Hades by Candice Fox Read Free Book Online Page A

face, the boy still unconscious by her feet. She looked sick and pale. He sat silently by her side as she ate the spaghetti bolognaise he had cooked for her. Color came slowly back into her cheeks. The little girl ignored the stuffed animal, letting it slip to the floor beside her chair.
    When Hades took her bowl away her eyes rose to the ceiling, examining the colored bottles and chains and cracked teacups hanging there, the broken mobiles and pieces of bone and polished machinery parts. She reached out and touched the huge black wing of a dead bird he had nailed to the wall by the table, following the long dorsal feathers with her fingertips. He watched her, wondering if he’d spot that strange look he had seen the night of the murders, the darkness in her eyes that he had only ever witnessed in the eyes of the damned. He didn’t see it and he told himself that he must have imagined it. When he beckoned her into the living room she followed obediently and sat curled on the very edge of the sofa, as far away from him as she could get. He switched over to The Simpsons, thinking it was something she might have watched in her other life. She didn’t laugh. Not once.
     
     
    The boy moved through layers of consciousness, but was never really awake. Hades set a routine of checking on him twice in the middle of the night, which sometimes woke the girl suddenly and got her screaming and crying.
    On the third day the boy was still out. Hades thought about driving him to a hospital and dumping him at the doors, but what would he do with the girl? She had seen his face. She had seen his house. Hades worried incessantly about the boy, sometimes peeling his eyelids back and staring helplessly into his vacant eyes. He didn’t want the boy to die. More than that, he didn’t want the girl to know it before he did. He changed the bandages on the boy’s head and cleaned the vicious wound.
    He let the girl out that afternoon. It was a Friday and there were few workers about. He had dropped hints to the sorting center staff about an old flame who was giving him trouble about his children and who’d threatened to dump them on his doorstep. He led the girl down to his workshop at the bottom of the hill. She sat on the edge of a bench and watched him work on his latest creation.
    Finally he seemed to have found something that brought life into her eyes. She watched with rapt attention as he ground and welded and beat the salvaged materials into the shape of a fox. Her lips formed shapes of wonder. When he waved her over from the bench she dashed to his side, reached out and touched the still-warm metal, stroking the snout of the giant beast tentatively as though it were living—and dangerous. She watched for hours, saying nothing.
    As they walked back to the house she reached up and took his huge fingers in her hand. Hades looked down at her and it seemed to bring her out of a daze. She realized what she was doing and snatched her hand away. The setting sun made her cheeks look flushed pink and her eyes a glittering gold. She seemed like a living doll to him. He worried that his clumsy hands might break her.
    The man and the girl stopped inside the doorway to the little shack. The boy was in the kitchen, crouching, one hand steadying himself against the floor. He was looking at the ceiling. Hades realized with shock that he had left the door to the secret room open. The girl let out a howl and flew at the boy, encircling him with her arms. He was confused and shaken, couldn’t stand properly. Hades had never seen the boy’s eyes open of their own accord. They were even sadder and more soulless than those of the girl.
    “Marcus?” the girl sobbed, taking his face in both her hands and shaking it. “Marcus? Marcus? Marcus?”
    “Easy now,” Hades cautioned, moving her hands away gently. “Just be careful with him.”
    Marcus looked up at Hades with the cool detachment of a mental patient. Hades worried that he might be permanently