Darker Than Night - Amelia Wilde Page 0,43

Demeter in a heap on the floor and run. The windows along the side of the room have latches. There’s no time for latches. I grab the top of the frame and kick one out with both feet, then fall, onto my back, onto the floor.

The bomb sails over my head and through the window. It has three red lights. All of them are blinking. From the way it’s spinning, he skipped it like a rock through the broken glass.

The impact comes a moment later, rattling the walls of the building. It’s not so much a sound as pressure, intense, unflagging pressure, and I turn over onto my hands and try to get up. Except there’s been a short-circuit. An overload. The room flickers and goes dark and in that space I’m trapped in a film reel of memories that feel like broken glass.

A small, waiflike Demeter standing in a slice of moonlight in my attic bedroom, tears running down her cheeks. “I don’t want to get burned.” She’s still so young that her R sound is muddled. “I can’t reach—”

Her tongue between her teeth in concentration, a chubby grip on the pencil. She swipes her hair out of her eyes. “D,” she says, face lighting with pride. “What’s next?”

“E,” I tell her. “M. E...”

“Don’t look!” she squeals. I’m not fucking around—my eyes are covered by my own hands. But she puts hers over mine. “Count to twenty. Count to a hundred!”

“Ninety-one,” I say, and she laughs, her footsteps receding while her giggle hangs in the air. “Ninety-two.”

“One loop,” she repeats after me. “Two loops. Cross—it’s not working.”

“Try again. One loop—”

A whisper in the night. He’s coming. I’m out of the bed before I know what I’m doing, shushing her, taking her to the piece of shit closet in my room. It’s only large enough because she’s thin, small. I’m sorry, she mouths, and I close the door on her white face while heavy footfalls shake the attic stairs. I have the words ready. It was me.

Demeter, knees to her chest on the lakeshore. “Do you think he’ll ever like me?”

“I like you,” I tell her.

The room blinks back into existence, a frustrated scream pulling me back and up to my feet.

Poseidon has her. Her feet don’t reach the ground and her white dress looks ridiculous, incongruous. She’s already scratched deep lines into the flesh exposed by his rolled-up sleeves. With one big hand he turns her head to the side.

“Say the word.” Hate burns in his eyes. The bomb didn’t take out the building but Poseidon might. His mouth is a twist of disgust.

He’s going to snap her neck.

I hold out a hand. Wait—wait. It would be simple. It would be clean. She’s killed so many people, she’s maimed so many people, she’s destroyed my heart. She looks at me from the corner of her eyes and there’s real fear there. No hiding it from me. I’ve seen it too many times.

How can she ask me to save her now?

After everything?

“If you kill me,” she rasps, her voice raw. “You’ll never find it.”

At first I think she’s talking to me, but it’s Poseidon’s face that heats, rage stoking higher in his eyes. “I don’t care,” he says.

“Yes you do.” It’s almost a melody. “You do, you do—”

“You’re such a bitch,” Poseidon growls. “A hellion. I can’t stand the sight of you.”

“Then let me go.” She’s not scratching him anymore, just hanging there in his hands, her face pale.

“Pick one of them.” His hand tightens on her face and she stiffens. “One of your little police buddies. They can trade you for a place on the force. Can’t they, Zeus?”

Demeter blanches. “No. No—don’t.”

It’s in this moment that the full depth of her brokenness is finally clear. She was having women raped in front of her, but now, the suggestion of a prison sentence has turned her into a trembling rabbit. God knows what she did to Savannah. What she would have done to Brigit.

“Put her down.”

Poseidon has never hated me more than he does in this moment, but he does it—probably because he hates touching her the most. Demeter trips on the hem of her dress and recovers. And for the second time today she hurries toward me.

For a single instant I can see her outside, in the woods, running toward me just like this with a smile on her face instead of a complicated, terrified relief.

That girl in the woods is gone. She’s dead. This one—I don’t know who