Page 49 of Devils and the Dead
I picked up the fruit in suddenly sweaty hands, surprised by how heavy it was. The thought of taking this step terrified me.
“You eat it.” Hades squirmed, his gaze everywhere but on me. “After you’ve taken my token. We’ll be married.”
I barely knew him. Daydreams of me and Hades living in his beautiful afterlife were one thing, but the reality of that sort of commitment was something I was so not ready for.
“You sure I can’t just take the fruit with me into the elf lands and throw it at the queen if she gets out of line? I’ll bet it could do some serious damage as a projectile weapon.”
He stared at me blankly, my lame attempt at a joke clearly falling flat.
“You could wait to eat it until you’re at the elf-queen’s court, but I worry that it may be taken from you before you have the chance. Best to do it beforehand. Besides, to work correctly, you’d need to have already accepted my marriage token, so waiting to eat the fruit wouldn’t allow you to evade the wedding portion of the spell.”
This clearly wasn’t a time for humor, and I knew Hades was risking his pride to even suggest such a thing, but I was scared. And I had questions.
“So I’m assuming if I accept your marriage token and eat this, I’ll be living at your place September to March for all of eternity?”
Hades actually blushed. “If you want. I mean, you can always just leave the marriage token on my doorstep and break the spell.”
Like Persephone had done. This was such a mess. It was a perfect way to ensure I’d have an out if the elf queen tried to kidnap me, but in the end I’d either be married to someone I really didn’t know well enough to take that step with, or repeat the action that had previously broken his heart and basically annul the whole thing.
Could we move forward afterward? Would this whole pomegranate thing keep me safe, but wind up being the very thing that destroyed a relationship with someone who could possibly be the love of my life?
I turned the pomegranate over in my hands. “Did you have kids together? You and Persephone?”
“No. She wanted children. I did too, but somehow I must have known our marriage wouldn’t last because I told her I wanted to wait.”
Sheesh, we hadn’t even kissed and here we were talking about marriage and children. I wasn’t even sure how I felt about having kids, let alone whether or not I wanted to have them with Hades. I liked children. I got the impression Hades would be an amazing father. And I wanted to do all the things my mother hadn’t done—I wanted to raise my kids like Cassie had raised me.
If I had them, that is.
I set the pomegranate back down on the table. “Let’s go over the steps here. Tell me how the fruit-wedding token combo works.”
“We say our vows and exchange tokens. In the human tradition, it’s rings, so I assume that’s what you’d want.” He eyed me worriedly. “Then you eat the pomegranate—”
“The whole thing?” I wrinkled my nose, thinking the rind, or shell, or whatever the hell it was called was going to be kinda difficult to choke down.
“Just the seeds. So you eat it, and we’re linked. Married, actually. But it doesn’t have to be forever. When you get back from dealing with the elf queen, just put my token on my doorstep—”
“Is there a better, less insulting way to annul our marriage?” I asked. “I’m not going to just dump the ring on your doorstep and walk away. I mean, first I don’t even know where your doorstep is or how to get there. Secondly, that’s rude as shit. I like you. I want to explore this thing with you and see if it turns into love, into something permanent. I might end up wanting that ring back one day, and ending our temporary marriage the same way your ex-wife left you doesn’t feel like something that would lead to a possible future together.”
His whole body relaxed and he blew out a breath. I knew this had been hard for him, but I hadn’t realized that he was just as terrified of this whole thing as I was.
“I don’t want it to feel like I’m rejecting you,” I said softly. “I just want to be able to take about a hundred steps back in our relationship, so we can take our time getting there. So we’re sure. So we enjoy the romance and the journey. I appreciate you offering to do this for me. If I say yes to the fruit and the marriage, I don’t want it to dredge up any more bad memories and parallels with your ex-wife than absolutely necessary.”
He smiled. “I appreciate that. And yes, you can just give the marriage token back to me when you return.”
Why hadn’t he told me that in the beginning instead of assuming I was just going to toss it at his door and run off? The fact that he’d immediately made that leap let me know that Hades really did carry some baggage about his ex-wife. Which was okay. I had baggage, too. Together we’d work through this. Slowly.
And now that we understood each other’s intentions and fears, it was time to lighten this up a bit.
“I’ll have you know my sisters are going to kill me if they find out I got married without them,” I teased. “If we ever do this for real, I’m going to need a white dress, and a huge ceremony in Accident—probably catered by Glenda. I’ll ask her to make a pomegranate wedding cake.”
His gaze met mine, and my heart lurched at the tentative hope in his eyes.
“White might not be the best choice of colors if the wedding ceremony is going to involve the messy eating of a bright red fruit,” he commented. “Maybe you should change tradition and be married in black, or wine-red. Or you could always wear a bib for the fruit-eating part of the wedding.”
I stared at him a second then burst out laughing. I’d caught a hint of dry humor from him before, but this was downright funny.
“Wedding bibs for everyone,” I pronounced. “We’ll have Eshu stand at the door and hand them out to all the guests. Unless you plan on having Eshu be your groomsman.”
