Chapter One

“You’ve got the knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Inmate Speck.” The warden picked up a paper napkin and wiped the mustard from his fingers.

I ignored my own rumbling stomach.

I was used to taking the blame for things I hadn’t done.

I was ready for it.

I knew it was coming; I was just sad I’d had to miss dinner because one of the methheads on C block had decided to bite it in the shower.

I didn’t even know her name.

Jennifer... Something ?

My wrists were shackled. The iron bracelets rubbed against my skin like a host of fire ants. An itch I couldn’t scratch. My ankles were connected to my wrists by a long chain wrapped around my waist and the chair I sat on.

Two guards stood sentry behind me, arms crossed and feet squared—their gazes fixed in the middle distance. Their distraction was an illusion.

I coughed—my chain jerking as I went to cover my mouth. Both guards stepped forward, ready for action.

The warden sat in front of me, picking the remnants of his beef sandwich from his teeth with his pinkie nail. That sandwich sat forlornly on the plate before me, half-finished and oozing mustard.

He'd be waiting a long time if he was waiting for me to speak.

I didn’t speak. Period.

Which was just as well, I wasn’t a pleasant person, and keeping quiet helped maintain the illusion.

Also, bad things happened when I used my voice.

I guessed that being in control of a thousand unruly female inmates allowed things to fall through the cracks. Maybe the warden didn’t know I was mute?

The warden was a rotund man in his late fifties sporting a beard that covered his neck but not his chin. His eyes were beady, constantly darting from side to side as if expecting an attack. His shirts were pressed and white, but the fabric was almost translucent, revealing the shadow of his massive amount of chest hair.

The inmates called him Sergeant Ape, but no one knew if he’d served in the military. The haircut indicated yes .

The warden stared at me for a long moment, waiting for one of us to break the silence.

Every time my hands twitched, the chains rattled. The sound was eerily loud.

He knitted his fat fingers together, placing his elbows on my open file as he leaned forward, focused and full of judgment. “Madeleine Speck.” He spat my name like a curse. “Another dead inmate. That’s four in three years. What a coincidence, huh? You enter the shower, and suddenly, Inmate Callahan falls and hits her head on the tile. Wrong place, wrong time, huh?” He let the sentence hang.

I licked my dry lips but didn’t speak.

His beady eyes narrowed. “Or you’re the reason so many of my inmates are addicted to Sugar .”

I knew about Sugar. You didn’t spend time behind bars without knowing about the drugs that moved through the prison and which inmates made hooch in the toilets or huffed toilet bleach.

Sugar was one of the bad ones.

Only last month, Mackenzie-Grace had cut her arms from wrists to elbows and pulled her veins out. She’d worn a blissful expression the whole time as if she was knitting a blanket. She’d been taken to the local hospital for treatment and hadn’t returned.

She’d live—don’t ask me how I knew. I just did.

“Inmate Speck!” The warden barked. “Am I boring you? Huh?”

I shook my head, going with the safe response.

We stared at each other for a long moment. Neither of us verbalized the truth about the situation.

It wasn’t a coincidence anymore. Too many inmates were dying around me.

I liked it as much as he did.

Someone knocked on the door, bursting in without waiting for a response—dangerous and stupid in a women’s prison—the kind of action that told me exactly who it was.

Susan .

Dr Susan Holdsworth. The prison psychiatrist.

Her arms were laden with folders, and her hair sat in a high bun with a halo of flyaway strands. She smiled at me apologetically, dumping her files on the nearest surface and ignoring the warden as she signed a greeting in ASL.

“Madeleine! Did the warden tell you about the transfer yet?” She asked, signing every word when she didn’t need to.

Susan often forgot that there was nothing wrong with my ears.

I lifted my hands, drawing attention to the shackles and shrugging.

The doctor turned to the warden, her eyes round with admonishment. “Why did you restrain her hands? She needs them to speak!”

The warden pinched the bridge of his nose. “Inmate Speck is a prisoner, Dr Holdsworth.”

Susan flailed her hands before signing at me so fast that it was hard to distinguish one word from another.

“... Transfer... No appeal... Victim’s family... Retrial... Death Penalty .”

My brow furrowed, and I sat up.

What ?

Sensing my confusion, Dr Susan slowed her hands. “ Your appeal was denied. There is a possibility that the victim's family will go for a retrial. They want to push for the death penalty. You need to make a choice.”

It felt like the world had dissolved under my feet, and there was nothing to hold onto.

The death penalty.

For a crime I didn’t commit.

While the real murderer pranced about the streets. Free.

My mouth filled with saliva, the precursor to vomit, and I froze, unable to move as Susan’s words circled around my head like a figure skater.

“Will you two broads stop using that damn hand-speak?” The warden bit out, his cheeks flushed.

“I was just informing Ms Speck about the recent appeal and the potential for a transfer.” Dr Holdsworth replied cooly.

“Transfer?” The warden barked a laugh. “Its death by lethal injection, or the Red City, Inmate Speck.” He knitted his fingers together and leaned forward, his gaze oddly intent. “I’ve got the board of goveners on my ass about sending more prisoners to the Red City. The demons run out of playthings faster than my prisoners run out of Kotex.”

My nose wrinkled.

Susan glared at the warden, but he continued speaking. “It is a legal duty as warden of Sandy Village Correctional Facility to inform you that in light of the lack of success of your latest appeal, you are being given the opportunity to transfer your sentence to one of the Red Cities around the country. You will be subject to a retrial if you deny your right to transfer your sentence. Where your sentence may change and is likely to become more severe.”

Death or demons? Those were my only options?

The warden waved a hand toward Susan. “I’ll leave you to talk it over with Dr Holdsworth, but I need a decision before you leave this office.” He grabbed a color pamphlet from his top drawer and slapped it on the desk, sauntering from the room—leaving me alone with two guards, a psychiatrist, and half a beef sandwich.

Susan waited for the door to close before stepping closer, kneeling before me, and placing her hand on mine. The guards bristled, but the good doctor ignored them.

“You don’t have to go to the Red City, Maddie.” Dr Holdsworth said in a soft voice.

It didn’t escape my notice that she had chosen not to sign. Maybe she’d signed for the benefit of the warden. I couldn’t begin to decide her motives.

Susan brushed her hands against her pencil skirt as she stood up, grabbing the pamphlet from the warden's desk.

She scoffed in disgust. “Our prisons are full. Too much of the taxpayer's money is pumped into our prison system without much to show for it. Instead of rehabilitation and drug programs to keep people out of jail, they’ve decided to throw people to the demons. It’s cheaper.” She shuddered. “The pamphlet won’t tell you the truth. You’ll be free to walk about, shower without fifty other women, or eat food that isn’t slop. But demons aren’t kind masters. They’re ruthless.”

I knew all of that.

I probably knew more about demons than she did.

“But...” Susan winced. “I put your name forward.”

My eyes widened, and I couldn’t keep the betrayal from my face.

Sometimes being mute sucked because I wanted to ream the doctor out for sticking her nose into my affairs.

“I don’t want you to die, Maddie.” Susan looked away. “I don’t know if you killed your foster family. I’ve been your doctor for five years, and I still don’t know. I know that you deserve a chance to live, even for a little while. You’ve been behind bars since the moment you turned eighteen. I don’t want you to die.”

The doctor crumpled the pamphlet in her fist, startled when she looked down at the rumbled paper as if returning to herself.

I didn’t want to die.

But living?

I wasn’t sure how to do that either.

The sun beat down on the crackled asphalt, and heat waves rose off the bend in the road.

The air conditioning was broken, and my jumpsuit was sodden, clinging to my skin. The back of my arms stuck to the pleather seats, and the chain around my wrists yanked me to the side every time the driver turned too fast.

A single guard, Rodriguez, in charge of ten female inmates.

Until I came to Sandy Village Women’s Correctional Facility, I’d never stepped foot in Nevada. I’d been born in Portland and lived there most of my life. Going from wet and cloudy Oregon to dry and arid Nevada hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time—I was going to prison and had the theory it was all the same. A prison was a prison, right?

Wrong .

Heat. Dry air. Sweltering, sweating, and smothering heat clung to every breath. I hadn’t filled my lungs since the moment I’d set foot in Sandy Village. A decade hadn’t been enough to get used to the oppressive heat.

There were ten of us in total. Five from death row sporting the gunmetal gray jumpsuits. No doubt, the death row inmates had several appeals that went nowhere and had opted for the Red City instead.

I knew the other four inmates by name, though I wouldn’t have said we were friends. Making friends was difficult when mute. At best, I had non-threatening acquaintances. Of which my current companions were not.

Though we were all chained, I kept my eye on Inmate Thomas—a woman with a full face of prison makeup. She’d stolen my shampoo when I first came to the prison, which seemed to be her MO. Loud, proud, and unable to keep her mouth shut, Inmate Thomas was my opposite. Though I wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing. We both seemed to get into trouble the same amount regardless of how many words we spoke.

“Hey! Pretty Boy!” Thomas whooped. “Are we there yet?”

“Pipe down, Thomas!” Rodriguez , the guard, backed.

“Make me!” She sat back, grinning.

The guard scoffed but did nothing.

I fell asleep sitting upright.

We stopped for gas, but no one was allowed off the bus.

We were given a small cup of water when we crossed state lines into California.

I’d never been to California before, and my heart hurt when I realized I’d never be able to see the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hollywood Sign.

When I’d been a surly teenager, carrying my belongings in a trash bag from one foster home to another, one thought had gotten me through.

I wanted to see it all. To see the world and all the wonders it had.

I needed to see it all before I claimed a space for my home.

I’d collect postcards from the library. I’d scan them and glue them into my journal, making notes of all the places I wanted to see. First in the US, then Europe, and then beyond.

I’d never felt settled. My kind never did until they ‘claimed’ a home.

It was the most brutal loss of all for a Bean Sídhe.

I didn’t recognize the city names on the freeway signs. Red Bluff. Redding.

The drivers switched out.

We were given biscuits with army ration packaging, but the hunger was all-consuming and had stolen all energy from the inmates.

I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been strapped to a bus bench with a mouth so dry it hurt to breathe.

The walls looked almost like a city skyline at first. Smooth, unblemished cement rose from the trees, like the Hoover Dam—which I’d only ever seen in pictures.

As we grew closer and closer, the wall left everything else in shadow. The road stopped, cut off by the wall like an ax hitting a tree trunk. There was nowhere left to drive.

The bus pulled to a stop on the verge, kicking up dust. A single vault door sat in the middle of the road, the only sign of human life in the ancient forest at the end of the road.

The trees were too large, too unnerving. Their bases were as wide as the prison bus, rising to meet the height of the concrete wall. Everything felt too big, like I’d entered Wonderland and drunk the wrong potion.

The guard did a count, and the driver stepped out for a smoke.

Our chains were separated from the bus and linked together.

If I didn’t get some food soon, I would be sick.

One by one, the inmates were led from the bus. We stood on the road in awe, staring at the wall extending to the sky. A strange pulse burst out, pinging like sonar, coating the world in a magic mist. Dissolving seconds later. The wall was marked with hundreds of sigils in all sizes, some the size of my hand and others the size of an elephant.

I didn’t speak Cyclian, the demonic tongue. The words were magic, and the language was almost impossible to learn unless you were born in Hell. Which I had not.

The vault door opened, revealing a man in fatigues, carrying a gun on his shoulder and a clipboard in his hands. He regarded our group with a cursory glance and made his way to the prison guard—checking his clipboard as he walked.

“You got two inmates, Speck and Higgins?” The Red City guard asked, double-checking his piece of paper. “Special order. They’ve got to go straight to processing.”

“Speck? Higgins?” Rodriquez called out.

With my hands chained, I couldn’t lift them; without my voice, I couldn’t call out.

Higgins piped up, like a child answering a teacher. “Here, sir!”

I pulled my top lip between my teeth.

“Did you say Peck?” One of the other inmates piped up. “I’m Inmate Peck.”

The guard in fatigues shrugged. “You two, this way. The others have to run the gauntlet.”

Peck shot me a snarky grin as Rodriquez unlocked her shackles. The two inmates were taken away.

It didn’t take long for Fatigues to return, gesturing to the door. One by one, we shuffled through, our feet chained and our hands cuffed in front. Each woman connected to each other.

Fatigues led us to a plain room, metal detectors, scanners, and a strange device resembling a desk fan without propellers. He bolted the door and nodded to Rodriguez. The prison guard began unlocking our chains; the moment we were free, the guard made a break for the staff door, disappearing from the crowded room.

“My name is Mr Jingle.” Fatigues called out. “You likely won’t see me again, but it’s my job to get you through to the Red City.”

A few of the girls snickered at his name. Mr Jingle had short-cropped hair and a crooked nose. He also looked like he started fights for a living.

“Demons like to make their pets squirm, so you’re going through the gauntlet. It weeds out the weak ones.” Mr Jingle announced. “First, you’ll need a sigil. Your sigil will then be keyed to your new master once you reach the city.”

“Master?” Inmate Thomas put her hands on her hips. “Who said anything about a master .”

Mr Jingle ignored her. “You’ll go to auction. If a demon likes you, you’ll become a pet. You’ll receive basic cost of living payments. Your money is in credits. It’s useless outside of the Red City.” Mr Jingle had clearly given the speech so many times that he could do it in his sleep. “Your master will be responsible for your other expenses. If you don’t have a master, you’ll have a job. If you don’t have a job, you don’t have protection. Simple? Line up, and welcome to the Red City. You belong to the demons now.”