Hades (An Archer & Bennett Thriller)

by Candice Fox

  There were cops everywhere. Civilians battered my shoulders as they passed, looked, bewildered, into my eyes. I glanced around at the sheets of rain splashing on the windscreens of dozens of patrol cars crisscrossing the intersection like discarded toys. The clouds above the Sacred Heart Church were black, as though burned.

  I took a vest from the nearest cop. He seemed to know who I was and was holding it out for me as I jogged towards him. Eden and Eric were loading their weapons by a car at the front of the gathering.

  “What’s happening?”

  “A garbageman called in a sighting of Beck about an hour ago on the opposite side of the shopping district. Said the guy was rinsing bloody hands in a garden tap, if you can fucking believe it. We went, looked, didn’t take it seriously until we got another sighting up near the park—said he was trying to play with a stray cat. We chased him back here. He’s just gone in and fired a couple shots to clear out the morning mass. Our chief’s ordered us to pull back and block the street off.”

  “Anyone hurt?” I asked.

  “Can’t tell.”

  There were still people leaving the church through the side and front doors, those who had fallen and been trampled in the rush. The Sacred Heart 5AM mass was one of the biggest in the eastern suburbs. I knew the mass well. My grandmother had forced me to it every Saturday morning throughout my childhood, and if I mucked up, we’d go back for the Sunday repeat. Thunder split the air, a ripping sound like the tearing of fabric. We stood back and watched the church tower, which seemed to lean against the moving sky. A white marble Mary presided over the double front entrance above pointed arches inlaid with stained glass. Howling saints. A blood-spattered Christ. I buckled the vest and ran forward, splashing rain up my ankles and into my boots.

  I jogged to the front doors, catching sight of Eden and Eric, their guns low, creeping along the side of the building. The windows in the foyer were shattered, glass on dusty tables laden with idols, cards, brochures. I crouched beneath a sandstone pillar and listened. Wind howled through the broken windows, tossing papers and clearing shelves in the small shop. A Catholic News crumpled under my boot.

  My training told me that now was the time to talk to Beck, to open up a line of communication and try to turn it over to reasoning. But I didn’t want to talk to him. I had nothing to say. I didn’t want to reason with him. I didn’t want to coax him out of the church with kindness, with lies, with platitudes. I wanted to catch him and pull him down. I wanted to get my fingernails into him. My teeth ached. It was an animal thing, the rage and the sickness in me. I was hungry for him.

  It was the ceiling that first drew the eye, enormous and gaping, ribbed with polished mahogany buttresses. Pointed arches lined each side of the roof, allowing what little light the storm would allow to filter in and strike the rows of pews. My jeans were dripping rain onto a royal blue and gold rug that ran a hundred meters forward to the altar. There were bags and coats and umbrellas in the pews, scattered prayer cards on the hardwood floors. Everything pink, aquamarine, gold. Faces littered the alcoves, statues and carvings, infant angels, a bemused Mary, a moaning Jesus.

  “Beck?”

  My voice billowed outwards and upwards, causing pigeons to flutter in the roof near the north and south transepts. The thunder gave an answer. I crawled to the right, wedging my body under a full-sized reproduction of Michelangelo’s Pietà in fiberglass. Paint had rubbed off the Lord’s knees and Mary’s palms from the touch of thousands. Christ’s face, peaceful, emotionless. I thought of Martina’s sleeping eyes.

  A figure dashed across the front of the altar. I heard gunshots, noticed a flash from the rows of pews. Beck’s jacket caught a stand of lighted candles. It crashed, echoing, to the carpet.

  “Eden!” I called. More shots. I moved forward, fixing my eyes on where I had last seen Beck. Ahead, smoke curled between the pews. I rose up on my feet and ran forward in a crouch.

  It was no more than a sharp tug, the bullet catching my arm and spinning me backwards into the space before the doors to the confessional booths. My gun slid away from me on dusty marble. The sound came after the pain, a clap that rattled off the high walls. A figure rose from where it crouched. The image of it was surrounded by green light. I shifted back against the door beside me and realized it was sprayed with my blood.

  Eric had clipped me right on the edge of the vest, in the meaty place between my shoulder and arm. He walked towards me between the pews, grinning, his cover forgotten.

  He sighed, shaking his head. “You know, we were actually willing to forgive Doyle his unique tastes because he was too close to us, because he might bring us unwanted heat. We let him play the monster. He was a curious dog, wanted to dig, just like you. He dug and dug until he uncovered something he wished he hadn’t. You can’t say you weren’t warned, Frank.”

  His gun rose to my face. I turned away and felt the heat of the fire before the altar on my cheeks and brow. I thought of nothing but her eyes. Faced with Eric’s gun, Martina was there, as though the memory had been waiting for my attention.

  I don’t know what I expected from the gunshot. The fear swelled and seemed to cripple me, cut off all sensation, stifled my breath. Then the noise. My body jolted, wood-stiff. I opened my eyes and exhaled sharply, terrified of the pain.

  Eric slumped onto my legs. His blood was on my palms, which had been turned out in surrender. It was on my face. Eden’s body was turned towards the fire, her silhouette outlined against a broken window like a cat against the moon. She was trembling. Her whole body seemed to constrict inwards as though she were sickened. I saw the moment when what she had just done hit her after the seconds of silence between the blast and her brother falling and her finger coming off the trigger. Done, finished, the decision made. Her face crumpled, she drew back her lips and a small, pained growl came out of her. It wasn’t simply the sound of hurt. It was the sound of hurt trying to be acknowledged, trying to come out, and her furious determination to keep it in. She straightened and wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her gun hand.

  Her eyes were black as they lifted from Eric’s body to mine. They took in nothing of the lightning when it pulsed red and green against the stained-glass windows. She seemed to eat the light.

  “He was also warned,” she said.

  I shoved Eric off me. By the time I got to my knees she was gone. My limbs felt dead. I picked up my gun and crawled towards the north transept. A painted figure of Mary stood on a huge globe, a serpent writhing under her bare toes. I caught my breath, my eyes dazzled by the fire that had begun to climb the velvet curtains by the altar, a yellow-backed beast.

  “Eden!”

  A door slammed. I ran. There were wooden stairs, warped and unpolished. Gunshots split the stale air. I ran up the stairs, feeling the heat from the floor below throbbing in the walls around me. My body seemed to bounce off the corners of the high, wide tower, leaving handprints everywhere. Plastic roses in terra-cotta pots adorned the landing under a window depicting a frowning St. Anthony.

  Eric. She shot Eric.

  Sweat poured down my chest. Eric’s blood was all over me. I remembered the photos of Eden covered in Doyle’s blood.

  I kicked in the door to the tower room. My aim flew to the only standing figure. It was Eden. Beck’s hands were splayed on the floor, his palms flat on the polished wood. Windows were breaking on the bottom floor. I heard glass tinkling onto the stones of the altar and shouting voices rippling off the walls. Eden looked at me. Her boot was clamped on the back of the killer’s neck. Her thumb flicked off the safety, swift. A guilty child.

  “Put your gun down,” I said gently, “and cuff him.”

  Eden’s hair was tight around her skull. I could see her brother in her then, the sharp edges of her face and jaw, the malice. She looked wild. Blood was running down my belly. I flicked the safety off on my own weapon.

  “He’s not being cuffed,” she said.

  I shook my head. Found myself laughing.<
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  “You don’t have the right.”

  The heat from the floor burned in my feet. Eden smiled, as though listening to the ramblings of a madman.

  “You don’t have the right,” I snarled. “You’re denying closure to hundreds of people. They’re going to want to see this out in full. He’s not yours.”

  “If they knew what’s in store for him, they’d give me that right.” She was suddenly almost crying, trembling with rage. “Jesus, Frank, how can you not understand? You know what Maximum is like. The comfort. The security. The counselling. The fucking vocational classes and guitar lessons and fan letters and the magazine interviews. No one will know that I’ve done this. No one knows what I’ve done before. There’s a line, Frank, that has to be crossed sometimes. He can’t be allowed to live. He forfeited that right.”

  “Put your gun down, Eden.”

  “No.”

  “Put your gun down!”

  I was far enough away to see Beck move, but Eden missed it. His hand swung around and grabbed her ankle, pulling her leg out from under her. I threw myself at Beck just as he rolled up into a crouch. I had my weight alone to fight with. My arm was useless, my head swimming. He shoved me down and rose onto his knees. His wet teeth grazed my cheek.

  “There’s no gratitude. There’s no loyalty.”

  Eden hollered and beat him back onto his stomach, the butt of the gun cracking against his temple.

  I lay on the floor and looked at the earrings lying beside my hand, simply looked at them, aware without having seen it that they fell from Beck’s shirt pocket. Two ladybirds, perfectly fashioned, glossy in the sparkle of lightning around the tower. I scooped them into my bloody palm and sat up. The air shuddered in and out of me as though whistling through barbed wire.

  All of my pain was gone. It was replaced by a cold, shrill emptiness. A door had been closed on all that led to this moment, sitting on the floor in the tower, with her earrings in my hand. Everything behind the door was cut off, inaccessible, gone. Eden stood above me, watching me, Beck lying on his side under her gun. She was calling me but I couldn’t hear her. He was laughing, I think. Or barking. I can’t remember. I stood, shaking, my eyes locked on my palm. I might have been speaking. I don’t know. Both of them were looking at me. Smoke was curling past the windows, flames beginning to throb in the wall behind Eden.

  There was no thought. I had none of the rationality that Eden had used, the cold calculation of who deserves what and who has the right to take life. All I could think of was Martina in the bed where I had left her, the cat curled against her leg, her hand on the sheet where I had been. All I could think of was her mismatched china and the posters on her walls and her fat landlady and the stairs to her apartment, red-carpeted and empty, always dark. I don’t remember deciding to shoot Beck. I didn’t feel anything when I did. My hand simply moved, lifting my pistol. I watched his head buck as the bullets entered it and thought of an animal.

  The gun was empty and clicking. Eden pushed my hand down. The room was on fire, making my eyes water and my scalp tic with the furious beat of my heart.

  Ash was falling from the ceiling in a light black snow. It sucked towards Eden’s lips as she panted. We looked at each other. Time was nothing.

  EPILOGUE

  I figured myself pretty lucky that no one stopped me as I signed out of the Prince of Wales just four hours after surgery on my shoulder. The press mobbed me in the parking lot, their voices echoing off the bulbous glass awnings that crested over the patient intake center. They were there again on the steps of headquarters, milling around a coffee vendor, raining cigarettes around him as I stepped from the cab. No one touched me. I was poison. The owls scattered when I entered the bull pen, unable to meet my eyes. Two street cops had been waiting for me there, helplessly pacing around my desk, chewing on my pens. The two who had been assigned to watch Martina’s apartment, to protect her after I’d left. They rushed forward, unable to look at my face. I already knew what they had to say. They had received a call in from a public phone that another patrolman was taking a beating from a gang of youths in an alleyway a few streets over. They had gone, instantly. It was an old trick. Beck had known they would protect one of their own over a stranger. He knew they were loyal dogs. I walked past these men without allowing them their explanation.

  The only person who looked straight at me that evening was Eden, when I opened the door to the interrogation room.

  She lifted her eyes and locked them to mine with an expression I had seen many times—a cold exterior hiding weighty thoughts the way the black ocean surface will hide a shark. She had been sitting with her hands beneath the table, staring at an empty pale yellow notepad, the pen aligned beside it like a scalpel.

  I went to the chair across from her and sat down, adjusting my sling carefully. There was silence, ringing, the world enclosed in concrete walls. A camera hung over us, the light slowly blinking.

  This is my life now, I thought. Each moment, each sensation, could be afforded directly to the hands of the woman sitting across from me. The seconds and minutes and hours that had ticked by since she had killed her brother to save my life were hers and hers alone. I knew, looking at her now, what he had been to her. Partner and savior, tormentor and protector. She looked smaller without him in the world. More frail, yet something new, something wavering in unknown sunlight, daring to grow. I knew, looking at her eyes, that some part of her had hated him. But she didn’t know how to live without him either. Eden owned me because she had chosen me to take his place and, rightfully, she was beginning to hate me for it and would hate me for some time. She owned the agony that I had still refused to address, the aching details that would come with the processing of Martina’s body, with the collecting and distributing of her things. Eden had given me this. Eden owned my every breath. I felt hatred swell, hot and tickling, through my chest and down my arms.

  She owned me, and yet some part of her was now mine, the way I had unconsciously desired it from the moment we met. I was stained now with her life, with the understanding of what she was, the dark hollows of her being. Intimate. This is my life now. I think I had known somehow from the moment we met that she was a wild thing, that she was different from any woman I’ve ever known before. In the beginning it had drawn me in, lured me, a calling that made me curious, a danger that I wanted to test and feel. I hadn’t known then that I was dealing with a monster. Now I knew and there would be no way I could get away from her. To run would be to awaken that predatory instinct in her, to invite her to cut me down. I would have to remain her partner, her secret keeper, her watchful slave. I had promised her a secret once. Now she had it.

  Her eyes wandered over my face, silently, like a creature of another species analyzing the danger, assessing the movements of a foreign thing. Calculating.

  I lifted my own yellow notepad onto the table. She looked at the paper, then at my eyes. I set my pen on the first line of the page and she reached forward and did the same.

  “You start,” I said. “I’ll follow your lead.”

  She nodded and started to write her statement. When she was well ahead, I began my own.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’ve always been a storyteller but I could never have had the success my writing has brought me without the influence of many passionate and talented writing teachers. James Forsyth, formerly of the University of the Sunshine Coast, my first “fan,” spent a year teaching me how to rein in my young writer’s excitement and how to embrace my darkness. Ross Watkins and Gary Crew taught me the mechanics, and Kim Wilkins of the University of Queensland taught me the business. Ros Petelin and Caroline McKinnon taught me how to love my language, cut the chaff and never settle for close enough.

  I’d like to thank Camilla Nelson of the University of Notre Dame in Sydney for listening to my story, and my tough-talking agent Gaby Naher for going into the ring for me. I owe a great deal to my lovely publisher Beverley Cousins, for her faith, excitement and hard work.


  To my family—thank you for biting your nails while I waited for answers, cheering when it looked like I’d won and crying with me when I failed. Thank you, Mum, for reading every word I’ve ever written, listening to my drunk phone calls when I was rejected and introducing me to strangers in the street as your daughter, the writer.

  Photo © John Heweston

  Candice Fox is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney’s western suburbs composed of half-, adopted and pseudo-siblings. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.

  As a cynical, troublemaking teenager, her crime and gothic fiction writing was an escape from the calamity of her home life. She was constantly in trouble for reading Anne Rice in church and scaring her friends with tales from Australia’s wealth of true crime writers.

  Bankstown born and bred, she failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy at age eighteen. At twenty, she turned her hand to academia and taught high school through two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees. Candice lectures in writing at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, while undertaking a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism.

  Hades is her first novel, and she is currently working on its sequel, Eden.

  Don’t miss Candice Fox’s next searing thriller

  EDEN

  Coming from Kensington in 2016.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

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