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Sure enough, only a few moments pass before the elevator doors slide open.
I expect Kell, stepping out to declare she has no idea how to get out of this secret realm and has Ferragmos impatiently waiting.
Instead, a slightly familiar figure moves past the doors. By slightly, I mean that I’ve seen her but don’t know her. Not even a name.
She’s the striking redhead who appeared when Hecate decided to join our klatch back in the mall. From the time the two of them took it upon themselves to just hang out with us, her arrival was a curious occasion—even to Mom and Veronica, who treated her with manners but glanced secret looks at her that were drenched in curiosity.
The same interest with which I regard her now. Not so passively.
“Hello. May I help you…ermmm…miss?”
She casually tosses her long, corkscrewed curls. The black tips on the heavy ringlets are a perfect match for her impenetrable stare. The rest of her face, while strikingly stunning in an ethereal way, is just as unforgiving about revealing her purpose. Trying to peer even half an inch into her is impossible.
A stranger…in more than one sense.
“Notmiss, all right?” she snips out. “Please, notmiss.”
“All right.” I revert to a little sheepishness simply from the music beneath her voice. The confidence, couched in vocal harmony, that has me going as still as Kara. “So…”
“You can call me Maiden. Or even Kore.” Our visitor pauses after a couple of steps, suddenly seeming like a cautious fairy in some mythical wood. “But most…call me Persephone.”
Kara gasps. “Ohmy.”
I’m able to recover my composure more quickly. “What are you doing here, Persephone? And what do you want from us?”
“Only to talk,” she replies, full of the same mellow-but-don’t-believe-all-of-it vibe that Hecate first gave off to me. “And hopefully, to make friends.” That part, she flings directly at Kara. “But even more hopefully, to congratulate you on your nuptials. And to beg that your wedding takes place as soon as possible. At any conceivable cost.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
KARA
If it’s possible, Persephone’s more striking in Oread’s muted light than she was in the mall’s flesh-colored floods. But her desperation is distracting from the effect. It takes over her large, intense eyes and rapidly fidgeting fingertips. Clearly the woman’s existence, with spending half the year talking to plants and the other wandering around Hades’s dismal citadel, has taken its toll on her social skills.
I try to ease her discomfort by lifting a friendly smile. “Well, there’s the conversation starter I didn’t expect.”
“Not a conversation,” she flings back at once. “I’m so sorry, butthatI don’t have time for. Hecate thinks I’m in the bathroom taking care of female things. And there’s still too much information to get out here.” She grabs the bottom of her crisp business blouse, working the hem like fresh dough. “So very much I have to say. Too much, too much.”
“Persephone?” Maximus is gentler now. He probably sees what I already have: that the goddess, who’s technically one of his many stepsisters, is as stressed about this as we are. “What is it? And who, exactly, do you need to tell?”
“Well…you. And you.” She ticks a nod at Maximus and then one at me. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“You know what they say about assumptions.”
My second attempt at humor harvests me another frown that teeters on dismissive. “After all, you’re the golden ones,” she rattles off instead. “The newitcouple. The news on everyone’s lips. I meaneveryone, ineveryrealm. I suppose that makes Mother Hecate very right about things. Hmmm. I wonder what Mother Demeter thinks about all that?”
“Wait.” Maximus stretches out a hand as if trying to calm a skittish kitten. “Hecate—MotherHecate—she was right aboutwhat?”
His sharp emphasis brings the goddess’s head up. Her eyes bore into him, just as wide and fierce as before, but those blue and onyx depths seem different now. At their corners, little tremors form. The vibrations take over the edges of her lips as well. It’s as if Maximus’s stress has given her permission to offload some of hers, but now she doesn’t know what to do with the relief.
“About…having to help her keep an eye on you. She said it last night when she came and retrieved me from Olympus. I’m not due in Dis for another ten days, but she saidsheneeded me early. That it was a job she couldn’t even entrust to one of the Iremia diamonds.”
Unlike the rest of her revelations, all of that practically pours out of her as one garbled sentence. Halfway through, she scoots her gaze away. By the time she’s done, Maximus and I are watching her cut a tense path to the light-up leaf and then back. A couple of times, the elevator detects her approach and opens with that cheery but annoying chime.
“Okay. So,” Maximus finally utters. “You…and Hecate…have been basically following us all day?”
A hesitant giggle tumbles off the goddess’s lips. “Not while you were at the big Beverly Hills mansion, of course. You Valaris have all those nosey neighbors.”
I grimace. “Truth.”
