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Until another thought occurs to me.
“How did you get it to work?”
Hades blinks. “How did I get what to work?”
“You and Aunt Persephone. Daisy said. She said she could do something to your energy so you wouldn’t get headaches. How did you get that to work? Like, she saved you. The other day. Because of the solar storms.”
Maybe Apollo is reacting to the magnetic storms. Maybe I’ve missed something enormous about him, and he’s more like Hades than I thought. Apollo is so sunny, but maybe he’s not the sun at all.
Hades puts his hand on my shoulder and shakes, very lightly.
Oh. I forgot to breathe.
I start breathing again.
“That’s different,” he says, after a minute.
“You and Aunt Persephone? Well, obviously you’re different people, but how different can it be? We’re all different people. That’s what humanity does.”
“Persephone has her own…” He makes a circle in the air, indicating that his word choice might not be accurate. At least, I think that’s what he’s indicating. “Power. And I have mine.”
“Okay?”
“It’s not like your mother and father. Or Poseidon and Brigit.”
“How do you know that?”
“Through observation,” he says.
“Then how does Persephone do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t say that to me,” I snap at him. “Everyone keeps saying they don’t know. And that’s not going to be enough. Nobody knows how to do anything. That’s, like, humanity. That is all of humanity. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to throw up our hands and let Apollo die.”
There is a silence during which Hades’s black eyes don’t tell me anything about what’s going on in his head. Damn him for that.
“I would imagine,” he says, finally, “that the way things work between me and Persephone has to do with a certain…bonding element.”
“Bonding element? Like rope? Like handcuffs?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Not like that.”
“Like fucking?”
Another brief pause.
“If I recall correctly, it was during a…private time we spent together.”
I fling my hands up into the air and pace away from him. “Well, fuck! Because we’ve already done that! If fucking was the cure, then he’d be cured right now! Sorry to ruin your life with that information! I probably should have said it quieter, but it’s too late now! It’s too late for everything! God! If it was as simple as fucking, I’d be in there riding him to kingdom come!”
“I have no doubt,” says Hades, gently.
I throw my head back and stare at the ceiling.
“I can’t believe that’s all you had to do. Just hop in the sack, and boom, bonded or whatever.”
“No sack,” he says, with extreme delicacy. “I seem to recall a chair.”
