by Molly Ringle
She stood back from it a while in her mind’s eye, regarding it with wonder. Compared to her other lifetimes, longevity and power beamed from this one; it felt like the sun compared to distant stars. The prospect of opening it up daunted her. But perhaps it held the guidance she needed. She pulled the tome close in her mind and opened Hekate’s life at the beginning.
The velvety darkness of the cave was Hekate’s earliest memory, accompanied by her parents’ affectionate voices and their hands holding hers, and the soft glow of souls—human, dog, horse, cat—illuminating the flowers in the fields.
Kerberos, the sleek brown immortal dog, was her sibling and playmate and protector. He followed her everywhere and slept on her bed. The smell of dog breath and the warmth of his tongue licking her skin formed a permanent part of Hekate’s childhood. One day she fell in the river, and before her parents had time to do anything other than shriek, Kerberos leaped in, caught her by the back of her neck in his jaws, gently but securely, and swam with her to the bank.
She grew up around ghosts, people who had died. Her presence delighted them. She gathered it was a special treat for them to see a living child. She learned their language along with the upper-world tongue her parents frequently spoke, picking up both easily.
Pomegranates grew in the orchard, and they would have made her learn all kinds of other languages, but her mother and father wouldn’t let her eat them.
“Not until you’re older,” her mother said. “No one’s ever been down here so young before—not while they’re alive, I mean—and we don’t know whether it’s a good idea for you to bring those memories into your brain yet.”
Indeed, she was forbidden to eat any of the fruits or plants that grew in her mother’s Underworld gardens. Her parents brought all Hekate’s food down from the upper world. For, in addition to being a child, Hekate was mortal.
“We knew it as soon as you got your first fever as a baby,” her mother told her several times. “It’s what we expected. I was mortal too as a child, even though both my parents were immortal.” Still, she always sounded worried when she said it.
“But you’ll make me immortal when I’m bigger?” Hekate asked.
“Of course we want to, but we must make sure it’s all right with everyone else.” Her mother smiled and kissed Hekate. “So be nice to your aunts and uncles.”
Of immortal aunts and uncles she had many, whom she saw now and again.
The immortals had established the ritual of meeting twice a year, at winter and summer solstice at the palace of Zeus and Hera, to nominate new initiates. Hekate usually didn’t get to come along, and was left with a trusted mortal woman who had assisted her grandmother Demeter for several years, but she heard about the results of the voting afterward. The immortals had become cautious about awarding those white stones. It was no light matter, making someone live forever. It led to lots of arguments among Hekate’s uncles and aunts. There was, for example, a man named Adonis whom aunt Aphrodite put forth a couple of times, and he kept getting voted down and making her angry at everyone.
But some candidates did get voted into the lucky group over the years. As she grew up she met several new ones: a man named Helios, a woman named Eos, two hardworking brothers named Prometheus and Epimetheus, a son of Aphrodite’s named Eros—whom most people hadn’t known existed until she brought him forward, all grown up—a son of Hermes named Pan (similarly unexpected by everyone), and a group of artistically talented women whose number gradually grew to nine. Hekate had trouble keeping their names straight, but they tended to be referred to in a group as the Muses anyway.
When everyone asked Hermes in curiosity where this son had come from, he blithely said, “A goat-herder’s daughter, whose clan lives so deep in the mountains in Arkadia that it’s a miracle I ever found them once, let alone twice. His existence was a surprise to me—I didn’t even think she was pregnant—but he’s a delight, truly, and he’s definitely mine. Looks just like me, and nothing like the rest of the clan. And you should hear him play the flute.” He shot Apollo a wicked smile. “He’s better even than you, I think, Apollo.”
Meanwhile, when Aphrodite was asked how she managed to have a grown son in another city without the others knowing, she smiled calmly and said, “In the last few months of pregnancy, loose garments and extended travel to avoid all of you. After that, wet nurses, who are easy to hire. As to his father, I’m saying nothing.”
A longer story didn’t appear likely to be got out of either of them.
Hekate’s father and mother didn’t propose any candidates. They told her she was the only one they wanted to keep forever. And in any case, they didn’t know that many mortals, as they didn’t deal with living people much, except in errands for the dead.
Hekate knew normal children didn’t grow up in the Underworld. Most of them didn’t live in caves at all; or if they did, they were caves close to the surface, where you could walk right out into the sunshine, and didn’t need a ghost horse or a rope ladder to get out. And when those cave-dwelling children did go out, they were of course in the living realm, not the spirit realm. Most of them didn’t even know the spirit realm existed, which struck Hekate as absurdly funny, equal to not knowing that wind existed, or that stars existed.
Hekate did travel to the living realm too, especially to visit her grandmother Demeter, but her parents didn’t like to take her out much. The people grasped at them and begged and sometimes shouted threats, which made her mother and father worry about Hekate’s safety. They all acted bizarre on the whole, those living people, when they saw an immortal. Hekate found them fascinating, but didn’t mind staying away from them most days.
Hekate was also different in that she sensed magic, and could bend and control it a little. More and more each year as she got older, in fact.
Her parents didn’t notice at first. When she prattled about a different “breath” or “warmth” or “tingle” or “glow” in one part of the cave or another, or during one season or moon phase or another, or while touching a certain type of plant or rock, they assumed she was being fanciful, pretending as children do. It seemed natural for an Underworld child to talk about sights and sensations rather differently than an above-ground child would.
But one day Hekate was walking with her mother through the Underworld’s gardens, and winding a green braided rope around her fingers. She was nine years old. The rope belonged to her father; he sometimes used it as a belt, but had allowed her to take it and play with it today. Thinking of him, Hekate felt a sudden reviving warmth in the rope. “Daddy’s coming back,” she said.
Her mother pushed a handful of leaves into a bag, and studied Hekate. Confusion pulled her eyebrows together. “Yes, he is. But you can’t sense people. Can you?”
“Not the way immortals can. I only knew because the rope told me. Since it’s a piece of his clothing.” It made perfect sense to Hekate.
Her mother only looked more puzzled. “I’ve heard of witches using such tricks to find people. But they have to say all kinds of spells and draw shapes on the ground and such. I’ve never been sure it really worked. It might only be luck when it does.”
Hekate shrugged. “I ask the magic to help. In my head. There’s a lot of magic down here, so it’s easy. Don’t you and Daddy do that?”
Persephone shook her head, and rubbed the leaves of a nearby olive tree between her fingers. “The magic we use is of a different sort. We don’t feel it like that. We only see what it does when the plants contain it, after people eat them or use them.”
“But you do use it,” Hekate said. “When you switch realms. I can sense the wall—the gate sort of, the thing between this realm and the other—but I’m not perfect enough to get through it.”
“Perfect enough?”
“Yes, immortals get through because their bodies are strong and perfect,” Hekate said, impatient with her mother for not understanding something so obvious. “That’s why I want to be immortal. One of a thousand reasons.”
Her father arrived in the garden then, and called to them across the rows of plants. Persephone caught him up on this odd conversation. He frowned at his daughter, and they ended up spending the rest of the day testing Hekate’s claims of finding people by holding one of their possessions and thinking of them. It worked fine when Hekate was in the Underworld, no matter where the person was, this realm or the other. It even worked fairly well, but with less certainty, when she was in the upper world. Her parents looked at each other inscrutably.
Hekate guessed her ability worried them. “It won’t harm me,” she said, exasperated. “The Earth knows we’re helping lots of people every day. The magic won’t hurt us if we don’t use it to hurt anyone else. If we did, it would bounce back onto us, like if you threw a rock at a stone wall in front of your face. That would be stupid, wouldn’t it.”
Again her parents only stared at her in concern and astonishment, rather than agreeing with the obviously logical statement she had just made.
Another day, not long after that, she wandered up while her father and mother were talking about the caves of punishment. Hekate had seen those deep flame-lit caverns only once, and then only because she snuck down there without permission, with only Kerberos as company.
“But when I do want to find someone down there,” her father was saying, “how can I? The souls can’t speak to each other, each confined alone the way they are. No one knows where anyone else is.”
“And walking along the cells, asking each one their name…” Persephone shuddered at the idea of the unpleasant, interminable task.
“Ask the cave to help you,” Hekate told them.
They both turned and directed their sternest expressions at her. “Tartaros is no place for children,” her father said.
“Even the cave knows that,” her mother said. “Children’s souls are never down there.”
“But if you want to find someone, ask the cave,” Hekate said. “Obviously the Fates are there, and listening.”
Hades narrowed his eyes at her. “You haven’t been down there again lately, have you?”
“No, just the one time, when you made me come back up. But the way the flames come on for you in the tunnel, and how the vines grow themselves and trap the souls—and how the souls have to go down there if they’ve been evil even though they don’t want to go—it’s all someone working magic. Spirits or Fates or something.”
Her mother’s olive-tan skin looked paler now as she regarded Hekate. She darted a glance at Hades, who was thinking with his frown cast toward the grass, then asked her daughter, “What do you think we should say to find someone?”
Hekate shrugged. “Take me down again. I’ll figure it out.”
She got her way after a bit more arguing. Soon they were descending the close, low tunnel, following flame after flame in the stuffy air.
They entered the stone arch to the chamber where the cave held the souls.
“Now what?” Her father folded his arms, his cloak wrapped around him as if to shelter him against the atmosphere of the place, though it was stiflingly warm.
“Who do you want to find?” Hekate asked.
Hades and Persephone exchanged another doubtful glance, but he finally answered, “Well, a husband and wife were found dead in Zakro, on Crete. It’s been stirring up a lot of worry because no one’s sure if they killed each other, or if it was a murder-suicide, or if someone else did it and escaped. I can’t find them in the fields, so I suspect they’re both down here and guilty of something. If I could bring an answer back to their neighbors, it would calm everyone down.”
As she listened, Hekate trailed her hand along the stone arch’s bumps and divots. She cupped her palm near a flame shooting out of the wall, as close as she could bring it without burning her skin. “What are their names?” she asked.
“Nopina and Drakokardos.”
Hekate studied the chamber and what was visible of the tunnels. Flame and the specially twined vines—those were the living hallmarks of Tartaros. Best use those. She picked up a long scrap of willow-and-ivy rope that lay on the ground, and lit its end in the wall’s flame, like a torch. “Fates who guard these souls,” she said in the Underworld tongue, watching the flame she held, “guide us to the souls we seek: Nopina and Drakokardos, wife and husband recently dead, of Zakro on Crete.”
“Hekate,” Hades began, “I don’t know if the cave knows or cares where Zakro on Crete is—” But he stopped, for a new flame burst forth with a whoosh.
They all looked toward the sound. The flame had emerged in the wall of one of the tunnels. Satisfied, Hekate dropped the makeshift torch, stamped out the fire under her sandal, and walked toward the tunnel.
It worked exactly as she knew it would. The flames led them to the separately confined souls of the wife and husband. Her parents stared at Hekate in wonder, almost forgetting to question the couple until Hekate reminded them.
The pair, it turned out, were guilty of two other murders together, before the husband killed the wife and then himself. Hades took the news back to Crete, settling the questions surrounding the deaths.
And Hekate continued to grow in her understanding of magic and how to use it, though every day she wished she were immortal so she could handle the magic even better. Her parents often brought her along on their errands to the living world, and made sure she impressed her immortal aunts and uncles with her insights. But everyone still held out on giving her the fruit of immortality—and still wouldn’t tell her which tree it was—because they feared the fruit might freeze her in her child state, and therefore it was best to wait till she was older.
Then the plague came.
Chapter Nineteen
Sophie stepped out of the bus into the warm, flower-filled meadow. Blue mountains with snowy peaks stretched to the sky in front of her. The harbor lay behind her, its seawater-scented breeze sweeping inland and making the wildflowers bob their heads. A bird trilled a song from somewhere in a tree covered with fuzzy red blossoms.
The beauty moved her to extreme remorse. She turned to Adrian. “Oh God, I’m sorry! I’ve been making you hang out in boring corners of Oregon and Washington when your home looks like this.”
He grinned as he wrapped the horses’ reins around a tree with a palm-like frilly canopy. “No worries. Your Northwest is pretty too.”
“You’re just being nice. It isn’t like this.”
“It’s spring here. Everything looks better in spring.” He came over and latched his arm around her. “Shall we fetch her?”
Sophie nodded, her heart speeding up in nervousness.
Adrian sent Zoe a text, and said a minute later, “She sensed us. She’s on her way.”
Sophie regulated her breathing to normal, and nibbled her lower lip, which was sticky with lip gloss. She’d made greater effort than usual with her appearance today: makeup, hair products, a skirt and cute sandals instead of her usual jeans and sneakers. But it felt inappropriate now to have dressed up, even while it would have felt inadequate to have dressed down. How did you prepare for meeting your child? That is, the child you had in previous lives?
The wind rippled the meadow grass, then a young woman flickered into view and walked toward them. She was tall, almost six feet—taller even than Adrian—with strong bones framing a lanky body. Supermodel makings, Sophie thought, except Zoe came across as fully natural, with none of the artifice of a fashion model. She wore no makeup, and had short, light brown hair, unruly from neglect, it appeared, rather than by design. Her gray T-shirt and army-green cargo capris were well worn, as were the black high-tops on her feet. Her only jewelry was an ear cuff that glinted silver in the sun.
She and Adrian hugged as they met, then Zoe turned her alert brown eyes to Sophie.
“Hey,” Sophie said, suddenly shy.
“Hey.” Zoe’s smile reflected the shyness, and she swung her arms awkwardly.
Should they hug? Sophie thought in a panic. Instead, she tried an explanation, though a t
otally unnecessary one, on topics they’d already covered in texts. “I’m finally remembering you—Hekate, I mean—and I wanted to see you, and New Zealand, and—and maybe Adrian’s dad if we can arrange it, so…”
“Yeah, of course, I’ll help with that. Can bring him to you if you like.” Zoe had the same accent as Adrian, the Kiwi vowels twisting upward so half of them were like the “i” in “is.” Sophie had tried to hear it in her mind, but Hekate’s voice kept overriding it: the childlike tones, and the accent that sounded no different than Persephone’s own.
“So you’re—you know, remembering stuff now too?” Sophie asked.
Zoe nodded, stuffing her hands into her pockets. “I’ve got up to about age twelve, I think. Whole new set of parents. Bit weird, isn’t it?” She sent Adrian and Sophie a crooked grin. “When we’re all the same age now.”
“You’re older than me, even,” Sophie said. Both Adrian and Zoe were twenty-one, while she was still eighteen.
“I’m glad you came.” Zoe squinted past them at the harbor. “I wanted to meet you as well. Would’ve come seen you before long, if you weren’t coming here to visit.” Her glance darted to Sophie again, the awkward smile still upon her lips.
And in that glance, like a bright light being switched on, Sophie saw Hekate looking out Zoe’s eyes; the soul of the beloved, brilliant child. Sophie laughed in amazement, her own shyness falling away. “It is so good to see you. Tell me everything. How’s it going with your folks? How are you coping?”
Zoe’s smile transformed into a frank grin, as if she were seeing Persephone at last in Sophie’s face too. “Oh, it’s been madness. Where to start?”
They strolled down the hillside as they dived into conversation. When Sophie looked aside at Adrian, who stayed quiet, she found him walking nearby with Kiri, head bowed, smiling as if perfectly happy.
“Nothing seems to be coming of our tip-offs.” Landon prodded the fire with the poker, shoving an unburned log on top of the coals.
Betty Quentin adjusted her stiff leg and settled her foot on the hearth. “On the plus side, we haven’t been found.”
