Hades

2. Hades

CHAPTER 2

HADES

There are a few tellings of the

Hades and Persephone myth….

Hades saw Persephone

and fell in love with her in an instant.

There has been much heated debate about

whether an arrow from that rascal

Cupid /Eros/Amor

was involved since the beginning

of the tale’s retelling.

There has been even more current

debate about whether

the underworld god’s love was

Desire,

Obsession,

or

Entitlement.

(Perhaps it was all three?)

In any case, Hades saw her,

then conspired with Zeus to possess her.

Maybe she was entrapped.

Or perhaps she was a gift.

Or possibly a payment

of some godly sort.

There are too many versions of her

descent into the underworld to count.

But however the story goes,

she became his.

And in almost every version of the myth,

Persephone was incredibly unhappy

with her sudden entrapment.

But after a time, she came to love

her black-hearted captor.

And somehow they became

one of the most surprising

Happily-Ever-Afters

of all time.

However…

Galen Fairgood did not take

the ending of this myth

into full account when he

named himself Hades

and renamed his beautiful

prisoner Persephone.

(Persy for short.)

“You? You’re my husband?”

The woman he nicknamed Persy back when she belonged to him stares up at him from the VIP suite’s hospital bed with her mouth hanging open. For a time, he had possessed her body and soul, refusing to consider or care about the ethics of doing so. She’d been Persephone to his Hades. A reluctant bride gifted to him.

“A blood debt.”

That had been his short answer to the few who dared to asked him about her sudden appearance in his life, including Persy herself.

“You are a blood debt. Your father gave you to me in exchange for his own life.”

And that had been his version of the Hades and Persephone story.

Until now….

There’s no indignation or fury in her expression. Only surprise and confusion.

Persy doesn’t remember him. His skin tingles with a matching shock.

She’d called him by his long-lost name, Swamp Boy—the superhero he’d wanted to be when he was a boy. Because that was who she saw when she woke up to the sight of him. The thunderstruck twenty-one-year-old American hero by her pool. Not the cruel god he’d become.

She doesn’t remember Hades. Only Swamp Boy.

Also, she expects an answer to her question.

He’s not sure what to tell Persy….How to explain why he lied to the nurses and the rest of the hospital about their status. That he wanted…no he needed to be close to her after he found out about her accident.

The charge nurse who’d apologized to him speaks before he can come up with anything.

“Do you not remember your husband, Mrs. Fairgood?” she asks. Her forehead knots with worry.

“I don’t,” Persy admits to the nurse while continuing to stare wide-eyed at Hades. “I remember meeting you, but not dating or marrying you.”

By some act of God, other than major bruising, nothing was broken in the accident, and they’d taken the bandages off once the swelling had gone down.

But she still looks fragile as a leaf. Fear and confusion shadow over her gorgeous face, and her voice quavers as she tells him, “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe this….”

Hades has to look away. A lump of pain forms in his throat, too thick to swallow down.

Merde. He needs to speak up. Explain to both Persy and the nurse that this isn’t a lapse of memory on her part but an outright lie on his. He has to—

“I can’t believe I’m actually married to you. This is like waking up to a secret dream come true!”

Persy reverses the hold on their hands, and a new expression bursts across her face. One of pure happiness, innocent and bright.

Her smile hits him like a grenade, and it explodes in his chest, obliterating all the words he was about to speak—all the solemn explanations he’d been prepared to give her when…if….she woke up.

“Non, ma belle, you are my dream come true.” He kisses her hand. “It is the other way around.”

Somewhere in the background, one of the nurses audibly sighs, while another one whispers under her breath, “I wouldn’t mind waking up to him myself.”

But the charge nurse continues to eye Persy with a concerned expression. “If you’re really having trouble remembering, we’ll need to get the doctor in here right away. Mr. Fairgood, if you don’t mind waiting outside while we—”

“No!” Persy cries out. She grips his hand tight in her much smaller one. “I want him to stay here. With me.”

She doesn’t remember him. But it’s him she turns her large brown eyes up to and beseeches, “I’m scared. Please don’t leave!”

She’s never touched him like this. She was spitting furious at him during the first few weeks of her unwilling imprisonment and psychological torture. Sometimes her small hands would curl into unconscious fists with the instinct to claw his eyes out.

Good, he’d thought back then. He’d wanted to reduce her to swearing and tears, bring her down to his level where rage and desire walked the same thin primal line.

His cruel god desire for her went beyond possession. He wanted to break her out of that pretty, refined princess mold. Mentally, physically, and emotionally. At a soul level, he wanted her to understand she was little more than an animal who belonged to him. At the time he’d been convinced that was the only way to reconcile letting the daughter of his mother’s murderer live.

But no matter what he threw at her, she’d remained exactly what she was—what he secretly feared: better than him…too good for him.

Back then, her clear but unuttered hate had been a balm of sorts. Every grind of her teeth, every flash of her eyes filled him with a cold pleasure.

But that was then. Now…

“Please do not leave me,” she says again, her voice soft and broken.

Her plea nearly buckles his knees.

Never in a thousand years would he have ever thought he’d hear Persy beg him to stay by her side, to provide her with the comfort of his presence.

“Of course. I am not going anywhere, cher bebe.” He switches her hand to his left palm so that he can wrap an arm around her shoulders. “Do not worry yourself about that. Ssh, everything will be all right. I am here. I am here for as long as you need me, ma belle.”

She buries her head in his chest and asks him questions as if he were a doctor. Why can’t she remember him? What’s happening? How long have they been married? Wait, do they have any children?

He answers the best he can. “I don’t know….Let’s see what the doctor says….About seven years….No, not yet.”

Three truths and a lie. It feels like some kind of game he and his sister would play with Nanan Cherise, the Cajun godmother who raised him while his mother worked for the Perreaults.

“Is French her native language? Should I page a translator along with the doctor?”

Hades doesn’t realize they’ve fallen into speaking his preferred language until the charge nurse asks him these questions.

Apparently, neither did Persy. Her body tightens underneath his arm. “I speak fluent French? When did I learn to do that?”

No, he won’t leave. Or tell her the truth. Not yet. Not while she clings to him, needing him for the first time in her life. He holds her close for the next hour as the nurses examine her and three doctors from three separate departments ask her the same series of questions.

She has amnesia—obviously. But the doctors want to run several acronymed tests before they make any formal declarations.

They don’t need any tests to tell them what she lost, though. Nearly a decade of memory, along with their version of the Hades and Persephone story.

And yes, she also speaks French now with an effortless flow and a slight Cajun accent. If not for the memory loss, he’d find it impossibly cute. And irresistibly attractive.

At this level of French, she was the kind of woman his godmother dreamed of for him.

Nanan Cherise had been a battle-ax of a woman, fierce and prideful. But she’d gone fast after receiving the news of his mother’s death. So fast, he’d wondered for the first time in his young life if the two women who’d somehow come to raise a family together had been something more complicated than the sister friends they claimed to be.

They’d slept in the same room for as long as Hades could remember. On twin beds, sure, but there had been no nightstand placed between them. And there had been several ugly fights behind closed doors after his mother announced she was pregnant with Ellie…followed by months and months of angry silences.

Had that been less about his mother being a gros couillion—a big fool, as Nanan Cherise had claimed? Those boyhood memories rewrote themselves in his adult head as he and his little sister stood by their godmother’s hospice death bed just a few weeks after they gave his mother a proper cremation and spread her ashes in the swamp.

Ellie and he each held a hand as she dispensed her last wishes.

Between the COPD and the heart failure she hadn’t bothered to get diagnosed before a trip to the hospital was required, it was an effort to talk. But she used her last breaths to call Ellie a tete de cabri, a head of a goat, the colorful Cajun version of stubborn. Then she made her promise never to change.

“Bien, bien,” she wheezed after Ellie assured her she wouldn’t with tears streaming down her cheeks. “You gon’ need that goat head in this hard world, cherie.”

Then Cherise turned her rheumy eyes to her godson. “Promise me you’ll marry a woman who speaks French, cher.”

It didn’t matter that he wasn’t her blood son or Cajun by birth. His real name, Galen, sounded Gallic enough, and Cajun French was dying. “Raise your kids up in our language.”

Back then, his only plan had been revenge. Their mother had died terribly because of Antoine Perreault, and decades before her time, and now he and Ellie were losing their second mother too.

“I’ll try,” he answered, merely to appease her.

Either that was enough for Nanan Cherise, or she just didn’t have any more fight left in her. On that weak promise, she closed her eyes, and a few minutes later a medical professional entered the hospice room to call her time of death.

“This is not what you expected, non?”

Persy’s voice pulls him out of the memory.

They’re back in her suite, awaiting the results of the many tests her doctors had ordered. Persy is still speaking in French, playing around with the found talent like it’s a toy, a consolation prize for the many years she lost.

“Non,” he admits, also speaking in French. “But I am happy you are alive.”

She stares at him, then seems to force herself to blink. “I am sorry, I cannot stop looking at you. It is only, you are incroyablement beau gosse….”

She breaks off with an embarrassed dip of her head and finally switches back to English. “Oh, my God, I just said that. Out loud. Please tell me I was a lot cooler than this when we were dating—like, I didn’t spend the entire time staring at you and calling you unbelievably hot in French.”

He smiles at the image. “Non, you played it very cool. And don’t worry, I called you ma belle and spent a whole lot of time staring back at you.”

“My beauty…wow. I’m beginning to see why I got so serious about improving my high school French.”

She laughs in a delighted way that makes parallel timelines play out in his head. What would it have been like to date her like a normal guy? To have married her and raised a family with her as Nanan Cherise had wanted.

“Did I call you mon beau?” she asks with a hopeful tone.

“Non, you never called me that,” he admits, struggling to keep the conflicting thoughts off his face.

He must not have done a great job of it.

Her smile fades and she asks, seemingly out of the blue, “My mom’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” he answers, fully in English. “How did you know?”

She just looks away and asks, “And my father too?”

The painful knot forms in his throat again as all her forgotten memories flash through his head. He can’t talk. Still can’t speak that man’s name out loud. So he simply nods.

And she blinks a few times before saying, “I think I must have known that. I don’t feel upset or shocked. Just a little sad.”

Just a little sad….A silent movie of all the events that ruined their happy ending unspools in his head. “Hades, don’t. Please, don’t. If you truly love me, don’t do this.”

“Did my mother die before or after we became a thing?”

Her question pauses the terrible movie mid-frame.

“We were a thing the moment our eyes met,” he snarls. “You were mine from the start, even if I had to wait…”

He breaks off. Remembering the situation. Remembering himself.

“You dropped out of college to be with me. But she didn’t know about us before she died if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Okay, I get it.” She gives him a chagrinned smile. “I wasn’t able to resist you when you showed back up in my life. But I also wasn’t able to disappoint my mom. That tracks. You must have hated me for being such a coward.”

“I…I could never hate you. Even when I wanted to—badly. Your father, though…”

Now. Now is the time to tell her. To fully confess the entire story. But the words won’t come.

He imagined their parallel timeline so often on the road to ruining any chance at a relationship they might have. But he’s never gotten a chance to actually experience it. And the way she’s looking at him—her expression open and gentle, her eyes wide with trust—it’s addictive. Better than heroin, even.

“Is that why we moved to Ohio?” she asks into all his torn silence. “To get away from my father because he disapproved of our relationship? I know he would’ve made life harder for us in Louisiana.”

One of the doctors—the neurologist—enters before Hades can answer.

It’s a good news, bad news situation.

The good news is that Persy’s amnesia looks to be purely retrograde and severely isolated, which means she won’t have to relearn basic physical functions as many patients with traumatic brain injuries and memory loss have to do.

Also, she appears to be having no trouble forming new long-term memories, and her mood and temperament are presenting as steady, which means she’s managing her emotions just fine.

”I’d go as far as to say great, even, considering the situation,” the doctor tells them.

The bad news: Her many scans were somewhat inconclusive, so they’re having trouble determining if her retrograde amnesia is neurogenic, psychogenic, or a mix of both.

In laymen’s terms, they can’t say for sure if her memory loss is here to stay or temporary.

“We’re leaning toward temporary, given all the other positive factors,” the doctor tells them in reassuring tones. “We’ll keep you overnight for further observation, but since you didn’t sustain any other major injuries, the best thing might be for you to go home with your husband and reinstate your normal routine.”

To his surprise, Persy eagerly nods along with the suggestion.

“Yes, home.” She speaks to the medical professional but gazes up at Hades. As if he is the only thing that matters in the universe. Her one and only sun. “I want to go home with you.”

Home…

He could deny her nothing, but he also had to tell her.

If not the full truth, some version of it.

“Give us the room,” he commands the doctor as if he were a minion, not a highly trained, world-class trauma neurologist.

But the VIP suite comes with certain perks, or maybe the doctor can tell how dangerous Hades truly is underneath the suit he’s wearing. After assuring them a nurse will come back later to talk with them about follow-up care, he quickly departs the room.

“You asked how we ended up in Ohio,” he says when it’s just Persy and him.

“Yes, I did ask that,” she agrees, proving the doctor’s point about her still being able to form new memories. “Why Ohio?”

She wrinkles her nose, letting him know she wouldn’t have opted for this particular Midwestern state if she’d had a choice.

The real answer was that she’d chosen Ohio because she didn’t think he’d be able to find her here. But out loud he answers, “You have an aunt here named Tess. After your father died, I think you assumed she’d be a good caretaker for your little sister.”

“Daphne—oh gosh, how old is she now?” She lifts her eyes to the ceiling to do more of the mental calculations the neuropsychologist was so impressed to see her do earlier and concludes, “Fifteen! I can’t believe I missed so much….”

She lowers her eyes back down on that regretful note. “Was I visiting her when I had my accident?”

“Not exactly. We were…” A partial version of the truth unfurls. “We were officially together for about four years. But after your father died, we got into some big kind of fight. It was all my fault. I took you for granted, and I didn’t treat you as well as I should have. So, you left me and moved to Ohio. Eventually, I came to my senses, and I followed you up here. I was hoping we could work things out, that I could be the husband you deserved.”

This doesn’t even touch the surface of their tumultuous relationship story. Yet, it feels like he’s never said anything truer in his life than when he tells her, “You got hit by a car before I could prove myself to you again. And now you don’t remember me, and it’s too late.”

“We were estranged?” She shakes her head, confusion etched across her face. “For how long?”

The number clogs his throat, and he has to choke it out. “Three years.”

“Three years?” She juts her chin forward, her eyes widening with shock. “Are you serious? Did I find out you were cheating or something? I mean, did you get another woman pregnant?”

“I could never cheat on you—not after you gave me your virginity.” This isn’t an honorable declaration, but a basic truth. How many times had he tried after the first time they had s*x? And in the months after she ran away?

He’d barely been able to bring himself to flirt with another woman after that fateful night—much less touch one in the way he only wanted to touch Persy from that moment on.

Still, he had to give her some kind of explanation she’d understand. “We disagreed about how I handled a delicate situation. You wanted me to do one thing, and I chose to do another. I should have listened to you, and I paid the price when you left me.”

In some ways, she is lucky—at least temporarily. All the painful memories she’s lost rise like shadows inside of him, excoriating him like a whip.

“You don’t have to come home with me,” he tells her as the memories lash him. “Your Aunt Tess and your sister—they live in a two-bedroom apartment. But I’m sure they’d be more than happy to have you stay with them for as long as it takes for you to regain your memories. In fact, if you want a bigger place with a room of your own, I’ll get it for the three of you.”

No, he isn’t giving her the full truth. But he is giving her something he never has before: a choice. “Anything….I’ll do or get you anything you desire.”

He gives her a choice, and he takes her hand again. One last touch when she isn’t repelled by him, just in case he never gets the chance again.

Then he says, “Tell me….just tell me what you wish to do.”