by Vivian Wood
At the tree line, I stop one final time. Once I get on the train, there’s no going back. A wild instinct bursts out the cage of my chest—run, run, go home, go back inside, pound on the door, beg her to let me in—but no. I am not a little girl anymore, my mother is not my keeper, and I’m leaving.
I need this.
I fold the purse into the palm of my hand and step into the murky darkness beneath the trees. For the first several paces, everything is shadowed, moonlight cutting through the branches and splashing onto the dirt. The shadow changes character as I go, lightening until the soft glow of the streetlamp burns into the night. It’s old, the plastic casing around the lightbulb cloudy, but even that much light tells me what I need to know—the fence is open.
The fence is open.
I jump into the air—I can’t help it—and come down soft, heat rushing to my cheeks. God, let Decker not have seen me jumping for joy. I don’t know who he convinced to give him the key, and in this moment, I don’t care. It’s going to be an irrelevant detail in the space of an hour or two. My pulse is a hummingbird, fast and light and giddy. Walk slowly, normally.
The train waits on the tracks.
From my brief stint at boarding school, I know what a real train platform is like. I rode this same train into the city, and it let me off at the main station, where a bodyguard my mother hired took me straight to the school’s front door. He did more than that, actually. He took me to the door of my bedroom. That man slept in an apartment across the street from the building for three years, watching. My jaw tightens at the memory. I’m just one person. There was never a reason to keep me under lock and key. Nothing ever happened.
Whatever. All of that is in the past. The past, the past, a long time ago. Soon, the past will be behind the train, and we’ll leave the train behind, and all of this will become like a dream.
The car lined up at the platform has a door flung open wide. From here, it seems like a pitch-dark maw. The gentle rumble of the engine hums underneath the breeze. It’s waiting. It’s waiting for me.
But where is Decker?
I scan the length of the train as far as I can see. In the distance, another faint light glows, shadows flashing in front of it. They’re loading the flowers. Nervousness wraps its hands around my neck. Where is he? We were supposed to meet here.
Maybe he meant on the train, not at the train. A flush of heat spills down my back. He could be waiting inside for me, hidden from the other men who work on the deliveries, hidden from everyone. For the first time in my life, I don’t mind the thought. There won’t be any fence inside the train car—just me and Decker, if everything goes according to plan. It’s two hours to the city. We could do a lot in two hours.
Don’t rush, don’t rush. Every instinct says to keep my eyes open, to look around, but I need to listen. I let them flutter closed. Leaves rustle in the wind. Far away, an owl cries. No footsteps, no gasp from my mother—what are you doing here? Of course not. She’s sleeping, her breathing even and peaceful. Unless she can sense what I’m doing. But that’s a ridiculous thought. My mother’s not omnipotent. She’s just a woman.
Even the dirt beneath my feet has a strange, otherworldly quality. It’s been years since I crossed this stretch of ground. I’m going to need new shoes in the city. I know that already; these soft canvas ones won’t last long on paved roads.
Why doesn’t he come out and lean against the door, that familiar grin on his face?
Maybe he’s preparing a surprise.
I can’t stop my own grin from taking over. Surprises—I love surprises. At least, I think I do, in theory. I’ve read about them in books. A crowd of people behind a door, ready to shout, happy birthday! A gift presented with a shy flourish. My God, he is. Decker is exactly the kind of person who will know how important this is, and I bet he’s going to give me my first real surprise. I’m sure he’s that kind of person. He’s never seemed to be anything else, and we’ve talked every day for months.
There’s still no sign of him as I take the last few steps to the train car. A set of steps leads inside. The handle is cold under my palm. I heave myself up, ready to pass out from the anticipation. It might not be so bad to tumble into Decker’s arms and wake up in a new life.
But the train car is dark.
Of course it’s dark; I would have seen light coming from the inside, obviously. Obviously. But it’s completely dark, not a single running light on. My eyes adjust bit by bit.
It’s not a special train car.
I shake off the disappointment like an errant fall of raindrops. I don’t know why I expected it to be a special car. This isn’t a first-class trip to the city; it’s a midnight escape. Still, this is.... It’s nothing. It’s clean, yes. Enough light comes in through a narrow window at the very front of the car to see a pair of seats, more like a bench, against the back wall. The rest is empty space. This is a storage car, not one of the passenger cars.
I swallow hard, shame pummeling my disappointment. I didn’t come here for luxury. I came here to get out. And this is going to be our life. Decker can’t afford a fancy house, but at least he can accept it graciously. He’s not worried about paying for everything, about starting our new life with the little bit we’ve managed to scrape up without attracting attention. He’s not longing for piles of money or an extravagant lifestyle. Neither am I.
One last scan of the car. Where is he? Goose bumps crawl up the flesh of my arms and down my spine.
“Decker?” It takes everything in me to get the word out, and it’s barely above a whisper. I clear my throat and try again. “Deck, are you here?”
If I’m too loud, somebody else running beside the train for the nightshift could hear me. I’d never forgive myself if I got all this way only to screw it up by shouting for Decker. I just want to know he’s here. More than I want the train to finally pull away. More than I want to leave it behind in the city. My skin heats with wanting. Where is he? Where is he?
A sound like someone being sick wriggles into the train car.
It’s so soft that I dismiss it as noise from the forest. There are a hundred things moving and living out there. Any one of them could have made a strange noise.
It happens again.
The other door out of this train car is up in the front by the narrow window. Clouded glass keeps me from seeing out, even with my face pressed against the surface. I try the handle. The door opens without a sound.
One step out onto the connector, and I wish I’d never come.
The air is a knife against my skin, sharp and cold. My stomach twists. Shock bores in behind my eyes and squeezes, viselike and terrible, so strong I have to clutch the handle on the side of the train to stay upright.
I’ve found Decker.
Now, the sound makes sense. It wedges itself into my understanding.
Decker’s feet are six inches off the ground in the center of the clearing, kicking uselessly into the open air. It should be impossible. He’s too tall to have his feet so far off the ground. He’s too tall, but the man holding him there is taller. Bigger. And infinitely stronger.
I’ve never seen Luther Hades. But I don’t need a photo ID to know it’s him.
Only Luther Hades could suck all the light from around him, turning moonlight into darkness. Only Luther Hades could look that huge or that lethal. Only he could make Decker, who reminds me of a tall tree, look small.
The biggest dog I’ve ever seen sits at Hades’ feet—fur darker than the night around them—growling at Decker but staying still. For now. We’re surrounded by death, aren’t we? My mother never mentioned anything about a dog, but there it is, tense, waiting. Not tied to anything. It could do anything. It’s as dangerous as he is. As deadly. They’re a matched set, taking up all the space in the world.
A memory screeches across the back of my brain—a photograph, shoved into my face, my mother saying “if you see a man who looks like this, you run; you run as fast as you can. You scream.”
&nbs
p; I see him now, feet planted in the earth. I’d know his face anywhere. I was born to know his face, to run from it. But I can’t run now. I can’t move. Where did she get that picture? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. All those things might as well be buried underground.
Because it’s really him. It’s really the man who wants to kill me. The moonlight shows me a sharp silhouette of his face, and I can’t look away.
He’s got his hands around Decker’s throat.
He’s choking him to death.
Chapter Four
Hades
My first impression of her, out the corner of my eye and bleached by moonlight, is that Demeter has been hiding an angel. Not just a daughter, but a creature of sky and air. No one appears out of darkness so brightly, like a light source is beneath her skin and woven in with the fabric of her dress. The breeze picks up the hem and plays with it. The motion hooks me in the center of my chest. One glance, and the man wriggling beneath my hands is nothing to me. He’s always been nothing, from even before the moment he walked up to the door of my train car and stepped in like he owned it.
Mistake.
I relished his expression—shock turning to horror while my dog Conor put his body between us with a vicious growl, showing off for me—for a full five heartbeats before I dragged him back outside. Conor followed at my feet, wary and watching. Nothing interested me less than his sputtered excuses about “meeting someone else” and “I didn’t expect…” and “please, I’ll just…” and so on. I got tired of it soon enough. Anyone unintelligent enough to climb into random train cars with the swagger of my older brother runs the risk of paying the price, and tonight the price is that I’m slowly cutting off his air supply. The man is weak. Betrayal made him this way. For all his fieldwork muscles, he’s absolutely incapable of doing anything. His hands scrabble weakly at my wrists. He is nothing.
And now, he’s less than nothing, because I can’t look away from the woman standing on the connector between two train cars, her hands to her mouth, eyes wide and horrified. The dress—it reminds me of Demeter in the way it portrays simplicity. That woman is anything but simple. This woman, I can tell, is the third rail. In the moonlight, I see every detail, and envy tears through me.
I’m jealous of the moonlight touching her skin.
I’m only touching this wriggling fish of a man.
A siren sounds in the back of my mind, struggling to override the powerful urge to snap his neck and get my hands on her as quickly as possible. There will be consequences, the voice of reason howls. Look at her, look at her—
I am looking at her. Conor looks too with a low, questioning growl.
“Stay.”
He stays. He always does. When he was a puppy, I spent hours shaping him into the guard dog he would become. Those hours pay off especially well in moments like this, when I want people shaken to the core.
White dress, hair spilling down her back in curls, the gentle slope of her waist up to perfect tits. What’s under the dress, aside from those tits? Little to nothing, judging by the hard little peaks of her nipples.
I want her.
My mind sighs with all the things I could do to that pretty little body, consequences be damned. I shove the idea of the apocalypse, of all these fields burning around me, out of my mind, crushing it under one foot like a spent cigarette. Fuck all of that. What matters now, in the wordless animal part of me, are all the sensations crashing together in a hail of lust. My blood unleashed, thundering through my veins. The tease of the night breeze on my skin. And the pulse between my legs, harder than iron.
A movement distracts me, a glancing blow against my shin. It’s so pathetic it might as well be the touch of a tailor, whisper-light. But it reminds me that I’m currently killing a man who has gone horribly off-course. I waste a look on him. The moonlight leeches his skin of color, but I can still see the dusky shade to his cheeks. Might as well end it now so I can turn my attention to better things. I didn’t need him anyway.
“Stop.” Her clear, young voice rings like a bell across the space between us. “Please.”
I’m watching his eyes, not hers, but that “please” lights up kindling at the base of my spine. That—I want more of that. The edge of fear, the end of the word almost, almost, slipping into a whimper. I’m torn. I want to see her face when she begs, but something interesting happens when she does it—the half-dead man’s eyes open wide. His expression, for someone on the brink, has an element of hope. A little more of it, a little brighter, would make it even more of a pleasure when I stamp it out. I could say yes. “No.”
She leaves the train with footfalls soft as rain.
“You’re killing him.” Her half-exhaled words are thick with desperation and tears. I want to lick those tears away from her skin, more than I’ve ever wanted anything. No wonder Demeter kept her hidden. No wonder, no wonder. To think of what a man could do to her.
Ah—that’s it, isn’t it? This man, the one who couldn’t even enter a train and escape with his life—he had plans for her. No doubt, she believed whatever pretty things he said to her. Boys like this, with smiles like that, are all talk, the fuckers.
“That’s right. I am killing him.”
“No, please—please don’t do that.” She can hardly draw a full breath, and the sound of it is intoxicating. I reward myself with a glance. Tears stream silently down her cheeks. “I know who you are. Don’t do this.”
A laugh tumbles out from between my lips before I can stop it. “You know who I am. So? Why should I spare your boyfriend?”
She hesitates. That moment of hesitation confirms what I already knew—this is Demeter’s daughter, without a shadow of a doubt. This innocent creature, the one her mother named Persephone, radiating innocence and terror, actually fucking hesitates.
“He’s not my boyfriend. We’ve never…. We didn’t say we were together. We were going to….”
He couldn’t even convince her that they were in love. Something less than a man sags in my grip. I’ll give him this—he fought longer than I expected him to. But she’s delivered a killing blow.
“You were going to meet him, weren’t you? Out in the middle of the night, all alone. And then what?”
“Go to the city.” A mournful half-sob. “Then go somewhere else, somewhere my mother couldn’t find us.”
That sparks my interest. A girl like this, thinking she’s running away from Demeter? A very interesting choice, though of course that’s not what the fool in my hands had in mind. What he had in mind was a double-cross. I could laugh.
But Persephone. Why would she want to leave all that power behind? Unless, of course, she didn’t have access to it. But why wouldn’t she? Demeter will need a successor eventually. In her line of work, most people don’t get the chance to grow very old.
“That’s not going to happen now,” I tell her casually. “You must know that.”
“Why not?” Such an adorable struggle. She clearly doesn’t want to sound plaintive, and yet... she does. “You could let him go.” In my peripheral vision, I see her hands lift then fall helplessly back to her sides. “If you let us go, we would never bother you again.”
“You won’t bother me again anyway.” I’m committed. I want the adrenaline and the release. The world will never miss a nobody like the one I’ve caught. “Really, you should be grateful.”
“Grateful for what?” Persephone comes a tentative step forward.
“That I let you watch. If you hurry, you might even get to say goodbye.”
I’ve been toying with the bastard. One swift snap and this is all over. The summer wind kicks up, and the train whistle wails across the night, setting Persephone into motion.
She runs across the empty space and throws herself against my arm, her legs pressed against Conor’s side. He snaps at her, growling, and a bark tears loose into the air—but he doesn’t move except for the trembling of his body. He holds himself back, even though nobody runs at him that way. Nobody runs
at me that way. And here she is, ready to get torn apart.
“Down.”
Conor backs off, but he’s not happy about it. Tension pours off him, but he puts his head down on his hands. He trembles almost as much as she does. A cool wash of adrenaline spills into my veins, probably from shock. She isn’t strong enough to pull my arms away from her boyfriend or break my grip, and after a moment, I realize through her sobs that she’s not trying to. She’s only trying to get my attention.
He makes a horrible sound, halfway under the ground already, and Persephone gasps the sharp gasp of all women since time immemorial.
“Please,” she cries. “Don’t kill him. There must be something I can do, something—”
Oh, the sweet thing. I look down at her, clinging ineffectually to my arm. Nothing would be better than to let her think she’s coming with me of her own free will. Nothing in the world.
“I’m not here to make a bargain.”
Her eyes are huge and dark, tears glistening on her chin. She licks her lips.
“I’ll do anything.”
In that moment, something shifts, a boulder rolling away from the open mouth of a cave, dawn splitting the sky above. I’m taking her regardless. The world has presented me with an opportunity, and I’m seizing it, whether that opportunity fights me or not. But the tears, and the begging, and the noble sacrifice—I want more of that too. And I fucking shouldn’t. I absolutely shouldn’t. I should kill the man as an object lesson in being more careful and let her run back to her mother’s house.