Darker Than Night - Amelia Wilde Page 0,3

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