Page 3 of Captured By the Cupid

When an icy spectral hand crawls across my shoulder, and bony fingers curl into my wispy curls, I choke on a scream. Ghosts aren’t supposed to touch. They havenevertouched me!

Violent emotions and mad impulses send me tearing through the misty veil. Gravity returns as more gnarled branches scrape my clothes, my skin.

The ghosts follow me, chase me, and hunt me down. I pass through some of them because all they are is dark fog. I learn some hold form when I knock into several, disrupting bones and even claws. A skull topples to the ground. Bile churns in my stomach, but I hold it down somehow.

“Come, little pink.”

“Come, rosy girl. A little further.”

I stop in my tracks. The last thing I want to know is what “a little further” means. So, I turn in another direction. Eerie energy cloys at me, and I struggle to breathe. Moreshadows follow me, hunting me, their ghostly eyes glowing and disorienting me.

Through the thinning mist, I make out a silhouette of naked trees. Dark ghosts still pursue, but I stagger toward those trees with cold energy brushing my back.

I swing my head, glancing all around and searching for something, anything—even a place to hide in this otherworldly place. There is no mistaking it. I’m nowhere near the woods and the abandoned sanctuary.

Everything around me is gray. No autumn foliage. No frost growing along the forest floor, sparkling from the crystalline moon. There’s no moon. Nothing but an ever-shifting firmament of gray and black clouds that dance in a shadowy ballet. Decay perfumes the air.

Beneath my boots, the ground is a mass of shifting gray, like ever-moving bruises.

Soprano-pitched whispers, like ethereal children, echo from the otherworldly trees. A language I have never heard, and I can’t help but wonder if the ghostly trees are speaking to one another.

There’s no sense in denying it and wasting my time. I’m nowhere that is remotely…human.

Am I…dead?

2

“Don’t tell me how to run my domain, Hades.”

EROS

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve trusted in hope while counting these steps.

Damned major deity can’t have a normal office like the rest of us. No, he needs a giant obsidian table in the middle of a small library filled with eternity tomes—one that rests at the top of a grand and steep staircase to rival the cliffs of Olympus. Guess the bastard’s earned it. Thankfully, I have wings.

Once a year, on this day, I get a VIP pass to the front of the line, as it were, considering hundreds of thousands of souls have crossed the River Styx to have their accounts settled.

“Is it the 4th of the month already? I’m so forgetful at dates,” he says without pausing to glance up from his work. Countless eternity tomes lie open, gold ink scrawling over the thick pages by sheer will of their master.

I snort and roll my eyes. “I still don’t care for your humor, Hades.”

Yes, that Hades. God of the Dead, King of the Underworld. Sovereign of the Styx. Keeper of the Abyss. Lord of Souls.

“She’s not here.” He licks the corner of a page and turns to the next as a strand of long black hair falls onto the book. “Same time next year?”

I slam my fist down on his table, though I know it will hardly disrupt him. “It’s been over a hundred years! How do you lose a fucking soul as significant as hers?”

He sighs deeply. Still doesn’t look up because it would take mankind discovering the Holy fucking Grail for that to happen. “Must I remind you how many souls pass into my realm every day, Eros?”

I refrain from a growl and seethe through gritted teeth. “150,000 on average.”

“On my good days.” He turns a few more pages. “One natural disaster or terrorist act, Zeus and zounds, will these humans ever tire of killing one another? Oh, and please don’t claw up my table like you did last year. I quite liked that table, and it took the forgers a full month to make a new one. Thank you.”

I bristle. The over-polite patriarch never ceases to rake on my last nerve.

“Perhaps you could do with a little vacation,” I opt and lean over, clicking my claws on the table like an ominous implied message between us. Never a threat, but I imagine he wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway. Like anyone would threaten Hades. “Holiday in Purgatory perhaps?” I suggest and bare my sharpened teeth. “I could show you what it’s like to dispense justice and punishment instead of your glorified babysitting.”

“No thanks,” Hades says with a wave of his hand. “Perfectly fine for you, my dear Eros, but as much as I swing many ways, you know I take no lovers to my bed during my busy seasons. And I prefer my supreme zoning master planner position. By theby, you’re looking quite tense, my boy. Have you taken any new lovers?”

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