Neverfall

by Brodi Ashton

  THE FIRST PERSEPHONE

  Everybody knows who the first queen of the Underworld was. Persephone. Human mythology books begin and end with her.

  But the truth is, Persephone was merely the first of many queens of the Everneath. There are those of us who know the truth: the Everliving, like me, who feed on willing human beings—Forfeits—in exchange for eternal life. We know that Persephone was brought down by a Forfeit who emerged from the hundred-year Feed with her youth, and sanity, intact.

  Every succession of power since has been brought about by a Forfeit who survived the Feed.

  We know this. This is common knowledge among the Everliving.

  What we don’t know is who will be next in line for the throne.

  My Forfeit survived the Feed. I believe I’ve found the answer.

  PROLOGUE

  All I could do was watch.

  The Tunnels came for Nikki, invisible wind grabbing at her hair, tendrils of smoke wrapping around her waist. Relentless.

  This was it. This was the end.

  Fighting against the force of the funnel cloud, she reached up to touch Jack’s face. Declarations of love were exchanged. She couldn’t spare one last glance toward me.

  All I could do was watch.

  Jack threw her to the ground behind him. He jumped into the Tunnels, feet first, sacrificing himself so that Nikki could live. The Tunnels were satisfied.

  Nikki collapsed into the arms of Jack’s brother, who whisked her and her freshly broken heart away.

  And all I could do was watch.

  She left me on that balcony, paralyzed by emotions I didn’t know I had in me.

  The question I should’ve been asking myself was, In ninety-nine years, how will I find another Forfeit who will survive the Feed? But the question I actually asked myself was, Could Nikki ever look at me the way she looked at Jack in those final moments?

  I was done watching. I had to act.

  ONE

  NOW

  A bunch of weeks after the tunnels came for Nikki and left with Jack.

  In a strange bed, in a strange room.

  The haze started to clear, and I realized I was in a bed in an unfamiliar room. Eclectic lamps, shaded in deep-purple fabric, cast dark light against the walls.

  And someone was calling my name.

  “Cole. ” Rough hands slapped my face. “Cole. Wake up. ” A male voice. Familiar.

  I tried to say Leave me the hell alone, but it just came out as a groan. I rolled over to one side, swatting at the intruder like a fly.

  “How much did you say he drank?” the voice asked.

  A second voice scoffed. “I’m not his babysitter. ” This time the voice belonged to someone of the female persuasion.

  “Sure. Especially when you had the chance to get with the lead guitarist of the Dead Elvises, right? The more wasted he is, the better. ”

  Ah. Maxwell. Fellow Everliving. Friend.

  I opened my eyes—apparently I’d shut them again—and blinked several times. Max’s face hovered over mine.

  “There you are. Ready to leave the brothel?” he asked. “We’ve got a gig. ”

  A girl with blond hair stood next to him, also staring down at me. “My bedroom is not a brothel. ” She sighed and put a hand on her hip. “Okay, so he’s drunk. I don’t see what the big deal is. ”

  Max leaned down, put my arm around his shoulders, and hoisted me up off the bed. “The Dead Elvises drink, but we don’t get drunk. We don’t need to. ”

  He pulled me toward the door.

  “He needed to,” the girl said defensively. “And he had fun. ”

  “Excellent. I’m sure he’ll remember it clearly and document it in his diary under the heading, ‘What the Hell Was I Thinking. ’”

  I swung my head back as we went through the doorway. The blond girl raised a hand and waved at me. I lifted a finger in response.

  What the hell was I thinking? I hated blondes.

  8 coffees and 4 dry-heaving episodes later.

  In a green room somewhere.

  I pushed myself up into a sitting position on the circa 1970s couch and groaned loudly as a spring broke free and gouged my thigh. Damn green-room couches. The muffled bass tones of some random opening band floated in from the stage, making it difficult to think straight. I was not ready to go on.

  I groaned and rubbed my eyes.

  “That’s what you get for going on a five-day bender,” Max said from the small kitchenette that broke off from the main room.

  “Five days?” I swore loudly.

  Max came back in, carrying a fresh pot of coffee. He filled my mug. “Yeah. You left to confront Nikki about how she survived the Feed. Fast-forward five days, and I find you passed out in a superfan’s bedroom. What happened?”

  I rewound my brain to five days ago, when I had stood on Nikki’s front lawn. “She said she didn’t know how she survived. ” I frowned. “But she was lying. ”

  “Why do you think that?”

  Because her eyes always gave it away. I saw them clearly as I asked her how she had survived. When her words were as full of holes as a sieve and held no truth, she would blink more than she needed to. As if to create a barrier between herself and the person she was lying to.

  But I couldn’t tell Max this. It would bolster his claim that I was “obsessed” with her. Which I totally wasn’t.

  “I just know, okay?” I put my head in my hands, breathed in deeply, and for the first time realized I smelled something other than coffee brewing. “What’s burning?”

  “What do you think?” Max said.

  I rolled my eyes. Maybe someone else would be alarmed by the odor, but for me it was the new normal. It meant that Oliver and Gavin, the bass player and the drummer, were in the kitchenette messing around with the chemical pyrotechnics our manager had suggested for our next tour.

  “They’re gonna burn the place down,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I turned toward the kitchenette. “Indie bands don’t need pyrotechnics!”

  Oliver leaned his head out the doorway. “But it’s awesome!”

  “But we’re not a hair band from the eighties. ”

  “But … it’s fiiiiiire! On a stage!” Oliver ducked back inside the kitchenette. I shook my head.

  A knock came at the door. “Ten minutes, Deads!” the club manager shouted.

  I glanced around the room for my guitar and felt Max’s intense gaze. He was waiting for something. “What?” I asked.

  He frowned. “You know it’s over with Nikki, right?”

  I grimaced. “She’s the closest we’ve ever gotten to finding someone who could take over the throne. ”

  “But it’s over,” Max growled.

  “She was our only chance to never have to find human sacrifices for the queen again. We would be done with the quotas. ”

  “But it’s over! The Tunnels came for her, and she escaped. It’s done. You have no power over her anymore. ”

  Max always had a problem with me choosing to take Nikki to the Feed, but I still wasn’t sure why. At first I knew he thought my pursuit of Nikki would be pointless because she would never choose to go with me.

  But she did.

  Then he thought she didn’t have the right training, or the right lineage, to survive the Feed and stay young.

  But she did.

  “Why do you resent her so much?” I said.

  Max sighed loudly. “I don’t. I just don’t think our future lies with an unknown girl from nowhere. ”

  “But she survived the Feed. ”

  “So? She’s an anomaly. She also avoided the Tunnels, because another guy—also o
bsessed with her—made a stupid decision that cost him his life. All for a girl. ”

  I relaxed my shoulders. “Is that why you hate her? Because you think I’m going to make a stupid decision too?”

  He took a step closer to me. “I think you are primed to make the stupidest decision of your nine-hundred-year life. She’s gone. You have nothing to hold her to. Nothing to threaten her with. She’s free. ”

  Another knock came at the door. “Five minutes!”

  Max started to turn away as if he’d won the argument. He held the door open, and the band went through the doorway. As we approached the stage, the sound of screaming fans grew louder, and I forced the practiced unimpressed-but-happy-to-be-performing smile onto my face.

  What Max didn’t understand was that from the moment I’d met Nikki, I couldn’t imagine either one of us ever being free of the other.

  TWO

  LAST YEAR

  Harry O’s.

  The night fate threw a wide-eyed girl in my path.

  The bouncer’s eyes glazed over, and he stood aside with a blank expression on his face. It wasn’t natural.

  “Was that really necessary?” I said to Max as we passed through the doorway into Harry O’s club. “We’re already on the list. We’re like top of the list. ”

  Max closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. “No, but if we only did the necessary things in life, how fun would that be?”

  I glanced back at the bouncer, whose blank expression had been replaced with the carefree smile that always appeared on a human’s face after an Everliving fed, momentarily freeing the human from his or her worst emotions.

  For a little while the things that weighed heavy on that bouncer’s mind would be lifted, and the best feelings inside him would rise to the surface.

  If I thought about it long enough, I’d consider that man lucky.

  But Max feeding off that bouncer just to get us inside faster was an unnecessary risk of our exposure, not just to the humans, but to other Everlivings. The band as a rule tried to fly under the radar in both worlds.

  The less the queen knew about us, the better. When you were ruled by a tyrant, anonymity was imperative. Or at least obscurity. Already we were toeing the line because we hadn’t fulfilled our sacrifice quota this month. Any minute we’d be getting the automatic text from the Everneath reminding us we owed a debt to the Tunnels.

  “The D. O. P. are already here,” Max said, using his own little nickname for the Daughters of Persephone. He gestured to the other side of the giant room where Meredith was sitting at a long table next to Kasey James and a brunette I’d never seen before. A sign stood in the middle of the table on a metal stand: RESERVED.

  The new brunette was for me, I’d guess. Probably shipped from the D. O. P. Distribution Center just for this moment, to meet her Dead Elvis.

  She’d give me whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. She’d have been raised that way.

  The piped-in club music blaring over the speakers did little to drown out the excitement wafting over the crowd from the girls at the table. I started to make my way across the dance floor, the band following close behind me. The crowd parted for us. I’d grown used to the stares that followed us most places, especially in hipster joints like this one.

  That’s all they were though … stares. Rarely did someone have the guts to approach us. Maybe it was because we looked unapproachable. Max was, after all, wearing a silver, spiked dog collar tonight.

  Someone bumped into my shoulder with enough force to knock me off my path.

  “What the hell?” I said, pushing him off me.

  “Hey, watch where you’re—” His slurred speech cut off as he got a good look at me. “Dude,” he said in that I-recognize-a-rock-star kind of way. “You’re a Dead. ”

  I rolled my eyes and resisted the urge to push him again just for fun.

  “I’m a fan. ” At the f sound in fan, I got sprayed with droplets of the man’s spit.

  Maybe I should’ve had more patience, but I’d been doing this for hundreds of years. The Dead Elvises were only the latest incarnation of our band. We picked a new name, a new genre of music, a new identity every generation or so. But this generation was so digital, and our images were plastered everywhere. Next time we did this, we’d probably have to get face-lifts as well.

  But the point was that tonight the crazed, drunken, spitting fan was becoming old.

  Everything in my life was becoming old.

  “Can I have an autograph?” the guy said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “You have no pen and no paper. ”

  He stood there staring blankly at me, as if to say, Why would I need a pen and paper?

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Find me later, dude. Okay?”

  A smile broke across his face with such enthusiasm that I wondered if I’d accidentally said How about you join the band?

  He staggered away and disappeared into the crowd. It was guys like that who made me reconsider hiring a bodyguard. But bodyguards weren’t our style. Bodyguards signified a certain level of stardom, and we liked to cruise just below that level.

  Once seated at the table, Meredith wedged herself in between Max and me. Max’s face lit up—at least as much as Max’s face ever lit up, which was about as much as Bill Gates’s would if he found out he had an extra million lying around. Max was lucky he found this Forfeit attractive. It would make the first few decades of the Feed more tolerable.

  “Cole,” Meredith said, infusing more excitement into those four letters than I’d heard in a while. “This is Shacey. She’s from the Seattle chapter of the D. O. P. ”