The Death King

by Jovee Winters

  Hoarsely, I said, “I could say the same to you, you know. Fight. Fix yours. Do what needs doing. As I recall, I’m not the only one dealing with this fallout.”

  She shrugged, and a look of bitter disappointment flashed through her eyes. “Yes, well, the fate of Kingdom doesn’t hinge on my toxic romance, now does it? Fix yours, Hades, because only you can.” And with those parting words, she was gone.

  My thoughts turned back to Calypso, and I cringed, stopping my thoughts in their tracks. I realized with a start that Dite was right. Much as I’d told myself I knew who Thalassa really was, I’d been trying to coax out her past.

  But I’d felt the passion of her kiss, the feel of her on me, the way she’d responded to me, and how easily we could still be together. Calypso or Thalassa, she and I were still one.

  And somehow, I would make this right.

  Thalassa

  * * *

  I sat in the deepest folds of my waters, staring with eyes that saw nothing into the vastness of time and space.

  Why had I done as I’d done? What in the bloody hell had made me think that acting out in such a manner would have been a good thing?

  My nostrils flared as I tasted the bitter, acrid tang of my waters on my tongue. It was my own emotions that caused my waters to be dead this way.

  I remembered the other life, when my waters had been full of fantastical and whimsical creations of mine, birthed from the deep-seated peace and contentment just being with him had elicited in me.

  I remembered the animals that trailed behind me as a child would its mother, content merely to be in my presence. I remembered the hippocampus I’d once called sister, and the glorious opulence of my underwater home, the castle built of a giant pearl with golden overlay, and how I’d even managed to create a type of moon and sun, even down there.

  I’d created such beauty then.

  I sighed and looked around me. There was no disturbance of either beast or man with me. No sirens.

  Seren had once sparkled with verve, but the waters here were perpetually black and empty, with no warmth at all.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, contemplating who I was and who I wanted to be.

  The drive, the need to find my heart, take back my soul blade, and conquer the realm was naught but a tiny spark in me now. An emotion that had once been so overwhelming in me was but a whimper of noise.

  I’d not laughed since my rebirth, had not understood the simple joy of spending time in the company of someone I truly liked, mostly because I’d liked no one.

  I remembered so much of the previous world—the extended family I’d built, the friends I’d made. But I’d felt no pull toward them again, no desire to reclaim that which I’d lost. And even Hades’s memories hadn’t tugged at my heartstrings enough to make me curious enough to seek him out.

  I’d been nothing but antipathy and alone with my isolated thoughts, imagining that the giant void inside of me might be filled once I became the goddess I should have always been, the powerful ruler of the pantheons, the mighty Thalassa once more.

  Then I’d felt him watching over me, day and night, not interfering, but always there. It had infuriated me at first, confused me even. I’d tried to hide from him, but one could not hide from a god. If they had a mind to find you, they always could.

  Once I’d realized that he’d only intended to look, I’d found myself wondering about him, why he did as he did, why he seemed so obsessed with spying on me.

  I hadn’t lied when I’d said it’d been easy to put two and two together. I had so many memories of Hades that I’d known he’d been someone to me in the other life. I’d seen myself kissing him in several of the memories and even noted that I’d rather enjoyed his attention and had actively sought it out.

  As my thoughts became more and more consumed by him, it was like something inside of me kept urging me to go to him, to find him, to see with my own two eyes, in person, what it was about the hermit god that should draw me so.

  Then I had seen him, and I’d suffered the very last emotions I’d expected to—rage and betrayal.

  Those emotions had made little sense to me, but they had helped feed the fuel of my fire. They made me think that I’d been right all along, and the gods of Olympus were unworthy to even be in my presence. But he’d not been like anything I’d expected. In my waking dreams of him, he’d been warm and caring, but the reality had been shockingly different.

  He’d been as cold as I. As bitter as I. And though he’d known me well enough to know that I could break him if I chose to, he’d not had the sense to fear me. He’d spoken to me as an equal, called me out on my duplicity, and had baffled me entirely.

  He left me reeling and confused, wondering if I’d been wrong all along and questioning everything I’d thought I’d known. Being in his company had opened me up in a way I’d never expected, and I found myself falling into the same trap as the other version of me had.

  It scared me that I could lose my edge so quickly. Was I doomed to become merely his wife again? With no thoughts of my own other than to please and serve him? Just what kind of relationship had we had before? Had I abdicated my divinity for him? Had I given him all of me and lost myself, my true self, in the process?

  All I remembered was the sense of being stupidly content, like a meek little puppet who could not think or reason for itself, doing only as its master commanded.

  That was a fate worse than death for me. I did not want to be unequally yoked to another, so addlepated in the head that I actually thought myself happy when, in truth, I was just a weak caricature of the woman I’d once been.

  Just who had Hades been to me, really? But more than that, what had I actually been to him?

  I knew the legend of him and Persephone, how he’d tricked her into becoming his bride in the Underworld, stealing her away from Demeter and making the poor child believe, after a time, that she’d actually fallen in love with her trickster husband.

  There was a name for that kind of a romance. It was called Stockholm syndrome, and it was as unhealthy as Tartarus. It didn’t matter how real the emotions felt to the captive. The truth was that their captor had manipulated and tricked those feelings of fealty and devotion out of them. They had no more free will in what they did than a slave. They simply didn’t know it.

  I could not imagine a more destructive and volatile union than that. The stories of Persephone and Hades seemed like a fable though, a tall tale, because though the stories of them existed, I could not actually think of a moment when they’d truly been together.

  I swallowed hard and dropped my chin to my chest, feeling the movement of water that was my body expanding and flexing through the deepest canyons and ravines, scraping against rock, and rolling with the swirling tides. I might have no one for me down here, but at least I was free. At least I was still me.

  “Thalassa, if you are there, please come out. It is Hades, and I wish to speak with you.”

  I’d have recognized the deep, shivery timbre of his voice even without his formal introduction, and I debated what to do. My pulse stirred, causing the waters to roll harder and swifter, creating rushing currents that moved me every which way.

  Why had he come for me? Hadn’t he understood that my intentions were not simply to run away, but to get away from him permanently?

  No, no. I would not go to him. Whatever he’d been doing to me up there, it had to end now. I could not bear for him to pluck any more emotion out of me. It made me feel sick and desperate and filled my bones with longing so fierce that I thought I might even die from it.

  I shuddered and squeezed my eyes shut. “Go away, Death,” I whispered, voice raw and broken.

  My words rolled through the tides, but I knew he’d heard them because I heard his deep and sonorous sigh. Despite my earlier protestations, I found myself fighting an internal war.

  I desperately wanted to rise up to the surface and go to him. Despite all my internal warnings not to be, I was drawn to the darkly handsome
god, even now, even knowing just how dangerous being with him was to my equilibrium and piece of mind.

  I felt his warmth pulse through the waters. He’d reached his hand inside of me just as he had the previous night, and I gasped, experiencing that same fiery sensation of touch and wonder and desire curl like flame all the way through me.

  I shuddered and bit down on my tongue,

  “Why do you hide from me? I would never hurt you.”

  I snorted. That was what everyone said until, of course, they hurt you. I might be reborn, but I wasn’t stupid.

  After several long minutes during which neither of us said a word, he finally spoke. “Okay, Thalassa. I suppose that if you’re going to stay here for an eternity, then I must settle in, too, because I’m not going anywhere.”

  Glowering, I felt the rise in my water’s internal temperatures, causing the surface of it to bubble and steam.

  His responding low chuckle, full of humor, set me off, and without stopping to think through what I was doing, I shot to the surface with the swiftness of a mako shark. I solidified into something resembling a mortal and planted my fists on my hips.

  “Leave,” I said, voice low and deep, unflinching in my desires that he should do as I bid.

  He was sitting on the edge of the canyon, one knee lifted before him. He was no longer dressed in the black, stifling armor he’d forced himself to wear on our initial trek through the forests. Now he wore a pale dove-gray shirt that opened at the neck, exposing the olive complexion of his firm skin and his clearly defined chest

  I’d known that he was a big man, but seeing him now, wearing nothing but a loose shirt and dark trousers with no shoes on at all, he looked somehow… more. Bigger. Stronger. More handsome.

  I swallowed hard, temporarily stunned by the sheer masculinity oozing from off him. Without the severe steel encasing his body, he seemed infinitely more approachable and yet, oddly enough, far more daunting and sinister.

  He wore an easy grin, and his dark-blue eyes glittered with starlight. “I’m not going anywhere, Thalassa.”

  I gritted my teeth and my nostrils flared as I tried to regroup, get my edge back, find that anger again.

  But all I felt right now was a quivering in my stomach and a strange fluttering that traveled all the way through me and even made my toes tingle.

  “You’re a bastard, Hades, and I no longer wish to play this game with you,” I said, voice far more tremulous than I’d intended it to be. I wanted to lash out at him and hurt him as badly as I now felt that hurt, but instead, I was weak and stupid, and I needed him to go away. “Please.” I squeezed the one word out just as I slammed my eyes shut, not wanting him to witness whatever it was that was happening to me.

  I was so mortified by these feelings coursing through me.

  Pain.

  Anger.

  But mostly, I felt so bloody alone all the time. Except when I was with him. However, one thing had become very clear to me. I might be with him, but he was with her.

  I was so lost to the anguish in my head that I’d not heard him near until his hand was framing my jaw. I sucked in a sharp breath, and my teeth turned to fangs that wanted nothing more than to tear into his flesh and make him feel just a tenth of the agony that I did.

  “Don’t you want your heart back?”

  I gulped, hating that I loved his touch as I did, hating that it made my body burn with desperate feelings, shameful ones for a virgin goddess. I suddenly understood my previous self more than I cared to admit. I knew why she’d turned as she had, why she’d forsaken all that she was for this man alone.

  He’d placed a spell on me then, and he was trying his hardest to place one on me now. I clenched my jaw, nostrils flaring as my fingers curled and unfurled, nails turned to deadly curved claws that could eviscerate a man just for staring at me wrong if I wished to.

  I was one part agony and one part loathing. But I didn’t know if it was him that I hated or myself. I shook, fighting that stupid lump in my throat. “A goddess does not cry. She does not feel. She is cold. She is—”

  “Oh, my dark queen,” he murmured tenderly.

  I jerked, spasming in his clutch, loathe to admit just what his words did to me, how they tortured me and made me want and burn and need with a recklessness that stole my breath.

  “Leave me, Hades,” I pleaded one last time, voice little more than a reed of sound, thin and fragile. I was exposing myself to a man I barely knew. But that was a lie because from the moment that he’d come back into my world, everything had been upended, and the memories that’d meant so little to me before were now pounding away at me like one of Cyclops’s massive fists. I shook.

  “Look at me, woman,” he said in that deeply accented voice of his that never failed to turn my knees weak.

  So I did because he was the enchanter, and somehow, this lesser being, this lesser god, had a hold over me that was inexplicable and very, very dangerous.

  His eyes were dark, looking almost like a twilight blue, and filled with the starlight from the heavens. His gaze was piercing, looking not just at me, but through to my soul.

  I trembled almost violently in his grasp. “What have you done to me?” I whispered.

  I told you who he was to me… to us. That ghostly voice of my past was almost smug in her arrogant triumph over me.

  All my plans, all my desires from just a few days ago were burning away to dust every second that I spent in this lesser male’s company, and I hated him for it. Hated. Him.

  With a swiftness of rage that I’d never seen coming, I shoved those claws of mine through the sides of his stomach, making him heave and gasp and seize up as he stared at me with a look that was at once betrayed but also knowing.

  It was not a killing blow. I’d never intended it to be. But I was angry, and I didn’t know why.

  The tears were flowing down my face, and I was screaming words I’d had no intention of saying.

  “I am dead inside. Dead! In constant torture and agony. I’m all alone in those dark waters, and I hate it! I hate you. I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! I hate you all!”

  My words ended on a pitiful wail as his darkly handsome face was blurred from my vision. I felt his hands gently wrap themselves around my wrists. I could have fought him, could have clawed my way in even deeper. But the anger was giving way to something else, and instead, I found myself yanking my hands out and dropping to my knees.

  Covering my face with hands that smelled of his dark essence still, I murmured, “I am so very wrong, Hades. So very wrong. Something has happened to me, something I cannot explain. I… I can’t… I can’t be this anymore.”

  I’d had no intention of laying myself open to him in this way, had no intention of saying these mortifying, truthful words that made me burn with shame. But out they’d come anyway, and I fully expected him to leave me then.

  It was probably why I’d stabbed him, to make him feel my darkness, to make him see how terribly bad and wrong I was for him. Whatever he’d hoped to find in me, it wasn’t there anymore. That woman he’d once loved wasn’t me. Maybe she’d been better, but I was not. I was a monster.

  “I’m not a good person,” I murmured weakly, shoulders heaving violently from my tears, which were turning these woods from a forest into a sprawling lake bed full of glimmering blue-green waters.

  But he did not abandon me as I’d expected him to. As I’d almost hoped he would.

  Instead, his hands were on my face. “Look at me, female, and so help me, if you stab me again, I will do terrible, violent things to you. So play nice, Thalassa.”

  I almost chuckled to hear him threaten me in that way because “terrible” and “violent” were two words that thrilled me to my soul.

  Pulling together whatever dregs of humanity I still had left to me, I looked up at him. His jaw was clenched tight, and his dark eyes, with which I found myself becoming more and more obsessed, were narrowed into slits of barely leashed rage. They sparked wit
h flames of blue, and if I hadn’t already been kneeling, I knew my legs would have given out from under me.

  I pressed a fist to my stomach, wanting so badly to apologize to him for what I’d done, feeling suddenly and very terribly ashamed of my actions. I still wished to destroy all of the glittering, golden ones, and yet Hades was no longer one of them in my mind. He was outside that realm of debauched and debased lesser gods, and that was absolutely chilling to me.

  I knew that history was about to repeat itself for me, and unless I left immediately, I would be absolutely lost to his dark spell again. I would lose myself all over again. I would become weak. I would become that other creature once more. I wasn’t sure I wanted that, but a part of me wasn’t sure I didn’t, either.

  My jaw trembled, and he growled, making my blood sing, making my soul feel as though it would soar. For the first time, I began to feel the breadth and movement of life begin to sparkle within my waters.

  I gasped, blinking, staring at him and wondering what in the devil he’d done to me to turn my magick as he had. Whatever life I’d managed to create before had been dark and deadly. But what I felt being birthed now was light and beauty, creatures with fins of glittering jewels and gold. My waters were pulsing, breathing, and I was so stunned that I could only stare at him.

  “Who are you?” I heard myself asking, feeling outside of myself somehow.

  At that, he finally spoke. “I never lied to you.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not possible.”

  “Dammit all, Thalassa!” He snatched up my wrists in his impossibly powerful grip, and I trembled, but not from pain.