CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

GOLDEN LIFEBLOOD

Blue lights.

The cave that led to the Underworld curled around the travelers. Surrounding them were thousands of glowing orbs hanging in the air, the lost spirits of the dead.

Blue lights.

Seth felt strange as he looked at them. He had spent most of his existence as one of those lights. Like Stella and Juliet, he too had been in a bottle on a dressing table, though not Persephone’s, Raidne’s. Persephone couldn’t keep him for two reasons. The first one was that Raidne needed to have his soul handy should an opportunity arise that could give him the immortal body they sought. The second was that if Hades found Persephone hoarding something like his rival’s soul, Seth would never get out of Tartarus.

Blue lights.

As the ferry floated by, Seth felt a deep kind of expectation rise up in his heart. In this life, he had never felt like he had something to look forward to, but if he could break the curse tonight, then life held unlimited possibilities. He could live the way he wanted to, and whatever road he decided to travel, he would never again become one of the tiny blue lights that wandered the banks of the river Styx.

When they reached the mouth of the river, Persephone was there waiting for them. She was like his dream, but a thousand times more vivid. It was her eyes that struck him the hardest. She had green eyes when she was in Juliet’s body, but when her natural red eyelashes framed those green eyes, the impact almost undid him. Still, somehow, she was different from what he remembered. The line of her mouth was harder and she was dressed differently. Forget the silks. With the changing of the times, so was there a change in her wardrobe. Now she was wearing blue jeans and a black halter top that crossed her chest and tied in two different places on her back. The top left her stomach exposed and around her hip bones were the same type of symbols that he had seen on Hades.

She tied her curly red hair into a ponytail and then put out her hand to help him onto the stone-carved dock. Her hand was warm. He was just getting used to it when she let go of him and turned to Apollo to help him.

“Are we going to do this here?” Apollo asked, “Or do you have some other place in mind?”

“We need to go to one of the bedrooms. Once this is finished, I won’t want to be moved. I can heal best if I’m lying down.” Her lips were deep red as she spoke. Seth couldn’t take his eyes off her.

As she led them through the palace, he kept thinking, This is the woman I fell in love with? This is the woman I wanted to protect so badly that I gave up my life not once, but twice? I believe it.

Also, he noticed that she was right. A different side of her personality was coming out. In the pool room, she had seemed competent, controlling, and exacting. Now she was leading them through the mansion of the Underworld like a nervous detective in an action movie. She peeked around corners. She perked her ears like she was waiting to hear the sound of a door at any moment. She went ahead from time to time and then beckoned for them to follow her.

Then it hit him. She was really afraid of being caught by Hades, even if she was a goddess.

Finally, it seemed like they were at the end of the line. There were two doors in front of them.

“This one leads to the bedroom for whores and this one leads to the bedroom for wives. What do you think?” she asked, turning to Apollo. “Which bedroom should we use? I’ve never been in the bedroom for wives. If Hades comes home, he probably won’t look for me there.”

“You mean to tell me he’s treated you like a consort all this time?” Apollo grimaced. “Even so, if you’re planning on leaving him then the insult of performing your surgery in that room would be devastating. Besides, that’s the only place in his palace that he has not shared with you. I think it would be better if you let him keep one thing to himself. It would give him a little dignity.”

Persephone favored him with the foulest expression in her artillery.

It was then that Seth realized that Persephone did not have Apollo’s approval. After his speech to the Occult’s Addict, Seth had assumed that she did.

If Apollo didn’t approve then Seth felt like the ‘other man’ and he hated that. He always ignored that part of their problem because it disgusted him. It wasn’t as if she had decided to marry Hades or given him a promise of love. She had never given Hades her heart.

He pushed ahead of them and entered the room meant for whores.

It was black. The only light in the room came from her dressing table, a tiny blue light in a bottle. Then Persephone entered and the room seemed to come alive. Potted plants swayed like there was a breeze, candles spontaneously lit, water began flowing down one wall, the bed curtains parted, and the edge of the sheet curled down.

Seth stared. Then he cleared his throat as if to let everything in the room understand what he was saying. “This is where your contract was made. This is where we will break it.”

Persephone seemed incredibly heartened by his words. She cast her green eyes on him with such approval that it nearly stopped his heart. Even though he knew he was just a tool, her praise made him feel valuable.

“Lie down on the bed,” Apollo said.

She gave Seth one last look before she smoothed her blankets back into position and stretched out on top of them.

“All right,” Apollo said, sitting next to her on the bed. “Where do you think your seeds are?”

“My abdomen,” she said, touching a spot above her navel and then moving her fingers as she pointed to a spot below. “I think there’s one here, and one down here.”

Apollo brushed her hands away and placed his own against her stomach and pressed down firmly. “I owe you an apology. I thought you were dressed like that because you were planning a seduction.”

“You’re hilarious,” she said icily.

He looked into her eyes earnestly, more earnestly than Seth thought possible under the circumstances, and said, “I’m sorry.”

She said nothing more and after a moment of his pressing and feeling her abdomen and sides, he said, “You’re right. There are only two there. One is lodged in your large intestines and the other just outside your stomach wall. I’ll start searching for the others now. Close your eyes.”

Seth should have felt uncomfortable with Apollo touching Persephone, but there was nothing romantic in the way he touched her. He started with her head and placed his fingers on her temples. Rubbing gently, he didn’t look at her. Instead, he looked blankly at the ceiling or the headboard behind her. He was focusing on his fingers.

His hands worked their way into her flaming hair and behind her head. “I found one,” he said. “It’s lodged between your spinal cord and your skull.”

Persephone winced.

That one would be undoubtedly difficult to remove.

After that, Apollo spent a long time examining her throat. He seemed to think it was logical for another seed to be there, but after a good five minutes, he moved on to her shoulders and down her arms. He held both her arms at the same time and examined different muscle groups to see if he could feel a difference in them. He paused when he came to her wrists. “There is a seed stuck in each of your wrists. They’re deep. That accounts for five. There’s only one left.” Apollo’s eyelids flickered as he scanned her. “There’s only one place for the last one,” he said, placing a hand over her heart. “It’s here.”

Persephone slapped his hand away. “Sorry,” she repented immediately. “I just didn’t want to hear that last one. It will take me to the brink of death to have that one removed.”

“He is the God of the Underworld. He wouldn’t make this easy.” Apollo sighed and then got off the bed. “Did you catch all of that, Seth?”

“Yeah,” Seth mumbled, wondering how he was going to get up the appetite to do this.

“Do you want me to supervise?” Apollo asked, looking at Persephone’s bare stomach.

“You think I should start there?” Seth exclaimed in disbelief. He had absently been thinking of starting with her wrists.

“They are actually in the least vital place on an immortal. Besides, she hasn’t eaten in five years, so there won’t be any other food in her system. It’s completely clean. If I were doing this, that’s where I’d start.”

Seth looked to Persephone for guidance.

She nodded.

Seth mentally buckled himself up. He didn’t want to appear weak in front of either Persephone or Apollo, so he clenched his jaw on teeth that wanted to chatter and made fists of his fingers that wanted to tremble. He walked around to the other side of the bed and climbed up next to Persephone.

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I am just a tool. I am just a tool, he chanted in his head to calm himself, but he wasn’t calming down. His canines were growing long inside his mouth. One look at Persephone lying there waiting for him to bite her and his body reacted accordingly. He wasn’t supposed to be like this. He had already had all the blood he needed. The idea of biting her shouldn’t even tempt him, but it did, desperately.

Just then Apollo drew the bed curtain closed. “I’ll leave you two alone,” he said. His voice sounded remarkably like a physician’s.

“Are you all right?” Persephone asked Seth, propping herself up on her elbows.

“This just feels so wrong,” he whispered.

“It’s not. If you refuse, you’re saying that you and your family should be cursed because you’re still too afraid to stand up for me. Did you think undoing the wrong that was done was going to be easy?”

“And what about you? It will hurt.”

She sighed and slipped gently onto her back. “I’ll love you as you rip me to shreds. You’ll feel it.”

Seth ran a hand over her unbroken skin lingeringly. It seemed the ultimate shame to cut her.

“Time is short. Please, don’t hesitate.”

He moved his hand over her stomach and paused over the area where one of the seeds was. Then he closed his eyes and sticking out one canine more than the other, he scratched. Nothing happened.

“You’re going to have to bite harder than that,” Persephone whispered, her fingers reaching for his free hand.

He held her hand and bit down without remorse, getting his second fang involved, which was what she wanted.

Persephone’s blood tasted nothing like Juliet’s. In order to find out about Juliet’s past, Seth had to swish her blood around against his pallet like he was a human tasting wine. The message contained in human blood was subtle. It could even be ignored if he drank quickly enough.

This was different.

Persephone’s blood screamed her message, even though he tried not to taste it and definitely not to deliberately drink it. Her injustice burned his tongue. The taste of her blood gave him a full view of how she had lived as the wife of the God of the Underworld.

Seth closed his eyes and could see Persephone as clear as daylight as Hades slammed her against a wall. Hades thought it was a game. Raping her was a game. Seth felt her pain. The next moment he heard the mocking laughter of the white-haired god. Through Persephone’s ears, the sound was too cruel to be tolerated.

Then he saw Hades sitting next to her on the settee, trying to feed her pomegranate kernels. She couldn’t stand the taste. She spat them on the floor. Hades' red eyes narrowed. He raged at her ingratitude and spat on her.

Seth bit down harder. He had to find the seed. He had to make these memories stop.

In summer on Olympus, Persephone was forced to partake of Artemis’ pity and condescension, the Goddess of the Hunt. Persephone couldn’t endure to listen to such talk from a woman who had kept the virginity that had been stolen from her. To add insult to injury, Artemis was Apollo’s twin. His adoration for his twin had never ebbed, not the way his love for Persephone had withered.

In the Underworld, Persephone was treated like Hades’ doll as she was forced to try on all the different clothes he had prepared for her as gifts. She grew numb to the sight of her own naked body. The modesty she had once cherished was destroyed.

Seth pulled his razor teeth from the wound he’d made. Then with his fingers, he reached into the incision and pulled the long, hard seed free.

Persephone’s face was dead-white as he removed it.

“I got it,” Seth proclaimed with blood dribbling down his chin.

Persephone sighed and let her head rest on the pillows.

“Excellent,” Apollo said, sticking his arm between the bed curtains and holding out a small glass bottle for Seth to put the seed into. Then with the other hand, he tossed a white cloth on the bed. “Wrap her wound,” he instructed before his fingers disappeared.

“Thank you, Seth,” Persephone whispered as he put pressure on the gash, “but please don’t stop there. I fear we don’t have much time and I want as many out as possible.”

“How’s the pain?” he asked, not moving to obey her.

“I can bear it,” she murmured with her eyes closed. “It’s like Apollo said. These will be the easiest to remove, for both of us.”

He cradled her head in his palm, and in so doing touched the burial place of one of the seeds. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Then take care of me now and get the next one out,” she mumbled. Her eyelids peeking open to reveal two eyes like shining fireflies.

He nodded and found the next place.

Seth wanted to move confidently, but after he felt those few shards of her memories, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know more about her suffering.

Swallowing his concerns, Seth bit down again.

This time he felt loneliness, long stretches of loneliness. First, Persephone was lonely on Olympus. Demeter was the only one there for Persephone, and she loved her, but Demeter was also the Goddess of Harvest. Thus, she was not always there to hold her daughter’s head in her soft lap. For just one second, he got a taste of the love Demeter had for Persephone. She was a mother who loved her child despite all the rumors and disapproval that followed her.

Persephone was considered a repugnant child on Olympus because she could not let go of her mother’s skirt. How could a grown woman continue to want her mother’s love and attention even after she was married? And she was a goddess at that! Persephone knew what they said about her. Demeter ignored them and acted like her daughter didn’t have filthy arms. Persephone could not let go of her mother. There was no one else.

The disapproval extended. She was the wretched wife of Hades who would have had a grand family with beautiful daughters and powerful sons, yet Persephone denied him. She wasn’t even of any use to him in bed. Pathetic! In this case, the public ridicule came from Hera herself.

The last thought was a snapshot of Zeus himself giving her a disgusted look. It was because she’d gone missing from Olympus for a season and left her work to her mother. That was unpardonable. But Persephone didn’t care, not even when she was reprimanded by the God of Heaven.

Then, he saw himself. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and his eyes lit up with mirth. Seth felt Persephone’s pleasure as she ran like a madwoman in Stella’s body. She brushed her wind-torn hair out of her eyes and looked over her shoulder at him, chasing her.

Seth jolted away from her. He had forgotten what he was supposed to be doing. Immediately, he plunged his fingers into her wound and searched for the seed.

He was surprised. He had not expected to see himself in her memories or see his own face with such a happy expression. He couldn’t believe he had ever been that happy. His past felt like nothing but curses, curses, curses! How could he have been that happy? It didn’t seem real.

He pulled the seed loose and dropped it into the bottle Apollo held out for him.

“Wrap her up,” Apollo hissed, shoving his head through the curtains. “I hear footsteps.”

Seth ignored the blood on his face and worked rapidly to bandage her wounds.

“He’s coming!” Apollo prompted, helping him tie off the makeshift bandage.

“You have to go,” the wounded goddess said, holding her stomach. “There’s a back door to this room that leads to the river. It’s behind my mirror. The password is ‘breakable’. Hades doesn’t know I know it,” Persephone mumbled, pushing Seth and Apollo away. “I’ll face him myself, so go!”

“No,” Seth said, grabbing her hand. “You have to come with us.”

“I can’t,” she whispered. “You have to leave me here and go back with Charon.”

Seth felt helpless. Why couldn’t he protect her? What wrath would she have to face from Hades? He couldn’t leave her alone to face Hades.

“I’m used to it,” she said as though she could read his mind. “He’s here.”

Apollo pulled Seth off the bed by his shoulders, just as Hades stormed through the bedroom doors. He had abandoned Rylan’s body and the man who stood in front of them was nothing less than the actual God of the Underworld. His eyes were red as spilled blood and the vapor that surrounded him was the color of ashes, until he saw the three of them, then it suddenly turned inky black. “What is this?” he asked. His voice was smooth though it was clear he was enraged.

“Get out of here you two,” Persephone cried before she said spitefully, “I want to show my husband something.”

It was then that Hades noticed her bandages. His eyes became flames. “What have you done?” He extended his hand and out of oblivion retrieved a scythe with a blade as long as the span of a man’s arms. “Apollo, I’ll sever your head for what you’ve done, and as for that boy you brought down here, he’ll forever rest in hell. This is the last time I will stand for this ridiculousness.”

Seth stepped between Apollo and Hades. He tried to speak, but Hades immediately struck him across the chest with the edge of his scythe ripping a huge gash open from shoulder to hip. Seth couldn’t even scream. His blood splattered across Hades’ face.

As he fell backward, golden arms caught him.

Seth’s head swam with the pain. The feeling, he knew it. It was very much like a dagger through the heart or an arrow to his core, except somehow different. Those times, he had felt his strength desert him as his soul prepared to take flight. This time was different. The pain was exquisite, yet palatable. He could swallow the pain.

Seth pushed himself onto his feet as Hades’ eyes widened like two red moons hovering on the horizon. He could not believe what he was seeing.

“Golden blood? Immortal?” Hades spat as he examined Seth’s metallic blood dripping between his fingers. “How? Who?”

Apollo seized Seth from behind and as he pulled him backward, everything became a blur.

“What are you doing?” Seth choked.

“You think you can fight him just because you’re immortal? Fool,” Apollo muttered between set teeth.

Then somehow Seth was lying on the bottom of the ferry. Apollo rifled through his clothes until he found the money to pay the river master and soon the boat rocked with the current to the beat of a lullaby.

“You should have left me there,” Seth said grudgingly as his golden blood pooled under him. “She shouldn’t have to face that monster alone.”

Apollo sat in the seat at the back of the boat and put his chin in his palm. “Idiot! He can still slap you in Tartarus. He can still fight you until you lose your head. Dying was a blessing before. If he gets his hands on you, he could arrange for you to be tortured until the end of time. This immortal coil of yours is not a blessing. It’s a curse.”

Seth couldn’t talk for several moments. He hadn’t thought of it that way before, but it had to be true. When he could finally speak, he asked Apollo, “Then why did she do this to me?”

“Because this is the only way. But even now, as she lies in bed with gnashes in her belly, she’s protecting you. It’s her love. Besides, you have undone two of her months. Now she only has to spend four months a year with that devil. Tonight has been a great success. Enjoy it. In one night you have done what she couldn’t do for herself in sixteen hundred years.”

“But... what will Hades do to her?” Seth asked, afraid of the answer. His cut was already on the mend. The flow of blood had stopped.

“Who knows? Who knows what he has already done to her to make her like this?” Then Apollo dropped something beside Seth’s head. It was the bottle with the pomegranate seeds and smudges of Persephone’s blood smeared inside the glass. “You keep that. My part in this is over. From now on, no matter what happens, no matter what she suffers tonight, it’s up to you to cut the remaining four seeds from her body. Just don’t swallow them in your haste to get them out or you’ll be in a similar mess.”

Seth picked up the bottle and clutched it to his heart. What was that devil doing to his treasure?