If I’m too loud, somebody else running beside the train for the night shift could hear me. I’d never forgive myself if I got all this way only to screw it up by shouting for Decker. But I 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 has to be a noise from the forest. There are hundreds of creatures 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 window. I press my face against the clouded glass. Nothing. 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, a cold razor. My stomach twists. Shock bores in behind my eyes and squeezes, its hold 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 open air. This 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 towering or that lethal. Only Luther Hades 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. We’re surrounded by death, aren’t we? My mother never mentioned anything about a dog, but there it is, tense, waiting. It wears no leash. It could do anything. It’s as dangerous as Hades 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.”
I see him now, feet planted in the earth. I know his face. I was born to know his face, to run from it. To scream.
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 have been buried underground. Miles of thick earth above them. Suffocating them.
Because it’s him. It’s the man who wants to kill me. The moonlight makes his face a sharp silhouette, and I can’t look away.
Luther Hades has his hands around Decker’s throat.
He’s choking him to death.
4
Hades
My first impression of her, out the corner of my eye and bathed in moonlight, is that Demeter has been hiding an angel. Not merely a daughter, but a being of sky and air.
No one shimmers out of darkness like that—like a light source is beneath her skin and woven with the fabric of her dress. The breeze plays with her hem. 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 the moment he walked up to the door of my train car and stepped in like he owned it.
Mistake.
I relished his expression for a full five heartbeats before I dragged him outside. Shock turning to horror while my dog Conor put his body between us with a vicious growl, showing off for me. When I changed the venue, 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 my train car with the swagger of my brother Zeus will pay the price, and tonight the price is slow damage to his air supply. The man is weak. Betrayal made him this way. For all his fieldwork muscles, he’s absolutely incapable of defending himself. His hands scrabble weakly at my wrists.
He is nothing.
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. On her, a dress like this would be a disguise.
This woman, I can tell, is the third rail. The moonlight shows me every detail. Envy spikes 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 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 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. Pathetic. It’s like the touch of a tailor, whisper-soft.
Ah. Yes.
I’m currently killing a man.
I waste a look on him. The pale light leeches his skin of color, adding contrast to the dusky shade of 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 kindling at the base of my spine. That—I want more of that. The edge of fear, the end of the word 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, and I’ll take more pleasure in stamping it out. I could say yes to her.
“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.
That’s it, isn’t it? This man had plans for her. This man, who couldn’t enter a train and escape with his life. No doubt she believed the lies he told her. Boys like this, with smiles like that, are all talk, the fuckers.