Chapter 1

Chapter

One

P ersephone

"Persephone!" Like it has so many times before, the voice pulls me violently from sleep. It's an animal sound, my name in the roar of desperate rage. Beneath the anger, there is an echo of something more. A symphony of ancient anguish.

It cools my blood, pebbling my flesh with unease.

I've been waking to the call of a man no one else can hear my entire life. As far back as I can remember, I can recall the pain of his rough, unchanging anguish. The soul-deep rage that clings to the pain—too deep for me to possibly explore.

Too deep for anyone to explore. I can't even imagine an ocean trench being vast enough to encompass the breadth of his sorrow. His torment is a tortured melody that tears me from sleep, and more recently, interrupts even my waking moments.

There was once a time, when I was too young to know better, that I would ask others if they heard him. My Sunday school teacher had guffawed in horror, clutching the gold cross around her neck. Mom and Dad had hushed me, explaining it all away with excuses or calls for attention. Until the calls became too frequent, and I started seeing the doctors.

Even as a child, I could see something in the doctor's eyes when he asked me about the voice I heard. He pressed to know if this voice told me to do things. Bad things. He pressed for my most secret and shameful thoughts. Only, I didn't have any.

My thoughts regarding the voice even then had been worry. A sorrowful fear that another was hurting beyond comprehension. A sense that I alone could see to that hurt. Could make it better. Could ease it, if just a bit.

During my visits with the doctor, Mom and Dad would wait. Mom's nails were always bitten to the bed, her knees jumping anxiously. Dad's head was always bowed between his shoulders, as though he carried a weight too massive to bear. It didn't take me long to learn that what I heard was not normal. It was not normal in a way that would eventually bear a terrible kind of consequence I did not want to have to pay.

Deep in the night, when the voice would wake me and I'd creep from my room to Mom and Dad's for comfort, I'd heard their hushed arguments. They whispered of mental illness, of disease, and a life of hospitals.

Dad spoke of barbaric treatments. Mom spoke of prayer. They feared something was deeply wrong with me. Something terrifying and shameful.

I was a test from God, or a curse from the devil.

Their marriage was cracking. Because of me.

I learned in those early moments that I could not share this pain I felt in the depths of me. I could not share the man's anguished cry of my name. Not with the doctors, the church, or even with my parents.

I could not confide in the two people I should have been able to trust wholly and without restriction.

I terrified them.

At the tender age of seven, I learned to keep the voice to myself. I stopped telling them of how I woke in the night. I denied hearing the voice when asked. The doctor gloated in pleasure when he diagnosed me with an imaginary friend, not unlike many other children. He claimed my parents had no need to worry, and they eagerly believed him.

My Sunday school teacher sighed in relief at the news, but never quite looked at me as she did the other kids .

I learned what normal looked like and replicated it to please those around me. For years, it worked. I think it's still working.

I attended school, and worked hard to top the honor roll. I danced and played sports. I tended the farm with Dad, and worked with Mom in town in her flower shop. I sat between them in the pew every Sunday, my mind far, far away.

I grew a soul-deep love of art; paintings in specific. Though I had no ability with the brush, my appreciation for art never waned. Nor did it grow spite in the yawning shadow that is my lack of talent. I looked at a brushstroke and felt somehow closer to the voice that called my name in my mind. To the unexplained agony that festered in the depths of my soul.

Beneath the night sky, under the white shadow of a full-bellied moon, I felt alive. Staring into a golden flame, I burned with desire I could not name. And I'd been entirely obsessed with all things Greek Mythology, since I studied Ancient Greece in grade six. The Gods and Goddesses fascinated me to no end, even though Mom was always quick to tell me the myths were nothing more than stories, and there was only one God. Our God.

Still, the bookshelves in my room were bursting with texts and stories about the Gods and Goddesses. Maybe it was my name, Persephone, that drew me to the myths. I was captivated by the stories of Hades' claiming of his queen. The cruelty in the capture of a young girl. The deceit woven into the fabric of an unwanted love. The centuries and centuries— the millennia —of hateful spite that followed in the aftermath as a Goddess—a mother, scorned by the loss of her daughter to the God of the Underworld, starved the earth for six months of the year in what the people would begin to call the seasons .

I'd once asked Mom why she named me Persephone, and she had told me she'd liked the name Stephanie, but it was too common. She'd read the name Persephone in a book, and it had resonated. And that was how I'd become Persephone. Funny how, now, everyone calls me Annie.

I haven't been called Persephone outside of the man who roars my name in my mind. I haven't heard my name outside of my dreams, in ages.

Mom's hands come to either side of my face, and she leans in to press her warm lips to my forehead. Behind her, Dad's scruffy jaw is hard.

He doesn't want me to go. He's been vocal about this, unusually hostile, even.

For the most part, Dad is a teddy bear in blue jeans, plaid, and dirt-caked fingernails. But he's always been somewhat unreceptive when it came to my obsession with Greek Mythology. He's only little more receptive of my fascination with art, and slightly more so of the degree in archeology I aspire to work toward, specializing, of course, in the Hellenic Republic .

He's proud of the fact I want to go to school. That I have the desire to nourish my mind and enrich my life with a sustainable career. Even though he doesn't love the fact archaeology in itself will take me away from home more often than I'd be there, I know he's proud.

What he doesn't love is that I'm aspiring, specifically, to study archaeology in Greece. If it weren't so difficult to find jobs within the art sector, I know he'd be waving that flag high and wide. Alas, a career in art is not easy, and the theory of the starving artist has left him with a sour taste on his tongue.

I know what he's hoping. He's hoping that I'll go to Greece and explore enough of the country under the safety of a very expensive four-month programme in which I will be introduced to the career I think I so desperately want—and hate it. He's hoping for itchy bug bites and sunburns and heat stroke. Nothing too harmful, of course, but an in general awful experience that will have me tucking tail and returning home.

He'd been so opposed to the idea of my summer in Greece, that after a lifetime of promises to aid me in my education, he'd flatly refused to invest in this .

So, I'd dumped nearly my entire life savings from working nights in Mom's flower shop into this experience. It left me with very little to see myself through the next four months in Greece. I will no doubt have to find a job, but that's fine. That's totally fine.

It only adds to the experience, right?

"You call as soon as you land," Mom demands, and Dad gives me a firm nod. The only thing he's agreed to continue paying for is my cell phone, and the unlimited international minutes I'll need to keep in daily contact with home.

"I will."

Mom sniffles. "And make sure you wear a hat every day." Her lips pull down in a pouty frown. "You're so fair, you're going to come back looking like crisped bacon."

I don't tell her she's being dramatic, even though she is. "I'll wear my hat." I hurry to add when she opens her mouth, "And sunscreen."

I hate sunscreen, but I wear it always. For Mom.

Her mouth clamps closed and with a slightly narrowed eye, and a cheeky grin Dad misses. She leans in to press a second kiss to my forehead. "I love you, Annie."

"I love you, too." I step from her embrace to Dad's. He instantly wraps me in his bear hug. It's the one I recall from my youth. The one that never changed, remaining constant always in a world that is ever-shifting.

"Love you, kiddo," he murmurs gruffly into my fair hair. Emotion thickens his usually smooth voice, and his hug tightens, kiss deepening in my nearly white locks.

I have no idea where I got it, because both Mom and Dad have muddy-toned, brown hair. Mine is so blonde, it's touching albino white. At least I have Dad's green eyes and Mom's full, pink lips. I might not share her hair color, but I did inherit her fall of uniform, smooth waves.

I know I'm theirs, not adopted. Despite my fair hair, I look too much like them to question the validity of my bloodline. I think, if I'd been adopted, they'd have found some way to return me for the stress I'd put them under as a young child facing a potential personality diagnosis of some sort or another.

But we don't talk about the voice. We never talk about the voice. It's like it never happened. Never was.

I haven't told a soul about the fact I still hear him. Or that I hear him more often now than ever before. His calls for me growing more and more frequent, more insistent. The enraged anguish tugging the threads of my soul away from this place to another, far, far away land.

Sometimes, in the moments I'm struck by his call, stripped of sanity in the aftermath of my need to seek a way to respond to him, I think it's why I'm going to Greece.

And that terrifies me.

Because if I'm following a voice no one else hears across the globe—then maybe I really am insane.