Persephone Underground Page 9

  You cling to the most ridiculous ideas when you’re in a situation like this. For instance, I couldn’t stop being proud of myself for not fainting on this odd little plume ride. I assumed the ultra-redness waiting for us at the end of the drop were flames, but the tub hit a patch of velvety softness instead. Fury and I were buried in crimson rose petals; there were so many, I thought I’d suffocate to death. Petals got in my ears and eyes and the weight of them was staggering. When I came up for air, I realized that the blanket of roses I thought I’d been fighting was actually a bed sheet.

  I was back in Hayden’s bed. Fury had jumped down from the four poster and waited for his master at the door, and that’s when Hayden ducked his head to enter. He was the powerful, cruel bodied man I’d married last August – almost 7 feet tall and chiseled from head to toe.

  I was terrified. I didn’t want to be raped. I plead for mercy and he gave it to me – explaining to expect only tenderness on our honeymoon.

  Hayden’s long, dark hair fell over my naked body, and under this most intimate of curtains, I saw his true face. He was the Hayden I actually loved – the weaker one who lived on the surface with his grandmother, Mami Wata.

  “Surprise, Seph. It’s really me. My father and Mami Wata wouldn’t like it that I’ve let you see the real me. We must keep it a secret,” and with that, Hayden snapped his fingers.

  Two of his Persephone handmaidens materialized and pulled the curtains around our four poster, shrouding us from view.

  Now, my lover was 100 percent the Hayden I cared for. Unlike his grandmother, he had not lost weight or atrophied in any way. He looked fine. Not “fine” in the sense of handsome hunk a million girls would lust after, but fine enough for me to do so.

  We reached for each other hungrily and time fell away.

  Chapter

  14

  I not only surrendered to Hayden, but to sleep as well – dreaming of my life on the surface and the fantastic time I had dining with the Springers earlier. I dreamt of Ronnie’s concerned face. One dream bled into another. Right before I woke up, I saw her driving down the Boulevard of Champions, screeching to a halt in front of Mami Wata’s and demanding to take me home.

  “I’m not ready to leave yet,” I murmured into Hayden’s naked shoulder. With my lips pressed against it, I could ascertain it was the skinny, non-muscular shoulder of the man I loved. And there was something else too, that made me sit up with a start and spit out sand and salt water.

  We were sleeping on a beach – a beautiful, deserted beach with the smell of coconuts emanating from swaying palm trees.

  Hayden sat up and pulled me between his legs – laughing and holding me as waves rolled in and covered our legs in sea foam.

  We both wore nothing, not even the cliché of fig leaves over our privates. Crazy as it sounds, I was relieved to look down and see normal anatomy – not Mami Wata’s tail.

  “Happy honeymoon,” my lover shouted over the noisiness of the ocean.

  I didn’t want to spoil it by asking if this was real. How could it be?

  “Swim with me,” he said, rising from his wet seat in the sand. He pulled me up, and in doing so, I saw his manhood. I liked what I saw well enough to blush.

  We went neck deep into the water. Unlike the canals around his house on the surface, the waters I shared with Hayden were relatively clear. They glistened an aqua blue under the sun – the kind of blue that can only be associated with the Caribbean.

  “I brought you to my favorite beach in Belize,” he told me, ducking under the water and letting me ride on his back as though he were a dolphin. He took me out to a sand bar. The coral reef seemed to sparkle with the same jewelry I’d worn that night at The Pomegranate.

  I admit to being very happy. I felt safe and unworried that I had died and this was heaven. Truth be told, I never wanted to go back – to the Underworld or my boring life on the surface.

  I cupped my hands on Hayden’s wet face and told him – for the very first time – that I loved him.

  “I know,” he said, kissing me deeply. When we broke for air, I finally summoned the courage to ask if any of this was real, and if it was, had we paid some kind of price for it.

  “Am I still alive, Hayden?”

  “Of course, I would never let them hurt you.”

  I believed him.

  We were so far out, when two young women appeared on the shoreline, we could tread water and watch them, probably without their noticing. One of the girls was blonde and wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit, and the other was a black girl, carrying a small dog in her arms. They did not appear to be friends. It seemed, actually, like the black girl was the servant of the white.

  “That’s my grandma,” Hayden said, his speech effected by the water he spit out from our vigorous swim moments before. “And the dog she is carrying is the first Papillon she ever owned. Its name is Domino, of course.

  “That’s Mami Wata!?” I was incredulous, but then again, I supposed it was stupid to be surprised. I had been told, after all, that we could travel through time, via the 7 seas. Today, we were bobbing around the Atlantic, watching the timeline from when Mami Wata was a young girl – a confused teenager who had yet to discover her tremendous powers. She thought she was a demon just for being attracted to other women. She didn’t know the half of it back then.

  “It’s 1931 before Belize was Belize, Hayden told me. “This is British Honduras, and that white lady she’s calling after is my grandmother’s employer, Phoebe. She works for Phoebe’s family as a maid.

  “Oh, was all I could say, my memory suddenly flooded with all the pictures of Phoebe I’d dusted in Mami Wata’s bedroom back on the surface. This was the love of the old woman’s life, and though I had conflicted and not altogether wonderful feelings about Mami Wata, it still broke my heart to see her with Phoebe.

  Phoebe was laughing at her and calling her vile names, like servant and darky. Mami Wata ran behind her, trying to catch up, trying to impress the young woman with shells from the beach. It was hard with Domino in her arms.

  “Look Phoebe, I found one!” Mami Wata held up a starfish, but this, too, was ignored.

  “Don’t you dare drop Domino,” the incredibly beautiful yet icy blonde girl responded.

  “Why does she love Phoebe if the girl is so cruel to her?” I asked Hayden.

  “I honestly have never understood it. Grandma has mourned Phoebe’s death since she died. From the way the waves and the sky are, it’s probably early summer. By September, Phoebe will be gone…”

  I tried to guess the reason for her demise. I wondered if Mami Wata murdered her for not loving her back, for treating her so poorly. Hayden set me straight on how the girl had actually died.

  “I’ve heard the story so many times,” he sighed. A hurricane in Belize in 1931 wiped out over 2,000 people. My grandma came upon Phoebe when the storm was over…dead. A beam from her fine house had fallen and crushed her to death. She had Domino in her arms, and Mami Wata took him for herself.”

  “You have a gay grandmother,” I reasoned. It was not with any judgment, I just wanted to say it out loud. I needed to make sense of how she’d eventually gone on to love a man and create Miz Furr, my high school principal.

  “Well, not entirely. Remember how I told you she likes men and women both?”

  I nodded, wondering if even in this alternate dream reality we treaded in, I could get withered, prune-like fingers and toes, waiting in the water to hear the story of Mami Wata.

  “Well…,” Hayden continued. “In 1931, she was just a confused kid, going by the name of Sirene. She had been discovered an orphan, by an order of nuns. She had webbed feet. She thought she was gay. She had tried her hand at black magic and been able to pull some of it off, to an effect that impressed and delighted dear, psycho Phoebe.”

  “How did she even meet Phoebe in the first place?”

  “When my grandma aged out of the orphanage in Belize City, the nuns tried placing her with a Bri
tish family. They live in amazing houses here. Houses that need servants. Mami Wata was to look after Domino and make sure he didn’t bark during Miss Phoebe’s piano lessons.”

  “So many pictures of a blonde girl playing a baby grand in Mami Wata’s bedroom,” I whispered, not sure why I bothered lowering my voice. The girls and Domino had left the beach about 10 minutes ago, Mami Wata wiping frustrated tears from her cheek with her free hand.

  Hayden told me Phoebe had been a world famous prodigy at the piano. Her dad was a physician to all of the wealthy British ambassadors here. After the hurricane, Mami Wata swam from Belize to Florida. But she didn’t always stay within the Sunshine State. She traveled the world, back and forth between different dimensions.

  “In one time frame, Mami Wata is in love with a woman named Teresa Rose, who lives in Winterhaven.”

  “I know her! I’ve dusted her picture many times. She’s the woman with the twin daughters,” I said this with revelation in my voice, adding it made perfect sense for Mami Wata to love this carbon copy of Phoebe. The two women looked so much alike!

  If Mami Wata were a puzzle, she was just about solved with this giant piece Hayden had just helped me uncover. But two women couldn’t make a baby together.

  “Who is your mom’s father?” I asked Hayden.

  “Teresa wasn’t gay….,” he paused. “Not at all. She had a Native American boyfriend named John Runningwolf. Mami Wata was jealous, tried to break them up. She put a spell on him, bedded him….”

  Then like a clam we might find on the beach, Hayden snapped the conversation shut. He started to swim away. I didn’t have a chance to ask anything about Lucas Furr, his father.

  “Time to go back now, to the surface,” he shouted over his shoulder – over a strong breast stroke.

  “How?” I slapped at waves, cresting and rolling toward our swimming figures. The tide grew strong enough to pull us under.

  And then it did. I squeezed my eyes shut to stop salt water from pouring into them, but there was no need. The floor in the root cellar was dry as a bone. Fury the dog watched me vomit Belizean sea water. All proof that the Underworld, and its portals to the 7 Seas, were hidden again. Its vehicle – the claw footed tub – sat there completely intact.

  The only thing that seemed weird was someone’s flashlight shining in my face. I put my hands over my eyes. “Hayden, is that you?” I asked…I hoped.

  When my eyes adjusted I could see that it wasn’t Hayden or Mami Wata shining a light into the hole. It was Ronnie from the Springer’s dinner party.

  “Once I realized what was going on, I had to follow you here. Oh, honey,” Ronnie gushed – looking beautiful in the moonlight. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

  Chapter

  15

  Fury recognized the older woman helping me out of the root cellar immediately, so he only licked her hand when Ronnie gripped mine to get me out of there. It took some doing. Like Hayden, her grip was weak. No pulse, no heat, but it wasn’t like I could be choosey over who rescued me.

  Ronnie met my questions with answers before I could open my mouth.

  “I came looking for you when Marc and Demi went to bed. I knew, I just knew you were one of Mami Wata’s victims.” She spoke in a normal tone and at ordinary volume, so I could tell Ronnie wasn’t fearful my captors would hear us.

  She explained to me that the old woman was lounging in her bathtub in the house, tail out and slugging Mami Juana wine out of her ancient goblet.

  “I spied on her before this rescue,” Ronnie told me, dragging me by the wrist to her car. She had parked so that our hoods were side and by side, and she could give me a jump.

  I’d left my lights on all night. When my engine and hers roared to life, she told me to follow her out of the neighborhood, so we could talk at an all-night diner a few miles from here.

  “Forgive me if I don’t want to get to know you better in this deranged family’s front yard,” she winked and drove off.

  15 minutes later we were sitting in a sticky vinyl booth, looking at a menu with all kinds of hot fudge sundaes on it. Ronnie treated us to a brownie, drowning in vanilla ice cream and asked the waitress for two spoons.

  “Won’t Marc and Demi be upset when they wake up in a few hours and find you gone?”

  “No. They know to expect that kind of thing from me. I am still so traumatized from being kidnapped by the Furr family that I’m always flaking out on people.”

  “How old were you when they took you?” I asked.

  “High school, just like you. Miz Furr had her eye on me – knew Hayden would like me, and next thing you know I’m cleaning his grandmother’s house.”

  “Did he take you to hell?” By the time I asked this, the waitress came with our dessert. I could tell she had overheard us because she gave us the oddest look when she plunked down the brownie treat. Ronnie waited until she’d retreated to the kitchen to answer the question.

  “Of course, and I saw others – the girls he’d taken…who’d been killed before they escaped.”

  Ronnie was the first to tackle the dessert. She had a lump in her throat which made swallowing difficult. She told me she hadn’t allowed herself to think about this in over 25 years; that to cope with her PTSD, she convinced herself half the time, it had all been a terrible dream.

  “How did you escape?” I asked, taking the bright red cherry off the top of the sundae.

  “I never slept with him,” Ronnie replied. She watched my face go white because I had.

  “Oh, honey, there’s still hope! And anyway, I don’t think that’s what matters down there in that….world…of theirs. I ate their pomegranate when Mami Wata drugged me in the nightclub. I woke up, both prisoner and maid in her home. And I let them take me through their magic mirrors. I ran away just before we were to be married…”

  Ronnie trailed off as we both thought of the crystal blue waters and Caribbean beaches inside those mirrors in Mami Wata’s house.

  “Except for our honeymoon tonight, I’ve barely done that,” I admitted. “I’ve seen Hayden come through the mirror in the master bedroom, but I’ve only gotten to hell through the mausoleum in Our lady in Heaven, and via the root cellar.”

  I told her Hayden and I consummated our love for each other after I saw his grave marker at the cemetery. I knew he had been born dead, a stillborn.

  Ronnie took in my side of the story, nodding grimly. She expressed her disappointment that I’d fallen in love with the weaker Hayden – that I felt sorry for him, when all he was, really, was a sarcophagus of hurt and evil that sucked the life out of people so he could seem alive.

  If living that sort of life on the Boulevard of Champions could even be called living.

  Before Ronnie launched into the full, sordid story, she did tell me that only a person with a heart of stone could resist feeling sorry for the poor Prince of the Underworld. She did once, but as she got older, her pity had faded to anger.

  Still, what a bad life Hayden had. Mami Wata drugged him constantly. She deceived him into believing he was the undead, and needed to suck the life out of girls like me to function above ground.

  “There’s so much they’re not telling you,” Ronnie implored, grabbing my wrist. “When I found out the truth about that family…I couldn’t…I wouldn’t stay. You feel sorry for Hayden because you think he’s the undead. Well, he’s not dead. He was never actually still born. Mami Wata is a mid-wife, and she breathed life back into him when he came out, blue and not breathing. Ever since, he’s been sickly. Probably from…”

  Ronnie lacked the courage to finish. I prompted her, by telling her my blood was on her hands if she didn’t.

  “From inbreeding,” Ronnie declared finally. She smiled awkwardly at the waitress who left our bill on the table and refilled our coffee cups.

  “You girls take your time,” the lady said. She left us to discuss how the love of my life was the product of incest.

  “Don’t mean to land thi
s bombshell on you, but Mizz Furr’s twin brother is Lucas Furr. Hayden is unbelievably screwed up from being the product of a brother and sister doing each other.

  I don’t know if what they pull over on people – what they make us see down there – is from drugging us and hypnotizing us, or if they’re truly magic. I just know that I wanted no part of it. Hayden’s dad is pure evil.”

  “I know!” I whispered savagely, so the other night owls in the diner couldn’t hear me describe how Fury the pit bull spoke in Lucas Furr’s voice.

  Ronnie kept talking, confirming about Lucas Furr what I already knew.

  “He’s a gun lobbyist for the NRA. I think The Pomegranate launders money. I know he’s greased the palms of some pretty awful politicians, but…”

  “What?” I practically begged.

  “I was just going to say,” continued Ronnie, “that even evil fathers love their sons. It was kept from Hayden – the story of his birth. He doesn’t know his mom and dad are really brother and sister. And when I threatened to tell him, Lucas begged me not to. He said Hayden would be destroyed by the truth.”

  Neither one of us wanted that. Ronnie and I both reminisced about how tender and passionate the Prince of the Underworld could be – how incredible the trips with him through the 7 portals were. I had only been through one – where I met Phoebe and the teenage Mami Wata. Ronnie had been to each of the 7 seas. I quickly became jealous of all the things Hayden and Ronnie had done in their courtship that still eluded me.

  For instance, Hayden had never taken me on a white horse to charge across the beaches of the French Riviera; nor had I seen dark mushrooms glow at the bottom of the Australian sea. We both marveled at how Hayden never seemed to age – here Ronnie sat, with her fine lines and graying hair. She hadn’t seen Hayden since her narrow escape from Mami Wata’s house, and was flabbergasted when I told her he seemed not much older than me.

  We were both as skeptical of each other’s descriptions of the Prince and his Underworld as we were envious of what we were hearing.