Hades Legacy (Hades Series #3)

Epilogue

And nothing in this world could bring her back.

It's not often that I truly despise my existence, but after she died, forever suddenly became an agonisingly long time; especially if it's spent alone.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't see Jasmine much after everything finally ended, and in all honesty, I didn't blame her. Two of our friends had died, one had turned out to be the enemy's right hand spy, one had run away into hiding with his tail between his legs after everything fell apart on the beach, and the last one, the most important one to both of us for completely different reasons, had been unfairly ripped away from us by the stupid concoction called Fate. After all of that had happened, it didn't really surprise me that Jasmine kept her distance, from me or any of the supers except for her parents; and if I was completely honest, I still wasn't sure after all this time whether I would be able to stomach looking at Jasmine without being reminded of her.

I wouldn't be surprised if she felt the same way.

The one person I have seen a lot of, though, is Evie; quite literally the last person I thought I would ever actually enjoy talking to for an extended period of time, ever. I guess we got over our mutual hatred for each other by switching to mutually hating Amphitrite for what she did, and we spent quite a few nights together devising possible locations that her husband had hidden the crazy sea goddess; we even checked out some of these locations in the small hope that we were actually right, but given Hades had been alive since the dawn of time and most likely had thousands of hiding places we would never find, we didn't have much luck. But then Hades realised what we had been doing and just about trapped us in one of the pyramids in Egypt for going around behind his back, so made the executive decision to stop.

Apparently Evie hates mummies. I found that hysterical for all of about two seconds before I made the subconscious note to tease Ellie about it and ask her if it was a genetic thing, before it hit me.

Then it stopped being funny real quick.

Weirdly enough though, that didn't discourage Evie from coming up to the surface to visit me. Only, this time, every time she came up, she did the last thing I ever expected her to do: she asked me to tell her stories about Ellie, when she was up on the surface experiencing life for herself. The first few times, I wasn't sure if she was actually being serious; her and Hades had disappeared with Ellie as soon as Hades had dealt with Amphitrite, and none of us — including Spencer — heard from either of them for several weeks. But once Evie got me started telling stories, I found that I couldn't stop, and it felt like in a way, I was bringing Ellie back to life by retelling the stories of all the things she did, and how she found every little thing so fascinatingly beautiful for so many different reasons.

It took me a long time to realise that the reason Evie asked me to share those stories with her was because she missed out on those last, few, precious moments of Ellie's life. And I think in some ways, all those nights we spent swapping stories about her made the darkness a little more bearable for the both of us, even if it was just for a few hours.

I sigh, running my hand over my jaw as I stare quietly out across the beach from the spot we'd celebrated Ellie's birthday all those months ago. I couldn't help but find the cruel irony in all of this; I had finally, against all my good judgment and better efforts fallen in love with someone — and fallen for them damn hard — and then had to go and watch them die in front of me. After everything I'd done, after I'd spent my entire existence making sure I didn't let love affect me in the way I'd seen it destroy countless people, it had happened anyway. I had fallen in love with the one person I never thought I would ever fall for; the one person in the world who was actually selfless enough to sacrifice their own life without a moment's hesitation. I'd lost count of the nights I had spent trying to convince myself that I should hate her for what she did, for what she's done to me, but I've never been able to, not even for a minute. That's the thing about Ellie; she was so pure of heart that you couldn't just hate her. Even when she hated me, she could never stay mad at me for very long; and I wasn't so egocentric that I believed that was all because of my irresistibly charming personality. That was all her; she always saw the best in people, even when they broke her heart or were trying to kill her. I'd never met anyone like her in my entire existence, and I know I never will ever again.