Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) (27 page)

“All that’s left is dust,” he says in half a choke. His hands droop to his sides; he doesn’t bother to brush them off, all the pieces of Collin still stuck to them like sand.

“Walk me back to my chambers, will you? I feel so sad now.” Shee regards the pile of Collin for a moment, then rises to her feet—her many feet—and skitters across the carnage and bone and ash. “Come, come, my Grim. Come. I’ve had enough sadness for a day, I think.”

With great effort, Grimsky rises to his feet. For a moment, he seems to look around, as if searching for something even though he’s blindfolded by that scrap of fabric. Then, quite slowly, he pulls it off, and I discover that he has no eyes at all. Not even the green one.

“Grim,” she calls again, slightly annoyed.

He drops the blindfold. It lands in the pile of Collin. Then, morosely, he turns and follows the sound of Shee’s voice as she begins humming a strange, otherworldly tune. “Yes, yes,” she sings. “Follow my voice, yes.” She skitters backwards out of the room, a zombified, sullen, crippled Grim following. The spiders rush out after her, their little feet tickling against the bones and skulls as they pass, and then the room is empty.

Except for the ten or eleven of us who still remain hanging. I struggle to turn, looking wherever my restricted face will let me, but I can’t even seem to identify the person to my right
or
left, let alone the person straight across from me. All of us look the same encased in spider silk.

“Anyone?” I whisper, annoyed at how vastly even a whisper seems to carry in this annoyingly quiet and echoing space. “Please … Please, anyone?”

“I’m here,” drones an irritated man’s voice.

“Chief?” I try to turn, try to see who it is who speaks.

“Willard,” he grunts. “Tell me,” he goes on without prompt. “What part of ‘saving all Undeadkind’ included getting imprisoned by the Spider Queen and dying one by one before her?”

“It isn’t her fault,” calls someone from further down the semicircle, a woman. “No one could’ve predicted the strength of those spiders.”

“Did anyone see what I just saw?” growls Will, having none of it. “
FOUR
of our own have fallen before our eyes. Farris, Kaela, Collin, the old man … This will not end until we’re all dust on that floor. I could be HOME right now,” he carries on, quite suddenly ignoring the growing volume of his voice, “but Mayor Megan in all her wisdom sent us away to
die
. You think you mean as much as a Human life? Think again. You’re waste. I’m waste. We are, all of us, perfectly expendable. We’re unnatural. We’re abominations. We’re the Damned, you get it?”

“Oh, shut up your face, you self-important twat,” a woman shouts—Ash, if I had to guess. “What I saw just now is that Empress Shee and the Green Prince have teamed up. We have double trouble, that’s what I saw.” Or maybe it’s Sara who’s speaking, I can’t tell.

“This is … This is all my fault,” another whiny voice contributes. Jimmy. “If I hadn’t fallen asleep …”

“Yeah, this is all about
you
, Human. Get over yourself. You’re no stronger than any of us,” Will bites back. “Awake or asleep or downright dead, you would’ve been the first the spiders took.”

“Where’d they take her?” Jimmy goes on, his voice not hiding the tears that are likely squeezing out of his big dopey eyes. “Where’d they take my Ann?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it anymore. I can just go rot in Hell,” growls Will. “I’d go happily. I’d go willingly. I want to die on my terms, not hers. Not that Shee. Not that … that
fraud
.”

The term he chooses, fraud, rings in my ears from when Shee called me that very same word a moment ago. Shee turned into a bucket of anger at the mere mention of my name. What brought her to hate me so passionately? Did she feel some sort of anger toward me because of her apparent union with Grimsky?

Oh, and then Grimsky. The sight of him tore me in half, the way he just dragged himself around the cave, performing what Shee requested—or demanded. He’s a puppet. He’s a nothing. He’s a shell, an empty, nothing, used-up shade of what he once was. Just the sight of him hurt me like nothing else could. Maybe it’s because when I look at him, I see John dying all over again.

“John?” I murmur quietly.

There is no answer. I don’t know if he’s here and just choosing not to answer, or if we’re not all gathered in this room and, perhaps, some of us were taken to another. I clench shut my eyes, furious and torn apart and numb. The world is not very kind today.

Then, suddenly, five spiders spill into the room. “What’re you doing?” Will asks stupidly, as if the spider would answer. “No, no, no,” he begs of it, but suddenly I hear a thump behind me, and I realize Will has been cut down. “Where are you taking me??”

“No!” The spiders are snipping down the woman, too. Was it Ash or the other teen girl? “Stop! Let go!” And then the two are in view, being dragged out of the room by the spiders, the two Undead shouting out in protest. Then another joins them, a third that had been cut down, a woman who, with a grunt, shouts, “Off with it!” And I recognize her: Jasmine. I cry out for her by name, twice, three times, and she’s gone before I can cry it a fourth. Two more struggling cocoons hit the cave floor, then are dragged out gracelessly. One of them issues a grunt that I almost recognize—just that one small grunt. “John??” I call out, crazed, but soon they’re all gone, spiders too.

I peer to my right as far as I can. Two cocoons hang side by side. To my immediate left there is still a cocoon, within arm’s distance if I had them to reach out. Then, much further away, near the hole leading out, another swaying slowly.

“Is everyone okay?” I ask.

“Lovely!” says a voice, chipper as ever.

“Good to hear, Marigold.” She’s the one who’s far away, swaying gently near the way out. I twist to my other side. “You two? Are you two alright? Who’s left?”

For a long moment, there’s nothing. Just as I’m about to ask again, I hear: “I … am … Shee.”

I sigh, a bit relieved and a bit sad. “You’re not Shee, sweetheart, your name is Brains.” I meant to say Helen, but I’ve been calling her Brains so often, I don’t even care anymore. Everyone else calls her that anyway. “Who’s that next to you? Hey.” I squirm a bit, annoyed that he or she is being unresponsive. “Please. Speak. … Please.”

“I couldn’t … I couldn’t save her.” His choked voice is almost unrecognizable, but when he sniffs and I hear the gross slurping of tears and snot, my hunch is confirmed.

“I’m sure she’s fine, Jimmy.” I sigh, tired somehow. We can’t sleep, but I sure feel like I could use a nap. You know, the eternal kind.

“She’s not. She’s so not. She’s just a head.
She’s just a head
.” He starts sobbing now, his throat making these awful, croaky sounds every time he tries for breath.

“I … am … head.”

When my cocoon twists just slightly, I’m reminded that there’s yet one more unidentified person to my left. “Hey,” I say quietly. “I can’t see your face. Who are you?”

“May your every confidence be great,” he says in a high-pitched, playful sort of drawl, “and your every misconfidence greater.”

Now I realize I’m truly helpless. I’ve been left with a cheery and useless Marigold, Brains, a slobbering Human and a little Warlock who has no powers left.

“Remember?” he says, his tone still annoyingly lively. “When I first said that to you? I do.”

“I don’t care.”

“I said it to you, girl, the
first
time you learned that Grimsky was not what he seemed. You were attempting to escape the Necropolis and found Grimsky coming to your aid, only he wasn’t coming to aid you, he was coming to
stop
you.” The little Lynx giggles horribly. “And you learned, right then, that Grimsky had been, all that time, deceiving you. ‘And your every misconfidence greater’ … It’s my motto, really. You can borrow it.”

“He also put a sword through you,” I say, biting back.

“The lesson here,” Lynx continues, unruffled, “is that Grimsky knows no loyalty. He never has, in this Life or his last.”

“What would
you
know about his last Life?” I snort, annoyed to the brim with my coincidental choice in a cocoon-neighbor.

“More than you,” he grunts back.

I roll my eyes. If I concentrate long enough, maybe I can fall asleep. Maybe I’ll turn Human again and drift into a long, beautiful sleep where I can dream of a rickety house in Old Trenton I used to live in, and the warm, Human man with which I’d cuddle, sharing a bed.

“Weren’t you always curious, Winter? Weren’t you always curious why the Deathless King chose …
him?
”

“Wasn’t for his good looks,” I retort, feeling snarky. Truth be told, Grimsky actually
did
have a handsome face. Unconventionally attractive … in that dark, tortured-poet, Goth-punk-in-high-school sort of way.

Lynx giggles again, his voice squeaking when he says, “You don’t even see the flaw in the plan, girl. Oh, how amused it makes me, how so very, very, very amused. The Mayor was our messenger. He kept his eye on you, yes he did. Grim worked his ways. The Deathless King knew everything, but of course, did not know whether you were her
true
daughter until you were brought forth. And even then, she had her doubts. That is, until you shook her hand and burned her.”

“That wasn’t intentional,” I fire back. Wait, why do I even care?

“I don’t doubt it. So much of your success has been luck. Oh, but how so very soon your luck’s to run out. I’m sorry, dear girl, but this will not bode well for you or your lovely Not-Human-Anymore fellow.” He laughs again, loud and echoing. “Grim was good at his job. Too good. And when I see him, it’s going to bring me great satisfaction to turn him into
soil
.”

“Oh, great,” I say, mocking him. “And when you’re done with that, you can, like … plant a tree in him. Circle of life.” The jab sounded better in my head.

After a moment of what I take to be silent and dark contemplation, he says, “If there’s anything I want my little stupid Lives to amount to, it would be that I taught the world the importance of one thing.”

“Friendship and love?” I ask jeeringly.

“One thing,” he repeats. “To listen.”

“I
am
listening. I’ve
been
listening. The only thing you seem to like doing is listening to
yourself
, you miserable, self-important eyeless Lock.”

“I am not eyeless. And you are not listening.”

“You’re missing the only eye that means anything to you,” I spit back. “With two normal eyes, you’re nothing but a short man and a flapping tongue.”

“You’re not listening because if you
were
listening, you would know by now why your mother chose Grim.”

“I should’ve cut out that tongue when we first met.”

“A tongueless man has considerably less to say,” he reasons, his voice lilting higher.

“Less lies to utter.” I sigh, frustrated. Why can’t I have been left with John? He’s the only person in all the world I want to be around—now, more than ever. I even want to see him more than I do my own mother, wherever she is. Maybe she was one of the cocoons the spiders stole away. Maybe she met her end already, turned to dust before the Empress in one of her angry fits. “We need to get that stone,” I say in half a growl.

“Wherever it is,” grunts the dwarf, and I suppose on that fact, if anything, we can assuredly agree.

Those are the last words little Lynx mutters. After a long spell of silence, I finally close my eyes and I do precisely what he thinks the world should do: I listen. I hear the tittering of spiders, but it is a tiny, trickling titter. With sick humor, I wonder if I’m hearing the spiders inside of Lynx’s body. They must feel positively at home now, not only within the dark confines of his tiny cave of a body, but they’re embraced within a silken prison that must feel quite familiar, like a mother spider’s womb.

Somehow, the thought makes me less queasy today.

My eyes are still shut, and I know the world will still be there when I open them, if I’m unlucky. With them closed, I let my mind retreat. Strangely, it’s peaceful. It reminds me of the many times back in my rickety house when John would sleep and I’d be happily trapped in his arms all night. Though the hours would pass quickly for me, I spent them dreaming of a future with him. It was an imaginary future where we had children and a big pretty house and there were flowers everywhere.

Trying to recapture that dream, quite suddenly my mind takes a turn. The flowers begin to turn white and grey. When my dream-self peers upward, I realize it is snowing and the bright blue sky is being ever-gently traded for an endless grey one. Winter. Time is shifting. Time is pulling and bending and slowly freezing.

The dream takes me to a house in the deep, frozen north. I know this house but I won’t dare utter the name of whose it is. I know what the person inside this house does
not
know—that it is her last night to be alive.