Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories)

by Ringle, Molly

  He led her back through the tunnels and into the bus, and they launched upward through the cave mouth, into the bright sky. A minute or two and they were soaring over the Atlantic Ocean again.

  The morning sun reflecting off the sea dazzled Adrian’s eyes as he guided the bus. Sophie squinted too, leaning back to stay beneath the shade of the rusty roof. Despite the brightness, the speed of the wind made the ride as cold as ever, so Adrian wore his heavy coat and Sophie had rewrapped the blanket around herself.

  This time it was just the two of them for the transcontinental ride. Kiri awaited him back in the caverns, staying with Rhea, who was surely preparing further cutting remarks for him upon his return. But he barely cared. His mind whirled in a chaos of excitement and apprehension. He said nothing and waited for Sophie to speak first.

  A few kilometers off the American coast, she finally did. “Since the souls can’t touch anything, how do you get the riding gear to stick to the horses?”

  “A lot of plants from the cave have magical properties, not just the pomegranates. A couple of the right ones woven together can stick to souls.”

  “Only horse souls? Or human souls too?”

  Adrian focused on the hazy continental horizon. “Human too. If need be.”

  “You said you’d only been going there for three years. Did you learn all this in that time, or do you know it from remembering your past lives?”

  “Some of both.”

  The coast swept in beneath them, then a row of green hills, growing darker as they left the sun behind and entered the shadow of the Earth again. It was still the middle of the night where she lived.

  “The pomegranate myth,” she said. “Persephone and Hades. Does that have something to do with all this?”

  Hearing her say the names sent a thrill through him. He tensed up. “How do you mean?”

  “It’s a Greek myth. And Nikolaos is from Greece, and it looks like we crossed the Atlantic, so we might’ve been near Greece.”

  Adrian only shrugged.

  “Is there a good reason,” she demanded, “that you won’t tell me the most basic things?”

  “There is a good reason. Namely, I want you to figure it out on your own so you won’t ever think I planted the ideas in your head. Power of suggestion, and such.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to figure it out on my own?”

  He shrugged. “Eating the seeds would’ve helped.”

  Sitting back with an indignant snort, she hugged her blanket tighter. “Okay, so can you tell me this? Why send Nikolaos to get me? You’re the one who seemed to have this plan, the one who knew me from online. Why not grab me yourself?”

  “I didn’t want to be seen near you. There are dangerous people who know who I am and what I look like. Plus I wanted it done fast, but I didn’t think I could pull it off. Niko’s good at tricking people, so he volunteered to help.”

  “Even though you knew it would freak me out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And even though you knew bringing me to the cave would make that woman mad.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Who was she? Your boss or something?”

  “In a way.”

  “This is sounding like a mob kind of thing. Only paranormal.”

  Adrian pulled his smartphone from his pocket and tapped the GPS app. “There are certainly people who’d tell you we’re the bad guys.”

  “This ‘opposition’? I still don’t understand who they—what are you doing?”

  “Navigating.” Consulting the arrows and numbers on the screen, he twitched the reins and directed the horses to the northwest.

  “You need GPS to get me home?”

  Feeling sheepish, as if a real man would be able to steer by the stars and landmarks, he closed the app. “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t use it on the way to that cave.”

  “The horses can get there on their own. Spirits are like homing pigeons, and that’s home for them. But to get anywhere else, you have to navigate the old-fashioned way.”

  “Or rather, the new-fashioned way.”

  “Right.”

  As they crossed the plains and traversed the Cascades, he slowed the horses with a pull on the reins. He checked the map again. Their destination was only twelve kilometers ahead now. He slowed the horses to barely fifty kilometers an hour. The blur of dark landforms around them resolved into the silhouettes of individual trees and lighter patches of meadow. The air warmed. Beside him, Sophie let the blanket slip down around her elbows.

  Consulting the GPS, he guided the horses across a field and pulled them to a stop next to the stake. The orange flagging fluttered from its top in the breeze, catching enough light from the horses’ glow to be easily visible.

  He stepped down from the bus and looked up. The stars and planets shone so thick and bright they nearly throbbed. The air smelled of the freshness of an Earth practically untouched by humans.

  Sophie unwound the blanket and climbed out of the bus, immersed in checking her texts.

  “Anyone missed you?” he asked.

  “No. Thank goodness. I guess I’ll sneak back into the room and try not to wake up my roommate.”

  “Okay. Listen…” He waited until she looked up from her phone. “It’s serious, this business of not telling anyone.”

  Her phone’s screen dimmed automatically, the light dying from her face. “These people who are after you—are they a gang or something? And they’d really come after me?”

  “They’re not a gang so much as a…a secret society. And I don’t know exactly what they’d do. Except that they’ve already killed one of us, and tried to kill me.”

  Her breath hissed inward. “Who—why—”

  “We go against their religion, I suppose you could say. They’re scared of us. They shouldn’t be, but they are.”

  “So, wait, do they know you’re Kiwi Ade, online?”

  “I expect they do.”

  “Then why’d you go commenting openly on my posts? They could already know we know each other.” She sounded outraged, for which he couldn’t blame her.

  “That’s true. But if you pretend you don’t know what I am or anything about this realm, then they shouldn’t have any cause to bother you.”

  She sighed, glancing again at her phone. “Well, I don’t know what you are, that much is true.” She stayed quiet a few seconds. “Why was it so important to leave comments?” she echoed.

  “I wanted to connect with you.” God, did that sound lame. But he kept on. “There was no way I couldn’t reach out to you, once I…” He forced himself to stop. Even the suggestion that they’d known each other in past lives, or that his compulsion to find her had anything to do with the pomegranates, could be enough to make her doubt the validity of the memories when they started streaming into her mind. “You’re probably right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have commented. But if you knew how lonely it was, hiding out over here…”

  Now he sounded desperate and pathetic. Shut up, Adrian, just shut up.

  Sophie cleared her throat. Her voice became meticulously tactful. “I have a boyfriend. I should have mentioned. I thought you knew.”

  “No, I do know. You’ve said, on the blog. It’s fine.”

  “I came because of Grandpop, and because I was curious. But in case you thought it was a date…”

  “Well, it would be a pretty strange date, wouldn’t it.” He tried to laugh.

  She agreed with a polite laugh of her own.

  “Ready to go back, then?” he asked. “Last chance. I could whisk you away to Hawaii instead, if you’d like to sleep on a beach or something.”

  He won a smirk from her. “No, thank you.”

  “All right.” He gathered her close, letting himself breathe the sweet scent of her for a stolen second, then pulled her back into the living realm. The artificial glare of a streetlight seemed to light up the world after the dark star-studded realm of the spirits. They both swayed as the ground reshaped it
self under their feet. When they’d caught their balance, he let her go.

  She backed out of the concrete enclosure. “Thanks. It was…interesting, to say the least. But if I decide I can’t handle it again…well, I don’t know if it’s for me.”

  Oh, it’s for you. More than you know.

  Adrian nodded. “Get some sleep. You might have some interesting dreams.”

  And rather than drag out the farewells—or allow himself to say anything pathetic again—he waved goodbye and vanished into the spirit realm.

  Darkness washed down around him. His eyes adjusted, and the stars shone out again. Night birds and insects chirped in the grass and trees.

  What if the juice worked?

  Then Sophie would dream, and remember, and learn she’d been tricked. She’d be even more confused, scared, and angry than she already was. But one of the main things she would remember was him. Both of them, in living bodies and able to remember who they had been before—that hadn’t happened in thousands of years, because only lately had living people rediscovered the Underworld. He was one of the lucky souls, and he longed for Sophie to be another.

  He leaned back against the bus, and checked his messages. Zoe had left him a voice mail an hour ago; merely, “Hey, wondering if there’s any news. Ring me.”

  It was nearing midnight in New Zealand by now, but she sometimes stayed up late. She’d turn off her phone if she was asleep, so he called back.

  She answered at once, sounding anxious. “Ade! How are you?” Zoe had tended to fret about him ever since he was attacked in February. Natural reaction, when your best friend tells you he’s been shot and needs to leave the country, perhaps the living world altogether.

  “I’m good. You?”

  “Fine. Did you meet her again?”

  “Yep. It went…well, I guess.”

  “And the pomegranate?”

  “She turned it down. But I, um…” He shut his eyes. “Gave her some juice from it. She didn’t know that’s what it was, and she drank it.”

  “Adrian.”

  “I know. It was Niko’s idea. I don’t know why I listen to him.”

  “Maybe because you’re dying for her to remember you.”

  “Okay, a little.” Adrian looked out at the horizon, watching a soul streak by. “Ah, Z. When are you going to join us, eh?”

  “Not till you’ve rounded up every last crackpot and nut-job who’s trying to kill you, and killed them yourself. Or at least locked them somewhere in that cave of yours.”

  “You know that isn’t how I operate.”

  “Some god of death you are.”

  “That isn’t exactly my title, either.” He shifted his back against the cold rusty bus. “You’re probably smart to refuse. So was she. What have I done?”

  “It was only the juice, you said? Maybe it won’t work.”

  “Maybe. But if it does…when all that enters your mind, and builds up, it changes everything.”

  “Which is why I refuse.”

  “Okay, but it does change everything in a fun way, sometimes.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Yeah.” He lifted his face, and found a bright evening planet shining upon him between clouds. “But maybe now I’ll have someone to be crazy with.”

  Chapter Seven

  SOPHIE CROSSED THE QUAD QUICKLY, shivering as the breeze kicked up. Thunder rumbled in the distance, though the sky above was clear. The air smelled chilly, like dew on grass. Summer was giving way to fall, she thought, irrelevantly.

  Or maybe it wasn’t irrelevant. The myth of Persephone had been on her mind. And when Persephone was kidnapped into the Underworld, her grieving mother Demeter ranged all over the Earth looking for her, and in doing so dropped her care of the world’s growing plants. She only let spring be reborn when Persephone was freed to rejoin her. And every year, when Persephone had to return to Hades, Demeter repeated her withdrawal of fertility in the Earth.

  The myth explained the seasons. That was all Sophie had ever gotten from it as a child. Tonight Persephone’s story suggested a cavern full of other issues, deeper and grimmer.

  The smart thing to do was clear: politely say, “No, thank you” to every invitation Adrian issued from now on, and take care of her regular life, like a grown-up. That was why she’d refused to eat the pomegranate—it could have been some kind of drug, which would perpetuate her falling for this hoax, if indeed the whole thing was a hoax.

  But that spirit world seemed so real. Ignoring or forgetting it would be impossible.

  In the dorm room, Melissa breathed in quiet snores. Sophie took her pajamas and toiletries to the bathroom to change. But upon returning and climbing into bed, she only lay wide awake.

  Finally she sat up, bunching the pillow behind herself, and carefully drew her computer off the desk and onto her lap.

  She got onto her blog and looked for the comments he had left as Kiwi Ade. But she couldn’t find them—every one of them had vanished. She hadn’t deleted them, so he must have.

  Frustrated, she moved on to a search engine.

  adrian watts wellington new zealand, she typed. For good measure, she added kiri to the string.

  It popped up within the first ten hits: a news story from five years ago. A Wellington paper had run an article titled Assistance dogs go to school.

  She clicked on it, and found that it discussed various students in Wellington who used service dogs to help in their disabilities. Near the end she discovered this paragraph:

  Adrian Watts, 16, has been a paraplegic since an accident at age 5. He got his dog Kiri when he was 9, and “Life improved right away,” he says. “She picks things up for me if I drop them, helps carry my books and stuff, and opens nearly any kind of door, which can be really hard when you’re in a wheelchair. And she’s constant company. I can’t imagine life without her.”

  They included a photo: a teenage boy in a wheelchair—sure looked like Adrian, though skinnier and younger—and a dog who resembled Kiri, her paws on his lap, licking his face. If he was sixteen five years ago, he was twenty-one now, which also seemed accurate.

  Sophie re-read the article, piecing the big picture together. Clearly he wasn’t a paraplegic anymore, but it appeared he used to be.

  “Your circumstances were different. There’s nothing wrong with her life,” the woman in the red dress had said to Adrian.

  Did Adrian make some kind of magic deal, giving him superpowers and a cure for paralysis? And now perhaps he was in the crosshairs of someone dangerous because of it. But what did that have to do with past lives and pomegranates? And why was he living in the cave with the ghosts? Was that part of the deal? And again, why did he insist on bringing Sophie into it? Her blog posts couldn’t have been that fascinating.

  None of it made any sense. She needed sleep. She closed the laptop and slipped it back onto the desk. Rain began tapping on the windows. Thunder rumbled again. The wind rustled branches outside the dorm.

  She’d known her life was about to change when she arrived at college, but she hadn’t imagined it would veer straight into the surreal.

  She clearly should avoid Adrian from now on. But how could a person go on with an ordinary life after an experience like this?

  UPON ADRIAN’S RETURN, he found Rhea in the entrance cavern, sitting on a rock, running her bare foot over Kiri’s fur. The dog snoozed on the floor, next to the sandals Rhea had removed.

  Adrian climbed out, adopting an expression of humility as he tied up the horses.

  “Why would you disrupt her life that way? You know the dangers.”

  Rhea’s question was gently spoken, but he felt the seriousness of the words. He’d tussled with the quandary a long time now himself.

  He knelt beside Kiri, who lifted her head and licked his hand, her tail thumping the floor. “I wanted her to know before she got too deep into a regular life,” he said. “College, career, husband, kids. It’s better to start early if you can.”

  “You only say th
at because you started early.”

  “Maybe.” He eased down to sit upon the floor, picking grass seeds out of Kiri’s coat. “Um, I should tell you, Sophie did eat the pomegranate. Or at least drank some of the juice. I…kind of tricked her into it.”

  Rhea pulled in a long and evidently furious breath.

  Cutting in before she could expel it in the form of a tirade, he said, “Yes, it was horrible of me. But she could be an ally. She will be, I’m sure of it.”

  Rhea stood and paced barefoot to the river’s edge, hands on hips. The passing souls flashed green light upon her figure. “Does she know she’s eaten it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well. You must be rather content.”

  He didn’t dare say yes, but remained quiet, flicking aside the grass seeds and feeling the tumultuous happiness surface as a smile.

  Rhea turned and saw it. She snorted and turned her back again. “Given who she was to you, I suppose I can’t remain angry.”

  “Given who she was to us all, you could even be happy.”

  “I will be, if she doesn’t run from us in horror. And if you keep her safe.” Rhea pivoted and gave him a warning stare. “Handle her carefully. Help her see the beauty. The rightness.”

  Rightness was a word Rhea liked to use to describe their unique condition, and he understood its appeal, given that the opposition was entirely convinced of the wrongness of people like Adrian, Rhea, and Niko. Honestly, he doubted their rightness at least once a day himself. Still, for the chance to have Sophie stay around forever…

  “I’ll do my best,” he promised.

  FOUR HOURS OF sleep was really not enough, Sophie observed in the morning, stumbling along to the communal bathroom to wait her turn at the showers. Her head ached from insufficient sleep and oppressive amounts of stress, not to mention weird dreams.

  As she lathered up the soap, she reflected upon the dream she’d woken up from. In it, she had been in her thirties, married, and living in Germany in the mid-twentieth century. There was a man she felt drawn to, but he wasn’t her husband. She sat with him in a coffee shop with framed pictures of trains on the walls. They spoke German together, not that Sophie actually knew German. In the dream she did. And the man, though he didn’t look a whole lot like Adrian except around the eyes, seemed to be Adrian nonetheless. The only thing that made sense was that she’d be thinking of him in her dreams, given he was the man who “kidnapped” her last night.