Midnight Kingdom

by Amelia Wilde

  A long silence, so long that I look up to watch the fire dance in Hades’ eyes. “I don’t have a good explanation.”

  “Tell me the bad explanation, then.”

  He huffs a hollow laugh and shifts in the chair. “It’s impossible to say for certain, but it probably has a lot to do with my foster father. He liked to beat me outside in the sun and lock me out. Enough light lands my fucked-over brain between a migraine and a seizure.”

  “He knew that, and he still—”

  “He liked it,” Hades says, relaying this like it doesn’t hurt him to say it. “Maybe it was better when I was very young. I don’t know. Regardless, it’s permanent damage now. No fixing it. The only option is to dull the pain before my brain short-circuits.”

  So matter-of-fact. “Then what my mother makes for you—made for you—”

  “Painkillers. The only ones that have ever worked with any consistency. I don’t know how she made them non-addictive. I never asked.”

  The last piece of cloth falls to the tray and I stand up, trying to hide my shaking hands. My mother has been cruel always, but this makes me so angry that it freezes off the part of me that hoped she’d forgive me one day.

  Hades stands up too and goes over to his desk. He takes out a key from a place I can’t see and unlocks the last drawer on the bottom—the one that’s always locked. A minute later the door slides shut and he straightens up with a gun in his hands. It looks absurdly small in his huge grip, but he doesn’t tuck it away to keep with him. He brings it to me and puts it in my open palm. And then, in a tone I can only describe as loving, he tells me how to load it and shoot it, going over the parts until he’s certain I have it right.

  “Keep it close.”

  “Why?” I don’t like it, but I don’t put it down—he’s given an order. It’s just that handing me this gun feels like he’s saying he might not be here to protect me. And I can’t bear that. “Is something going to happen?”

  He tilts my face to his. “Promise me that if Zeus comes back, you’ll use this.”

  I swallow an ache in my throat. “I promise.”

  His gaze lingers on mine. “Good.” Coming from him it sounds like heavy praise, or relief. I can’t tell which. “Now come to bed.”

  17

  Hades

  Oliver rubs both hands over his face, then looks intently down at the schematics for the mountain on my desk. “I still think we need more people.”

  “Anyone we hire from the city could be connected to Zeus.”

  I’ve never seen him look more skeptical. “I would vet them. Like I’ve vetted everyone on the security team.”

  “Is there time for that?”

  He shrugs one shoulder. “There’s no news out of the city. None of my people have said reported anything out of the ordinary at Zeus’ property. Nobody coming and going, no shipments arriving.”

  Oliver hasn’t been sleeping, that much is clear. I tap my fingers on the desk and wait.

  “Nobody coming and going at his whorehouse,” Oliver says quietly. “So he could have moved everything somewhere else. He’s still hosting parties, but that doesn’t mean...” He meets my eyes with a sharp, almost owl-like expression. “We need more people. He could be sending them here on foot.”

  “How will you tell Zeus’ people from your own applicants? Word will get out, you know. There’s only one solution.”

  Oliver studies the schematic as if he’ll find the answer written there in small type, tucked next to a wall. Then he lets out a heavy sigh. “It’s going to be Poseidon’s crew, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’re going to have to bribe them, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not going to do it.”

  “Of course not.”

  The facts:

  The mountain must be defended from Zeus on the city side and Poseidon on the ocean side. He’s offered his men and he’s still running supplies as long as the train is closed, but there’s always a motive within a motive for him. He’s been lurking around enough to know about the vast extent of the mines and the factory. He’ll be waiting for an opportunity to take it from me. It’s too much like treasure at the bottom of the sea. All you have to do to get it is drown everyone else first. That would be Zeus’ logic.

  The trains are still not running, which means I can’t get anything from my usual contacts in the city, but it also means that Zeus will be under pressure for his own business, too. Demeter can’t sell what’s left from her fields. If I had to place a bet, I’d bet that she’s with Zeus already, bargaining with him for a second attack. I don’t envy him that.

  Persephone requires some kind of plan—one that I can explain to her without making it seem like Zeus is waiting at the gates. She keeps looking at the gun like it might grow a mind of its own. It’s unsettling on her. She should be out in the valley with Eleanor, doing whatever it is they do when people aren’t trying to kill each other at Eleanor’s front door.

  “Have you thought about sending her away?”

  At first, I can’t fucking fathom who Oliver is talking about. When understanding comes its with anger like wildfire, burning its way across my heart and my brain without a single river to stop it. “What the fuck kind of question is that?”

  Oliver grimaces but presses on. “She might be safer somewhere else. The city, under a different name. I have people there who could handle her presence there.”

  I cannot send Persephone away. I can’t. The idea of being apart from her—and making it happen myself—rends me in two. It starts at my ribs, prying them apart until my naked, beating heart is exposed to the corrosive air. It twists at my spine until my lungs fold in on themselves. Black encroaches on my vision. Send her away, and then fucking what? Hire some people to stand outside her door until this is all over? This will never be over, and I will never put that kind of distance between us again. Not after that fucking boat almost sank beneath my feet.

  “That’s not a plan to fortify the mountain,” I tell Oliver, the restraint fraying at the edges of my voice. “Think of a better one before I wring your neck. No—forget about it. I’ll tell you what we’ll do.” I stab a finger down on the schematics. “Build out the station. Have people start tonight. Add to the fence by the entrance to the mines. I want people at every door. Rifles and pistols.”

  “Are you sure you want her here?” Oliver has apparently slipped back into his own past, where he was a reckless fool with a death wish more extravagant than mine. I reach across the table and take a fistful of his shirt in my hand. He hits the glass figurine of the poppy on my desk and knocks it to the floor.

  “If you ever make a suggestion like that again, Oliver, it will be the last suggestion you give me or anyone else.” This—this should not set me off. But my blood rages at the thought of another person thinking that it would ever be a good idea for Persephone to be anywhere except on my mountain. No. Fuck no.

  “I understand,” he managers, and I realize I’ve pulled the collar of his shirt so tight that it’s choking him. I toss him backward off the bench and his chair goes over, sprawling him onto the floor of my office. He gets up quickly, I’ll give him that. “Do you think you’ll marry her?”

  It brings me up short. Marrying Persephone has been an abstract concept from the moment we first met. There’s no promise I could make to her during some sort of bullshit ceremony that I haven’t already made. She is mine now. A wedding wouldn’t make her more so.

  But Oliver’s bizarre question has revealed a flaw in how I’ve thought about this.

  I’ve never asked Persephone how she feels about weddings. If she’s ever imagined her own. If she even fucking wants that. She might, if we weren’t living under the constant threat of Zeus and the uneasy alliance with Poseidon. An image of her flashes to life in my mind—Persephone in a white dress, this one unlike the one she wore the night she came to my train platform. In my vision the dress does her justice until I rip it away from her skin.
Take the bouquet from her hands, let the petals fall. Spread her out on the bed on our wedding night.

  I am not the kind of man who thinkings about weddings. But I am the kind of man who thinks about Persephone in a gown that makes her pink with happiness.

  She could want that. And if she did, I could give it to her. I can give her anything in the world except the guarantee that I’ll be alive as long as she wants me to be.

  “You shouldn’t be sitting there.” Oliver sits up at my curt tone, and I see in his eyes that he knows this is a topic of discussion that’s unlikely to end well for us. “Go give everyone their places, and when you’re done, come back here. We also need to prepare for another eventuality.”

  Oliver looks so tired, bags under his eyes and a droop to the corners of his mouth. “What’s that?”

  “When they both attack us at once.”

  His brow furrows. “Poseidon wouldn’t double-cross us like that.”

  “Wouldn’t he?”

  I can almost read his mind. He’s thinking brothers. He’s thinking mutual aid. He’s thinking wartime. And then, in front of my eyes, the shift happens. Oliver watched Zeus try to kill me. He watched me try to kill Zeus. “Right,” he says. “Of course.”

  “Go and get the guns,” I tell him. “When we’re finished talking you’re going to get some rest. You’ll be useless if you don’t.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Fuck off, Oliver. And don’t lie to me. I’ve killed people for less.”

  18

  Persephone

  It can’t happen this way, with Hades making deals that end with him getting bruised and bloodied. It just can’t. The worry gnaws at me, twisting my stomach into a never-ending cramp and pulling my nerves in tight to my body. There’s not enough space in my skin to be this afraid. It does nothing to remind myself that he did come back, and is still currently shut up in his office with Oliver and Conor, and nothing is likely to happen to him there.

  Nothing is going to happen right now. But it will happen unless I do something.

  The book I’ve been trying to read and failing finds itself on the side table in the library. What am I going to do? Get up, for one. Go somewhere else, for another.

  Go to the city.

  And then what? Last time I was there, Zeus personally picked me up at the train station. I can’t call him for a ride. I could demand one from someone with this gun I have to carry around now, but I don’t like that idea. There has to be a better way. The metal bounces against my hip from inside the purse I use to carry it, completely unloaded. Putting the bullets in always seems like tempting fate. It’s the worst.

  I turn over the idea of asking Eleanor for her advice. Out in the valley the sun warms my face and my shoulders but it doesn’t get rid of the cold clench in my gut. My hand is on the door of her house by the time I realize that idea won’t work, either. But I open it anyway and go inside.

  No Eleanor.

  She’s not in her home or the room with the planters. “Hello?” My voice echoes off the high ceiling. She told me once that Hades insisted on having her house directly connected to the mountain. I’ve never gone through this way. It’s a shadow hallway, slim lights along the floor, and I follow it because I think I know where it ends up.

  And I’m right.

  The city by the mines, the community of all the people who live here. Out of sight and out of mind of the other things that have haunted them. So many people depend on the mountain and give it life in return.

  Like the mother who wouldn’t tell me her name. Her daughter, Jill.

  The sound of life here draws me in. People call to one another from the apartments. A woman haggles with a man who’s selling a bolt of fabric. It’s all very timeless, not like the city where Zeus lives. That’s all steel and glass and old building dressed up in new paint and hard siding.

  She would know, wouldn’t she? She would know how to get to Zeus. She and her daughter had to come here on the train. That’s how everyone from the city arrives. I wave to the man and the woman with the fabric and greet a woman named Rita who wears a red flower in her hair. I wasn’t too far down the street when I saw the little girl. If they’re home, then—

  Jill runs out into the street like she heard me thinking about her, but as soon as she’s in the middle she wheels around and heads back toward the door. Her mother is coming out behind her. Jill takes her mother’s hand and they set off in the opposite direction. It’s not usually my thing to chase people down when they’re trying to live their lives—there were never any people to chase down at home—but I do it now. Jill’s mother startles when I catch up to them.

  “I’m sorry,” I say instantly, and the whole plan pops fully formed into my mind. I know what I’m going to do. “I’m so sorry. You don’t have to tell me what your name is, but I was hoping you could give me some information. I swear, I won’t bother you about it again.”

  She looks up and down the street, like she’s looking for danger.

  “Is it him? Zeus?” Her eyes snap back to mine. “If you tell me how to get to his building, I’m going to make sure he doesn’t come back.”

  Her face hardens. A moment passes. My heart beats frantically, anxiously. If I’m going to do this then I have to get started now. Now, before anyone tries to stop me. Jill’s mother leans in. “Have you been to the train station?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you get off the platform, there’s a street.” She whispers the instructions quickly, and then moves on to the more important part. She tells me about the hidden door in the back where a woman will meet me—I’m supposed to let her know I’m there for a job, and she will take me in for an interview. “And don’t—”

  Her words get cut off by a deep, strong rumble that vibrates the mountain. It’s loud and close, almost above us. “What is that?”

  “The train’s coming into the station,” she says, wonderingly. “I thought there would never be any more trains.”

  I have to be on it. I grab her around the shoulders and pull her in tight, then bend down to kiss the top of Jill’s head. “You were going to say something,” I tell this woman, who has become my accomplice in an instant. I hope there’s time for her to become my friend. “What was it?”

  She presses her lips together, determination in her eyes. “Don’t give up.”

  Those are the words that ring in my ears while I sprint out of the mines, stopping only once in the kitchen, and go across the mountain. There’s nothing I want more than to go to Hades’ office and throw myself into his lap, but I set it aside, leaving that want behind with my heart. I’ll be back for it soon. I will.

  19

  Persephone

  The journey from mountain to city proceeds how my new friend said it would. The train. The platform. The walk to Zeus’ huge, pale castle taking up the corner of a city street. The woman who answers the narrow door in the alley, looks me up and down, and tells me to follow her for an interview. I’ve shoved a scarf down on top of the gun in my purse to keep it from clinking against my other things while I walk, and I keep reaching for it, patting it. Still there. Still there. Still there.

  Zeus has a quiet house in the afternoon. I remember this from last time—there were plenty of hours in the day to eat and put on makeup and prepare ourselves for whatever the evening would bring. That’s not going to happen this time. I remind myself of it with every step. Not this time. Not this time.

  I follow the swish of the woman’s navy dress through a series of hallways and into a smaller version of the main ballroom. Pieces of furniture line the walls at intervals, and they’re not empty. Each one is draped with a woman doing something ostensibly for herself—reading, painting her nails, putting on makeup in a compact mirror. But they’re not, because each one of them is nude.

  Fear bubbles up, washing out to the tips of my fingers, and I press them together hard. No shaking hands. No crying. I can be afraid and still be a queen. We approach Zeus’ desk, which is a massive
installation of polished wood. He’s sitting in a sunbeam like it’s nothing—it is nothing, for him—head bowed over an open ledger. “What is it, Margaret?”

  “A new girl,” she tells him, and then she steps inside to let him see me.

  “Persephone.” I don’t trust the warmth in his voice, or the delight in his eyes—I don’t trust it for a second and I take an involuntary half-step back. But there’s nowhere to go. I’m here, and nobody knows about it. “I see you got my invitation.”

  The room twists sideways and I manage to stay on my feet, but it’s close. The train did come too easily—it’s obvious to me now. I thought I was being brave, running onto it, but I was being stupid. My teeth knock against one another, anxiety reaching my face, but I clench them until it hurts and continue on. “I—I assumed you wanted a chance to explain yourself.”

  A flicker of surprise. “Explain myself?”

  I stalk up to the desk, even thought all I want to do is run in the opposite direction. “Explain why you’re such a twisted asshole that you’d kill your own family. Why would you do that?”

  “You’ve never wanted to kill your mother?”

  “No. Of course I haven’t.” But I did think about it, didn’t I? I thought about it all those years ago, when the woman at the Fates read my tarot cards. I did think about it. “But that’s not what this is about.”

  “Isn’t it? You want to know why I’d do something so awful as try to kill the brother who’s been a thorn in my side for decades, but you already know that family doesn’t mean love. Sometimes it’s just a code word for violence. And anyway, he deserved it. Aren’t you happy someone tried to avenge you? I can’t imagine he’s been kind.”