My Life From Hell (41 page)

Stumbling to his feet, Kai scooped me up and jumped a hundred feet out of the torrent’s wake. Another jump. More distance.

With each leap, my bones jarred and my teeth rattled. But it snapped me back to attention. I gaped as Kai kept us heartbeats ahead of the deadly wave. A final jump. He landed us on a cliff overlooking the temple grounds. We were safe from the water.

But when I finally let out a relieved breath, the sky burst into flame.

It creeped me right out of my skin. My nails dug into my palm and I scrambled backward through the black ash covering the ground. Tiny puffs of it burst up with each step, settling back down to coat my feet in fine black powder. The world smelled like electrical smoke and burnt dust.

I heard Hades laughing hysterically. Like he’d just heard the best joke in the world.

Water, fire, earth. air. Every single element heralded death.

I stared in confusion. In horror. Desperate to make sense of the senselessness.

Zeus closed the distance between us in a single stride. The destruction didn’t affect him one bit. He squatted down to speak to me, eyes glittering with amusement. “One above. One below. Alive. Awake. A key. It is no more. It is no more.”

“What have you done?” I screamed, hanging on to Kai for balance as the earth continued to break around me. I swung my head to look at him and shivered. I’d never seen this expression on Kai’s face.

Dread didn’t cover what I felt seeing my all-powerful boyfriend stare at the sky in perfect horror.

“We’ve brought the apocalypse.” Kai turned stricken eyes to mine. “You and I.”

That was impossible.
I
was the
savior
of humanity.

Cassie’s words about me being the instrument of destruction echoed back to me.

Zeus chuckled and patted my head. “You’ve done such a good job. Earth will be free of humans in no time. Maybe I’ll let you live after all, daughter.”

I didn’t get a chance to respond because, at that moment, the very fabric of the air around us shredded. I flew into my father’s leg with a hard jolt, bouncing off of his shin to land on my butt in the dirt. Blood streamed from my ears. I put a hand on my stomach, certain that the violent rift in our atmosphere had torn my organs from my body.

Standing, moving, doing anything beyond gaping up at the swirling, churning, burning depths above, was impossible. I saw the end of everything.

Man, was I pissed.

I clawed at my arms. Everything we’d gone through?
Theo
?! For what? The end of the world? The end of humanity? I refused to accept it. There was no way we’d been so wrong.

I peered through the smoke toward Demeter’s temple far below. There was nothing left. Just a raging torrent of water.

Winds buffeted us. Fire writhed all around me, mocking with its flickering dance.
Instrument of our destruction.

I looked into the depths of the rift. How could we be responsible? In the face of all the hate that had surrounded us, Kai and I represented love. Didn’t we?

Persephone’s voice raged in my head.
They must not win.
My arms burned and my head felt ready to explode.

The rift grew larger and larger. It was angry.

So was I.

I faced my last seconds of existence and thought about everything I’d experienced since I’d become a goddess. How my fury had grown with each new challenge. Had it really been any different than the rage that the gods had felt?

Look at how much raw anger Kai had held on to. For his father. For Persephone.

For me.

Despite all our protestations, were we any different from the rest of them? What if Kai and I had performed the ritual from a place not of love, but of hate? What if we’d taken the right actions—a love ritual to stop Zeus and Hades—but with wrong, angry intentions? What if the means hadn’t justified the end, and in wanting to prove those gods wrong, we’d given them exactly what they wanted? A world free from humans. A gods-only existence?

In which case … what?

Fight harder.
Persephone shouted from inside me.

I pushed her voice aside. Tried to focus.
One above. One below. Alive. Awake. A key. It is no more. It is no more.
How did I stop this? What did the prophecy mean?

Persephone stole my breath with her rage. It speared through me, my own anger calling up in response to hers.

The rift swirled faster. Like it was reacting to my churning emotions. This was a billion times worse than me sending spring into limbo. With that thought, I understood what had to be done.

Kai and I were not the prophecy. Or rather, we were. But the destructive one.

The version that could
save
the world? It applied to me. And Persephone. She was above. I was below. My realization was the key. The key to stopping this apocalypse and all godly destruction. Making sure it was no more.

I finally understood what Hekate had meant by Persephone and me being in synch. What my visions meant by insisting that all I needed was love.

Humans knew that love got you everywhere.

Love gets you nowhere.
That was Persephone’s—no,
our
secret fears. And it had gotten us nowhere.

Overhead, the rift expanded in an ugly crackle, consuming entire heavens. It had gotten us worse than nowhere. I flinched.

I
was the synthesis of god and human. And it was
my
rage,
my
fire,
my
hate that had to be extinguished right now. My path was clear. I knew what had to be done. Fighting our fathers? Taking control of the minions? It was just more destruction and powerplay. How could I have believed that my outcome would have been anything other than this? No. Destruction was for Hades and Zeus.

I had to relinquish the role of warrior. My path was creation.

I’d said as much to Zeus and Hades before. I was the goddess of ushering in a spring free from the destruction of the gods. A world that allowed humans to bloom. I’d just been trying to do it with a blowtorch instead of a green thumb. It was time for me to remember who I was and what I truly stood for. Human and goddess selves alike.

It was time to forgive. Time to love.

I looked at Kai. Maybe a minute had elapsed since he’d realized what we’d done. He was rooted to the spot, watching the end, his expression shattered.

I touched his arm.

Kai stared at me, glassy-eyed. “How could we have done this?”

“It’s okay. I know what it needs.” I smiled at the questions in his eyes. “Love, baby.”

Then I threw myself into the rift.

Twenty-four

I’d like to think that Kai was back there screaming a clichéd slow motion “Noooooo!” Maybe even combined with a run toward me, his arms outstretched, the pain at my sacrifice etched across his face. But the truth was, I jumped, got my teeth rattled as the rift knocked me around, and then I found myself back in the garden.

And oh baby, was it glorious. Gloriously terrifying. My vision had come true with a vengeance.

A carpet of lava bubbled over the ground, consuming everything except the rock on which I stood. The air hung so heavy with smoke and ash that the sky looked night-dark. But the lava burned so brightly, that I threw a hand up to shield my eyes.

Fat orange bubbles popped, turned black, hardened, and were swept away. Geysers of molten lava jetted, reminding me of Fee’s chandelier. This was no less beautiful, but the jets spewed upward to heights of thirty or forty feet, infinity times more deadly. Fragments of molten lava flew through the air.

In the middle of it all, the lava swirled around the furiously blazing pomegranate tree. The fruit, the leaves, everything was gone save for the most barren skeletal outline visible in the flames.

I shook in the face of this devastation. It’s amazing I didn’t wet myself. Major life-realization-heroic-moments are all well and good, but my heart hammered and my brain screamed, “Are you freaking insane?!! You just threw yourself into the heart of darkness, idiot!!! And look where you ended up!!”

All of that combined in a hell of an endorphin rush that left my limbs rubbery. I’d been so certain that jumping into the rift was the way to stop the apocalypse. But this? I didn’t understand this.

Lava splashed my skin, blistering it. I protected my face as best I could, but I had to get out of here, or risk death. I tried to step forward, not even sure where I could go, since the lava fountain danced all around me. But that was irrelevant. My foot was stuck fast.

Panic clawed at my throat. The stone twined itself around my feet, as if it was fluid. I knew how this ended. With me in a sarcophagus.

I fought back. Blasted the stone. Again and again.

I had a visitor. Kiki stood beside me on the rock. She didn’t look particularly goddessy with her low cut zebra print top tucked into fitted jeans, and stilettos on her feet. Her red hair was as pouffed up as ever. But I didn’t doubt her power for a second. “Stop fighting it. You had the right impulse. Don’t ruin it all now.” A lit cigarette appeared in her hand. She inhaled with an oddly delicate flick of her wrist.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Enjoy your smoke. Don’t worry about me being entombed or anything.” I flung myself violently from side to side, hoping to break free.

The stone rose up to my knees.

“Sophinchka.” Her voice was stern.

I stopped struggling long enough to stare at her. “What? You have something to say to me, Kiki? Some great wisdom to impart? The vision is real. Happy now?”

She blew a smoke ring to the side of my face. “This … manifestation. It did not come from me. You saw the consequences of your actions. You didn’t heed the warnings. Now you live them.”

I slammed my hands down on the stone, now at hip level. As if I could physically hold it back. My body was a block of icy terror. Which was ironic since the air around me was so hot, that it had to be amping my core temperature.

The tree wasn’t doing much better. I watched branches disintegrate and fall away into nothingness.

I glared at Kiki. “I needed love. I gave in to love. To compassion. I understood the gods. Realized I had to take another path. What more is there?”

She looked at me, puzzled. As if she couldn’t understand how I could fail to understand. “You are missing the most important piece.”

“What?!” I felt the stone cement my belly button.

“All
you
ever needed was love.”

I screamed in frustration. That was no help. I knew that already.

The stone slithered up to my chest. Lava splashed against it, hardening into chips. Great. I could be a freaking art piece in Zeus’ statue room when this was over.

Kiki stood there, watching like she’d handed me the key to this whole puzzle and was waiting for me to unlock it.

I forced myself to take a breath, which wasn’t easy, since the rock was crushing my ribcage. All right. I needed love. No, wait. She’d emphasized “you.” I needed people to love me? Well, I had some. Maybe not all the ones I wanted, but good ones nonetheless.

The stone rose to my armpits. The tree had lost all its branches now. Only its spindly trunk remained. Poor tree. Poor Persephone. I felt for her. “She never felt loved enough. Never loved herself enough.”

I hadn’t either.

“Talk to me,” Kiki said.

“Where to start?”

“Where it began.”

I tried in vain to break free of my prison. “There wasn’t much to it. To me. Sophie Bloom, the girl who flew under the radar. Hoping to feel worthy one day. With my mom. Then with Kai.”

The words tumbled out. The stone slithered over my shoulders. I wouldn’t be able to talk soon. “History repeating indeed. Persephone and I were exactly the same. When nothing worked to make us feel better, we raged and fought and ignored and yearned and hurt.”