Read Online Hades by Candice Fox - Free Book Online Page B

was something he’d rarely witnessed—it was like the blur of a beautiful creature retreating from him into the dark. He was sure a couple of people had loved him over the years, but never in a parental way and never with the vulnerability of a child. He wasn’t even sure he could spot love in someone else, let alone demonstrate it himself. Uncertainty itched at the man’s insides. There seemed to be no rules and Hades didn’t like that.
     
     
    The first time the children killed they were eight and ten.
    Eden and Eric had settled into a life at the dump that seemed to Hades to be uncomplicated and comfortable, the kind of life that children who had been broken needed to repair their hearts. He gave them free rein to explore and play and dream and run wild during the day. At night he schooled them, following Eden’s interests into classic literature and European history and Eric’s passion for science and war. Hades didn’t risk sending them to school. Though he had commissioned the forged birth certificates and medical papers and other things he would need to prove their legitimacy, some part of him feared that one day someone would recognize them from the newspaper reports and television clips and missing posters that had followed the slaying of their parents. Some part of him feared that one day they would be gone from his life as abruptly as they had come. Though villains of every nature still arrived at his door seeking his help, the little ones gave him a reason to believe that not all of his life was dedicated to evil.
    Hades had watched the news religiously in the beginning to try to understand how such a colossal fuckup could have occurred, though he could only do this when the children were in bed and he was sure they were asleep.
    From what he could gather, their father had been a lanky, quiet guy who made some discovery about isolating a gene that encouraged skin cancer and the scientific community had gone nuts about it. The mother was some kind of well-recognized creative type, a jill-of-all-artistic-trades who every now and then wrote snappy feminist columns for the newspapers. She was a dark, glamorous woman who was pictured with paintbrushes holding up her shimmery black hair or clay dust drying on her long, slender fingers, a woman who was always laughing and talking and touching people’s shoulders when she talked.
    There was plenty of news footage of the huge house on the lake, the shattered windows and the white-clad forensics officers tiptoeing through the chaos taking photographs. There were pictures of a set of gates with flowers and teddies and angry scrawled messages of vengeance towards the killers. The news reports likened the Tenor children to the three Beaumont kids who’d disappeared from a beach near Adelaide in the ’60s, and within days the assumption seemed to be that they were dead. Newspaper opinion pieces called for the kidnappers to burn in hell and other rather uncomfortable punishments. Much of the initial rage and hurt at the missing children made Hades stir in his bed with guilt. But not a single relative was mentioned in the media during the hunt for the Tenor family killers and interest in the case died, however slowly. He consoled himself by standing in the doorway to the children’s bedroom and watching them sleep, oblivious to the angry ripple they had caused in the world.
    Now and then the children romped and wrestled in the little room he had built at the back of the house that served as their bedroom, but it was minor stuff, nothing like the night he discovered their secret. Hades had ignored the sound of them jumping from bed to bed as he sat reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. When Eden started screaming Hades looked up from the printed words. Taking off his reading glasses, he stood and moved silently down the hall.
    “Don’t, Eric, don’t! I don’t like it! Don’t, don’t, don’t!”
    Hades opened the door. Eden was midair, flying from one bed to