Tempted by Darkness

by Lillian Sable

  “They have really good milkshakes here,” I said, picking up the menu.

  “Oh, don’t puss out on us now.” Cleo shifted closer to Adonis as if they were in on the joke together, even though his expression remained impassive. “I know you keep a bottle of bourbon under your bed for the weekends.”

  Alcohol didn’t mix well with my meds, making me groggy and off-balance after only a few drinks. But I liked the taste of it, so sometimes I put up with the consequences. That didn’t mean I wanted to be one of those girls tottering down the sidewalks of downtown Los Angeles in the middle of the night, too drunk to have any idea where they were going.

  Drinking took away your control, and I didn’t have much of that left on a good day.

  “The burgers here are great, too,” Adonis said to me as he picked up his own menu. “I don’t think the kitchen has closed for the night yet.”

  “I don’t eat red meat,” I reminded him.

  He cast me a droll look. “I know that. Obviously, I was talking about the black bean burger. They put this chipotle sauce on it that’s amazing.”

  It was a small thing, but it made me feel good that he would remember something that I probably only told him once before.

  “We need drinks.” Cleo surveyed the other occupants of the table before turning to me. “Seph, you should get the next round since you never come out with us. It’s only fair.”

  Adonis’s smile was easy, but he shook his head as he looked at me. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “You know Seph is loaded, right?” Cleo insisted, leaning forward, so her cleavage practically rested on the table. “She could buy every building on the block and still have plenty of cash to spare.”

  The money might have sounded great, but I’d rather have my parents still around instead of the money they left me. One devastating fire and the lack of extended family had made me rich before I was old enough to understand the concept of money.

  I was also completely alone.

  My wealth wasn’t a secret, but I didn’t like to make a habit of flaunting it. But whatever Cleo’s game was, I didn’t mind the excuse to leave the table. “I’ll go to the bar. Everyone good with beer?”

  Without waiting for a response, I got up from the table. They could drink the beer or drown in it for all I cared.

  The Taphouse was busy, even for a Friday night. We arrived just early enough to get a table, but now it was standing room only. I wove through the crowd with my gaze firmly fixed a few feet above people’s heads, so I didn’t accidentally make any eye contact.

  I had no idea that Adonis had followed me until I felt a hand touch the small of my back. He pulled away as soon I turned my head and saw that it was him.

  “I figure you can’t carry an entire table’s worth of drinks all by yourself,” he said, by way of explanation.

  “Having fun?” I asked, gesturing with my chin to the table full of people that I almost never saw him hanging with.

  “I needed to blow off some steam. My director for the showcase has been working me like a dog.” He teasingly squeezed my arm, holding on for a beat too long before pulling away. “I was a little surprised when I heard you were coming out tonight. This doesn’t seem like your scene.”

  Coming from him, I didn’t take it as an insult. This wasn’t my scene, that was obvious to anyone with a working pair of eyes.

  “I may have been strong-armed into it,” I replied with a sardonic smile.

  “Do you really expect me to believe that anybody can make Persephone do something that she doesn’t want to do?”

  “You might be surprised. I spend more of my time than you think getting bossed around.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Bossed around, huh? I didn’t know you were into the kinky stuff.”

  “Very funny.” I turned away before he could see me blush. The bartender met my gaze and started moving down the long bar, stopping to help a pair of giggling girls who got there right before us. “Are you drinking the pig swill they have on tap, or do you want something actually fit for human consumption?”

  He smirked at me. “Is pig swill for the poors?”

  “Oh, shut up.” I hated that I was embarrassed, even though I had no reason to be. “Olympus is a private school. Most people here come from money.”

  “Not as much as you, apparently.”

  With a sinking sort of feeling, I glanced back at his face. I’d thought he was better than this. “Does that bother you?”

  “Nope.” He stuck both hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “It’s just weird that you being a Rockefeller never came up in conversation.”

  “And how would that go, exactly? Hey, here’s the blocking for Act One. By the way, my parents died when I was a toddler and left me enough money to buy and sell your entire life.”

  There was a moment of tense silence while Adonis stared down into my face like he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen me before.

  Then he grinned, and it was like the sun coming out from behind rain clouds. “Fair enough.”

  The bartender finally arrived to take our order. The Taphouse made their own whiskey, although most people seemed to think the giant copper still in the middle of the restaurant area was just for show. Their private label wasn’t bad for something local. Adonis widened his eyes when I ordered two glasses of it straight-up.

  I raised one to him before taking a sip, welcoming the smooth burn as it slid down my throat. “Cheers.”

  “Sláinte,” he replied with a wink. “You’re always full of surprises, Seph.”

  The way he said it made a spot of warmth bloom in my chest, or maybe that was just the hard liquor.

  We took the beers back to the table while I tried to decide if I was losing my mind. I knew Adonis liked me as a friend, he’d said as much a dozen times. But every so often, I got these flashes of something else that made me wonder if we could be more. The moments were gone before I could decide if I wanted to act on them.

  “Drink up,” Adonis said with a signature bright smile. “Next round is on me.”

  If I wasn’t sure whether Cleo had designs on Adonis, it became much clearer when she decided to make an effort to point out all the things that made me the strangest person she had ever met.

  “So we have to talk about this play you’re doing for the showcase,” she said to me, leaning closer, so her barely covered chest pressed against my arm. “If it’s half as weird as all that shit you keep in your room, then we’re in for a show.”

  “This is the mythology one, right? I think I heard some people talking about it,” one of Cleo’s friends said. His name was Paul, maybe. “What’s it about?”

  Adonis answered before I could think of what to say. “It’s excellent, actually. Like a myth you’ve never heard before but will think you have, totally surreal and excruciatingly familiar at the same time. Might be the best one in the showcase.”

  A burst of pride made me smile.

  Cleo shook her head. “Well, the concept art I’ve seen is creepy as hell.”

  “One man’s creepy is another man’s masterpiece,” Adonis replied, glancing at me before he looked away. “We’ll have to let the audience decide.”

  The girl beside Paul set her empty beer glass down on the table with a loud clink. “Obviously, we know who’s going to play the male lead. Who are you casting opposite Adonis?”

  My fingers played in the condensation on my glass, and I wished I were somewhere else. “I’m not sure.”

  She was insistent. “You haven’t held auditions yet?”

  To be an actor was to be desperate for attention at all times. It was a hazard of the job, nobody got into the spotlight by accident. They had to make a conscious decision to take it for themselves.

  “We’re still trying to decide what we’re looking for,” Adonis said, sipping his whiskey.

  “We?” Cleo repeated with a smirk. “I didn’t realize you were so involved.”

  “What can I say, I’m invested.�
�

  “Well then, you probably have a copy of the script. Seph has been keeping that thing locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Let’s see it.”

  For a moment, he looked like he was going to deny it. But then Adonis shrugged and bent down to rummage in the shoulder bag resting against his foot on the floor. He drew out a sheaf of papers. “Final edits aren’t done yet.”

  “Nothing’s ever done until the moment the show starts.” Cleo grabbed for the script, but Adonis evaded her and laid it down on the table between them. “I’m going to read for the female lead, even though I don’t need to audition for you to know I’d be perfect for the role.”

  I wanted to beg them to stop. But I didn’t have a good reason for my sudden dread, so my mouth stayed clamped shut. Next time, I was going to risk Diana’s censure and stay home. This was excruciating.

  “I haven’t done much work on the first part,” Adonis said, leaning closer over the script so that his head was close enough to Cleo’s that they practically touched.

  Only theater students would sit in a crowded bar on Friday night and run lines.

  “Why don’t we get together tomorrow morning?” I asked.

  “Don’t be such a spoiled sport,” Cleo chided me. “We all just want to assuage our curiosity. If your play is as good as Adonis says it is, then you shouldn’t mind.”

  Putting your creative work out into the world was like giving birth to a baby that you were forced to abandon on the sidewalk. Then all you could do was hope someone came along to take care of it before it died. For reasons that made no sense, I didn’t want Cleo reading the lines for the female lead, much less playing her on stage. I had no interest in acting, but the character felt like it belonged to me. It rubbed me the wrong way to hear her saying the lines.

  In a gravelly voice that was completely uncharacteristic but totally worked for the role, Adonis read the first line. “Only you can save me from this life of darkness, dear princess. Please take my hand.”

  Ever the drama queen, Cleo brought her hand to her breast and sighed. “You would destroy me.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Lies from beautiful lips cut deeper than a blade. I would save you and love you. Ask me for the world, and you shall have it.”

  Cleo’s voice was low and sultry. “You would make me your slave.”

  “I would master you, serve you, and everything in between.” Adonis growled, sending shivers up the spine of everyone in earshot. “Just say you will be mine.”

  “That’s pretty hot,” Paul commented “Anybody want to split some nachos off the late menu? The kitchen closes in like a minute, it’s almost midnight.”

  “Wait, what?” I said, taken aback.

  It couldn’t be that late.

  I looked down at my wrist where my watch would normally be and realized that I must have taken it off when I got home. It was set with alarms for all the moments when one stretch of time transitioned into another. Like daybreak and sunset, solstices, equinoxes, and even the Chinese New Year. These were the times when it was most critically important not to step on cracks, walk under a ladder, or break a mirror.

  Dangerous times.

  Diana called it another one of my superstitions, but I’d always believed that these transitions were a point of transformation. The world was at its most vulnerable in the space between one thing and another. That was why I liked to be safely in bed behind securely locked doors whenever the sun was setting or rising.

  There was a reason why movies always showed the spirits rising at the stroke of midnight. And why the witching hour was set at the time when daily prayers in the Christian and Jewish traditions halted. It was in the gap between spaces, when contrary states drew close together and the veil separating different planes of existence weakened, that the world became its strangest and most dangerous.

  Times when spirits of the dead could walk the earth.

  I reached for the script. “We should stop.”

  Cleo pulled it away and read the next line. “Hades, god of the dead and king of the underworld, hear my plea— “

  “That’s enough,” I insisted, rising the table. “Don’t read anymore. Not right now.”

  But like always, Cleo didn’t listen to a word I said. “I want to be with you. Take me away. Take us away.”

  That was when the lights went out.

  Chapter Four

  Before all the medication robbed me of my ability to remember what happened when I slept, I used to dream about my parents.

  They died long enough ago that I couldn’t remember their faces. In my mind, I saw these ghostly figures shrouded in darkness. As a child, I would run towards them when I dreamed. But no matter how fast I moved, I never got close enough to see their faces clearly.

  I didn’t have pictures, although I’d never quite understood why not. Diana told me that by the time she became involved, all I possessed was a suitcase full of toys and the clothes on my back. She couldn’t give me any insight into what may have happened before.

  But for as distant and unformed as images of my parents might have been, the other figure that haunted my dreams had a face clearer than a beacon of light cutting through the night sky. Even when I woke up, a vision of him was burned on the inside of my eyelids.

  I’d spend the rest of the day seeing flashes of him whenever my eyes drifted closed. I knew his face better than the one that stared back at me in the mirror. His image was so vivid that it took thousands of dollars in treatment to convince me it couldn’t be real and was only something I imagined.

  The lights came back on, brighter than before, but accompanied by an oppressive silence. I didn’t have to look around to know I was suddenly alone. Adonis and Cleo had disappeared, along with everyone else in the bar. Empty tables and chairs met my gaze and the oppressive noise of a lively scene

  Take me away.

  Save for one man.

  Take you away.

  A man who shouldn’t exist outside of my sexually-charged nightmares.

  Take us away.

  God of the dead. King of the Underworld.

  Hades.

  He was standing right in front of me.

  As I stared at a face as cruel as it was beautiful, I realized that no piece of art I’d ever created had done him justice. He was beauty carved in marble that had been made fluid and alive while losing none of its unreality.

  My eyes burned as if the perfection of his face was more than my mortal gaze was capable of comprehending. It simply hurt to look at him, in every possible way.

  Hair so pale it was nearly white slipped down his back and nearly to his waist, moving in a breeze that I couldn’t feel. Cruel eyes so colorless that they were like chips of ice stared down at me. My eyes burned with unshed tears as I tried and failed to meet his gaze, like staring into the sun while ignoring the burning heat.

  “They call you Persephone.” He whispered my name like an incantation. “I understand it means bringer of destruction. It seems remarkably apropos.”

  And this was as close as I could ever imagine coming to staring into the face of a deity—if one were to exist. That was how I knew none of this could possibly be real. I had to be losing my mind.

  “Stop it!” I squeezed my eyes closed and pulled at my hair, fingers digging in hard enough that my nails were probably drawing blood on my scalp. The pain should bring me back to reality and tear me away from this impossible vision.

  But when I opened my eyes, a gaze the color of bubbling champagne filled my vision. The amusement there was a palpable thing.

  I wondered distantly if the color changed slightly with his moods.

  My voice was little more than a squeak. “You’re not real.”

  He laughed at me. The sound sent shivers of awareness down my spine, like painful pricks that left a shimmering and pleasurable heat in their wake. “I’m as real as the dust and wind that shapes the universe. I’m as real as the fantasies of mortals that give birth to a dozen realms, each the stuff of dreams and nightm
ares.”

  Feeling lightheaded, I briefly wondered why a total figment of my imagination would be talking in fanciful riddles. “You’re a hallucination.”

  “I’m real enough to touch.”

  He reached out a hand as if to stroke my face but stopped just short of touching. Cold emanated from his skin, like a chill wind blowing across your face when you step outside in winter.

  Real enough to hurt.

  Pain always worked to bring me back to reality. When things got really bad, I used to cut myself. Diana found out and threatened to have me hospitalized again if I didn’t stop doing it. She assumed I’d been practicing for an attempt at suicide. But I had needed to watch the blade slide across my skin, feel the bright ache of pain as red pooled in the fresh wound. Hurting myself had never been about dying.

  It had been about reminding myself I was still real.

  There was a steak knife lying on the table beside me, and I reached for it. Hades’s eyebrows rose as my hand gripped the plastic handle, but he made no move to stop me as I brought the sharp edge of it to my wrist.

  I had to be dreaming. Nothing could hurt you in a dream. Even when you fell from impossible heights in dreams, you were always awake before you hit the ground.

  My hand shifted up so the very tip of the blade dug into the thick skin of my palm. The first drop of blood momentarily fascinated me, so stark and brightly red even in the dim light of the bar. Initially, I only felt the pain distantly, like it was something I remembered happening to me a long time ago.

  But the pain was still there.

  His voice was chiding. “That was a very silly thing to do.”

  A scrap of linen appeared in his hand, and he tossed it to me. It caught in the air as if floating there. I grabbed it because I didn’t want to know if it would have fallen to the ground or stayed suspended.

  Magic wasn’t real. Magic couldn’t be real.

  But those were drops of my blood on the floor, and the throbbing pain where I cut myself was too much to be imaginary.

  It sounded nuts to hope that my meds had stopped working, and the hallucinations were back. But otherwise, my entire life was about to fall apart. Everything I thought I knew about how the world worked would be just another dirty trick.