Clearly there had to have been some kind of mistake. Persephone had been the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and the goddess of springtime. I’d been kicked out of one of the most exclusive girls’ schools on the East Coast for assault, my GPA was marginal at best, and I was probably the only seventeen-year-old girl in the entire state of Florida who’d yet to pass her driver’s license exam. How did any of that qualify me for the position of Queen of the Underworld?
Persephone and I did have something in common, however. Our boyfriends had the same job …
… a reality that was impossible to ignore when the deep, sad sound of a marina horn cut through the stillness of the morning air. I recognized it immediately from my last visit to his home, and knew all too well what it signified.
“They’re waiting for me down at the beach,” John said with a groan, dropping his head to the indentation between my neck and shoulder.
These words chilled me far more than any nightmare ever could. They, I knew, were the souls of the dead, who gathered by the shore of a massive underground lake just on the other side of the walled courtyard beyond the stone arches, to wait for the boats that would ferry them to their final destination….
John was the person who decided which boat they would board. The horn I’d heard signaled that a boat was arriving to pick up the latest batch of passengers.
I shivered, feeling suddenly cold. A dankness seemed to cling to every of inch of my body, despite the fire in the hearth and the warm tenderness of his touch. He must have noticed, since he reached for my hand and pressed it against his naked heart.
“Pierce,” he said, as if I’d wounded him somehow. “Don’t look like that.”
“I didn’t mean to.” I felt foolish. But I couldn’t help remembering my last visit to his world, when I’d been one of those souls, waiting on that beach to be sorted. “It’s not your fault. It’s just … that horn.”
He kissed the palm of my hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. All the laughter was gone, both from his eyes and his voice. “Sorry for all of this — sorry for your nightmares, sorry for what your mother must be going through, not knowing where you are, and sorry most of all for the times when I … well, when I didn’t behave around you as I ought to have. You weren’t far from wrong last night when you called me … what was it? Oh, right. A wild thing.” The entreaty in his eyes was difficult to resist. “But you know I only ever acted that way when you were putting yourself in danger … or when you were acting as if you didn’t care about me.”
With the hand that wasn’t holding mine, he reached up to trace the links of the gold necklace I wore around my neck.
“For so long, I thought you hated me,” he went on, his eyes hooded by his long, dark lashes. They were completely wasted on a boy. “If I had known that you never stopped wearing this after I gave it to you, I might have been a little less … agitated.”
I felt myself blush, and not only because his wandering fingers had strayed dangerously close to the neckline of my gown, seeming to search for my own heart.
“Well, I think you’ve figured out by now that I never hated you,” I said, steering his hand firmly to the less intimate territory of my waist. “And I know you didn’t mean to be so wild then, John. I’m not sure about now….”
My primness brought a smile back to his lips. With his heavily muscled frame, those scars, and that long dark hair that had a tendency to fall into those absurdly light eyes, I was certain few girls would have called him handsome, much less cute.
I was equally certain, however, there wasn’t a single girl my age who’d have been able to resist him. There was something so ruthlessly masculine about him that it was impossible not to feel a kind of magnetic attraction.
Especially when he smiled. Smiling, he went from the brooding juvenile delinquent the girls back at Isla Huesos High School might have whispered about, to the misunderstood hottie they’d definitely have slipped their number if he’d asked for it … and maybe more.
I couldn’t help feeling as if in escaping with him to the Underworld to avoid being killed, I’d gotten myself into a whole different level of trouble.
“Pierce, I know how many questions you must have,” he said. “And I swear I’ll answer them all — the ones I can, anyway — as soon as I get back. But for now, just know that I mean to — I’m going to — make this place feel like home to you, if you’ll give me the chance.”
Home? The Underworld? A gigantic underground cavern where the sun never shines, wracked by perpetual damp, to which dead people show up every five minutes?
I raised my eyebrows. “Okay. But first, maybe we should talk about —”
Boundaries. That’s what I meant to say. But he distracted me again.
“I know you never liked school,” he went on, the corners of his mouth still irresistibly turned up, “or you wouldn’t have gotten yourself thrown out of your last one. I know, I know … that was mostly my fault.” He grinned down at me. I don’t know what he was finding so amusing. He certainly hadn’t been laughing about what had happened with my study hall teacher at the time. “But anyway, there’s no school here. You’ll like that. But there’s still plenty here with which to entertain yourself while I’m working. I can get you all the books you need to graduate from high school, since I know that’s what you said you wanted. In the meantime, there are all my books….”