My Life From Hell

by Tellulah Darling

  I swiped at my eyes. Kai was right. Here. Now. I would fight. And later, I would fight with Kai about what he’d kept from me. But at this moment, I had a job to do. No way was Theo’s … absence going to be for nothing.

  Absence. I didn’t even want to think the other word. It made my insides twist as if Demeter was killing me a billion times over. I swear I felt bits of my heart breaking off and hitting the ground. I could hear the hollow thunks.

  “Sophie!” Kai yelled. He stood, tense, in position next to Festos.

  I blew a kiss toward the last place I’d seen Theo alive. And vowed that everyone who had brought this about would pay. Then I looked at Festos and nodded. “Do it.”

  Festos spoke the words and brought our ward down.

  I raised my face to the sky, feeling the wind on my cheeks as the minions swarmed to the attack. The war had begun.

  Now. Persephone’s voice swirled in my head. This time, I let her have her way. I mentally removed every block, every civilized impulse I had, and unleashed my full furious power.

  Kai and I fell into a pattern. I blasted shockwave after shockwave, clearing the sky momentarily with each discharge. But in seconds more came back. That’s what happens with an endless supply of minions.

  My ears rang with each explosion, until I felt like I existed inside of an endlessly ringing bell.

  Kai handled the minions that got too close to Festos. He was Fee’s personal bodyguard, keeping him safe while he chanted the cleansing ritual.

  I could see Fee’s body trembling with grief, but he kept going. And if he could, then I could too. His determination in the face of such insane loss, recharged me just as much as the magic ring on my finger.

  I fired again and again, staying rooted to the spot, and forcing extra power from deep within the earth. I wiggled my bare feet into the dirt, digging my toes in deeper.

  At least it didn’t stay dark. Between fireballs, lightning strikes, my shockwaves and Kai’s black light, it was quite the dazzling illumination.

  My eyes closed. I didn’t need to see the Photokia and Pyrosim to know where they were. I could sense them, millions and millions, swarming me. More than I could count. More than I could process.

  It was a plague of minions. The world was so thick with them that I was amazed there was still room for air. Their fireballs burned my skin and sparked my hair. Their lightning arced through my body.

  The air was heat and smoke and burning destruction. Every particle glided over my skin in electric vibrations that shocked the tiny hairs on my arms. Black ash rained down, covering me in a blanket of soot. I took it all in and used it. Turned it around and sent it back with every shockwave I fired.

  I felt untouchable. Even with all the hits I was taking, my healing abilities kept up pretty well. I had never been more a goddess, more every-inch powerful, than in this moment. I felt Persephone settle into my skin, connect to me in a way that had never happened before. For this moment, at least, we were in perfect synch. We were the vanquishers and our enemies would go down tasting our wrath.

  Until I heard the laughter. The mocking from my vision. It rolled through me with such contempt that I could taste it. My eyes shot open and flicked to Kai. I wanted to know if he heard it, too. But there was no way to ask over the roar of noise. Over the ringing in my ears.

  He understood though. He nodded and tilted his head up.

  Zeus and Hades had arrived. They landed on the ground with perfect grace, about twenty feet away. I’d seen them both in their towering god forms, but this was different. For all the times when I’d confronted them and mouthed off to them and mocked them? There was nothing vaguely amusing about either of them now.

  I shivered. A splinter of doubt wedged its way into my heart. I may have been a goddess, but they were truly the lords of all gods.

  They weren’t even angry. It was as if we were as much beneath their notice as ants. Suddenly I knew where the laughter—in my vision and in real life—had come from. We amused them. Kai and I. Their silly children throwing a temper tantrum. Zeus and Hades looked at us with exasperation and resignation. Like our fun was over now. It was time for the grown-ups to dole out the punishment.

  I wondered how I had ever been deluded enough to think myself equal to them.

  Except …

  Since our punishment was death—ours and all humans—so that the gods could freely roam, I wasn’t going to roll over and accept whatever they intended to dish out. I sidled over to Kai and Festos, still blasting away at the minions. The magic ring may have been recharging me but using so much power made me feel wonky. Light-headed.

  My human form strained to contain my power. My limbs trembled. My skin felt tight, stretched to its limit and ready to tear. My light wanted to break free, unhindered by my puny mortal body.

  I was burning up. Sweat streamed down the back of my neck and under the elastic of my bra. My hair was plastered in limp, damp strands. Moss green spots danced in front of my eyes. More and more with every shockwave I fired.

  I stumbled, anxious that my power would kill me before the gods did. We’d been so happy that Festos had found a way to recharge me, that we hadn’t stopped to consider whether or not I could handle a continuous re-up. Whether perhaps the reason I had to rest between blasts was because my body couldn’t take it.

  If this were a video game, my life bar would have been blinking red. And I’d be ignoring it. Voluntarily shortening my life span to keep firing at the minions. Keep trying to save the world.

  I burrowed my feet deeper into the earth and looked over at the guys. Festos had finished the cleansing, which meant that Kai and I were good to go. Seconds, Soph. Hang on a few more.

  My head cleared enough to hear Kai yelling at Fee to leave. Festos shook his head and Kai grabbed him by the shoulders. “Go!”

  Fee took in the situation. He knew that it was down to Kai and me. And despite all his power, his presence was now a distraction we couldn’t afford. He looked at me with dull eyes and I forced myself to nod. As much as I wanted him here, not to fight but to comfort, I couldn’t lose him, too. One more reason to wrap this up as fast as possible. Fee and I were going to need each other tonight.

  He understood. Blowing me a sad kiss, he disappeared.

  Kai took my hand. Resolve flowed through me. Let Hades and Zeus do their worst. Kai and I had love on our side and we would win. We’d make the minions ours, turn them on our fathers, seize their power, and save humanity from destruction.

  It would all be over.

  Kai threw up a shield of black light as we stepped onto the ritual location. I stayed on alert, ready to keep blasting even as I spoke. Between us, we’d deal with whatever they threw our way.

  It was a good thought. In theory. Thing was, they didn’t throw anything at us. Instead, Zeus and Hades began to chant. The wind picked up and the air grew cold. But beyond that, not much happened.

  A wide smile broke across Kai’s face. “They’re trying to start the apocalypse. One above and one below. But it’s not working.”

  I felt hope blossom within me. Zeus and Hades chanted more insistently, their faces clouded, turning splotchy with anger. I could have danced. The big top gods were achieving squat. Kai and I were going to win. I knew it. I felt it.

  I squeezed Kai’s hand, turned to face him, and spoke the first line of our ritual. “Katabaino.”

  “Anabaino,” he replied.

  Zeus roared and fired a thunderbolt that burst Kai’s shield into thousands of fragments of toxic light. It knocked us to the ground, our momentum rolling us away from my father’s next killing blow.

  A staff appeared in Hades’ hand. He struck the ground twice. Jagged cracks opened up in the earth, sucking everything into their depths.

  We got to our feet, hands still clasped, and ran. Forget staying in place to do the ritual. Our lives depended on outdistancing the earth that came toward us like a wave. I prayed that saying the words in the general vicinity would be enough.

>   “Di’erota, sthenos gignetai,” we chanted.

  The ground disappeared from beneath Kai’s feet. He stumbled and went down.

  Ironically, it was only the shockwave coming off Pops’ next lightning strike that kept me from falling into the hole as well. It hit and hurled me sideways. The mocking laughter started again.

  Kai. I had to get to Kai. The total and absolute terror of him not by my side, of losing him while my vision unfolded before me, gave me the jolt of adrenaline I needed to keep moving.

  Dazed and bleeding, I crawled to the lip of the hole on my belly. Nothing else mattered in that moment. Nothing but Kai. Without him, there could be no victory. I didn’t care that the minions continued to swarm me with their deadly assault. I fired another shockwave. almost carelessly, clearing the skies for another moment. But I wasn’t re-charged with the same level of light.

  Festos’ magic ring was running out of power.

  A shadow fell over me. Zeus raised his thunderbolt …

  … and missed as Kai shot out of the hole to physically tackle my father out of the way.

  It bought us precious seconds. Our eyes locked and in perfect unison we chanted the last line of the ritual. “Di’erota, menos gignetai.”

  The world went still. The minions hadn’t returned. I think that Zeus and Hades were too shocked that we’d completed the ritual to do anything. We all stood frozen, waiting to see what would happen.

  The ground beneath me bucked with a force no Richter scale could measure. Kai and I couldn’t get to our feet. The world shuddered so violently that we were flung around like rag dolls.

  I couldn’t understand what had happened. We’d done it. We’d said the ritual. We’d stopped Hades and Zeus.

  Hadn’t we?

  A roar split my eardrums. It wasn’t just loud. It was all-consuming. The noise slithered into me and punched me from the inside.

  My eyes bulged at a tsunami of water rushing toward us. So much that I wondered how there could be any left in the ocean. It was one atrocity too many. My mind snapped and I stared, hypnotized.

  Stumbling to his feet, Kai scooped me up and jumped a hundred feet out of the torrent’s wake. Another jump. More distance.

  With each leap, my bones jarred and my teeth rattled. But it snapped me back to attention. I gaped as Kai kept us heartbeats ahead of the deadly wave. A final jump. He landed us on a cliff overlooking the temple grounds. We were safe from the water.

  But when I finally let out a relieved breath, the sky burst into flame.

  It creeped me right out of my skin. My nails dug into my palm and I scrambled backward through the black ash covering the ground. Tiny puffs of it burst up with each step, settling back down to coat my feet in fine black powder. The world smelled like electrical smoke and burnt dust.

  I heard Hades laughing hysterically. Like he’d just heard the best joke in the world.

  Water, fire, earth. air. Every single element heralded death.

  I stared in confusion. In horror. Desperate to make sense of the senselessness.

  Zeus closed the distance between us in a single stride. The destruction didn’t affect him one bit. He squatted down to speak to me, eyes glittering with amusement. “One above. One below. Alive. Awake. A key. It is no more. It is no more.”

  “What have you done?” I screamed, hanging on to Kai for balance as the earth continued to break around me. I swung my head to look at him and shivered. I’d never seen this expression on Kai’s face.

  Dread didn’t cover what I felt seeing my all-powerful boyfriend stare at the sky in perfect horror.

  “We’ve brought the apocalypse.” Kai turned stricken eyes to mine. “You and I.”

  That was impossible. I was the savior of humanity.

  Cassie’s words about me being the instrument of destruction echoed back to me.

  Zeus chuckled and patted my head. “You’ve done such a good job. Earth will be free of humans in no time. Maybe I’ll let you live after all, daughter.”

  I didn’t get a chance to respond because, at that moment, the very fabric of the air around us shredded. I flew into my father’s leg with a hard jolt, bouncing off of his shin to land on my butt in the dirt. Blood streamed from my ears. I put a hand on my stomach, certain that the violent rift in our atmosphere had torn my organs from my body.

  Standing, moving, doing anything beyond gaping up at the swirling, churning, burning depths above, was impossible. I saw the end of everything.

  Man, was I pissed.

  I clawed at my arms. Everything we’d gone through? Theo?! For what? The end of the world? The end of humanity? I refused to accept it. There was no way we’d been so wrong.

  I peered through the smoke toward Demeter’s temple far below. There was nothing left. Just a raging torrent of water.

  Winds buffeted us. Fire writhed all around me, mocking with its flickering dance. Instrument of our destruction.

  I looked into the depths of the rift. How could we be responsible? In the face of all the hate that had surrounded us, Kai and I represented love. Didn’t we?

  Persephone’s voice raged in my head. They must not win. My arms burned and my head felt ready to explode.

  The rift grew larger and larger. It was angry.

  So was I.

  I faced my last seconds of existence and thought about everything I’d experienced since I’d become a goddess. How my fury had grown with each new challenge. Had it really been any different than the rage that the gods had felt?

  Look at how much raw anger Kai had held on to. For his father. For Persephone.

  For me.

  Despite all our protestations, were we any different from the rest of them? What if Kai and I had performed the ritual from a place not of love, but of hate? What if we’d taken the right actions—a love ritual to stop Zeus and Hades—but with wrong, angry intentions? What if the means hadn’t justified the end, and in wanting to prove those gods wrong, we’d given them exactly what they wanted? A world free from humans. A gods-only existence?

  In which case … what?

  Fight harder. Persephone shouted from inside me.

  I pushed her voice aside. Tried to focus. One above. One below. Alive. Awake. A key. It is no more. It is no more. How did I stop this? What did the prophecy mean?

  Persephone stole my breath with her rage. It speared through me, my own anger calling up in response to hers.

  The rift swirled faster. Like it was reacting to my churning emotions. This was a billion times worse than me sending spring into limbo. With that thought, I understood what had to be done.

  Kai and I were not the prophecy. Or rather, we were. But the destructive one.

  The version that could save the world? It applied to me. And Persephone. She was above. I was below. My realization was the key. The key to stopping this apocalypse and all godly destruction. Making sure it was no more.

  I finally understood what Hekate had meant by Persephone and me being in synch. What my visions meant by insisting that all I needed was love.

  Humans knew that love got you everywhere.

  Love gets you nowhere. That was Persephone’s—no, our secret fears. And it had gotten us nowhere.

  Overhead, the rift expanded in an ugly crackle, consuming entire heavens. It had gotten us worse than nowhere. I flinched.

  I was the synthesis of god and human. And it was my rage, my fire, my hate that had to be extinguished right now. My path was clear. I knew what had to be done. Fighting our fathers? Taking control of the minions? It was just more destruction and powerplay. How could I have believed that my outcome would have been anything other than this? No. Destruction was for Hades and Zeus.

  I had to relinquish the role of warrior. My path was creation.

  I’d said as much to Zeus and Hades before. I was the goddess of ushering in a spring free from the destruction of the gods. A world that allowed humans to bloom. I’d just been trying to do it with a blowtorch instead of a green thumb. It was time for me t
o remember who I was and what I truly stood for. Human and goddess selves alike.

  It was time to forgive. Time to love.

  I looked at Kai. Maybe a minute had elapsed since he’d realized what we’d done. He was rooted to the spot, watching the end, his expression shattered.

  I touched his arm.

  Kai stared at me, glassy-eyed. “How could we have done this?”

  “It’s okay. I know what it needs.” I smiled at the questions in his eyes. “Love, baby.”

  Then I threw myself into the rift.

  Twenty-four

  I’d like to think that Kai was back there screaming a clichéd slow motion “Noooooo!” Maybe even combined with a run toward me, his arms outstretched, the pain at my sacrifice etched across his face. But the truth was, I jumped, got my teeth rattled as the rift knocked me around, and then I found myself back in the garden.

  And oh baby, was it glorious. Gloriously terrifying. My vision had come true with a vengeance.

  A carpet of lava bubbled over the ground, consuming everything except the rock on which I stood. The air hung so heavy with smoke and ash that the sky looked night-dark. But the lava burned so brightly, that I threw a hand up to shield my eyes.

  Fat orange bubbles popped, turned black, hardened, and were swept away. Geysers of molten lava jetted, reminding me of Fee’s chandelier. This was no less beautiful, but the jets spewed upward to heights of thirty or forty feet, infinity times more deadly. Fragments of molten lava flew through the air.

  In the middle of it all, the lava swirled around the furiously blazing pomegranate tree. The fruit, the leaves, everything was gone save for the most barren skeletal outline visible in the flames.

  I shook in the face of this devastation. It’s amazing I didn’t wet myself. Major life-realization-heroic-moments are all well and good, but my heart hammered and my brain screamed, “Are you freaking insane?!! You just threw yourself into the heart of darkness, idiot!!! And look where you ended up!!”

  All of that combined in a hell of an endorphin rush that left my limbs rubbery. I’d been so certain that jumping into the rift was the way to stop the apocalypse. But this? I didn’t understand this.