It had to be her.
Every step she took, every new inhale, sent a new wave of energy passing through the island. Through me, through the trees on my left, whispering her name. Begging her to come back. To touch them and give them the energy only Persephone could give.
Was this just another trick my brothers created to torture me? Was she just a figment of my imagination, so desperate to feel something, anything but the constant void spreading through my body, rotting me from the inside out?
"Who are you?" I repeated again, hating the flinch on her face at the sound of the coldness in my tone. But she couldn't be who I was waiting for. She couldn't be.
Lifetimes have passed since I gave up on ever seeing her again, forever trapped on this island, in this eternal tomb Demeter had created from her own flesh and blood. Lifetimes in which Persephone's soul lived in the bodies of mortal women,dying over and over and over again, while I rotted here, begging for something, anything, to change. Begging to go to them, to these faceless women I could see in the dreams, in the memories.
And each time, each lifetime, each life ended in misery, in tears, only leaving me with a heartbreak I knew too fucking well.
So who was she and how was she here? She was no one from the island. But she wasn't mortal.
This woman in front of me had power humming underneath her skin, waiting to be unleashed. Waiting to be free. The shadows in her eyes sharpened the longer she stared at me, but she never replied to my question. She didn't try to come closer either, and I both hated and loved the distance.
I took a step backward. She took a step forward, then two, then three, until those silver eyes stared up at me, the top of her head barely reaching my shoulders. Her lips parted as those icy eyes skimmed over my face, coming back to my eyes after every perusal, drinking me in as if she were seeing me for the first time in her life.
"Who are you, stranger?" she suddenly asked as her head tilted to the side, more questions popping up in her eyes as her lips pressed together. "Why were you at the docks this morning?" She saw me? How could she have seen me? "But that's not the point." She took one more step forward, our chests almost touching, our energies fusing, buzzing, exploding around us.
She could feel it too, I could sense that much, but she wasn't aware of her power. Or if she was, she had no idea how to pull it forward. She had no idea how to wield it, and sometimes that was more dangerous than being aware of what you were capable of.
That darkness I sensed in her eyes, that bitterness brimming somewhere deep inside her, was more apparent the closer shegot. She was a predator, a lioness in a forest full of gazelles, just waiting to attack, and she had no idea. Not even a clue what kind of a weapon she carried.
Was that why her soul called out to me? This dark energy living inside her was probably why I felt such a pull. Why I felt the need to touch her and the need to also run away. She couldn't be the one the sisters had told me about. She couldn't be the one who would end my suffering.
She just couldn't. After thousands and thousands of years without my soulmate, while my own soul bled, ripped away from the one it belonged to, I've learned to live with the pain. I learned to live with the knowledge we would never be together, never again. Not in this life and probably not in the next one.
"Are you going to answer or are you going to keep staring at me?" she asked, the defiance, the rage in her eyes sparking the fire from the ashes of my own soul, and I didn't know what to do with it. "So?"
My hand lifted of its own volition, begging to touch her, to see if she was real, this fiery Goddess standing in front of me. I was torn between the need to run from her and the need to find out what she was. I was torn between the desire to claim the full lips begging to be kissed and the desire to go back to my house and remember why I only ever allowed myself to touch Persephone.
But the longer I stood in front of this woman, the less I thought of the one I lost. The less I thought of the pain that followed her death, her eternal ending, and I knew I needed to get away from her. Far, far away.
"I'm Hayden," I said, looking down at her, wishing I could see the thoughts swirling behind her eyes. "Hayden Raev."
"Hayden." She rolled the name given to me by the locals on her tongue, as if she wanted to taste it. But I was a fool for allowing myself to seek her out when I felt her again, herenergy erratically jumping all over the place. "And what are you, Hayden?" she asked, accentuating my name as if she didn't believe it was the real one. But more than that, it was her question that made me stop and think. "You're not one of the monsters or mythical creatures, or you have a stronger glamour than the rest. But I can see them." She looked around me, her eyes tracing something. "I can see them touching you. I can hear them in my ears, begging me to remember, but I don't know what I'm supposed to remember. The same way you've been asking me to remember in every single one of my dreams."
I recoiled, taking a step back from her. She's been dreaming of me, too? But in my nightmares, in every single one of them, we never spoke. We never touched. I begged her to come back to me. I begged her to stay with me, but each time she fell over those cliffs—these same fucking cliffs.
She could see my shadows, the curse that followed me from the Underworld the moment we got locked in this place. She could hear them, the voices of the damned. The voices that wouldn't, couldn't, quiet down no matter what I tried. She could probably even hear their cries if she tried hard enough, and I didn't know what to do with that information.
"Impossible," I murmured, staring at her as if I was seeing her for the first time. It was only then I noticed the red around her eyes and the puffiness in her face. It was only then I could feel her pain as if it were my own slamming into my soul.
Suffocating.
Relentless.
Craving for violence.
"What's impossible," she bit out, again coming closer to me, "is the fact that I can see things that aren't supposed to exist. What's impossible is me seeing the man that had haunted my dreams for almost a year now, almost always hidden, except for the eyes and that tattoo on your neck. What's impossible,stranger," her voice rose an octave, "is the fact that my life got turned upside down when I was supposed to die together with my family, yet I'm still here. There are many things that are supposed to be impossible, yet here I am, standing on an island that might as well be my doom instead of my salvation." Her voice cracked at the last word, and the wayward tear I hated to see ran down her left cheek while those eyes shone brightly, swallowing me with their misery. "So I'm going to ask again."
The tips of her boots touched the tips of mine, her fingers just a breath away, so fucking close yet so far, because I couldn't trust myself not to do something stupid.
I couldn't fucking trust myself not to snatch her from here and take her to my home. To lock her inside and to hide her from the misery she was obviously living in. To hide her from anything and anyone that wanted to hurt her, when there was only one other person I had cared about enough to even entertain such an idea.
Only one person throughout my entire existence understood that monsters weren't those who lived in the dark, but more often those that lived in the light.
"Who are you?!" Her voice boomed across the clearing, silencing the wind that started picking up. My eyes lifted up to the skies, to the dark clouds violently rolling toward us, toward this very place. The thunder sliced the skies with a savage cry, and as tears rolled down her cheeks, so did the rain, washing over us with a touch of pain.
