Page 67 of The Catacomb King
I tried to tell myself that after all, I had always wanted to get away from Limer. To see something different. To be someone special.
And I had done that. For one precious moment, when I’d moved through the pipe-shaft in Hades’s arms and breathed the mist from the white waterfall, I had been someone special. I had done something that no one else could do. How ridiculous of me, how hubristic, to expect to keep going after that.
Besides, death came for all of us in time. It had come for my father when he was only in his thirties, as hale a farmhand as you ever met. It was better for me to go out like this than like that. Better to be sacrificed to a hungry god, under the hands of a handsome prince, than to shrivel in my little village, coughing up blood, while everyone I loved left me behind.
At least this way, I got to do the leaving.
Without looking at him, I asked Hades, “How many hours are left until the end of the third day?”
“Six,” Hades said.
“That’s enough time,” I said. “We’ll finish the pipeline. You’ll sacrifice me to the Monarch.” My voice broke. I almost stopped talking, abruptly on the verge of tears. But I plowed ahead. “You will uphold your end of our bargain. You will extend the pipeline to Limer. You will get water to my people and my mother.” It wasn’t a question.
I could feel Hades’s stillness beside me.
Eventually, he asked throatily, “Is that what you want to do?”
No! I want to live!I almost screamed. But I swallowed and said flatly, “Yes.”
“Because I didn’t only bring you up here so you could see the sky,” he said. “I thought… I thought that, before it… happens… you might like to see your mother.”
Now it was my turn to fall still.
“There’s just enough time. Three hours there, and three hours back.”
I couldn’t answer.
“I would take you,” Hades offered quietly. “If you wanted to go.”
Of course I fucking wanted to go. I wanted to touch her face. I wanted to tell her I hadn’t left her. That I had always done my best. That I loved her. That I would die for her.
That I was about to, in fact.
But the only way my best would be good enough was if I stayed in the underworld.
“No,” I said, ignoring the way my chest hurt. “No. There’s no time.”
Another silence.
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” Hades said. His hand was still tangled in my dress. He turned to me and fisted his other hand in the fabric so that both his hands pressed against my thighs through the silk. I swallowed. I said tartly,
“And you hope you never do again, I’m sure.”
“I don’t think I could,” Hades said. He sounded vaguely dazed at this, almost annoyed. “I don’t think thereisanyone else like you, Persephone.”
“That’s enough.” I couldn’t do this right now. I was about to die. I couldn’t have his lips so close, his eyes so wide, his breath ghosting my skin like it had in front of the waterfall when he’d kissed me. Kissed me. Kissed me.
He was saying, “Did Elke tell you how long we live? We godlings typically live to be something like five hundred years old. I am very, very young.”
“And you act it.”
“But that means I will live another four hundred and seventy-four years, and I will never meet a woman who can compare to you. You possess a strength that my people do not know. A curiosity, a cleverness, an intelligence.”
“For gods’ sake, Hades —”
“But that’s the least of it. You aregood, goddess. Don’t get me wrong, you’re also sharp — intolerably so sometimes — but you wield your sharpness in the name ofgoodness. We godlings are not evil, we’re really not, even though you humans think we are.”
“I don’t —”
