Chapter 15
Beingafraid of the dark is a common—some might say universal—fear for a reason. We’re probably wired to be fearful and cautious about places we can’t see because people who got cavalier about the dark didn’t make it in the days before we had things like fire.
So, it’s true—occasionally, being in the dark does make my heart beat faster. I do feel those old urges. The ones that tell me to get to the light.
But they always disappear, because you can’t grow up with a cousin like Daisy and be afraid of the dark. Not the way other people are. If the dark meant anything growing up, it only meant that someone big and strong was close by and willing to defend us at any cost.
I know better than to think there’s nothing dangerous in the dark of Mociar, but I’m not afraid.
Separately, I wish the sun would rise.
It doesn’t seem possible that we flew for so long, that Mociar is nine hours ahead and dawn is taking its sweet time.
I stand outside the door of the brick building, the cold seeping through my jacket. I spend the first ten minutes balling my hands into fists and trying to warm them up in my pockets.
Twenty minutes goes by.
“It’s been twenty minutes,” I tell the guards.
They ignore me.
At twenty-five minutes, I wander back to the car and get my bag. It’s a hard case covered in fabric with straps that I can use to wear it over my shoulders. I put one strap over one shoulder and let the bag dangle behind me like my school backpack.
Half an hour.
Forty-five minutes.
Voices rise from the other side of the building, but they quiet almost immediately. The guards on this side glance among themselves in little flickers of their eyelids disguised as blinks. No other reaction.
An hour.
The guards ignore me some more.
At an hour and ten minutes, the guard gestures to the car. I give him a scornful look and remain in place by the building.
At ninety minutes exactly, I square my shoulders and march past the guards.
They don’t stop me.
That’s one of the many signs that something has gone wrong.
The front room of the building—why does it smell like gasoline?—is empty.
The back room contains one man who sits at a desk, writing. He has a small lamp that gutters like a candle.
He lifts his head as I reach the desk, and for an instant, I could swear I’ve seen him before.
But I haven’t seen him before. I’ve only seen someone who looks like him, and it was Senator Chris Walsh.
The animal parts of my brain do not appreciate the resemblance. I can’t think about the photos in that envelope right now. I can’t think about what they mean, and who took them, and how Apollo must’ve felt when he saw them. Every instinct says that this man was involved in that somehow—that he orchestrated this—but I don’t have time for that now.
I’m not as tall as my dad. I’m about the same height as my mom. But I still know how to loom.
So I loom over the man at the desk. “Where is he?”
“Gone,” he answers, with a smile like the missing chunk of the building. He sounds far too American to be here. He sounds way too pleased for this to be a good thing. But if that means Apollo isn’t dying in a cell somewhere in here, then okay. I can deal with whatever is happening one step at a time.
“Gone where?” I match his genial tone. I was out front, so wherever he went was clearly not above board.
“Gone to make a deal.” I remember the voices earlier and curse myself for not checking it out. I’m getting pretty good at cursing myself, apparently.
“A deal with who?”
“It’s none of your concern, little lady.”
I turn on my heel and leave.
His confusion follows me. He probably expected me to beg. He probably expected me to cry.
I don’t care what he expected. This little lady has other things to do. None of it ladylike.
I circle the building. No sign of Apollo. But a short distance away, at the place where the fence bumps up against the forest, which crowds the skirt of the mountains, there is a gate in the fence, and two guards.
They’re young. One watches me make my way over. The other watches beyond the barbed wire, smoking a cigarette.
I go for the young, wary one.
The thing about private planes is that you can bring all your good knives with you. Never let it be said that I travel unprepared.
I push the point of my knife gently into the soft part of the first one’s chin. His fellow guard is too busy with his cigarette to notice.
“Where’s Apollo?”
He blinks. Swallows. Points at the forest. “They went into the mountains. They’re going to the border.”
“Thank you,” I say, with a big, earnest smile, then push the knife just a little farther in and draw a little blood as a warning. He squeaks, but stays still. “Now open the gate.”
His buddy has noticed by now, but the first guard hisses at him. He pulls the gate open just wide enough for me to slip through. I pause on the other side and look back through the wire at them.
“Say anything to anyone, and I’ll slit your throats.” I punctuate this with a wide, bright smile, like I’ll enjoy slitting their throats, and wait until they’ve both nodded.
Then I head off into the woods.
When I can’t see them or the fence anymore, I swing my case onto the ground and shrug off my coat. There’s a portable bow inside my case, originally designed to survive plane crashes and remain useful through covert military missions. It will stand up to just about anything. There’s also a collapsible quiver and a collection of the sharpest arrows I’ve ever owned.
Thusly prepared, I toss the coat and the case off the path and do a last check of my outfit.
It’s similar to the clothes Apollo and I wear when we play our games, except this one is the one I wear when the hunt is real.
The dawn comes on very,very slowly in the mountains, and the cloud cover isn’t helping. It’s giving all the evergreens a strange, surreal quality that isn’t my favorite.
I make two phone calls in that weird light.
The people I’m following don’t care about getting found out. They leave an obvious trail that I follow for at least fifteen minutes, and then they turn off into more densely wooded and mountain-ed terrain.
It’s not much harder to track them, even so. Apollo’s energy is hot and terrified, and I hate it. I hate it so much, but I don’t let it get to me.
Apollo thought I needed to be protected, but the truth is that I thought he needed to be protected, too.
Because I’ve never told him about the other game I play. The game that’s not a game at all.
When I was thirteen, I decided I wanted to hunt. Not do archery practice with targets—hunt. So I did my internet research. I looked up all the rules. I got a license and reviewed the laws and learned how to kill various animals cleanly.
I didn’t want to kill an animal, necessarily, but I felt like I had to. I felt like there was something off about my life, and about the rest of the world. It wasn’t bloodlust I felt, just that there was a cycle I needed to be part of. One that wouldn’t be right until I took my place in it.
So finally, after months of exhausted research, I got up the courage to sneak out of my house in the middle of the night.
I didn’t keep a lot from my parents growing up. I had no reason to. They trusted me and I trusted them. They respected my hobbies, and encouraged me—all the things great parents are supposed to do.
I didn’t want to tell my dad about the hunting.
He was open with us about our childhood, so I’d heard about the things his foster father had done in front of him and to him. I heard about the things he and his brothers and his sister survived.
I didn’t think he would be interested in any more killing of any kind.
I had a plan when I walked out of the house that involved the subway and at least two Ubers and public lands north of Manhattan. It was a very detailed plan that would have me back at home and safe in my bed before sunrise.
But when I got to the end of the driveway, someone was already there.
My Uncle Hades leaned against one of his black SUVs with his arms crossed. He wore black the way he always did, but his clothes that night were sturdy and simple and warm.
I stopped at the curb, and he turned to me like I hadn’t been sneaking. Like I hadn’t been making my footsteps as silent as humanly possible.
“Ready?” he asked.
I thought about lying. I don’t know why. “I?—”
He just gave me a look.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I’m ready.”
Uncle Hades didn’t take me to a public preserve. He drove me to the same piece of property Apollo and I own now. Hades owned it then, and he sold it to me for eighteen dollars on my eighteenth birthday.
Hades was the one who went into the woods with me the first time. He stopped the car at the parking area and zipped me into a hunter-orange vest, then tugged a hunter-orange hat over my hair.
“Is anyone else going to be in the woods?” I asked while he was zipping up his own vest and pulling on his own hat. I used to wonder, when I was really little, if he’d look better in other colors than black. My uncle looks oddly decent in orange, but I don’t think it’d suit him for everyday wear.
“No,” he answered.
“Then why—” I gestured to all the orange gear. I had studied hunting safety practices and had a much smaller reflective vest in my bag, but it seemed like overkill if we were going to be alone.
“Hunting rules.”
“Hunting rules, or you want to cover your ass in case my parents find out?”
“Cover my ass in the event of…what?” He gave me big eyes, which is the funniest expression I’ve ever seen on him. “Your big, scary dad comes to beat me up?”
“I’m going to tell him you said that.”
“No, you’re not.”
Hades was right. I didn’t tell my dad he said that because I thought I might slip up and reveal the hunting trip.
That night, he asked easy questions about what I knew, and wanted to know if I had any questions for him, and asked if I had killed before.
In retrospect, it stands out to me that he asked if I had killed. Not if I had killed an animal.
“No,” I said. “How did you know about my plan?”
He gave me another look that said why would you ever think I didn’t know about your plan?
Hades only asked one more time if I was ready, and then he didn’t ask again.
A large part of hunting is stillness. You can’t tromp around through the woods and expect the animals not to run from you, so eventually we chose a spot and set up a small temporary blind and a pair of seats, and we waited.
“Hunting hours are from sunrise to sunset,” he mentioned, his voice fitting in with the soft forest sounds. “You get a little extra time for birds.”
“I know,” I whispered back.
“So don’t hunt at night somewhere you might get caught,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“And don’t hunt by yourself. It’s a ridiculous way to die. Just text me.”
“Okay.”
The deer came along about half an hour later.
Its antlers were at least the length of my hand. It was legal. For the briefest moment, I wondered what Uncle Hades’s plan was. Just to sit there and watch?
I decided not to ask.
Instead, I drew back my bowstring, aimed, and let it go.
I knew the second that the arrow left the string that it wouldn’t be a clean kill. The truth was that my hands were shaking. My heart was in my throat when the arrow hit, and I’ll admit this: I did want to freak out.
For one second.
That was as long as I had before Hades put his left arm out in front of me, like you’d throw your arm in front of a kid in the passenger seat, and threw something with his right hand.
In the near-dark, the knife was a blur. My arrow had hit the deer too far forward and caught in muscle. Hades’s knife went in with a solid thunk, precisely between the point of its shoulder and its belly.
The deer dropped like a rock and landed on the ground, unmoving.
I lowered my bow as smoothly as I could. It was so quiet in the woods. Just wind whooshing in the trees and the smell of fallen leaves and the two of us.
There was just the deer.
When I turned to my uncle, he was watching me with mild curiosity and no judgment, waiting to see how I would react. Maybe he thought I’d be sick, or cry, or freak out.
But I was flooded with a sense of balance—real balance—for the first time in my life. It had been kind of scary to shoot an arrow at something and know that my intention was to kill it. Cleanly and quickly, even if I hadn’t quite pulled it off.
And I knew, somehow, that I was meant to do it. I was meant to hunt, and to track, and, yes, to kill. I was part of that balance, so I could either resist it or respect it.
I knew then that I’d always choose the latter.
I gave him a shaky smile, and he smiled back.
I see that moment differently now that I’m an adult. At the time, I thought that Hades was managing his expression so carefully because he wasn’t sure if I was ready for the reality of the hunt.
When I got older, I realized that he believed me when I told him I was ready. Unlike other adults I’d encountered, Uncle Hades didn’t use those questions to try to convince us to change our minds. He was genuinely asking, and accepted the answer as true.
The way he watched me afterward wasn’t because he hadn’t believed me, or because he thought I’d change course and have a big emotional reaction, or because he had any problem with big emotional reactions. I’d already had plenty of those in front of him growing up. We all had.
He was watching me with such meticulous calm because he wasn’t sure how I’d react to him.
It’s one thing to know your dad and his brothers as powerful, nearly superhuman men who scared other people sometimes. It’s another thing to learn that other people might have a real reason to be scared. And my Uncle Hades—who had made bowls of popcorn the size of our pillows for movie night and who had sung weird songs to distract me from the sting of the antiseptic when I had a scraped knee and who had carried me in his arms into dark rooms and said nothing is different just because it’s dark, listen, it sounds the same as it did when it was light—thought that he might have revealed, in that moment, that the scary thing in the dark was him, and had been for a long time.
But he hadn’t. He’d only proved, yet again, that sometimes what you needed wasn’t a person who would cover your eyes. Sometimes, you need a person who won’t hesitate to finish what you started. And he never did.
He was the one who taught me how to hunt, and field dress an animal, and bring it out of the woods to be processed and given to people who needed it more than I did. Those trips we took, skirting the edges of the law on private land, are how I know that hunting is as much a part of me as anything else.
So it’s second nature to follow Apollo’s energy through the forest, even as the mountain gets steeper.
It’s second nature to know, well before I reach the clearing, that there are three men with Apollo.
And it’s second nature to know I’ll kill them all.
Because they’re not the scary thing in the dark.
I am.