Darker Than Night Read online

  Darker Than Night

  Amelia Wilde

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Connect with Amelia

  Also by Amelia Wilde

  1

  Zeus

  The moment Brigit’s hand drops away from my face, I know I’m fucked.

  We’re both fucked.

  She is especially fucked and the hot blood on my hands and sleeves underscores the point. My eyes burn. Tiny shards of glass? I have no idea and I don’t care. I don’t care about anything anymore. I was wrong to ever care.

  Up ahead, in the dark of the street, a shadow runs away from me dressed like Reya. For a moment I feel a wild, pulsing hope, but it’s gone in a flash. I know what I saw. She’s dead, and Brigit saw it too. If dead Reya had only been a hallucination then Brigit wouldn’t have tried to save her.

  Brigit tried to save her, and then I walked her back to her death.

  My ears ring, a flat tone that won’t go away no matter how much I shake my head. It won’t go away until it does and then the air around us is a riot of noise. Wind kicking up through the city blocks. Sparks flying on the air. Ash, painting the sky. Something explodes behind us and I know it’s the building. Whatever took out the back half will be lighting the rest ablaze. More fire catches with every step I take.

  The sirens begin at the end of the block.

  What happened to the rest of them?

  My body tries to turn. To find out. There are so many women at Olympus and I only saw three, three in the ballroom. Three and my dead secretary. I don’t know where they are and my bloodied, thrashing heart has ceased to function in a way that will let me think. Think.

  How long is the walk to the hospital? Twenty minutes, if I hurry, but the horrifying truth is that Brigit is getting heavier.

  She was helping before, in the way that a person will help you carry them if they’re conscious. I saw her eyes. Her face was left untouched by the apocalypse we lived through. But now her head has dropped back.

  I steal a look at her eyes and all of me jolts in an embarrassing involuntary startle because it’s not her, it’s Katie, it’s Katie, bleeding out all over my shirt in her red dress. A blink transforms her back into Brigit but my gut twists, my heart stops. Cold grief digs its nails into my spine. I would give anything for Brigit to hold on that tightly. But she doesn’t move.

  She doesn’t move.

  I’m crossing intersection after intersection, hardly looking, and no one is looking for me. Three fire trucks speed by, sirens screaming, lights painting us in red and white.

  I don’t have a plan, other than to get to the hospital.

  And then what?

  What, if she’s dead? I make a vague decision to throw myself off the roof, if that’s the case. It’s a mindset issue, really. I will never be in the mindset to live past this, if Brigit is dead.

  A familiar black SUV jumps over the sidewalk curb in front of me. It misses the brick facade of the store we’re in front of by inches. The door opens, kicked out by James, who sprints toward me with both hands up. I don’t stop walking. If I stop, I’ll crumple to the ground and none of us will get where we need to be.

  He puts himself between me and the road. “You’ve got to stop.” He’s breathing hard and scared, the whites of his eyes showing. “You’ve got to get her there faster. Get in the car.” He points, a slow gesture meant for an idiot. Is it possible I’ve gone into shock? I doubt it. I’m not capable of shock. But I am finding it difficult to perform the unique calculus of walking from the curb to the SUV.

  James puts a hand on my shoulder. “Get in the car.” His voice cracks. “Please.”

  “Hurry, then.” I sound so casually irritated, as if I’ve been asking him to appear all along and now he’s done it, a few minutes off schedule. He pushes in front of me and throws open the back door. We get in.

  I get in. Brigit flops lifelessly into my lap and the red of her blood in the lights of the SUV is so bright that it pulls me headfirst into somewhere else. My knees on the carpet. Katie’s red dress.

  “We found the charges in the back,” James says. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “Charges?”

  “The explosives.” He stomps on the gas and reverses into the street, the SUV rocking. Brigit rolls against me and a fresh gush of blood soaks my shirt. I hold her closer to try and mitigate the bump from the curb but I don’t want to push the glass farther into her back. It’s an enormous shard for her small body. It’s going to kill her. “We found the explosives and I cleared out as many people as I could, but—”

  “The tower always falls,” I tell him sagely, some bullshit I heard from one of the women who works at The Fates. “I’m not giving you a glowing reference.”

  James’s face is pale in the rearview mirror. “I won’t blame you if you kill me.”

  “Kill you?” I laugh, automatic and heartless. “You’re my head of security. Why would I start with you?”

  “I’m the closest.”

  The way James is driving, it’s only a few minutes to the hospital. He guns it into the emergency entrance, throwing me shoulder-first into the door. Fine, it’s fine. I stop Brigit’s head from making contact and pull the handle, spilling us onto the sidewalk. James tries to get out but I kick his door shut. “You go to my place. You have the address?”

  He does. He’s the only one at the whorehouse who knows the place I’m talking about, and he confirms it with a nod.

  “Go there and wait for me. If I don’t come back, you know what to do.”

  His hands are on the wheel. “You have to come back.”

  I ignore this and go toward the lights.

  The hospital is blinding at this hour. Its glass and metal front is an ocular assault. Maybe my retinas were burned by the explosion. Don’t look down. I look down regardless and the red threatens me a second time. Red on red. An ambulance howls its way along the side of the building and this sharpens my resolve. Not a single fucking person is going to get help before Brigit. I’ll get them to help her if it’s the last thing I do, and it might be the last thing I do.

  The first thing I see when I get into the lobby is a woman, running.

  Her hair is another red flash. Blue scrubs, sprinting in the opposite direction. Is she running from my father?

  She’s running from me.

  The waiting room is a collection of statutes, people frozen in chairs. They’re faceless, unimportant things, expressions frozen in shock.

  Say something. No words come to mind. Or—the words that come to mind won’t mean anything to these people. My building exploded. Someone tried to kill me but Brigit was in the way. There’s glass—

  A voice over a speaker is a muddled mess of codes. For her? For me? I don’t care if they clear the whole building, as long as someone comes to help.

  Someone is coming.

  A flock of blue scrubs and white coats, running, running. I discover I’m standing in some liminal space between the waiting area and a wide hallway, big enough for crash carts and stretchers. The redhead from before reaches me first.

  Then she reaches for Brigit.

  And—

  I can’t.r />
  I wrench her away from them, from the grasping vultures. They’re all talking at once, too many of them, and the rush of blood in my ears shreds the words into an unrecognizable mess. Panic body-checks me with enough force to crack several ribs, and fuck these people. I brought her here but it was a mistake, a terrible mistake—

  “Don’t touch her.” I sound feral, and some detached part of me wonders what hell this desperate man crawled out of. “Don’t put your hands on her—”

  I’m searching for an exit, though an exit is the last thing I need, when a familiar face elbows her way through the crowd. I’m the person with the poker face in every situation. Carina Jain wears one now. Shoulders relaxed, hands in view, she gestures the others back. They’re all on edge, tense and waiting, and if even one of them steps close again I will pull this building down around us. “Zeus, she’s losing a lot of blood.”

  A lot of blood folds in on itself and then explodes like the back wall of my building. “She’s dying.”

  “You have to let us help.” A hand on my arm, near my wrist, and I take a big step back. Don’t touch her. “Put her down. Right here. I promise you, no one will do her any harm.” Carina snaps a stretcher into being at my side. “Just lower her. Carefully, carefully...”

  It feels like death, like being cut open at the core and flayed alive, but her voice seems so reasonable. This is what I came here to do. I did not anticipate that it would melt my skin off, but I lower Brigit down to the stretcher nonetheless. Carina moves to the other side and blocks the rest of them so that I can get my arms out from underneath her.

  “Let’s go,” says Carina, and if I was burning alive before, now the flame has reached my bones and taken them all out.

  Because this bitch has double-crossed me.

  She motions in the others and there are too many for me to stop. Three of them tangle up with my feet while they start to wheel Brigit away.

  “Sir,” one of them says, an insolent gnat begging to get his nose broken. “Sir. You can’t come this way.” The stretcher disappears through a set of swinging double doors and I am still being harassed by these assholes. The door gives way beneath my hand and sets off an alarm. Four of them, in front of me now, a fifth diving in to join the fray.

  I can’t let her out of my sight.

  It’s controlled chaos back here, much like the main floor of the whorehouse on a party evening, and I see its patterns like I’d see the whores turning in their neat circles around me. Brigit, surrounded by scrubs so that all I can see are her feet, is getting farther away.

  “We have to stop you,” one of them says, a tremble in his voice. “Sir, we have to stop you.”

  Another set of doors.

  They take her through.

  The last part of my carefully constructed facade turns to ash. The ashes burn.

  “I’ll kill you,” I warn the one who’s bold enough to put himself between me and the doors. “I’ll kill you now.”

  “You can’t go back there, sir. It’s against hospital policy to let visitors go into the operating suite—”

  “Get out of the fucking way.”

  “Sir—”

  I sweep them all to the side with one arm, with more power behind it than I intended. One goes flying into the side wall. The double doors open again and Carina comes out, running again. “Let me see her.” I grab for the front of her white coat. She lets me have it, but she’s not the only one coming. The controlled chaos is turning to actual chaos, and I know, I know, that I should sit down and let them do their jobs. I know. But I can’t let it happen. I can’t die like this. I can’t die with my heart stopping in another room, not for the second time. Not tonight. Not now.

  I drop Carina and push through, a laugh bubbling up and escaping. It’s everyone in this emergency room against me, and I cannot hear a thing they’re saying. None of it matters. Let them keep coming forever. Let them keep pulling at my arms, my clothes.

  A door with a window looms up in front of me and through the window I can see her feet again. Where are her shoes?

  I wrestle an arm free to open the door.

  My palm never makes contact.

  A hand comes down on my shoulder and wrenches me straight backward. Who the fuck—

  “Back up, fucker.” I hate the voice in my ear, hate it with every bit of my soul. “Let them help her.” Hades gets one arm across my chest and this time, this time, I’ll kill him. This time, I won’t let him go back to his precious little mountain.

  I go for his hands first, but he’s in his right mind and I’m not. It’s a wrestling match in the middle of the hall, all the hospital staff backing up. I stomp on one of his feet but he only swings me to the side, one arm pinned under his. We collide with a short man in scrubs and I reach for the guy’s throat—I’ll kill him too, every one of these people keeping me from Brigit—but Hades slaps down my hand.

  “She’s dying,” I shout at him, at everyone. “I’ll kill all of you if you don’t let me see her, you fucking animals, I will raze this motherfucker to the ground with all of you in it—”

  “A coin for the ferry,” Hades says, his hands moving quickly. Lightning speed.

  “What the fuck are you talking about, you piece of—”

  He puts something between my teeth and clamps his hand down hard over my mouth. A pill. He’s given me a pill. Panic explodes, shattering what’s left of me like glass, and I fight him like a man possessed. But the fucker is prepared this time. A tray with medical instruments goes over, each slice of metal ringing like a bell on the floor. In my attempt to scream at him I’ve swallowed whatever it was, and with every passing moment his arms lock down harder. I can’t even break his wrist.

  I can’t do anything but let him drag me backward down another hall, kicking at the floor, trying to rip his arms from his body, but he’s too strong and getting stronger. We’re through another door, a smaller room, and he hauls me bodily over to a corner where there is a bed. He tips me into it like he’s just kicked me out of a third-rate bar and fuck me, I fall. “Who told you I was here? I’m going to kill you too.”

  He adjusts his jacket and puts his hands in his pockets. It’s fucking infuriating, how possessed he looks, while I’m—

  What the fuck? I’m drunk. Or—

  “Do it, then.” Hades has the nerve to throw me an impatient look. “Get up and kill me, Zeus. I don’t have all night.”

  I’m a very good host, so I try to oblige him.

  And I can’t.

  Because a clean, sweet darkness is closing in, and closing fast.

  “I hate you too,” I tell him. “I hate you so fucking much.”

  “You really are an ungrateful bastard, aren’t you?” I can’t answer. Too dark. Too tired. “Sleep it off. You can thank me in the morning.”

  2

  Brigit

  The world turns upside down.

  One minute, Zeus is saying something to me. Something I can’t hear, because something has happened to my ears. A terrible thing. Only a terrible thing would dull the world this much. The beat of my heart is the only sound, but after a while it stutters to a halt. A clear, bright pain at my back spreads out and wraps me in its wings until everything is white, white, white. White like driven snow. White like the burn of the sun.

  It’s so white, so unbroken, that it takes even longer to realize it’s still turning. A deeper white glow turns over head. Sunrise, sunset. I try to laugh but it hurts. There was a joke—what was the joke? I’m expensive. I don’t feel expensive now. I feel nothing, a blissful nothing interrupted only by firework bursts of pain from my back.

  What happened to me?

  I breathe in clouds and exhale ice. If this is heaven, then it’s not very exciting. Who ever thought the afterlife would be like playing in a giant white parachute, without the playing or the parachute? There’s nothing here. My mom should be here with me if I’m dead.

  The flat white divides itself neatly in two. White and black. Like Zeus and Hades
. The darkness rises, covering up the white until there’s only a thin line left, and then...

  Nothing.

  And then...

  Hands.

  On my face.

  Big, strong hands.

  From far away, there’s a rhythmic beep, as if someone on another continent has forgotten to replace the batteries in a smoke alarm. Smoke alarms are important because that way, you know if there’s been an explosion. An explosion—yes. I remember orange flames and a ragged hole in the ceiling.

  I remember stars.

  “—with me,” he says. Those are the words I was tracing on his lips before I came here, to this nowhere place. Please stay with me. “Brigit.”

  That voice. A golden voice. I can feel it behind my eyelids the way a person feels the sun even as they sleep.

  “Wake up.”

  I’m not asleep.

  But.

  I’m not awake until I open my eyes. It takes another eternity to figure out how to move my lids, which are weighted down by some outside force.

  The voice insists. “Wake up, Brigit. Come back.” It’s fervent, like a prayer, half-commanding and half-beseeching. It makes me wish I was the churchgoing type just so I could hear someone pray to God like this. Unfortunately I’m not the churchgoing type. Unfortunately I’m a total sinner. A whore, if you will. Yes—that’s what I was doing. I was working. I was working—

  I open my eyes and look into the face of God.

  Not God—just a god, and he is so beautiful it makes the machine off in the distance beep faster. What little I can see of the room is white like my dreams, white like the world I was just in, and Zeus is a stretch of living color. Black slacks and a white shirt and golden eyes that shock me back to life. Giddiness races up my veins and pours into my brain, stirring up all the memories there. Waiting in the dark of the alleyway. Seeing him for the first time. The way he circled me, stalked around me, looked. Much like he is now, eyes hard on mine. “If you’re going to look any longer, you could at least pay me for my time,” I rasp.