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All around the room, the Gods and Goddesses who have become my friends, my family, gasp in horror.

“Let it,” Hades growls.

“Hades…” I shake my head. “This has to be.”

“He will take you to Olympus,” Hermes says softly. His eyes are a little wild. A little hopeless. “You will be at the mercy of Demeter and Zeus.”

“I know, but I must go.”

“What did the Fates tell you?” Poseidon asks darkly. He’s been leaning against the wall, large arms folded over a largechest, nearly this entire time. Now, he’s claiming the space between us, coming closer. “What did they tell you to make you so certain that you needed to go with him? With the God of War?”

“I—” I look to my feet before casting my gaze to the room. “Simply that when he comes for me, I must go.” I harden my voice, filling it with a determination I fear even as I know it’s right. “Iamgoing.”

Hades bows his big, horned head between his shoulders. “You can’t go alone.”

“I come!”The words are loud in my mind.

“Hydra will come with me.”

Hermes looses a sharp laugh. “Zeus will never allow her in Olympus.”

“We make it a condition of my going,” I say. “Surely, we have some pull. They want me there—I’ll go with protection.”

Hades scrubs his hands down his face. “I don’t like this, Persephone. You are human. Vulnerable.”

“I know.”I’m really beginning to wish I wasn’t human.“I know what I am. But they still want me for the powers inside my soul. I don’t know why, but I know they need me alive.”

“You will be unprotected!”

“Hydra—”

“Won’t fit everywhere!” he roars.

I can’t make my tongue tell Hades that I suspect Ares will be on my side. That he will stand with me, protect me. He’s not in a state of reasoning around what he believes is the impossible.

I flinch. Softly, inside my mind, Hydra speaks,“This is true, my Persephone.”

“Olympus is a complicated place, Persephone,” Hermes tells me. “It is full of secrets and politics. There is darkness in its beauty and blood in the wine. You must always watch your back.Friendandfoe will be after you. You will be, entirely alone. I would go with you but?—”

We all know he can’t. That he bound himself to the Underworld forever more when he gave Hades his soul.

Thanatos bows his head, but I don’t miss the tight set to his hard jaw.

“I’ll go,” Leuce volunteers. “I’m strong, trained, and I know the games those Gods play.”

Memories accost me. Visions so vividly gruesome play in my mind, stealing my breath. I’d just saved Minthe from being transformed into a mint plant when, in Demeter’s ire that they’d joined me and Hades in our bed, she’d aimed to end Minthe tragically by binding her irrevocably inside a plant.

I’d invited them into our bed because they were beautiful, and they loved me. I loved them. Perhaps not sexually, but still—I’d loved them and trusted them. And I thought, perhaps, they could help me seduce my husband. Make him love me more.

I’d been wrong. Hades hadn’t even looked at them. He’d watched me as they?—

I can’t. The memory cranks to a stop in my mind and I hear Minthe scream that she took Leuce. That Leuce was missing.

Fear twists a blade in my heart now as it did that day when I searched on horseback for my friend. Aethon had ran faster and harder than ever before, but by the time I found Leuce where Demeter had planted her beyond the Elysian Fields, on the pale mountains adorned with white poplar trees, the rooting had already taken place.

The curse was slow and agonizingly painful.

Her feet were entirely rooted. The skin that covered her legs, once smoothly dark and beautiful was split as bark tore, as though from the depths of her, to settle in place of skin on her legs. Ribbons of blood streaked the flesh of her legs as shimmering streams fell from her eyes to streak her face.