Persephone’s Fall – Page 32
Eventually we make it home. After getting nothing but silence out of me for ten minutes or so, Hades shrugs. “See you, Seph.”
The skies are clouding up. This is going to be one of those storms that drops the temperature by twenty degrees, and fills the air with sheets of rain. Before that happens, though, it’s turning the whole place an interesting shade of purple-grey. It’s like the air has leaked right into my whole apartment and leeched the color out of everything. The light’s gone, and the apartment’s turned into a series of blurry shapes, the type of things you stub your toes on when winter is moving in and the sun drops below the horizon before your brain remembers to turn on the lights.
There’s electricity in the air. Up here in the tower, you can feel it sometimes, when a really good storm is rolling in. At least, it seems that way to me. Everything seems tense, charged. It heightens my perceptions, makes the back of my eyes hurt. Small jolts of adrenaline keep running through me, and I wonder if that’s instinct. Something primal that I can’t control. Something that wants to flee from the coming storm.
The real difference between humans and animals is that we pretend like we’ve somehow advanced. We laugh and call ourselves stupid. Truth is, it’s only our technology that allows this. Take away our electric lights, and we’re still a bunch of cave men, huddling in the dark and cowering from the thunder.
See? This is the sort of shit my brain starts turning out when a storm’s coming in.
I could’ve done without this, today. It’s just amplifying things already murmuring, angry and restless inside me. The wedding dress woke them up. The fight with Hades stirred them around. What’s left is a soft sound in the background, rising and falling, like nearby sighs or distant screams. Like the rush of the wind and the blood in my ears when I’m up on the roof, contemplating the drop. Like the muttering of a crowd not yet ready to become a lynch mob, but working themselves up to it.
I look in the mirror and the sixteen year old who was so close to the surface earlier today has gone back into hiding. It’s just the same dead eyes looking back that I’ve always known. No tears, no laughter, no hate, no joy. Just Seph, standing in her apartment in the growing dark, looking in the mirror and trying to ignore the voices in her head.
I’ll be on the roof tonight. Those voices will wake me up some time in the early hours of the morning, when the wind is howling around the hotel and the rain is hitting the building like handfuls of stones being hurled by some angry God. I’ll go out, I think, wearing nothing at all, and stand on the edge, and hold on until my arms hurt and I’m shaking from cold and I’m bruised from the force of the rain. I’ll hold on until there’s barely enough strength left in my body to keep from letting go.
But I won’t let go. Not tonight. Not yet. Not until I’ve seen this thing through. After we’re married I’ll sleep with Hades. I’ll make him think that he won, that I’ve given up on the drop, and I’ll get him to tell me about the rest of it. Where the information on my father is. How to eliminate it. And when my parents are safe once again to continue leading their stupid lives, then I’ll finish what started that night when I left Auriga in my bed and went to the roof for the first time.
I crawl into bed even though it’s barely seven o’clock. It’s like Christmas… the sooner I go to sleep, the sooner the time will come when I get what I’m waiting for.
