by Eris Adderly
“Should a mortal choose never to be born again, they may cross its fires and know the truest of ends. Their soul will cease to be.”
“That sounds terrible,” she whispered.
“For some, perhaps. For others, it is a release. They must choose, but I prevent them from choosing rashly. It is rare.”
Persephone stood with this in the circle of his arms for a time. Her own release, embodied in mortal jewels, sat heavy on her finger.
“Your hands,” she said, grasping the connection.
“Yes.” Those hands slid up over her forearms before returning to flank hers at the rail. “When I accepted rulership of this realm, I would have stood right alongside the Children of Olympos, at least in appearance.
“But I am the only being who may immerse himself in the Underworld rivers and lakes unaffected. Someone must control them, and it must be me, though after age upon age, even my flesh cannot withstand their ravages entirely.”
“But their purposes serve mortals. Why should you need to …” She gestured at the winding line of destruction oozing between the uprights of the bridge.
“Mortals are not always known for making wise choices.” Black humor tinted his words. “I’ve had to fish countless poor fools out of harm’s way over the æons. Attempting to drink from or cross the wrong waters at the wrong times. Almost always under the control of some wild emotion.”
“But … you? Personally?”
“The care of the mortal dead is my task. I will not avoid it for my own comforts. Even if it does mean the Olympians shrink in horror at the sight of me.” His final assessment curled in the shape of a smile.
Just above audible, Persephone replied: “I’m not shrinking.”
“Not yet.”
He pressed her against the rail with the length of his body and her jaw went tight. Fingers trailed along the back of her hand, stopping when they came to metal.
“This is an unusual jewel,” he said, thumbing Polyxene’s ring. “It hums with life.”
Fates! Could he ask about anything else?
“It was a gift.” There. Vague enough.
“From your mother?”
She cleared her throat, nerves twisting. Somehow, she knew he would spot a lie. “From a mortal.”
“A mortal came by a gem like this? Do you remember a long-lost lover, Persephone?” She could feel the taunt rubbing her raw, exposing needs unsated.
I am not going to tell him about my promise to Polyxene.
“Did you seek me out on this bridge just to speak of my jewels?” she said, lashing irritation like a whip.
He chuckled behind her, the sound all shadows and coiling smoke. “No, I did not.”
Fingertips came to the far side of her jaw. A glint of light in black eyes. That mouth on hers. Again.
Finally.
Stolen kisses on the mortal plane had been one thing. Here, however, crushed between Hades and solid stone, mere architecture holding her back from oblivion, Persephone knew kisses of another kind. A kind she could only have from the Lord of the Dead, where he took and she gave, where he pushed and she lay back, unprotesting but afraid.
It was the fear. With his tongue searing against hers, the fingers of his right hand circling her throat, the goddess knew fear to be that nagging, undiscoverable lack that had kept her unfulfilled in the arms of men. The one dark something she didn’t want to confess, even to herself.
Fear was the reason she could feel her thighs slide, wet beneath her chiton. When he let her breathe at last, grip still firm above her collarbones, his forearm crossing over her breast, Persephone could do no better than stare.
An ebbing song of heartbeats had to pass before she could speak. Hades waited, a naked hunger painting the lines of his face where dour levity had gone before. Breathlessness did nothing for her pride, yet this was not the first time he’d cornered her against a precipitous drop, was it?
“You seem to enjoy this,” she said.
“Mm? Enjoy what?” Fingers skimmed her ribs, moving toward her waist.
“Pinning me at the precipice.”
A hand was on her hip, pulling her against him. “I do,” he said. “Though I admit it’s a rather unscrupulous way of getting what I want.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
Both hands held her fast.
“Fear.”
The railing disintegrated. Livid red stone churned far below, and Persephone’s heels scrabbled on the edge of the bridge.
“Hades!”
Her hands flew to clutch his restraining arm, the wool of his chiton at his thigh.
“Yes?” The god was as calm as a windless sea while every frantic muscle in her body squeezed back against his body like water seeking the lowest point.
“Move back.” Oh, how she hated the tremble in her voice. Hades only tightened his hold, and a sound of amusement came near her ear.
“Have we reached your limit, Green One?”
The river crackled. Hungry. Eternal. Pockets of stone lifted enough to cool into islands only for the patient devastation of the current to fold them back again into the earth’s molten womb.
She wanted his touch. Wanted him, but fantasy was harmless, wasn’t it? Reality yawned all around her now, its maw dire with consequence. No sooner had she owned her inexplicable appetite for those feelings of fear, than he’d been confessing aloud his desire to provoke them. Could he know? Could he feel it in her limbs?
Had they come one step too far?
“Please.” Her mouth was the only part of her to move. Her two feet arched on tiptoe at the glittering edge of stone. Where her thighs met, a now-familiar hum began to well.
His grip was iron, but so much of her remained exposed, a dare to the Fates. At her back, another danger: male arousal twitched against her curves.
“Can you feel it?” Hard cock held the promise of more trouble to come. Persephone made a noise somewhere between gasp and whimper. “Your panic,” he said, “excites me.”
Fates, I can’t take it.
“The speed of your pulse, the way you cling.”
That voice could charm a snake, and the tension in her limbs coiled tight. Should she melt to his words for one moment … Could anyone but Hades survive the Phlegethôn?
“I will cling to you without the danger, my Lord.” She dared to wriggle backward, urgent and shameless in her begging. “Please.”
“But never with such beautiful desperation.” Fingers hooked over her hip, cradling bone and sending need coursing between her thighs. “Tell me.” It was a command. “Tell me why you’re afraid.”
She wanted to obey. To please him. That was another new wrinkle. Her impulse to balk, just for the sake of pride, had all but disappeared. Those dark murmurs of approval made her reel with want, with achievement, but the drop …
“I’ll fall,” she said, allowing him his prize. “The river …”
A thumb brushed her throat. Heat rose to lick her toes, her ankles.
“Persephone.”
How could he make her name into a velvet caress, every single time? How could it stroke her like a tongue, in secret places, and bind her as sure as any tether?
“Have I taken you yet where you did not wish to go?”
The truth of it laid her open, swept her clean. “No.”
“I would never let you fall,” he said. “Never.” The silence of the cavern built around them. Even the surreal sounds of the river faded back to a purr. “Do you trust me?”
The question weighed more than even his first: ‘Will you obey?’ But that didn’t change her answer.
She nodded.
“Tell me.” Squeezing hands insisted, hinting at the fire of his own needs. Her breast rose and fell beneath the god’s protecting arm. She closed her eyes.
“I trust you, Hades.”
“Then let go.”
Against all reason, Persephone did. Clutching fingers released his arm, the pointless hold on his chiton. He nuzzled her temple with his jaw.
“Go on.”
It took her several fortifying breaths before she could give him what he wanted. With each lungful, Persephone banished tension. With each heartbeat, she promised herself this would not be a mistake.
She let her sandal give up the edge. Then the other.
The goddess trusted the Lord of the Dead to hold her, feet dangling over the River of Fire.
Hades hissed with his own restrained approval. “Perfection,” he said. “Your confidence should not go without reward.”
The hand at her hip slipped to the open side of her chiton. Discovered flesh. Descended.
“My Lord.”
He found her, wet, ready to leap out of her skin. His other supporting arm firmed its grip, and Hades went about complicating her world.
Those fingers knew her weaknesses. Their prior encounters had taught him where and how to purchase response. Only now, as he explored and teased, her urges to squirm and buck came with a heart-stopping price.
She had to remain limp as the circling touch found and ignited every nerve. She had to hang, all outward calm, as he caught up that sensitive pearl and worried it between his fingers, lest all the writhing she wanted to do somehow made him lose his grip.
The angle was shallow, but he managed to stretch her entrance with just the tips of two fingers. The meat of his palm ground out a breath-hitching friction over that most swollen, aching part of her sex.
Linen abraded her nipples where his clasping arm pulled it tight over her breast. His mouth played havoc on the soft parts of her ear, her neck. She could feel the slick of her own lust painting her thighs, his busy hand. The threat of the fall, much like the binding of the Elaionapothos, had her lost for how to hold back the flood. Sensation came washing in, helpless sounds came pouring out.
Was he saying something? Fates, her senses were everywhere.
“There is more to it,” he said, jerking the cup of his hand against her mound, “isn’t there?” Persephone let out a whine that might have been an agreement. She couldn’t think. “Everything sharper,” he went on. “Every scent you inhale, every taste on your tongue. More.”
His fingers retreated, but only enough to move their devotion to that bead that made her see stars.
“Oh please!”
Bliss wrapping her up, a fiery end threatening from below: it was more. More than she could take in at once.
“Do you understand it, my love?” Circling fingertips increased their pace.
“Terror heightens the senses.” That growl had her dripping.
Oh yes, it does.
“Restraint heightens the senses.” He shored up his grip, thumb and forefinger clamping down on her throat to a point no mortal would have been able to tolerate.
Sweet Creation, yes!
“Surrender heightens the senses.”
Blue and purple lights began to flare at the edge of her vision. Persephone dripped from his arms, a stilled pendulum over eternity, allowing the Lord of the Dead to bring her to perfect torment over the promise of a fateful drop.
The keening in her ears was her own.
“Surrender.”
Every muscle under her ribs condensed. It was so close. So close. His strokes reached an impossible plateau.
“Hades!”
“Trust me. Surrender.”
Persephone abandoned her limits.
For the first thudding heartbeat, she fell in black silence. Then her senses caught up to her and her own feral noises flooded in to fill the space. Her body yielded up surging totality around Hades’s tireless hand.
She called his name and swore and gave up trying to be still because she knew he would hold her safe.
An ankle hooked back around his calf and she writhed on his fingers, tilting her head, demanding his mouth, which he gave.
Something faraway told her he was backing onto the bridge, but Persephone was still shuddering, seizing under his touch. She felt his body bend, felt her own feet touching stone, her knees folding as the last violence of her orgasm shook her.
Black eyes met hers, upside down, while slowing fingers smeared echoes of delirious heat. Her head lay on his kneeling thigh and male arousal throbbed under wool, just out of sight.
He saw to your pleasure, and none for himself.
She raised a limp hand, brushing knuckles over his length. “Hades …” Her voice came at a rasp.
“Another time.” He lifted her fingers away; brought them to his mouth in a string of soft, incongruous kisses.
She looked up at him, spent. Altered. The first dozen thoughts were too complicated to condense with her tongue. The thirteenth was absurd.
“Will we have to walk all the way back?”
His laugh was a drug.
“No love,” he said. “We will not.”
*
Hades attempted to retain at least some respectable amount of focus on his duties, but this was proving no small feat with the goddess walking at his side.
His regular visit to Menoites and his herd of glossy black oxen was behind them, the rolling Underworld fields dwindling in the light of the paráthyra at their backs. The path through the cavern ahead was smooth from millennia of use, and he kept to it now instead of rushing to his next destination by means of the æther. It gave him an excuse to linger in the presence of Persephone without any irritating distractions.
The day after their encounter on the bridge, she’d expressed an interest in accompanying him on his rounds rather than meandering about his realm on her own.
And how could he refuse?
The collected elegance she wore like a mantle now as they strolled belied nothing of the raw abandon he’d witnessed over the River of Fire. She was a fine match for the unvarying peace of the Underworld landscape surrounding them today, but there, on the bridge …
Suspended over the Phlegethôn, she’d freed herself to the savagery of trust. The Daughter of Olympos—who had no business being in his realm, truth be told—had allowed him that exquisite gift of surrender. She had blossomed in his arms, feral and dangerous in her acceptance.
Dangerous to him, was the problem.
This entire affair should have been a transaction. Instead, the Goddess of Growing Things was a Fates-damned drug. He wanted her and nothing but her, every waking moment. For the love of creation, he had responsibilities to attend!
“Hades.”
“Mm?”
Attention here and now, immortal.
“I said, this is not something I’m accustomed to seeing in the upper realms.”
“What’s that?”
Her half smile had him wanting to do terrible things.
“When my mother still permitted my presence on Olympos, I can hardly recall Zeus making such a diligent circuit of his domain.”
Hades let out an uncharacteristic snort. “Well. The Lord of the Skies has a far larger population of immortals in his third of the rulership. No need to oversee everything himself, I suppose.” He caught her quizzical eye and added, with careful enunciation: “A far simpler matter to be fruitful when one is well-liked.”
And since when do you lapse into self-pity, Polydegmon?
“I see.” The goddess returned her eyes to their path and, for once, Hades felt the tang of regret on the back of his tongue for airing such bitterness aloud. He didn’t care for how his chest felt when her smile disappeared.
“Regardless,” he said, trying to salvage her good humor, “it behooves a ruler to make his own observ—”
The air roiled hot in their path and he and Persephone balked.
Twin red orbs swelled to hovering life and Hekate poured out of the æther.
“Hades, mmy lord.” Her three voices slipped and slid.
“Enodia.”
At his side, Persephone looked less ashen than their last encounter with the Goddess of the Crossroads, but Hades could see white knuckles where her hands were clasped.
“Kharon iss in nneed of you,” the tri-form goddess said. “It iss mosst urgent.”
“Well what does he wa—”
Hekate and her torches were already gone.
Hades closed his eyes and swore to himself. He opened them to find Persephone waiting, the tilt of her brows expectant. His sigh was audible. Intimate conversation would have to wait.
His bident cut through the air as he brought it to form with the long familiar gesture. He held out his other hand to Persephone.
“We will not walk this time.”
*
The æther of the Underworld was no better or worse to pass through than that of the upper realms, but Persephone tasted something … other in it as Hades pulled them through the connective essence of the plane. Something earthy perhaps; more condensed.
She raised no objections at all to the necessity of clinging to his side as they went, but the grim line of his mouth at Enodia’s sudden departure had her tense for whatever their destination would bring.
As they regained their physical forms, the Lord of the Dead released her to stand on a beach.
A beach?
A shore, to be more accurate. Black sand stretched away in either direction along a calm, but steadily flowing river. Low-hanging mist obscured the opposite bank, but the water stretched for quite a breadth before it disappeared into the cloud. None of the watery paráthyra appeared in this place, but Hades’s favored sourceless light kept the land around the riverbank visible like the grey time before dawn in the realms above.
Upstream from where they stood, a stone pier pointed out into the water like a bony finger, lanterns made from the thinnest alabaster glowing at intervals down its length. Docked at the end was a boat of such ancient and somber purpose its mere presence cooled Persephone to her immortal bones.
The ferryman’s boat.
This was the Styx.
“Kharon.”
The first word out of Hades against the near silent shushing of the river made her start. The gnarled immortal was already making his way across the sand to where they stood, his staff marking out a trail of holes as he went.
“My lord,” Kharon said as they drew near, “we have a hero.” The ferryman mouthed the word with the same tone one might discuss vermin.