Page 91 of Persephone's Curse
Of course sometimes, rarely, a ghost wouldn’t make it to the Underworld. A ghost would get stuck behind, trapped in our world, where Melinöe could not reach them. For even though her mother spent half her year walking on our soil, Melinöe herself was eternally imprisoned below.
Did she miss them, then, these ghosts she could not reach, these souls she was forced to live without?
Yes. Yes, I think she missed them. I think she pined for them. I think she hated every moment they were forced to be apart…
The five of us sat on the floor, our witchy circle expanded.
The five of us, again:
Girl, girl, girl, girl, ghost.
As it always had been.
Henry held Evelyn’s hand in his lap.
It had been a bit of a shock.
It had been alotof a shock.
He looked…
Alive.
More alive than I had ever seen him.
When he’d come through the doorway, when he’d come through Clara’s painting, there had been a sound. A loud sound, a ripping sound. When we looked through the window, we could see that the tear in the sky had gotten bigger.
A lot bigger.
“Right,” Henry said. “We’ll deal with that in a moment.”
And he’d hugged Evelyn, who’d risen to meet him, a long hug that made me uncomfortable, unsure of where to look. And then he’d hugged me, and it was such a shock that I actually forgot to breathe for a moment, and when he pulled away I started choking, and Bernadette had to slap me on the back to get my lungs started up again.
“You touched her? You hugged her? You can touch her?” Clara had said, blinking rapidly like the light had hurt her eyes and she was still recovering, and then Henry had huggedherand then Bernadette and then we had all sat down and been mostly speechless, just processing, just trying to understand.
“How are you this solid?” I asked finally.
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “Something about the doorway?”
“How come you couldn’t follow me through?” Evelyn asked, and I saw him squeeze her hand tighter.
“I don’t know that, either,” Henry said. “But Ithinkit’s because of the tear in the sky. I sort of…fitnow. And I didn’t before.”
I couldn’t stop shivering, but I wasn’t cold.
Henry had hugged me. Henry hadtouchedme. For our entire lives, the only one he’d been able to touch was Evelyn. I felt like my brain was short-circuiting. I couldn’t even look him in the eyes, I just kept remembering how horrible I’d been when I last saw him.
“I called to you,” I said, staring at my hands in my lap, twisting a ring around and around my pointer finger. “We used the Ouija board, we left paper and pens by our bedside…”
“I heard everything,” Henry said. “The crypt, the temple, the closet… Itkilledme that I couldn’t find a way to answer.”
“No pun intended,” Clara said, and giggled at her own joke.
“Can you see it in the Underworld?” Bernadette asked. From her place on the floor, she could see out the window, and she looked out it now, up at the black mark.
“Yes,” Henry said. “It’s affecting things there, too.”
“It’s affectingus,” Clara said. “Evelyn can’t play the piano anymore. Gosh, I probably can’t paint anymore. I didn’t even think of that. Did you guys think of that?”
