My heart sped up now as it fought the drain of my energy into the ground. I gasped for breath and weakly tried again to wrench myself away from the gravestone. The dark figure knelt beside me, and in an instant, I knew that smile, even with my vision blurring and dimming.
Haley.
He reached over my head and brushed his fingers lightly over the gravestone. A rush of dark, cold nothingness running through the stone canceled its seeming magnetic hold on me. I could feel the cool, soothing finality flow down into the ground and saturate it, snapping the invisible strings that had tied me to the fast-reknitting dead flesh below. The roar of new life died off until not even an echo was heard.
Like a rubber band snapped too hard, the energy came slamming back up into me, jerking me like a marionette and knocking my body against the gravestone, which was now just an old, sad piece of slate.
Haley reached out to steady me, but fisted his hands with a grimace and pulled them back.
"I should wait another minute or so," he said to himself. "You are still recovering. Who knows what my touch would do now?"
I stared at him, too shattered to think of anything other than the fact that he wasn't breaking up with me. I might be a mutant goddess with a homicidal mother and swirling green things under my skin, but I was still an eighteen-year-old girl with a brand new boyfriend.
He smiled at me, that smirk that always set my stomach flipping like pancakes at a lumberjack breakfast.
"You'll need to be more careful," he said. "Bringing the dead back to life as zombies is definitely not part of the plan."
"No," I agreed. "The zombie apocalypse is still a few years off, right?"
"That's up to you to decide. Tell you what, we'll do it for fun someday when you're really bored."
"Sounds good."
Hysteria never sounded so cheerful.
We stared at each other, his endless eyes pulling me into his dark, soothing orbit. Yet, I saw my own eyes reflected back at me in his gaze, like the spark of creation at the center of a black hole.
Tenderly and tentatively, he reached out and stroked my cheek with the backs of his fingers. Tendrils of sharp, constricting ice shot into my body, shocking me, but overall, it felt good.
He tried to withdraw his hand, but moving so fast that I startled even myself, I covered his hand with mine.
The contact was electrifying. It was as if our touch sent supersonic threads of energy into each other, tangling and twining irrevocably.
"Who are you?" I breathed.
"I am Hades," he replied simply. “I am yours.”
And then he kissed me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IF YOU'VE NEVER TRIED the whole kissing a fellow mutant-god-whatever thing, you should.
The moment Haley's lips met mine, all of my energy seemed to grow and surround him, inviting him to feel my essence, just as his endlessly cold darkness called irresistibly to me. We clashed, creating a perfect moment of light and no-light, life and no-life.
His icy hands found the warm skin of my back, and I dug my fingers through his shaggy hair.
"Mine," he growled as he kissed my lips once more, taking possession of them with a fierceness that melted me. "I will never let you go now. She cannot have you!"
His words were breathless from his kisses, and the ferocity behind them would have scared me before. Yet now, I felt the same passion and possessiveness. I was whole and balanced for the first time in my life. We were fundamental and elemental to each other. There was no Haley without Stephanie, and no Stephanie without Haley.
Or...wait....
There was no Hades without Persephone, and no Persephone without Hades?
The names still jarred me, and I broke our kisses, but not our embrace, pushing him back from me just a few inches.
"So, uh, really?" I asked dazedly. "Hades? God of the Dead?"
"I prefer King of the Underworld," Haley replied with a grin. "Which makes you…my queen."
"Um, yeah."
He kissed me, but once more, I forced myself to stop so I could voice the questions that were quickly piling up in my brain.
"Hang on," I gasped. "No kisses for at least a minute, okay?"
"No."
His kisses were like drowning in love, having it fill your lungs and cloud your brain until nothing but love was left.
"Seriously! Wait! At least tell me that you don't really think you're a god."
Haley pulled back a fraction to look me deeply in the eye.
"We are gods," he replied softly. "Ancient beyond name and infinite beyond concept. You are the first atom of the universe, and I am the last."
"Then why...all this, um, dabbling with mortals?"
Haley smiled sadly and sighed, sitting up and pulling me with him and into his lap. He leaned back against the gravestone, but I was careful not to touch it or the soil, just in case. No more zombies and monster plants for me, thank you.
"Now that you've broken the spell —" he started to say.
"Spell? There was a spell on me? Who put it there? Is magic real?”
He laughed. “As I was saying, I can answer all your questions now, but how about one at a time?”
I thought for a moment, then asked, “How exactly did I break the spell? I mean, I kind of have an idea, but I'd really like some clarification."
"You stated your true identity," he replied. "You claimed your true name, and your true nature was revealed."
"That's it? All I had to do is say 'I am Persephone' and everything would be fine?"
"Well, for the most part, yes, that’s how it worked. And, 'fine' is a relative term. Things at the moment are not quite fine."
A depressed silence came over me. Right. Monstrous mother on the loose, out-of-control zombie-creating daughter exposed to the general public, and massive weather crisis on the way.
"Perhaps," Haley said, chuckling into my hair. "Miss Jones would be the best person to answer your questions."
"It's late, though. Do you know how to find her?"
"She is exactly where I left her fifteen minutes ago."
"Where?"
"Having dinner with Morris, Zack, and Helen at The Golden Dragon."
"Oh."
"Apparently, the Crab Rangoons there are delicious."
I stared at him.
He smirked at me.
"What? Mortal food is delightful."
"I can't even. Let's go."
***
The Golden Dragon was just a small, tired but still hardworking restaurant in downtown Darbyfield. Morris' family's restaurant had served the greater Darbyfield area for twenty years, but this was the first time I had ever been inside. (Did I know the kind of oil they used to fry those processed foods in? Yes, I did: the delicious kind for deliciously processed foods.)
We found everyone sitting in the back, at one of the large, family-style tables with the turntable in the middle.
Being back in reality, or at least what reality was for everyone else, put me off-balance. The edges of everything wavered in my mind, like a funhouse mirror, and if I squinted just right, I could see the enormity of the universe behind it.
Thankfully, pretty much everything right in front of me was within the scope of what I considered normal.
Morris absently eating while scanning his laptop? Check.
Helen nibbling while frowning and thinking Deep Analytical Thoughts? Check.
Zack making bad jokes and taking another helping of every dish until his plate was the size of Darbyfield High School? Check.
Katie Jones toying with a Crab Rangoon and telling Zack to shut up? Well, nothing Katie Jones ever did really added up, so I was just going to go with "check" for that one, too.
"Well," she said to me, carelessly tossing the Crab Rangoon to Zack with an impossible flick of her chopsticks, unconcerned by the way he reached out and grabbed it mid-air in his own chopsticks with inhuman speed. "You finally figured it out. Thank goodness. I mean, there really weren't that many more
clues we could have given you without breaking the rules. We cut it pretty close as it is."
Haley guided me to a chair next to Zack and then sat down on the other side of me.
"Cashew Chicken?" Zack offered.
"This is not the time for Cashew Chicken," I informed him.
"There is never not a time for Cashew Chicken," he replied with a shrug, scooping the rest onto his plate.
"For once, Zack is right," Katie Jones said. "Shocking, I know. Don't look at me like that, Zachary. Sit down, Miss Jenkins. It is important that we stay very firmly rooted in the here and now, especially since the here and now is out there somewhere, very pissed off and starting to attract attention."
"Attention?" I exclaimed, my heart dropping into my stomach with the thud of a day-old Crab Rangoon. "What has happened to Mom?"
"More like what has Mom made happen?" Katie replied. "But I'm getting ahead of myself. Now then, you have figured out that you are Persephone. You also know that Haley is, in his true form, Hades. The gentleman to your right, stuffing his face, is Zeus."
I stared at Zack, who gave me a sheepish grin despite his cheeks bulging with food like a chipmunk.
Helen gave a short, derisive laugh and said, "Excuse me, but did you just imply that the Darbyfield quarterback is actually the all-powerful Zeus? The god with the thunderbolts and an address on Mount Olympus?"
"No," she replied. "I did not imply anything. I stated it unequivocally. Just as Deborah Starr is Demeter, and I am Hekate, goddess of all things magic and occult."
Morris stared at Katie Jones, his expression somewhere between terror and love.
Without missing a beat, Helen retorted, "So, if Stephanie is Persephone —and I'm not saying I buy this for a second—then what you are saying is that gods and goddesses are real? Stephanie is a goddess?"
"Or a mutant," Morris said, still staring at the librarian goddess.
"Shut up," Helen ordered.
"Shutting up," he replied.
"Mutant would be more like what we are now, as you see us," Katie Jones said. "Our eternal forms poured into human bodies. Of course, they're really kind of souped-up human bodies because a regular mortal form wouldn't be able to contain our power. They’d simply explode. However, we are able to channel certain of our abilities through these bodies, things like our vision, speed, strength, and some of our unique powers.”
“Like what Haley did to the metal of the locker?” I whispered.
He grimaced slightly but nodded. “Even metal deteriorates and ‘dies.’ I lost control for a moment and accidentally accelerated the deterioration process until it was nothing more than the dust it would become in a couple thousand years.”
“Oops,” Zack chuckled. “Bad god of the dead!”
Helen rolled her eyes.
Katie Jones broke in, “In truth, what we ‘gods’ actually are has yet to be defined by your science, which is quaint but shows a great deal of promise. It may all come down to atoms and quarks one day, but right now, whatever we are gives us the powers and a seemingly eternal lifespan that humans most usually associate with a god."
"We kind of got tied up with Earth by coincidence," Zack added, adding more beef lo mein to his plate. "For a really long time, we existed free in the universe. Then the Earth formed, and something drew us in. The Earth is a kind of complete reflection of every one of us and what we represent, so it became a focal point for us. But, it’s hard to be subtle about our existence all the time. Actually, that's where the whole ancient aliens thing came from."
"Aliens are real?" Morris whispered, all his Area 51 dreams coming true by the look on his face.
"And, they like Chinese food," Haley added wryly.
Then, it hit me.
"I'm...an alien?" My voice was somewhere between panic and hysteria.
"It's all very complicated," Katie Jones said reassuringly. "There are lots of... dynamics. Just think of yourself as the goddess Persephone for the next couple billion years, and you'll be fine. Now then—"
"Billion?" Helen and I exclaimed at the same time.
"Only a few. After all, the Earth is due to be incinerated by the sun at some point. Then we'll go someplace fun, like the Eagle Nebula and see what kind of trouble we can get into there."
"Maybe we should bring the conversation back to the here and now?" Haley suggested, rubbing a soothingly cool hand over the back of my neck.
"Oh? Oh! Right," Katie Jones said with a smile. "I do love toying with mortal astronomy, but that's for another day. Now then, Stephanie, we're beginning to see signs that your mother is gearing up for a classic rampage of the gods. These things are not pretty and generally do no good for mortals. We need to come up with a plan to stop her."
"Wait, wait!" I cried. "Stop her? My mother really is part of all of this?"
"It has been over a million years since your mother has played this game, and she's not happy about losing."
"What game?"
"Why, the game of hiding you from Haley."
I whipped around to stare at Haley, then turned back to stare at her.
"Why would she do that?" I demanded breathlessly.
"The whole myth of Persephone thing, remember?" Katie Jones answered, waving a piece of General Tso's Chicken, speared through with one of her chopsticks. "Your mother is Demeter. She wants you all for herself. She likes to think she has all the power because of her role in growing things and the harvest. It seems to me that she began to take this whole 'Earth Mother' thing way too seriously about two million years ago, and look where it led her. Birkenstocks, tofu, and a god-awful taste in dresses."
"So, wait," Helen interrupted. "You're saying that for all this time, she has been hiding Stephanie, er, Persephone as Stephanie?"
"Well, not just as Stephanie. Mortal coils can only last so long. Poor design in my opinion. Give me half a chance, and I could dream you up something really tremendous. With tentacles. And gills."
"Focus, Miss Jones," Haley called to her.
"Right. Anyway, Deborah came to me and called in, oh, a couple of favors, and made me cast a spell on her and her daughter. Basically, her idea was to tie up your energies with the whole primate evolution thing that was just starting to happen. She inserted both of you into the cycle of reincarnation. The spell also dampened your ability to remember and question certain things. I thought Deborah would do this for a few hundred millennia and get bored. I had no idea she would take it this far and do the things she has."
"You’re saying that basically reincarnation is real?" Helen's expression was On the Corner of Dubious and Shocked.
“Sort of.”
"Go back a minute. What did Stephanie’s mom do?" I was so glad Morris asked that question. There was no way I could ask it myself, not with my heart frozen and ready to shatter.
"Well, obviously Haley wasn't the first young man to notice Deborah's beautiful daughter. And…maybe this isn't the first time Stephanie has rebelled against the rules of her mother. Neither had a good outcome. Until now. At least, I hope now."
A deathly silence settled on the table, as we waited for Katie Jones to say something more.
She looked up from her bite of food and put her chopsticks down and sighed.
"Let's just say that reincarnation happens no matter how old you are when you die or how you die," she said quietly.
"Okay, I'm confused, so I’m just going to put it out there," Morris suddenly babbled nervously. "You're implying that any time in the past Stephanie got too out of control or some guy liked her, her mom just killed her, counting on her to come back through reincarnation? I mean, how could she count on both of them coming back at the same time, and if Stephanie died before her mother did, wouldn't she have been reborn...oh... wait... if her mother died later...oh..."
"Now, you're beginning to see, Mr. Chow," she said, beaming proudly at him. "Delayed reincarnation. Stephanie’s soul was held dormant by the spell while Deborah lived, died, and was reborn. The whole spell was extremely tr
icky and complex, very binding and comprehensive. Took me ages, literally, to put it together so that Deborah would always know who she was, but that Stephanie would never be able to break the enchantment and realize who she was."
"Then how was Stephanie able to break the spell?" Morris asked.
Katie Jones smiled mischievously and signaled a server for the bill.
"The only saving grace to this whole situation is that every spell must have a loophole because nothing is ever absolute. Basic law of the universe. It's impossible. So, while it's not much of a loophole, it was the best I could do. The ancient Greeks came very close to understanding what was going on with the myth of Hades and Persephone. I’ve always wondered how they managed that.” She paused and gave Haley a long, searching look. He returned her gaze with a smug look of his own. “Anyway, I got my first chance to leave a clue about two hundred years ago, hoping that someday, I could set things in motion so that the clue would be discovered by the right people at the right time."
"The Proserpine Puzzle?" Helen guessed. "Katherine Jones, A.C. Swinburne's mistress, who discovered the long-lost riddle that went with his poem about Proserpine?"
Katie Jones' smile got bigger. "Those were the days. Corsets and fans. I loved it. Of course, toilets had yet to be invented, so that was a drawback, but still, no one was the wiser that I, um, upgraded my chamber pot to flush."
“Wait, you’re Katherine Jones?” Morris exclaimed.
“Why do you think I insisted on everyone calling me by my full name? I couldn’t be sure if or when you’d come across the puzzle, but I hoped that the names would guide you back to me. Thankfully, it didn’t need to happen like that, but in a situation like this, you can’t leave anything to chance.”
"I can't believe I'm even listening to this," Helen said, and I could tell her patience had not only worn thin, but that had it left town without a forwarding address.
"This is ridiculous,” she stated. “Complete new age crap. Magic and spells? There is not a shred of empirical evidence to support any of this, and I'm sorry, but if you know anything about our science, you know that truth requires proof."
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