Winter Break

You might think it's great to grow up with it being springtime all the time but that's only because you probably didn't. Let me tell you firsthand: that shit blows.

Imagine walking around all day surrounded by flowers that won't stop blooming in your goddamn footsteps, not to mention pollen creeping up your nose and every other orifice. Rain and sunlight playing this constant game of tag-you're-it and people always talking about hope and new beginnings, which is ironic because the beginnings never seem to fucking end.

I'm sitting at this all-you-can-eat buffet, sipping the nectar of the gods (whose nectar is it exactly? It’s stuff like this that haunts me) when my mom pops up out of nowhere and starts rattling on a mile a minute about this party she's putting on next week.

"I thought you could gather some flowers,” she says. "And remind me to invite the satyrs, Persephone. We didn't last time and they were ever so upset."

"You only gotta invite the satyrs for the nymphs anyway," Dionysus says from two seats over, winking lewdly. He is always halfway through a bottle of wine. It’s always the same bottle too. That's the magic of being the god of wine, I guess- you never have to refill your cup, and no one ever expects you to raw-dog life sober.

"No one was talking to you," I grumble at him as my mother flips through her phone, pulling up Facebook Events. I see that she's typed in "Spring Bash" which is about the most generic name on earth.

"How about we call it, 'same shit, different flies'? " I suggest, and she throws me a look. "That's something mortals are always saying, though," I bludgeon on. "If you want to be current, it's kind of catchy. Also ironic. The kids are all about ironic."

"Branding," Dionysus says, butting in again.

Mom pats me on the shoulder.

"Just make sure you wear your best dress."

By my 'best dress' I can only assume she means the one crafted of morning's first dew. It gets moisture in uncomfortable places and leaves nothing to the imagination.

"Anything but that," I say, but she's already scurrying off, fielding the notifications that are already popping up from her exclusive guest list. Dionysus chuckles at me. He knows the dress too. I give him the finger and leave.

.

I know at this point you must be thinking, Geez, Persephone, you're kind of a buzzkill. But here's the thing: I'm ninety-nine percent sure my mother has me bugged. No matter where I am, she knows. That's not something goddesses can just do, especially not goddesses of harvest activities and shit. I can't do anything without her popping up. This includes the time I slept with Narcissus, which would have been the lowest point of my life even without her help (he kept saying his own name). So I'm not overreacting, thanks.

I leave the fusion cafe and head across the meadow outside. Apollo greets me from a crumbling stone wall. He is wearing sunglasses and a scarf and sipping an iced Matcha Latte. He balances a laptop on his sculpted legs which he focuses on self-importantly, not bothering to look up when he addresses me.

"Heyy, Persephone. Where's Demeter at?"

"How would I know?" I ask him, half expecting her to emerge out of nowhere again.

"Listen, listen, I got this sick tune I'm making for the party, do you think she'd let me DJ?"

I put on a big stupid grin. "She'd love that," I say. "Now I've got to scram. Picking flowers and communing with small forest animals and all that."

I cut through the grass to a new path that didn't exist a second ago. One of the good things about Olympus is that the landscape's always changing. Zeus has a lot of time on his hands. This means I can take a walk on any given day and end up somewhere different. Lately I've been doing more and more of this roaming, seeing if there's any distance I can go where my mom can’t suddenly find me. So far no dice.

The path I'm following today meanders under a tunnel of trees dappled by sunlight. The smell of honey and the song of birds is absolutely everywhere, as per fucking usual.

I'm in the midst of wishing I was mortal so I could pretend to be sick- or just so I could rely on the comfort of knowing one day this life would be over- when I notice something's different. The grass under my feet is yellow, and as I continue down my path it grows increasingly dry and withered. There's a smell in the air too, like something's burning, an ashy, ominous kind of thing.

I stop and look around. The trees on either side of me have lost their leaves. What the actual fuck? My heart is pounding. the dry, crinkled smell of the fallen leaves drives me crazy. Not like an aphrodisiac, but not not like that either. Another smell drifts over to me, and this one isn't as mysterious, it's just kind of gross. Aren't cigarettes passe by now?

The source of the smell is somewhere to my left. Beyond the trees, I can see crooked, crumbling gray stones laid out over the barren earth. I'm so focused on this weirdness that I don't notice the figure leaning against the tree until I'm almost past it. A shadow rears up in the corner of my eye, and I jump, stumbling sideways. "Fuck!" When I regain my composure, I go to give whoever it is a piece of my mind, but the words never leave my mouth.

The man watching me is unhealthily thin, of middling height with dark, mid-length hair that falls around his face in a way that suggests he just woke up from a ten-year depression nap. His eyes are cavernous and dark, and I can't really see the pupils so there's just this effect like I could walk into them like dank tunnels. He exhales a plume of nicotine smoke and the corner of his mouth quirks up in an almost-smirk.

"Who?" is all that comes out of my dumb mouth. The only guess that occurs to me is every emo try-hard ever.

The smirk grows. "Hades. Lord of the dead. And you are?"

His voice is flat, with little to no inflection. Try-hard, I think again. I regain my footing.

"Persephone. But you probably already knew that, as it's obvious you're stalking me."

"Why would I stalk you?" he asks in a bored tone I try not to be offended by. I’m hot, that's why, asshole. I flip my golden hair over my shoulder. It does not have the effect it normally does in the absence of natural light. It's freezing, for the first time in my life. I wrap my arms around myself and talk to distract from my shivering.

"Mind explaining what you are doing here then? And why you seem to have brought an entire cemetery with you?"

Hades shrugs. "Had to take a smoke break," he says. "Try lighting up in the underworld. The smoke alarms go nuts.”

“Isn’t the underworld all fiery and shit?”

He waves a bony hand. “Urban legend. It’s actually winter 24/7.”

Winter? The cold, though it seems to have no effect on him, is slowly numbing my skin. I let it.

"I've never seen you in Olympus." If it weren't for the fact that mortals can't come here without an invite, I'd think this was some weird mortal kid trying to fuck with me.

"Hah," Hades says, still with absolutely no inflection so it comes out like a statement instead of a laugh. "Sometimes when Zeus clocks out to hit the gym I come up over here to fuck with him. He hates when I cramp his style."

"You know Zeus?"

"Know him? Yeah, he's my brother. You can't imagine the childhood trauma I've got to unpack."

My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out to see a frantic message from my mother. Something about how Hermes never gave out the invites she delegated to him and could I bring several dozen flowers back pronto? Hades chucks his cigarette on the ground and rubs the cherry out with a black boot.

“Well, catch you later maybe.”

"Wait," I sputter. My breath plumes in front of me. Suddenly imagining the cold retreating is the worst. Hades turns to me but I have no idea what to say next. I am not used to doing the wooing. I am typically the wooed. I am especially not used to attempting to woo a guy who looks several days dead, and like he's the lead singer of some shitty screamo band. Aphrodite would be judging me hard, but she's not here.

Hades looks at me, his mouth quirking. "You can come if you want. Get the full tour of everything you're missing out on."

He says it sarcastically. He has no idea how much what he says hits me in all my tender places.

"Yes," is all I can respond. He takes me to a gaping mausoleum a few paces away and presses a button. There's a humming noise from the emptiness inside and then a sleek black box comes into view, grinding to a stop in the doorway.

"An elevator?" I ask. This is too much.

"Why not?" Hades says. I don’t have an answer for him.

We get inside and travel down. In these close quarters I notice he's wearing some kind of cologne that smells of charred bones. His body gives off no heat. Mine is doing enough of that for both of us. What the hell is wrong with me? Maybe Narcissus messed me up even more than I thought.

I still can't get a read on him. Just to have something else to focus on I take out my phone again. My mother has added several more texts to her diatribe.

"Got a hot date tonight?" Hades asks. I flush. Why am I flushing?

"Nope. My mom just tracks me wherever I go. Turns out she's having some questions about my location."

"I bet," he says, "Seeing as tracking doesn't work down here."

The door opens in front of us and it takes ame a full minute to digest what he just said. "Say what?"

"Tracking doesn't work down here. It’s a dead zone in more ways than one.”

We step out into a serpentine corridor of ice.

"Now by ‘tracking’ do you mean even on a hypothetical chip that you suspect your mother hypothetically put in your body long ago when you were asleep and you haven't known a moment's peace since then? Like that level of tracking?"

He stares at me.

"Yeah, that would qualify.”

My heart leaps in my chest. I follow him into a cavernous room in which a basic kitchen setup sits, a weird dose of normalcy considering the walls are decorated with the bodies of mortals sealed behind ice, in various stages of rot. One of them is frozen mid-scream. I have so many questions. I am having the time of my life.

A strangled noise echoes up to us from down below, choked with pain and terror.

“The screams of the damned," Hades explains, at my look. "You get used to it."

I search for something to say to shoot the shit. "You got any nectar of the gods or anything?"

He makes a face. “Oh hell nah. I can’t drink that stuff without wondering whose nectar it is.”

I spin around and look at him.

"That's what I always wonder."

.

Moments later I am sitting up in his bed, reeling, clutching the black satin sheets around me against the cold.

"I would not have thought someone who looks like a resuscitated corpse would be that good in bed," I confess.

"Clearly you haven't fucked many resuscitated corpses," Hades says.

I give him a strong side-eye, but his eyes are shut, his head tipped back against the headboard. He has a bowl of blood red seeds I've never seen before and raises one to his mouth as I watch, licking it off the end of his finger.

"The hell are you doing?" I ask, then add, "No pun intended."

He opens those smoky dark eyes and turns them on me.

"Eating," he responds simply.

"That is the saddest meal I've ever seen," I respond, then, "I want to try."

He jerks the bowl away from me.

"Bad idea."

I cross my arms. “Excuse me, why?"

On the floor at the foot of the bed, his dog Cerberus raises two of his three heads and whines in sympathy. The third head sleeps on like a champion.

Hades sighs. "The pomegranate seeds are the only thing you need to survive down here.”

"Okay, so what gives?" I reach for the bowl, but he blocks me again.

“If you eat them, though, you're bound to the place like I am. You can leave, but only for a season at a time. You would be stuck here for most of your time. With me."

His eyes are devouring me whole. I pull the bowl towards me.

"And you'd be... upset about that?”

He watches me, a spark dancing in those depthless eyes. "You're just doing this to get away from that mother of yours."

I shrug, taking a seed between my fingers. "Partly, yes. Do you have any idea what it's like to be trapped in eternal spring?"

A smirk pulls at the corner of his mouth. "She won't be happy."

I pop the seed in my mouth, crush it between my teeth. Its sweet juice explodes over my tongue and I feel a warmth flow over me, despite the frozen atmosphere. I throw off the covers.

"What's the worst she can do?" I ask.