I nodded, and he left. Glancing at the reflection he’d given me, which now sat on my nightstand, I felt even guiltier than before. No matter how at fault she was, if I couldn’t even protect Ava, how was I possibly going to do the same for Henry?
Even if this hadn’t been a test, I still had several to go. The wrong word, the wrong thought, the wrong action and this would all be over. Henry’s life was no less fragile than Xander’s or even my mother’s, and I felt myself start to crack under the burden of fighting for him on my own. Henry stood on the sidelines because I had dragged him there, forcing him to pay attention, but I couldn’t make him care. I was the only one fighting for him, and I was no longer sure I was up for the challenge.
CHAPTER 15
POISON
One unfortunate side effect of Ava’s banishment and the risk that she might try to take revenge was the towering guard that was now with me everywhere I went. Measuring in at six and a half feet tall, he was the large blond I’d spotted at the ball back in September. He walked with a limp that didn’t seem to affect his speed, and I was too afraid to ask how he’d gotten it. While he didn’t say much, Calliope called him Nicholas, and he was nice enough for a guy who could easily kill me with his pinkie.
I was never alone anymore. When Nicholas wasn’t with me, Henry was, and he had more guards stationed outside my room while I slept. They were only for show; after Christmas Eve, Henry spent every night with me, a complete turnaround from how he’d acted before Christmas. It was as if I’d broken through an invisible barrier, and now instead of avoiding me and hoping I’d keep myself alive, he seemed determined to do the job for me.
Nothing ever happened in the evening except for the occasional kiss or brush of his hand in my hair, and he never pushed for anything more. I was simply grateful for the company, and the more I saw of his human side, the more I hoped I was enough to make him want to stay.
It wasn’t a charade. I wasn’t returning his kisses to fool him into thinking I cared about him or because I pitied him. I was falling for him, a little more every day, even though a very large part of me knew that this was a bad idea. There was no guarantee I would pass and nothing that gave me reason to think that any kind of relationship would last more than the remainder of winter. But if I did somehow miraculously succeed, Henry would need a reason to stay, and I would be that reason. So for the first time in my life, I shoved aside the worries and the doubts, and I let my barriers down. The afternoons were a burden now, a time I had to endure in order to get to the evenings we spent together, and every time I saw him, no matter how short a time he’d been away, my heart raced. Now that I had survived Christmas, I dared to hope, and with that hope came possibilities.
When I woke up before him, I watched him sleep as the early morning rays filtered through the curtains, and I tried to picture waking up to him like this for the rest of eternity. It was strange to think that if the impossible happened and I managed to pass the tests without getting myself killed, he would be my future. My entire future, with no threat of death lurking around the corner any longer. My husband.
The word was foreign to my thoughts, let alone on my tongue, and I was sure I’d never get used to the idea. But as much as I resisted it—I was too young, too alone, too not even remotely ready for that sort of life—I began to see that it wouldn’t be so bad. Henry was broken, but so was I, and spending my life with him was hardly the hell I’d thought it would be in the weeks after he’d saved Ava’s life. And in time, maybe we would be able to fix each other. I could give him what he needed—a friend, a wife, a queen—and in return he could be my family.
As the days until spring grew fewer, my dreams with my mother grew more solemn. Every moment was precious, but most of the time I had no idea what to say. We walked hand in hand through the park most days, and she led the conversation as we talked about everything and nothing. She told me every night how proud she was of me, how much she loved me, and how badly she wanted for me to be happy without her, to not need her to continue as Henry needed me, but the most I could give her in return was a tight nod and a squeeze of the hand. The things I couldn’t say gathered in my throat, forming a knot I could never swallow. As the days passed and my chances to tell her dwindled, I knew I would have to force them out eventually, but not yet. As long as there was a tomorrow in the manor, I could pretend there was still hope she would never have to die.
The closer I got to Henry, the further removed from the real world I became. Even though it was beginning to feel like I would never go back, like those six months would somehow find a way to stretch into eternity, I knew they wouldn’t. There was an end, and we were rapidly approaching it.
Despite Henry’s company and constantly being shadowed, I was lonely. Ella spent all of her time with Theo now, and while Calliope stayed with me when Henry wasn’t there, even she seemed subdued after the incident at Christmas. And though James was the enemy now, I thought about him often. It couldn’t have all been fake, our friendship, and I missed being able to miss him without feeling angry. He wasn’t the one trying to kill me, I was sure of it now, and something about knowing he was on my side even though I wasn’t on his was comforting.
I missed Ava most of all. Every time I came across something I wanted to show her or thought of something I wanted to tell her, it took me a few seconds before I remembered that I would never see her again, at least not as friends. Occasionally I caught glimpses of her leaving a room as I entered or at the other end of a hallway I turned down, but she was never there for more than a moment.
Henry never made me talk about the pain and guilt I felt at the separation, even though it sometimes kept me up at night. He let me work my way through it on my own, and I wasn’t sure if I were grateful or resentful. Knowing that Ava must’ve felt as badly as I did only made me feel worse. Maybe she wasn’t the best friend in the world, and maybe she was a little too selfish sometimes, but I wasn’t perfect either. With each day that passed I regretted my judgment more and more. Ava was allowed to make mistakes—we all were. And what gave me the right to punish her for them when all she’d been trying to do was make the loneliness a little easier to bear?
To try to fill the empty hours, I spent more and more time in the stables with Phillip. It was quiet, and he didn’t press for conversation. He seemed to understand what I was going through, and he offered to let me spend as much time with the horses as I wanted. It was a generous offer, considering how protective he was of them, but it wasn’t enough to make me forget what I was losing.
It was near the end of January when one afternoon, Henry found me in the garden, wrapped in a cloak and kneeling next to a dormant, snow-covered rosebush. The memory of how I’d gotten there was hazy at best, but I didn’t particularly care. Once Irene had told me the date in the middle of our tutoring session, everything became fuzzy, and it was Henry’s voice that brought me crashing back down to reality.
“Kate?” Dressed in a heavy black coat, he stood a few feet away, sticking out like a sore thumb against the snow. I didn’t look up.
“It’s my mother’s last birthday.”
He stood still. Part of me wanted him to keep his distance, but a much more insistent part wished he knew me well enough to know when I desperately needed a hug.
“She always hated being born in January,” I continued, my voice blank as I stared at the lifeless plant in front of me. “Said she never felt like celebrating when there weren’t any flowers and all of the trees were dead.”
“Sleeping,” said Henry. “The trees are only sleeping. They will return when the time is right.”
“My mother won’t.” I sat down heavily in the snow, not caring if my jeans got wet. “We’ve been celebrating her last birthday ever since she was diagnosed. This time it’s really it.”
“I’m sorry.” He sat down beside me and wrapped his arm around me, and the warmth from his body stopped mine from becoming numb. “Is there anything I can do?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.”
Henry was silent for a long moment, and when he did speak, his voice sounded distant. “May I show you something?”
“What sort of something?”
“Close your eyes.”
Fairly certain of what was about to happen, I obliged, expecting the change in climate. Instead of going from the cold outdoors to the warm indoors, however, I felt sunshine on my face and a warm breeze. We were still outside.
When I opened my eyes, half expecting to still be in the garden, I had to steady myself against Henry as I looked around. We were standing in the middle of Central Park on a summer day, exactly as my mother and I did in my dreams, except now the park was empty. My mother was nowhere in sight.
“Henry?” I said uncertainly, looking around. The lake was nearby, and I heard the strains of a familiar song being played somewhere in the distance, but we were alone. “What are we doing in New York?”
“We are not in New York.” He sounded wistful. I inched closer to him, both afraid and fascinated by this place. “This is your afterlife.”
I stared at him, his words taking several seconds to settle properly in my mind. “You mean this is—we’re—”
“This is your corner of the Underworld.” He raised an eyebrow at my expression. “Do not worry, it is only temporary. I wanted you to see it.”
Wildly I looked around, hoping my mother would appear, but it was just us. “Why?”
“I wanted you to see it so you would know—” He stopped, but he didn’t need to finish for me to understand what he wasn’t saying. He wanted to show me where I would go when I died. My stomach twisted into knots, and I glared at an unoffending patch of grass. So he wasn’t really fighting after all.
But he continued, his eyes lowered to the ground. “I am showing you so you will have some firsthand experience if you pass the tests.” A lie, but I tried to believe it. “Once you become immortal, when you are here, the Underworld will take on the shape as the mortal sees it.” Several seconds passed, and he added in a quieter voice, “I also wished to know you will be content in the end if the council does not rule in your favor.”
My favor, not his. Not ours.
I whirled around to face him. “Why are you letting them walk all over you like this? The council, your family, whatever they are—if you think I’m good enough, then why don’t you tell them to put a sock in it and respect your decision?”
Henry’s expression was unreadable. “I am not omnipotent,” he said, taking a cautious step toward me. I didn’t move away. “It is within the council’s power to make those sorts of decisions, not mine.”
“But you could at least try, and I don’t see you doing much of that lately,” I snapped. He flinched, but I kept going. “Aren’t you a member of the council?”
“Yes and no.” He gestured for me to sit down on the grass, but I refused, standing with my arms crossed. “I spend most of my time separate from them. When they desire my input, or when it is a decision that directly affects my duties, I join them. But their decisions deal with the world of the living. That is not my realm.”
“So why don’t you tell them to shove it and get this whole thing over with? If they rule over the living and you’re not living, why do they get to say whether or not you’re doing a good job?”
Henry gazed off into the distance toward the sparkling lake. “They are the ones who are able to grant you immortality, not I. Perhaps in the beginning they would have trusted me with this decision, but the mistakes I made with Persephone have colored the council’s opinion of my judgments.”
I gritted my teeth at the mention of Persephone, and hatred gnawed at my insides. Even if it was his actions that caused her not to love him, she was the one who’d hurt him. “Can I ask you something?”
He made a wordless sound in the back of his throat, and I took that as a yes. I settled on the grass beside him.
“Why did you kidnap Persephone?”
He pulled away enough to look me in the eye, and the pain on his face made me regret my question.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”
“No, no.” He shook his head. “I am not angry. I am only trying to understand how it is possible that the truth of the matter could have gotten so lost in time.”
I waited for him to continue, ignoring the dampness of the grass that was starting to seep through my jeans. He looked pensive, as if he were looking for the exact way to tell me something he didn’t often get to say.
“I did not kidnap her,” he finally said. “It was an arranged marriage that she accepted, as her parents were the ones to set it up.”
I hesitated, trying to remember the details of the mythology I’d learned. “Zeus and Demeter?”
“Very good.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “You must have figured out by now that my family is a strange one. We call ourselves brothers and sisters, but in truth we are not. We have simply been together for so long that the words to describe the bond we have do not exist. Family is the only comparison we can draw, though it is a weak one.”
“Ella told me you weren’t actually siblings.”
“Did she?” He seemed darkly amused by this. “We all have the same creator, but we are not strictly related. In fact, my brother—who is, of course, not actually my brother—is married to my sister. And their son is married to our other sister as well.”
Making a face, I tried to wrap my mind around that. “Not related, right?”
“Not even remotely.” He pressed his lips to my forehead, a silent apology. Or maybe he was trying to alleviate my anger. “Persephone’s mother is my favorite sister, and she was the one to suggest the match. Persephone and I got along well when we saw each other, and her mother insisted she wanted us both to be happy. While I was used to being alone, I enjoyed the prospect of spending so much time with Persephone. When she didn’t object, things were finalized, and she became my wife.”
Wife. What I would be to him if I succeeded. As often as I thought of what a future with Henry might bring, the idea of being his wife—anyone’s wife—still hadn’t settled well with me. Maybe it was because I was eighteen, or maybe it was because my mother had never married, but I couldn’t imagine it. Then again, maybe that was a good thing. No expectations. And my desire to be married wasn’t stronger than my desire to be with Henry, like I suspected Persephone’s might have been.
“She helped me rule,” he continued, “doing as you will hopefully be doing soon enough. But she was young when we married, and…” He averted his eyes. “Eventually she saw me as her captor rather than her husband. She resented me greatly, and while in the beginning she was fond of me, I do not believe she ever loved me, not like I love her.”
Love, not loved. I exhaled.
“History takes her side, of course, and I have my suspicions about that, but in truth I never forced her into a marriage. I love her dearly, and it was agony for me to see her so miserable. After several millennia, she fell in love with a mortal and chose to give up her immortality for him, and I let her go. It hurt a great deal, but I knew it would hurt more if I made her stay.”
I was silent for the space of several heartbeats as I digested what he was telling me. Unrequited love was one thing, but spending an incomprehensible amount of time in that sort of pain—I couldn’t imagine it. I didn’t even want to try.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my anger dissipating as I wished there was something else to say.
“Don’t be.” Henry’s lips curled up into a smile that held so much self-hatred that I wanted to reach over and smack him upside the head for it. “She made her decision. You have made yours. It is the most you can do.”
Again I nodded, still at a loss for words. James was right. He would always be in love with Persephone no matter what I did; I had to accept that. But part of me wanted him to love me, too. Even if it was only enough to get him through the spring, it would do. r />
“Henry?” I said, my throat tightening as I gathered the courage I needed. “Do you think you could ever love me? Even a little?”
He looked stunned at my question, his brow furrowed and his mouth slightly open. But I needed to know—I couldn’t expect a fairy-tale ending, but I never had anyway. My fairy tale was one where both my mother and Henry were still alive, and since it was too late for my mother, all of my hope rested on Henry’s shoulders.
Finally he pressed his lips to the corner of my mouth in a chaste kiss, and he then said softly, “As much as I am capable of loving anyone else, yes.”
My heart sank, but while it wasn’t the answer I’d hoped for, it would have to do. He took my hand in both of his and looked at me, as if daring me to look away. I didn’t.
“You have fought for me, and do not think I have not seen that. You believe in me when few others will, and I cannot tell you how much that means to me. I will always treasure your friendship and affection.”
Friendship and affection. The words hit me like a rock, but I struggled to remember that they were better than the alternative—so much better. But something inside of me felt empty, as if he’d stolen something precious from me. Maybe it hadn’t been all romance and rainbows between us so far, but I’d hoped for more, and I didn’t know how else to show him what I wanted. Not without offering myself to him completely, and I couldn’t, not yet. Not when I didn’t know if he felt the same.
When he continued, I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. “If you are not deemed worthy, then I will step down, and it is my hope that if you wish, we might spend time together before I fade completely.”
A rush of surprise filled me, and I blinked back the stubborn tears that had formed in my eyes. “How long would that be?”
“I do not know,” he said. “But I suspect I will last until your death, if it comes to that. If you will still have me when this is through.”
I forced a small smile. “That would be nice,” I said. “To—to be your friend.”