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 nightmares.”
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.
Possible explanations ran through my mind. Adonis hired an actor to pretend to be a character from my play as a practical joke. Cleo would have jumped on that idea like good dick if he brought her in on it.
For all I knew, they’d been planning this for weeks. Get me here and have everyone hide after the lights go out, so I looked like a mental patient having a freak-out. Pay off the staff of the Taphouse, and now everyone was part of the hilarious trick. It was like a surprise party, only terribly cruel.
“Okay, you guys can come out now,” I called to the empty taproom, even as my heart hammered in my chest. “This is hilarious and all, but it’s getting more pathetic by the second.”
Hades watched me with an expression that almost looked like sympathy, but there was a malicious gleam in his eyes.
“You poor, precious thing.” He snapped a finger, and my shift dress was instantly transformed.
Now, I was wearing a gown identical to the one that Adonis found in the costume closet, so close that it could be the exact same, one and I wouldn’t know the difference.
My fingers shook as I touched the fine beading at my waist. “How—”
“You know. Because you believe in gods and their power.” It wasn’t a question. He tilted his head to the side, staring at me as if memorizing the curve of my chin and the sharp angle of my brow. “You’ve always believed, even when the whole world called you mad.”
This had to be a hallucination, the most compelling one that I’d ever experienced. Even slashing my hand with a steak knife wasn’t enough to bring me out if it.
For the first time, I had some sympathy for all the mental health professionals who worked with me over the years. This must be what it felt like to talk to someone without even the smallest grip on reality. “This isn’t real. I’ve either gone completely crazy or . . .”
I trailed off because putting it into words was simply too much.
“Nothing is more real than the precious blood dripping from your hand. There is much I’d offer you for a taste of it.”
I stumbled back, running hard into the table behind me. More pain that should bring me back to myself, but didn’t. Even though I’d imagined him exactly this way, the potent sexuality still overwhelmed me when he stood this close.