This was the moment I’d been waiting for, my chance to put all the shattered pieces of my life back together. If I killed Eden now I’d be free of her devilish father and his landfill of horrors, of the memory of Martina that she carried with her everywhere like a perfume. She was the only piece that didn’t fit in my recovery. The only thing stopping me from being whole again. Without Eden, maybe I could start over. If I killed her now, I could forget I’d ever known the monster that she really was.
Instead I dropped my gun. Nick laughed, shifted sideways, and as he did a bullet whipped past my ear, struck him in the jaw, and sent him sailing backward. I heard running footsteps behind me, saw a flashlight beam approach. I caught Eden as she fell.
“Oh no,” I heard myself pleading. “No, no, no, please. Please God, don’t do this. Eden? Eden? Eden!”
She was a dead weight in my arms. We slid to the ground as the officers swarmed around us. I wrapped my arms around her, lifted her, and ran through them, back toward the gates.
EPILOGUE
H
ades sat at his table. He had been sitting there all day. The newspaper lay by his gnarled hand, untouched, the front page dominated by a picture of the young cop, Frank, carrying his daughter. He couldn’t think about that now. He couldn’t process what had happened to Eden, what it would mean for her, what they would have to do next. He needed to finish his time with Sunday. To finally say good-bye. Hades’ coffee cup stood on the sink-top, upside down, dry. In his left hand, he held an ancient photograph of a little girl sitting upright on an old wooden stool, looking off somewhere, unfocused.
That was how she was, always. Unfocused. Distant. A wild creature. That’s how she had seemed to Bear the day he found her on the beach as he crouched in the dunes picking plants for his lethal potions—a panting, panicked creature running toward him over the sand, her hair whipping in the wind and her arms out, reaching. A child of the earth, risen from a crack in the mantle somewhere, hot as fire as she slammed into his body, scrambled up his back like a possum, gripped onto his neck, her fingernails claws. The boys who had been chasing her up the beach came to a stop at the bottom of the dunes, one of them swinging the lump of wood by his side, weighing up their options against the huge man on the sand hill.
Bear had pulled the little girl off him with some difficulty. He found her barely conscious, racked by days on the streets. He held her there in the new sunlight, sat down, tried to figure where she’d come from, what the hell she was doing here. He called her Sunday. His runaway. One of a number of children he rescued over the years. Strays. Wild things. Children of the wind.
There was nowhere to visit Sunday, and that might have been the hardest thing for Hades, sitting there looking at his hands. Her body, buried deep beneath the well-kept and flower-laden headstone of Bonnie Melich, would be exhumed for DNA testing, then handed back to White and his family. Buried, probably, where her people had come from, miles from where the old man sat.
He had seen White on the news, railing at reporters about what he wanted done to retired Detective Tom Savet, what it had meant to his family, his mother, to have lost Sunday, the one piece of joy the old woman had ever experienced in her cold and loveless life. The Melich family had been there, too, stiff and noncommittal, still emerging from the lull they’d been enjoying for decades and into a new nightmare, a new uncertainty, for their lost child. Hades had switched it off after a time. It was all noise to him.
Now, as she always was, Sunday would be just beyond his reach. A moon drifting, following, teasingly close. Hades wondered what had happened to Bonnie Melich, the girl in the pub doorway, whoever she had been. Hades wondered what had happened to all of Savet’s case subjects, the little girls and boys, the old women, those lost souls he’d been too lazy to find. An inquiry would reveal it all, or kill Savet in the process. The young copper, Frank, told him that Savet was already locked down, extracted from his boutique retirement community in Woollahra and in custody at Silverwater. The young cop had made the call before he ever told Hades what he’d found. Smart. It would be harder to get at Savet now. Harder, but not impossible. Nothing was impossible for a man of Hades’ history.
Hades closed his eyes, cracked his neck, and set the photograph down on the tabletop. When he opened his eyes, a man was walking down the short front hall toward him, his stride long, quiet, slow. Hades watched Mr. Grey as the light hit his smooth high cheekbones, as they seemed to lift impossibly higher with his stark white, devilish grin. The manicured cannibal took up the chair across from Hades, sat down, and hung an elbow over its back, the steel-colored jacket hanging open, revealing its salmon silk lining. A shard of light from the kitchen window, red from the setting sun, glinted in the hitman’s eyes. For a moment he was a youthful Satan, come to collect a soul
“Greetings, old buddy,” Mr. Grey said. “I hear all your little rain clouds have begun to clear away.”
“Almost,” Hades said. He took the Magnum from where it sat on his right thigh, lifted it, and shot Mr. Grey in the face. The cannibal’s skull exploded down the dark hallway. The old man stood, stretched, felt the clicking of bones between his shoulder blades. The pinched muscle there that had been bothering him for weeks seemed to loosen. For a moment Hades felt young again.
Imogen stirred her coffee, careful not to hit the edges of the cup with her spoon, though she knew nothing would wake Frank now. He was flopped on his chest on the bed in the same position he’d fallen into the day before, barely stopping to get his bloodstained clothes off. He hadn’t spoken to her, but Imogen knew from the papers what had happened at the farm and the hospital afterward.
They said that Eden Archer was stable, but that she’d sustained terrible injuries fighting with the killers of two young prostitutes. The farm had been searched. Several arrests, including that of two men for a series of rapes. No remains of the girls had been uncovered, but on the news police choppers kept circling a large shed, and there was some hysteria surrounding Rye Farm organic pork supplies to various Coles supermarkets.
Imogen went to her desk, spread the paper out before her, and read the articles again, from the cover to the extensive middle spread to the editorial. The front-page picture had been captured by a paramedic using his smartphone. Frank with Eden in his arms, running on a gravel road, his mouth open, shouting. Imogen examined the panic in his face. The vulnerability. It was strangely attractive to see him like that. In action. On the run.
Eden looked like a blood-drenched doll in his arms, her head fallen back, eyes closed and dreaming. She was naked to the waist, her small breasts cupped in a black push-up. The public would be eating up the grisly tale based on this picture alone. Imogen smoothed out the paper. She found the scissors and began to cut. As she clipped along the bottom of the photograph, she stopped. There was a rather unusual mark on Eden’s ribs. A birthmark, almost electric pink in the image, shaped like a prancing pony. Imogen thought she might have heard people call that sort of mark a port stain. It was very pretty, crisply captured, distinct from the black blood that ran down her ribs. Just as Imogen noticed it, the mark seemed to dominate the entire picture. She put the scissors down. Felt strangely light-headed. She stared at the mark, and then, as though her world had been spinning and had suddenly righted, reached out groggily and pulled a folder from the middle of the stack on her desk.
The Tanner children case. Imogen flipped open the files, pushed them frantically over the desk. She found the worn news stock image of the slaughtered Dr. Tanner and his missing daughter, Morgan, at the beach. The respected scientist was stripped to the waist and hoisting a little dark-haired girl in a bikini into the sky. His big hands wrinkled the skin at her ribs but didn’t go so high as the birthmark there, a pony, hooves reared, just under the child’s armpit.
Imogen slowly put the two images side by side.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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Copyright © 2015 Candice Fox
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Previously published in Australia and New Zealand by Random House Australia Pty Ltd.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-1-6177-3443-4
First electronic edition: September 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1-61773-444-1
ISBN-10: 1-61773-444-6