Chapter 1

1

U sually when someone's running from certain death, they'll recall the sound of their hearts pounding in their ears and their life flashing before their eyes and that sort of thing. Or so I've heard.

Me? All I could hear was my mother screeching as she and my father chased after me, the tires of their car wailing in protest as they flew around a corner, and the only thought in my head was that I had to get to the Denny's parking lot ASAP so my brother could make good his promise not to let anyone take me from him. Sure, I had confirmation that there was an afterlife, but I didn't really want to end up in it that soon.

I nearly wept when the neon glow of the diner's sign was finally in view, and I knocked into at least one parked car in my haste to make it to the back of the building. As I ran, finally nearing the dumpster as my breath came in pants and my legs started to wobble, I yanked my wallet from my back pocket and pulled out a funny-looking card roughly the size of a trading card. Upon reaching the giant reeking steel bin, I threw the card onto the ground. "Gabe," I whispered urgently. "I could really use a hand right about now."

The glow that surrounded me was immediate and nearly blinding, but I was at least able to see my parents well enough to yell, "See you in Hell, fuckers," while giving them the finger and a Cheshire grin before I had to look toward my feet to avoid being blinded by the glow encasing me. Two pale blue hands sporting black talons reached up through the asphalt. One swiped the card I'd tossed to the ground, while the other grabbed my ankle and yanked me down through the pavement.

At this point, you're probably wondering what my life even is. So, let me backtrack a little.

My name is Zeke. Ezekiel, really, but I'd grown to hate my full name with the fury of a thousand suns by the time my parents broke me, and at least 'Zeke' didn't sound straight out of an ancient (and definitely mistranslated) text. I was born to God-fearing fundamentalists who headed a megachurch that ran on greed. I'd spent most of my life being taught that basically everything about me was a sin and that I'd be going to Hell if I didn't follow the strict rules my parents had.

The worst part? I believed them. I believed every bit of it and spent hours poring over the Bible and praying in hopes that God would forgive me for being a horrible person and being unworthy of His love. I did everything I could to be a good boy in my parents' eyes and to hear that I was worthy of our Divine Father's blessings.

My six siblings seemed to do it effortlessly. They had perfect manners, perfect responses, and perfect devotion. I, on the other hand, strained to keep up. I had to choke down my words whenever I wanted to question anything lest I get the belt. That lesson I'd learned when I was seven, and the new family across the street had moved in. Their son had befriended me, and when my parents found out, I'd come away with a beating.

"But why?" I made the mistake of asking through my tears after the assault stopped.

"Their dark skin is a sign that the Devil has tainted them," my father spat as he struck me once more for good measure. "They're filth. Stay away from them."

So I stayed away from him after that, but it broke something in me. I firmly believed in a higher power. I had all the faith in the world that there was a God. But a part of me started to wonder why God was so mean to His children, and this inner turmoil had me constantly on edge. By the time I turned twelve, I was hyper-aware of the fact that I wanted to rebel and terrified of what would happen if I did.

My parents were far wealthier than any religious leader had a right to be. I didn't understand that until I was nearly an adult. I had no clue that ordinary people didn't live in a massive ten-bedroom house. I also had no clue that people with good parents wouldn't be given what amounted to a walk-in closet with a single tiny window for a bedroom when larger rooms in the house remained empty. My perfect, obedient siblings got rooms like that. I wasn't good enough for it.

I'd attended a private religious school from the moment my education started, and my classmates weren't any better than my family. Kids, from my experience, have kind of a tendency to be mean without trying anyway. Add their parents' bigotry into the mix, and you get a school full of raging assholes, ready to pounce on whoever they saw as the weakest link. I had no friends there and spent my time trying to be invisible. It worked, for the most part, though in hindsight that was probably more because they knew who my parents were. My father's organization funded the school, and most kids there attended my family's church.

Things only got worse as I also began to struggle with the fact that I was far more interested in other boys than I was of the opposite sex. Anyone not straight was going to go directly to Hell, according to my parents. I heard about it nearly every Sunday from my seat at the front of the church, on the uncomfortable pew that felt almost as much like a punishment as the service itself did. My father roared about sin and heresy as my mother led the choir in singing about hellfire. There was no love in that church, only hate, and I would have done just about anything to escape having to listen to my parents evangelize why every single person in the sanctuary should be glad if they found legal means to rid the world of people they thought of as abomination.

I stopped speaking at home, beyond simple platitudes like the overly polite "yes sir/ma'am," "no sir/ma'am," and "I understand sir/ma'am." It kept me from saying something I shouldn't. Conversely, my parents praised what a good, obedient boy I'd become while I mentally screamed that I wasn't obedient; I was broken. If they thought I was depressed, that too would have likely ended in beatings in the form of an exorcism because, of course, depression—any mental health issue, really—was also a sign of the Devil. If I was afflicted with something like that, clearly God had forsaken me.

The only thing that saved my sanity was something I'd discovered when I was still very small: all my dreams were lucid. I didn't know this was unusual until a discussion in class about God appearing in dreams led to the teacher talking about how the ability to know you were in a dream was a very rare gift from God. In a way, that kind of made sense to me. Maybe God was giving me a way to escape my daily life. Regardless of how I came upon the skill, it kept me from contemplating more permanent means of escape. I could do anything and go anywhere, so long as I was asleep.

Unfortunately, those dreams didn't do anything about the fact that my parents only fed half their kids a decent amount of food. The four that looked like my father got the royal treatment. As far as the two sisters and I who looked like our mother, we were probably skinnier than was good for us—we weren't skeletal, per se, but I knew I could see my ribs when I had my shirt off. If we hadn't been attending a private school run by our father, I guessed we were only about five pounds away from concerned talks with our teachers. The older sister who took after our mother had escaped, sort of, into a marriage that was likely just as restrictive, but she'd at least gained a healthy amount of weight after she left the house. As for Abigail and I? I was guessing our parents were passing it off as genetics or telling people we were picky eaters or something.

The older I got, the more I determined that if there was a loving God, they certainly didn't want their children to be treated like garbage. Once I'd come to that realization, I spent a lot of time struggling with the knowledge that my parents were not good people.

Then, in the spring of my seventeenth year, the absolute silence of our family dinner was interrupted. In our house, the only person allowed to speak when we were at the table was my father, who only spoke to preach to us before eating. Three of my sisters had left behind the oppressive dinner table by way of marriage, but I didn't imagine their dinners were any better, even if the entire arrangement seemed normal to them. With them gone, that left me, my brothers John and David, and my sister Abigail to weather the storm that was our parents. During that night's unnatural hush, the ringing of the phone broke the silence, startling me. My father stood from his place at the table and answered it. After listening for a moment, he called for my mother, his voice hard. A knot grew in my stomach at the quiet rage I could hear in his tone.

"Who is this?" my mother asked upon taking the phone, her usual high-pitched shriek of a voice tearing through the room. There was silence again as she listened.

"What do you mean you've been trying to find me for a week? I don't care what you do with that faggot's body," she finally screamed into the phone, her voice dripping with the venom of a deep hatred. "He was no son of mine. The entire world is better off with him and everyone like him dead."

The knot in my stomach turned to ice, and I set down my fork. When my parents returned, I was still staring at my plate.

"When your mother was young, before she turned onto God's righteous path, she was tempted by the Devil," my father said, apropos of apparently nothing, using the same voice he used when preaching. "She allowed a classmate to put his seed in her, and she, in turn, begat him a child out of wedlock. That child grew to be a sinner, and he laid with men."

In my head, I was screaming. I had a brother. I had an older brother who was like me. Or I'd once had, at any rate, since it sounded like he was gone. I wished I'd known. I would have found him, and maybe we would have been friends. Maybe he would have taken me away from?—

I threw that thought away as fast as it materialized. Fantasizing about what could have been wouldn't get me anything but more pain.

"The sinner has paid for his sins and is dead by his own hands. Tonight's dinner, then, is a celebration."

My stomach lurched. The man was cheering over someone's death, a person his wife had carried for nine months and given birth to.

"Ezekiel, why are you not eating?"

My father's voice was hard and cold, and I swallowed nervously. "I'm not feeling well," I whispered. "Someone like that..." I couldn't finish the lie that someone like that disgusted me, but my father picked up on my meaning.

"That's why we're celebrating," he said firmly. "Because someone like that is dead. Eat your dinner."

I picked up my fork at his order, my hand shaking. I forced down two more bites, then managed to make it to the kitchen sink before throwing up every morsel of dinner I'd choked down. When the retching stopped, I turned on the tap, washed down the mess, wiped off my face, and rinsed my mouth.

I knew I was in for punishment, but I was not expecting said punishment to be my mother's fist driving into my face upon turning around. I was knocked back against the sink, then sank to the floor, boneless. She crouched down and punched my face again, and this time I heard a crunch when the pain hit and felt what I assumed was blood streaming from my nose.

"Now now, Marsha," my father's voice said from behind her, and I looked up to see him smirking at me. He sounded calm, as if he was attending the theater and was remarking upon a performance, but that expression told me he was enjoying watching my mother use me as a punching bag. "If you're going to hit him, do it where others won't see the evidence."

Then he kicked me in the chest. It knocked the air out of me, and as I started to black out, it occurred to me that not one of the siblings who were sitting at the dining table had even bothered to get up from their seats.

When I opened my eyes, I stood in the middle of a busy street. There was a carnival to my right and an apartment building to my left. Cars were passing through me. This was a dream, then, courtesy of me blacking out. At least the pain hadn't followed me here. I wondered why I was dreaming about such a sketchy neighborhood, though. It was filthy and falling apart, and why on earth was a carnival here? Clearly, my brain was going strange places, but I could blame that on the beating, I supposed.

I looked toward the carnival again, and this time, my eyes fell on a woman wearing an outfit that included what looked like layers of long, gauzy skirts. I immediately thought that she seemed suspicious, but she waved me over. This was my dream, which meant I was safe regardless of my opinion of the stranger, so I joined her.

"Look," she said, pointing to the dingy, horrible apartment building across the street. When I looked where she indicated, I could see two people on one of the balconies near the top floor. It seemed like they were arguing. I couldn't see very well from where I was on the ground, but one of them seemed familiar somehow. I was squinting at him, trying to figure out how he could be familiar when I could barely see him, when the other person on the balcony grabbed him. I gasped as he was yanked over the railing, and they both went plummeting toward the ground.

A hand covered my eyes. "You don't need to see this part," the woman said. "Your brother Gabe would never forgive me if I let you."

"Gabe?" I asked, whirling in her grip so I looked directly at her, not where the brother I'd never known had landed. "You knew my brother?"

"I know Gabe, yes," she said, and her use of present tense made my skin crawl for reasons I couldn't fully comprehend. Then she rattled off an address.

"What?"

"Go there," she told me, repeating the address. "Tomorrow. I'll meet you there."

"But how? My parents won't let me leave the neighborhood alone, never mind going to a bad part of Los Angeles."

She smiled sadly. I didn't understand why it was sad, but she only answered, "You'll see. Check your mailbox on the way out."

"What?"

"It's time to wake up, Zeke."

"Wait, who are you?"

She smiled a little. "You may call me Madame Persephone."

When I opened my eyes again, I could tell I was awake because the pain was there to greet me. I was still on the kitchen tile, with all the lights turned off. They'd left me there and gone to bed as if I were a rug on the floor.

The parents who had preached to me that Jesus was love and do unto others and all that had beaten me until I blacked out and then left me bruised and bloodied on the kitchen floor.

Later in life, when someone would ask me when I'd completely lost faith in the church, that would be one of two moments I would reflect on the most. But that night, the something within me I'd felt break all those years ago cracked open further. Either my parents were wrong, or the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were assholes. I didn't swear—it wasn't a habit I'd been allowed to pick up—but that was the only word that seemed to fit the circumstances.

I managed to pick myself up without screaming, though I wasn't sure how. Maybe it was the fear of knowing what would happen to me if my parents heard me get up. I slowly shuffled toward the stairs when a light turned on in the living room, nearly scaring the life out of me. I turned to look, and my father stared at me impassively from his chair. It was a long time before he spoke, but when he did, I was surprised that his words weren't more condemnation. "Your punishment will be to go out tomorrow and do door-to-door missionary work by yourself instead of attending school. Be sure to visit the larger houses that can afford what we expect our members to tithe. Your mother will do something to cover up your black eye. I expect you to be out of the house by eight, and you are not to return until sunset. Maybe that will teach you a little humility." He held out a stack of church literature typically handed out during an at-home visit.

I stared at him in shock for a brief moment before nodding and taking what he offered. "Yes, sir."

He nodded in return. "Go to bed."

"Yes, sir," I mumbled again before making my way up the stairs one at a time. Maybe it would teach me humility? What about not keeping my dinner down meant I needed to learn humility? And how exactly did missing a day of education make me humble? Regardless, it meant I'd be able to escape the area. The only problem was that I had no money of my own and no idea how I'd actually get to the address from my dreams, if it even existed. I couldn't even look it up because it wasn't like I had a computer or cellphone. I knew where the nearest public library was, though. Maybe I could use a computer there, or at least find a city map, so long as I was careful not to be seen by anyone from the church who'd tell my parents.

And even though it'd been a dream, I would definitely check the mailbox on my way out.

At eight in the morning sharp, I was standing in front of the mailbox. My right eye still felt puffy and sore, but after telling me I was not allowed any breakfast, my mother had slathered on enough cosmetics that the bruise wasn't visible. I'd been shocked when I looked in the mirror and saw that I appeared completely unharmed, aside from some swelling, and I briefly wondered if she'd had to learn that skill because of my father. Not that it changed my opinion of her, but maybe it explained her personality a little.

I held my breath as I opened the mailbox. There was a dark blue envelope inside without a name on it. I pulled it out, shoved it into my backpack, and walked away quickly before anyone in the family could see me. When I'd gone a couple blocks and reached the local park, I sat on a bench, retrieved the envelope, and opened it.

Inside the envelope was a prepaid bus card, a transit system map, printouts of where I needed to go and what trains and buses I needed to take, ten five dollar bills, and a note in swirly handwriting written in an oddly sparkly indigo ink that said the card had a hundred dollars worth of fare on it but that I'd have to get my own ticket for the train at the station (hence the cash). Despite knowing I'd never have the opportunity to use all that fare, I was incredibly grateful for it. I was also a little scared. All this meant the woman in my dream had to have been real. How had she gotten into my head? Should I be worried? But then, she'd also said she knew my brother and had covered my eyes to keep me from seeing him die. That didn't strike me as the actions of a person who wanted to harm me. On the other hand, deception could have been the whole point.

Regardless, I followed the directions, going to the nearest bus stop to catch a ride to the Metrolink train terminal at the airport. It wasn't like I had anything to lose by going. I managed to figure out the ticket machine at the terminal with the help of a kind old lady in line behind me and then waited for the train to arrive.

I'd never been on a train before, and maybe it was childish to be excited about riding one, but I was nearly bouncing in place when it pulled up to the station. I sat next to a window and relaxed for the first time in what felt like forever. No one in our church would be caught dead riding public transportation, so I didn't think there was any real danger of being caught. The trip only took about half an hour, but it was still a metaphorical breath of fresh air.

I hopped another bus at Union Station, and...it did not look like a good part of town, but I told myself I shouldn't judge people I didn't know. So I exited the bus at the stop written on the note and headed toward the address I'd been given.

The address was the apartment building I'd seen in my dream. It was real.

I stood in front of the building and craned my head to get a good look at the tenth-floor balcony above me. Then I looked to the ground. It was…discolored. I tried not to think about it too hard.

"Long way, isn't it?"

I nearly jumped out of my skin and whirled around to see a woman wearing a Bohemian outfit with lots of flowing gauzy fabric. She was exactly as I'd dreamed her, and that surprised me. I supposed that, deep down, I hadn't expected her to be real despite everything. "Madame Persephone?"

She nodded, then crouched beside me and placed a bouquet of what looked like forget-me-nots and daisies on the sidewalk. We both stared silently at the ground for a minute before she tilted her head to look at me. "You look like Gabe," she said, startling me again.

"I do?" I asked. Something about that made me feel a tiny flicker of acceptance. Maybe that was why the man I saw from a distance had seemed familiar.

She nodded, then stood back up. "You're his little brother, right?"

I sighed. "Apparently. I only found out when the city called our mother and she pitched a fit."

The woman made a face. "I have opinions about your mother."

I sighed. "Yeah, you and me both." I hesitated, then asked what I really wanted to know. "What was he like?"

"Who, your brother? Gabe's a skeptic through and through," she laughed. I still found the present-tense usage jarring, but maybe that was her way of grieving. "He's a good kid with an amazing sense of humor."

"Then why did he kill himself?"

Madame Persephone raised an eyebrow at me. "Why do you think it was suicide?"

"Because the police told my mother it was?"

"You saw what happened. He wasn't the only one there," she told me as she peered up toward what had probably been Gabe's apartment. "I was standing across the street and saw everything."

"You what? " I demanded, taking hold of her arm without thinking. "Sorry," I said a second later, immediately letting go.

"It's fine," she assured me. "I appreciate the apology." She gestured across the street, where there was a crumbling parking lot. "Your brother's death really was exactly as I showed you, though. The carnival I'm part of was set up there temporarily, and I happened to be standing at the entrance when it occurred."

I looked over where she pointed and made a face when I took in the crumbling asphalt. "With the parking lot falling apart like that?"

"It was in much better shape while we were there," she said with a mysterious smile, making me feel like there was something she wasn't telling me. There had to have been—my mother's shrieks into the phone the night before had suggested my brother had died a week ago. Would the asphalt crumble that badly in such a short period? "Can I give you a piece of advice?"

"I mean, sure. It's not like I'm obligated to take it just because I listen."

"I think you'll like this bit," she assured me with a grin. "Come to the carnival."

"Now?" I asked her, bewildered.

"When else would you be able to?" she asked in return. "Though I suppose you'd be able to visit in your dreams. But now's the better opportunity."

She wasn't wrong, but it did make me question something else. "How did you even know I'd be able to get away today?" I asked her.

She held a finger to her lips. "That's a trade secret," she said with another mysterious smile. "Let's just call it magic, hmm?"

Sure, why not? Why not call what the scary lady who invaded my dreams can do 'magic'? It made as much sense as everything else that had happened to me over the past twenty-four hours.

"For right now, though, may I see your backpack?"

I gave her a concerned look.

"Trust me," she implored.

Stupidly enough, I did trust her despite her being a stranger. I handed over my backpack. She opened it up and stared inside, murmuring something I couldn't hear under her breath. Then she handed it back to me, looking pleased with herself. "Anything that will fit in there will be hidden from those who would harm you," she told me.

"Right," I said slowly, not believing a word of it as I slipped the bag onto my back again.

"Now, shall we go?"