I wish it wasn’t beating now.
“Somewhere safe.”
The problem with moonlight is that it makes it too easy to see everything. The dampness at Zeus’s forehead. A swipe of dirt across one cheek.
The shovel propped against the barn.
He’s lying. Our foster father did not patiently wait for Rosie to settle down. He beat her, like he beat me. He killed her, and Zeus buried her. Of course. The only strange part is that Zeus is lying to me. To spare my feelings? It’s a moment of kindness I wouldn’t expect.
He’s lying, and Rosie is dead.
My stomach heaves, but there’s nothing left to bring up. I want to rage at the sky, find my so-called father, and squeeze his neck until there’s no more breath in his lungs. But the house is far, and the night is deep, and my dog is gone.
I put a hand to my face, and my fingers come away wet. Disgusting. I flick the moisture away, my own blood rebelling from it in a cold wash. A buzz at the edges of my consciousness sounds like an approaching storm. If it’s going to happen again, I should sit down. But there’s no warning pain, only a sick, hollow pit at the base of me. I am a building, and the pit is eating at the foundation with gnashing teeth that leaves only emptiness. A cloud crosses over the moon. By the time it’s gone, I’m a collection of walls and blown-out windows. No heart. No soul.
A light touch on my shoulder. “He’s asleep now, if you want to—” I wrench Zeus’s hand away with enough force to break bone, but he must see it coming, because he yanks his hand back at the last second. “You can come inside now, anyway.”
“Get away from me.”
“Where are you going?”
“Why do you care?” He doesn’t.
“He’ll kill you if he finds you gone.” Footsteps, coming fast. Zeus. “Wait.”
I turn around and shove with all the strength I’ve mustered so far, sending him sprawling into the cobblestone pathway with a crack that must be his head on rock. But Zeus hasn’t been lying on the ground for two days. He leaps back up and drives his hands into my shirt, curling it in his fists, twisting it tight. He backs me up against the wall until my skull makes contact, a fresh wave of hurt radiating through my head.
“You’re going to get people killed,” he growls into my face. People like Zeus. Or Poseidon. Even our sister, Demeter, god damn her black soul. Our not-father’s rage can burn up anyone in his path. “Even yourself, you fucking idiot. Do you want to die? After all this?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck you.” He slams me back against the barn one more time then lets go and wipes his hands down the front of his jeans. The shovel loses its purchase and falls. “Die if you want, but you’re not taking the rest of us with you.”
He stalks off toward the house and goes in.
The night expands around me, bird-calls getting louder and more insistent as it edges toward dawn. If I stay out here another day, I will die, and then I’ll never get my revenge. Zeus has had it easy. He doesn’t feel the last of the compassion, the last of the empathy, bleeding out of me in wet streaks on the ground. It soaks into the earth and disappears like it was never there at all. Maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe I’m an urn for the ashes of what little love I’ve known.
1
Hades
The quiet is more unsettling than the sound of the explosives had been.
The far-off booms went on for long enough that Persephone gripped my hand and stepped closer. I covered her with my arms, as if human flesh is any match for shrapnel and falling rock. In the ringing silence after they stop, she lets out a long breath and presses her free hand to the window. This window shows a fence under floodlights that will ultimately be meaningless. They won’t come through from the front. The gate is only a distraction.
They’ll come through the mines.
I know it, but perhaps Persephone doesn’t. She breathes fast and hard, looking down through the glass at the people working to breach the fence, and then stops, seeming to calm abruptly. That’s a trick she learned living in Demeter’s house, no doubt. I wish, for the thousandth time, that she never lived there at all. Then again, it’s what made her so perfect for me, isn’t it? Such a pure, pretty thing to bend to my will.
A dull throb in my head replaces the sound of explosions, mimicking them in a mockery of violence that will be real soon enough. Just not now, because Zeus won’t enter the mountain when it’s dark.
“It stopped.” My little queen looks up at me, eyes incandescent with hope. Better to crush it now before it takes root and chokes her. It will, in the end. She doesn’t know Zeus. But she does know Demeter. It’s a logic problem I don’t have time to sort out now. If Demeter forced that innocence into her with an iron fist, and Zeus is the opposite, then how many days will it take with me for her hopes to stop blooming? How many hours? “Do you think he changed his mind?”
I’m tempted to punish this last naïveté out of her, but it’s such a precious resource and nearly gone. After today—whatever happens today—there will be none left in her, unless by some miracle she holds on with both hands. The writing was on the wall, on her skin, when she appeared outside the door to my war room, trailing the hem of a silk nightgown the color of midnight with an ethereal white shawl around her shoulders. A ghost. A spirit of some kind, looking hollowed out by the way I used her.
“Impossible.” I turn her toward the window once again, which faces east. “Look.”
“What am I looking at?” Her soft whisper ignites another desire. Shove her up against the window, shove that nightgown up to her waist, and fuck her until she understands. It might be the last time, if Zeus has his way. The howling rage against that is a fire I can’t put out. I settle for a hand on the back of her neck, drawing her so close to the window that her breath fogs up the glass.
Most people aren’t as attuned to the way the planets move in the sky. Their lives don’t depend on it the way mine does. On some level, I always knew no fortress in the world would be enough to sever the bond I’m forced to keep with the outside world. Too much is always linked to changes in the sky and the ebb and flow of tides. Train schedules. Shifts in the mine. Waking and sleeping, the way people pay closer attention when they haven’t been on guard all night.
I can see what’s happening on the horizon through the trees, because it hurts. The last effects of what Demeter made for me wore off hours ago, at about the moment I stepped into the meeting room and Oliver gave me a look that verged on accusation.
And it’s not the first inkling of pain, far from it.
My pulse taps at the side of my neck in a warning. Conor, a bit belatedly, follows us into this room—a small alcove meant for the view—his tail patting impatiently at the floor. The low whine is yet another clue that I, personally, am fucked.
She can’t see it yet. She’s too focused on the tips of my fingers putting pressure on the delicate sides of her neck. I can feel it in her breath.
To Persephone, the horizon is still dark.
“I don’t see anything.” She tries again, putting both hands to the glass. “They’re almost through the fence.”