Prologue
Hades
Twenty-one years ago
Night draws soothing fingers over my eyelids. Humid air presses against the burnt-out pits where my eyes were before and cools them back into existence. It does little for the aching throb in my head that makes me feel like a floating skull, though I’m not floating, and I’m not a fucking skull. My life would be easier if I was nothing but bone.
Chilled grass imprints patterns on the back of my shirt.
Where did I end up this time? Outside. Not a very specific location. I could be anywhere, except I’m not near a road. No headlights sear across the red web of veins that must still exist in my eyelids; no tires hum across pavement.
I haven’t been run over either, which is a shame.
Something hard nudges into my ribs and sends pain spidering across muscle and bone. A rock. My ribs are intact—I can tell it from the dull, full-body throb. Broken ribs are sharper, more insistent. The sharp pain is courtesy of my own eyes conspiring against me. It’s courtesy of the sunlight. My stomach curls a fist around its empty center, and the back of my throat burns. I’ve been thoroughly emptied out. Vomited hours ago. All the better if I’m not lying in it.
Another nudge and a voice. I don’t catch the words, and I don’t care. Just leave me here. Let the sun do what the sun does best. Let it burn me alive and turn me to ashes.
I sense the kick before it lands—the space left in the air where the shoe will be—and try unsuccessfully to curl up on my side. A glancing blow. A jolt.
They’re not trying to kill me, whoever it is.
Opening my eyes reveals nothing at first. My vision is still fucked and blurry, and the night has painted everything in deep shadow except the stars. They hurt too, but they’re pinpricks compared to the sun. The light of other suns, farther suns, can only scratch at me, not stick a knife between my ribs. The sky, the stars, and a shadow that tears across Pleiades, almost covering the Seven Sisters.
“Are you alive?” asks the dark figure.
My brother Zeus. Not my born brother. The golden boy in the same foster home, the favored one, light where I’m dark. What’s he doing out here, anyway? He’d be better off minding his own business. A passing cloud lays the moon bare and lights up his face. Even the moonlight is too bright this early on, but now that I’m conscious, I can swallow it down so it doesn’t show. Hard, though. Fuck, it’s hard.
“Unfortunately.”
It’s agony to get up on one elbow then sit up and rub my hands over my face. My head is a giant brick at the top of my neck—a brick that’s been beaten to within an inch of its life.
We’re by the barn, a monstrosity that our so-called foster father likes for the purpose of making this place look charming and welcoming. He has it repainted a cheery red every year. I’ve landed two feet from the outer wall, close to where a shovel has been propped. That’s where the shade would have been in the daytime. Not that the shade would have saved me from anything except a vicious sunburn. As it stands, my face is only badly sunburned. So are the backs of my hands. Obviously, when my brain shut down, it didn’t care that much about saving my hands. It only cared about crawling away from a killing pain that can’t be crawled away from. Or walked away from. Or ran away from.
The monster is inside the house.
Zeus has a sheen on him like he’s been running. Maybe he has been. Our foster father likes to punish me. He brings Zeus with him to play golf or to sign business deals or to fuck prostitutes. Meanwhile I’m beaten unconscious and left in the sun.
I spit out a bitter taste. “What time is it?”
“Almost four.”
So I’ve been out here for what—twelve hours? Fourteen?
“Bastard cost me another day of my life.” It’s not the prettiest thing, getting up after you’ve been lying on the ground for God knows how long, but I get to my feet. The rough side of the barn meets my palm. The bruises twinge. A sharp pain in my ribs makes me wince.
“Two days.” To his credit, Zeus manages to look mildly uncomfortable.
“What do you mean, two days?”
“It’s four on Wednesday.”
More than fourteen hours then.
Much longer and the crows would have started to pick at my flesh. Fuck. Maybe they already did, and that’s why my entire face feels wrecked and swollen. At least I can look forward to a dark room. I sleep in the crouched attic on a thin straw pallet, but I don’t fucking care. As long it’s blissfully, blessedly dark. I’ve always been this way—photosensitive, they called it as a baby. It’s gotten worse the more my father’s beaten me, the more he’s left me in the sun.
My hand searches for something else, and it takes me a second to figure out what. My dog. The second we got out of juvie, I went out at night looking for a party. A fight. Something to feel alive. What I found was a dog pit. Took one look at the German Shepherd mutt shivering in the corner and bought her for too much money. Her name’s Rosie. Fucking Rosie. I’d have changed it, but she won’t come to anything else. That dog hasn’t left my side since. She doesn’t understand the limitations of a straw pallet when you’re as tall as I am. The only soft spot left in my heart is for Rosie. And she has a soft spot in her heart for Zeus, though she’s supposed to be mine. It’s odd that she’s not here, by my side.
The night is alive with cricket calls and the wind slipping through cracks in the barn’s shingles, but there are gaps in the sound. No paws on wet grass. No clink of a tag against a collar. No huffing breath.
Turning my head feels like dying all over again, but I do it anyway.
The house is a country estate with a wraparound porch renovated to its countryside glory. I’m almost certain he bought this place for the looks. Our “father” has no love of nature. No desire to live off the land. He has too much money to live so close to open fields, nice as this place purports to be.
The house could be beautiful, if it weren’t dripping with so much resentment and rage.
“Where is she?”
Zeus sticks his hands in the pockets of his dirt-stained jeans. “I set her loose.”
“Set her loose?” Rosie can’t be set loose. The reason she was up for adoption in the first place is that she wasn’t vicious enough for the purposes of the asshole who owned her. They wanted her to fight. Her talent was sleeping on my pallet and knowing when my brain is teetering on the edge of a blackout before I know it, or before I’m willing to admit it. She’s probably the one who dragged me into the shade out here.
My brother squares his shoulders. “She tried to get someone to help you. Hours of howling at your side. Then when we brought her inside, scratching at the door.” He looks to the side, jaw ticking. “I tried to get her to calm down.”
But he couldn’t. That’s the part of the sentence Zeus has left off. Our foster father would have no patience for a howling dog. He won’t tolerate noise that he’s not making.
“Where did you take her?” Something rips tiny gashes in the soft, unprotected flesh of my throat. I swallow at it reflexively, trying to get it to go the fuck away, trying to get it to release the grip around the middle of my chest, where my heart still beats in spite of everything.