Authors: Stephannie Beman
PERSEPHONE FLASHED from her rooms and to the cells of Tartarus. The place hadn’t
changed much from what she remembered. The dark tunnels glowed an eerie red, not from
torches, but from the veins of magically enchanted rubies interspersed throughout the obsidian rock walls.
She passed doorway after doorway, the mirror-like surface revealing the punishment of the prisoners within. Screams and cries for mercy surrounded her, but it didn’t affect her as it should have. This place had once been a place where the Titans had incarcerated their enemies, Hades included. Now the Titans were gone and she could feel the difference in the atmosphere.
There were men hung upside down, men covered up to their necks in water and unable to
drink it despite their thirst, men under trees who starved but were unable to eat the fruit dangling from the tree branches, men who rolled heavy boulders up the hill only to lose their footing at the top and have the boulder roll back to the bottom, and countless others who labored or suffered unsatisfied needs, or faced physical torment from their past misdeeds.
But nowhere did she see the brutality the Titans inflicted upon their prisoners, as she’d witnessed in Hades cell when Coronus had forced her to watch the torture he so loved. She found Hades’ cell easily, having walked these halls a hundred times. Little had changed and no new occupant resided within.
The chains still hung from the ceiling. The broken pottery, glass, and sharp stone littered the floors. The various weapons and devices of torture hung from the walls. But the voices were silent. Hades was gone.
Not gone, she reminded himself. He was King of the Underworld. He was ruler of his prison.
How could Zeus have been so cruel?
“Persephone? What are you doing here? You should be resting?”
She checked the walls of her control, glad that no power or emotion leaked out, before she turned to the man who was the center of her thoughts. “I came to see Tartarus for myself. I like the changes you’ve made.”
He frowned and she turned away, motioning toward the man sleeping on a bed across the
corridor. He twisted and turned and screamed, but he didn’t wake. “I never delighted in
punishment,” she said, touching the smoky stone that separated her from the criminal. “But those I brought to this place couldn’t live in the Elysian Fields as they were. They’d harm those who didn’t deserve to face such evil.”
He touched her shoulder. “Sometimes justice is a cold monster, but it’s one that protects the innocent.”
She glanced at him. “I remember him.” His frowned deepened. Through his jangled emotions
she could sense his confusion by what she was telling him. “He raped and murdered three young girls. Coronus laughed at the punishment I devised for him.”
“What punishment was that, Persephone?”
She could detect the hint of worry through the vibrations of his magic from his hand on her arm and the apprehension in his deep voice. She wanted to erase them from his mind. But she couldn’t, her power was too erratic and emotions too undisciplined. She clamped down hard upon her control. “He’ll relive those last memories and emotions of his victims for years to come.”
“So he’ll rape himself for eternity? What of the girls?”
“They enjoy the Elysian Fields with their families. No memory of their deaths.”
A niggling of a thought surfaced in his mind before he drew away from her, trying to hide what she already knew. Zeus had given Hades the Iron Queen of the Underworld as his wife.
He’d traded Persephone like a sack of meal to the god holding the most cards against him. Only Hades hadn’t known that Persephone was the Iron Queen. He come, not for the wife promised him, but the woman he loved, even knowing that he would lose his throne one day to the woman who was Queen of the Underworld.
Regardless of their surroundings, she leaned into him, her breath short, her eyes locked on his lips. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to make love to him as they had in her mind. It didn’t matter to her unstable power that they were in a place of torment. It wanted what it wanted and it would have it eventually. She just feared what would happen when it finally did.
She didn’t want that. She wanted her life as it once was, minus the fear of discovery and the consequences of being a Phlegethon daemon and god. She wanted Hades.
She swayed and Hades arms closed around her. The scent of sandalwood and vanilla filled
her senses. Her magic, ever so close to the surface rose and her passions awakened, demanding to be satisfied.
She flashed to the Elysian Fields, gulping in breaths of stale air, striving to manage her raging passion. Eris’ teachings saved her the unconscionable action of attacking Hades. She needed to redirect her power into something else.
Looking around the world she’d created, her heart ached for the neglect that transformed the Underworld into the barren world. Even the imitation sun wasn’t as bright as she remembered.
Kneeling on the ground, she placed a hand on the bare dirt and closed her eyes. Tapping into the wellspring of power, she sent the questing tendrils through the ground, strengthening the whispers of magic. In her mind’s eye, she saw the web of faint grayish power brighten.
Her heightened sense told her the moment Hades joined her. His hands rested on her
shoulders, warm and strong, tentatively offering his own store of unadulterated power. She accepted it in the spirit it was given. Her power twined around his, making his mark in the Underworld in another way. The magical web burned a brilliant, blinding white.
Aroused by the blending of magic and the connection of souls intertwined, she turned in his arms, embracing him, kissing him, drawing him down into the soft jade grass beneath the
sparkling emerald leaves of the tree. He kissed her back, his body gently pressing against her.
Her hands roamed over the planes of his back and arms, feeling the multitude of scars beneath the thin tunic.
She nipped and licked a path from his lips, along his jaw, down the cord of his neck, sucking deeply on the vein in his neck. She breathed in the scent of sandalwood and vanilla, and
something distinctly male.
“Persephone,” he groaned.
HADES NEEDN’T worry that Persephone had lost her ability to feel. She was more alive
now than before the return of her memories. Her passion was a fire burning bright within her, raging into an inferno at his touch.
She moaned as he cupped her breast, tweaking the nipple through the flimsy dress, his lips on the sensitive spot on her neck. She squirmed under him, seeking. Her hands gathered the hem of his tunic, tugging it up. Her bare leg glided sensually along his legs, wrapping around his waist, opening her to him.
Hades didn’t think. He couldn’t think. His primitive mind was focused on one thing. Make
Persephone his in truth.
He moved her dress aside, and pressing into the entrance of her wet folds. Her hips rose to meet him. He shoved his cock to the hilt inside her, shocked by the tearing of her maidenhead.
She gasped at the sharp pain and power seared across him, burning, then dulling. He didn’t move until she flexed her hips, drawing him deeper. Their magic whirled around them, shoving his passion over the edge into the unknown. This wasn’t the loving coupling he’d experienced in her mind, but an untamed passion. It was sex and nothing more.
OVER THE next week, Hades anxiety over Persephone’s strange behavior grew. Her
movements lacked their previous grace. They were methodical and eerie. Her behavior was
erratic, moving from hot to cold in seconds. Something was very wrong, and yet he couldn’t get her to confide in him.
She actually seemed to be avoiding him again. But rather than hiding, she seemed to be
immersing herself in work. Penelope, Zana, and Thanatos had each noticed the same thing and come to him to express their worry.
“What do you want me to do about it?” he finally snapped at Thanatos one afternoon.
“A Phlegethon needs their mate—”
Hades groaned. He didn’t need a lecture on Phlegethon daemons from Thanatos.
“I’m just saying she needs you just as much as you need her. She knows very little of
Phlegethon daemon-gods. Seeing as there are only three that I know of, and one of those three spent a thousand years in Tartarus.”
“Will you all leave me alone if I talk to Persephone?”
“Yes!” Thanatos said and two voices behind the door echoed in unison.
“I should figure out a punishment for rebellion and punish you all,” he mumbled loudly,
closing the book and handing Thanatos a clay tablet. “Could you give this to the judges on your way out?”
Thanatos saluted. “Yes, sir.”
Hades rolled his eyes and located his wife. She was sitting on the dais in the throne room, a large globe before her. She flicked a wrist and the scene changed over and over again.
She finally glanced up. She looked so beautiful and cold, so removed from the scenes before her, the innocence and passion he so loved about her hidden. The goddess sitting before him terrified him and made him feel safe at the same time. The irony in the paradox wasn’t lost to him.
“Do you have the time to talk with me?”
He nodded, striding across the chamber and taking a seat on the step beside her. “I always have time for you.”
Emotions flickered in her eyes and then where banked. She nodded and waved her hand at
the globe. It disappeared.
“I have some questions and I want you to answer them honestly,” she said softly. “If your answers are satisfactory, I will stay here with you as your wife and your queen forever. If your answers are unsatisfactory, I will leave tonight and never see you again. Is it a deal?”
His heart soared. He had a fighting chance at forever with her. With fear and hope in his heart, he started to nod but stopped. It wasn’t right. If he agreed, she’d remain only because she promised, not because she wanted to, and that was no way to live their lives.
A smile curled the corners of his mouth as he gave her his answer, “No. I’ll answer your
questions, but satisfactory or not, the choice to stay must be yours, Persephone.”
She smiled. “Agreed.”
“Who is Menthe? And what happened to her?”
“She was my first love. Before I became an immortal and learned what it meant to be a
Phlegethon daemon-god.” He took a deep breath. “I fell in love with Menthe; or rather I fell in love with her passion for life. I pursued her for nearly a year before I won her affection: A single kiss. My energy nearly consumed her in a moment of passion. Nearly draining her of her life.
Then I did something far worse. I shamed her by bestowed great riches upon her and abandoning her to the world. She was cast from the village and forced to survive alone. It was only by the grace of mercy, a man found her dying and saved her. He loved her as I couldn’t and she bore him children.”
“And who is Leuce?”
“My half-sister, born of the daemon Horkus and the human Cemya.”
“Did you kill her?”
She watched the minute expressions cross his face and enter his eyes. Pain. Sorrow. Guilt.
“Depends on who you ask. The Olympian say I did. Thanatos and my mother say I didn’t. I
say yes. She says no.”
“Explain.”
He closed his eyes. The words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t tell her.
The touch of her hand against his cheek startled him. His eyes snapped open and he stared into her light indigo eyes. There was none of the emotions one would expect, but there was something struggling to be free. Her emotions were so close, and yet so far away.
This was it. He had a chance, if only the words would pass his lips, if only he told her the depths of his crimes. She wrapped her power around him in a semblance of comfort and he laid his head in her lap and closed his eyes. She brushed her fingers through his hair with gentle strokes.
“Tell me, Hades.”
“Coronus wanted to use my power to cement his power base and I rebelled. I attacked him in his own home and ran for my life. He pursued me, slaughtering the inhabitants of entire villages if he thought they helped me. When he learned of Leuce, he thought he had a pawn to use against me. He took her and killed her family. He forced me to surrender or he would kill her.”
He paused. He didn’t want to tell her the rest and see the hatred in her eyes. He didn’t want to relive the pain of that moment.
“What happened?”
“I refused at first, hoping that he would let her go, but he didn’t. He let the Titans brutalize her. I surrendered. I just wanted to save her more pain. I let him strip my power and bind me in enchanted chains. Then he forced me to watch them rape her over and over again before they threw her from the mountain.”
She offered no words of comfort or forgiveness. She merely combed her fingers through his hair and stated the facts. “Leuce is right. You didn’t kill her. The Titans did.”
“She died because she knew me. If I had just surrendered—”
“She might have still died. Or she might have been blissfully happy. The possibilities are limitless. If I hadn’t met you, I would’ve remained in my garden until I died or broke free of the binds on my mind. If I hadn’t met you, I wouldn’t be here with you. I wouldn’t have my magic and I wouldn’t know what had been done to me.”
“If you hadn’t met me you would have your emotions, your passions.”
“I still have them.”
He turned to her in surprise. He hadn’t thought she was aware of them. “You do.”
She patted his shoulder. “Of course. We’re not so different, Hades. We both fear what havoc our power can have on the world outside. Or to those we love.”
He frowned, ready to ask her a question of his own.
“Now, tell me of Phlegethon daemon-gods. For I believe I share this blood with you.”
He half-shrugged. “We are the offspring of daemons and gods. We are few. We spend our
lives looking for our mate, the one who completes us. We are drawn to strong emotions, for our power is linked to our passions. It can become a deadly obsession for humans and a harmful one to immortals.”