Midnight Kingdom

by Amelia Wilde

  Midnight Kingdom

  Amelia Wilde

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Connect with Amelia

  Also by Amelia Wilde

  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.

  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.”

  They are almost through, the fuckers, but one by one, they hear something that makes them stop. Or at least slow. They’re not coming through this way.

  “He’s waiting.” I drop the pronouncement down to her and feel it work its way through her skin.

  “For what?”

  “For sunrise.” A finger against the glass, in front of her eyes. It gets brighter with every moment. Time ticks away.

  I have already made one miscalculation, and drawing Persephone’s attention to the treeline is a sleight of hand. If sh
e’s focused on that, she won’t know how bad things have already gotten. Conor nudges impatiently against my legs with a whine. The dog is the only one who knows, other than me. Maybe Oliver, if he’s been paying attention. My fatal error takes the shape of empty pill bottles. I’m not usually a man who miscounts, but I have fucking done it this time.

  There is nothing left from Demeter to keep the scrape and crush of the light at bay. Nothing. So many last things happen in life when you’re not paying attention. The last time you curl a hand around your queen’s neck. The last time your father kicks you while you’re going down hard into ground that feels like fire, no escape from another endless glaring day.

  The last pill, rattling in its bottle.

  “Why?”

  Behind us in the hall, the sound of soft footsteps multiply. Those will be the people from the mines and the extensive warren of living spaces off the work area. Some of them, Oliver told me, stayed behind to fight Zeus’s people. They won’t survive. He’s as willing as Persephone to take huge chunks of the mountain to rubble if it means a victory. This is his version of salting the fields. Stupid—if he lives through this and I don’t, he’ll need the diamonds sooner or later. At the very least he’ll need the people. I could be saving them from certain death now only to hand them over to a more dangerous devil later.

  A lot, it turns out, is riding on whether I live or die. Best not to let anyone know that the odds are not favorable.

  Understanding flickers into her eyes a moment later and she twists in my hands to look at me. “That’s not fair.”