Read Online Hades by Candice Fox - Free Book Online

blood all over you.”
    “Where’d you hear that?”
    “Dunno.” I shrugged. “Police report?”
    I’d lifted the file that morning, sifted through pictures of Eden standing by the ambulance covered in the blood and brains of her former partner. Her hair hanging in her face. Her palm to her temple and teeth bared. She hadn’t looked upset. She’d looked angry. Disappointed. Almost as though she’d wanted it to happen another way, a more dignified way.
    Eden’s lip curled in distaste. I shrugged.
    “What? Eric’s the only one allowed to go digging in old police reports for personal interest?”
    “I’d prefer it if you directed your personal interest elsewhere. I was right behind him,” she said. “I saw him get shot.”
    I let some time go by.
    We entered the eastern suburbs, hills laden with a tight mixture of weatherboard hovels, brick terraces and apartment buildings and glass-front mansions rolling towards the sea. Surfers milled on street corners, bare-chested and tanned. There were tribal tattoos and filigree scripts on skin everywhere and a stark absence of anything but white faces. I knew this city, had gotten myself drunk and fallen asleep on the beaches here many times as a troublemaking boy. It was a dangerous place for the Lebanese and Koreans, although they were safe at the larger beaches like Bondi. There was an unwritten code here about the faces that belonged on the scrub-fringed footpaths, those that belonged in the water, on the sand, in the pubs. In fact, everywhere but behind the counter of the local newsagent. At Maroubra even those strangers who met the criteria of ethnicity could take their boards and head up to the very southern tip of sand, never to the main beach where they would get in the way of the more experienced surfers. They were welcome at the Seals Club until ten and the main hotel until eleven. Maroubra had its local families who were born and raised here. Everyone else was a guest, and guests behaved themselves or were promptly and unkindly put out.
    I leaned against the window as the car rolled and dipped over hills, around the cliff edges. The rain began to patter on the windscreen and the surfers on the street corners didn’t move. I could make out more in the water, bobbing on the waves like lumps of driftwood.
    “Must’ve been hard,” I said. “You and Doyle were partnered for three years.”
    Eden sneered and there was no humor in it.
    “It’s supposed to be hard to see anyone shot in the face, Frank.”

Hades didn’t know how the children came up with their new names. One morning they just started calling each other by them and naturally he followed. From the moment that Eric awakened, Hades felt distanced from the girl. He hadn’t been close to her in those initial days but she and Eric engaged in a relationship that was utterly exclusive and strangely intimate. They spoke in a language of gestures and looks. Now and then Hades heard them whispering in the night when they were supposed to be sleeping in the secret room, and he could never make out what they said.
    The decision to keep the children never really happened. In the beginning he’d put off the heavy, painful question of what was best for them—and for him—until he knew whether the boy would survive, and then he put it off again until he was sure the boy was going to keep on surviving. Before he knew it three weeks had passed and he was taking the children into account when he ordered his shopping. Whenever thoughts crept into his day about how he would raise them and where he would keep them and just how fucking ridiculous the entire idea of running his nighttime business alongside being their father was, Hades simply banished the thoughts and did something else. It was easy to do. The children were always there. Hanging about under his feet or cuddling into his chair with him or trying to tell him stories in their wandering, illogical, wide-eyed ways. A month flew by and a routine fell into