaching within an arm’s terrifying reach. The susurration of her voice came as many-layered and hair-raising as her faces, its sibilances sliding past her ears like layers of an onion skin. Even the dark fabric of her chiton, her hair, roiled about in some disconcerting, immaterial way, as though they stood there on the bridge under drifting seas.
Eyes a match for the hovering globes burned into Persephone’s for an unsettling amount
of time. A moment before she abandoned courage to look away, the corners of Hekate’s lips turned up in a smile. Three smiles at once, really.
And they tell us Medusa is hard to look at. Fates!
“I approve of thiss mmatch, Lord Hades,” Hekate said. “You havve made a wise choice.” It was a pronouncement, and he opened his mouth for some rebuttal, but the goddess spoke over him, this time addressing Persephone.
“Consort of my Lord, you may ssummon me by the call of mmy name,” she said, “annd I will come to you and sserve. May your crossings be well-lit, alwaysss.”
Persephone hardly had time to become aware of her blush, let alone ask questions, when the tri-form goddess vanished in a whirl of dry air and a cryptic smile.
Hades’s arm remained at her waist, and she surprised herself by not stepping out of the unexpected feeling of security. The Lord of the Dead, a comfort? A long way to come, indeed. Her eyes traveled his chest, throat, and jaw, leaning back into that steadying grip.
“Consort?” she asked, meeting his eyes at last.
“Enodia is … dramatic,” he said, shifting an errant streamer of hair away from her brow with one of those wicked nails of his. Her pulse fluttered and she cursed herself for it. “Still,” he went on, “she sees much in the Realm of the Unseen. I would be a fool not to consider …”
Something in that dark gaze as his own thoughts rolled him under made Persephone ache in an unfamiliar way.
“Consider what?”
He cleared his throat, eyes focusing again.
“Regardless,” he said, “I think you see now why you might avoid calling her true name.” Some of the smirk had returned. “The goddess makes quite a sight for the unprepared.”