Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) (29 page)

“Wait,” I breathe as his icy lips reach my neck, as my coat is opened and the white mists blind me.

Do you think we live one life to prepare for the next one? Do you think we live a million lives to prepare for the perfect one that’s soon to come? Is it the next life? Is it a million lives from now? Is it never?

“Wait.” But he doesn’t wait. My coat opens. My dress is opening, the red tear where my mother had stitched it, stitch by stitch, stitch by stitch, I feel myself opening, and the winter winds whisper in my ears—I can swear it’s speaking to me:
You are the only one left to blame, Winter.
That’s what it says to me, as if I’m the winter.
The only one left to blame is you, Winter.
Why do the whispers call me winter? I’m pressing two numb hands to Gill’s chest, pushing him off me, but it’s as effective as pushing into a stone wall.
You did this to yourself, Winter.

“Claire?”

I open my eyes and suddenly it isn’t Gill over me.

It’s Grim.

He stares down on me, light spilling on his pale, sullen face from the moon or the snow, his eyes ravenous, his nose blushed the color of angry blood, his cheeks like cherries. It’s Grim, but he’s different … and he’s alive.

“I don’t want this,” I tell him, I tell the different Grim. The wind bites my face. I’m shivering. My eyes sting.

He looks hurt. “You … You don’t want me?”

There’s poisons of the mind
, my dad told me.
Poisons of the soul.
There’s so many things in my life that I wanted. So many things as a child that I got. I only had to cry loud enough. My every horrible action was rewarded with a doll, or a car, or a pretty red dress …

But the more I took, the less I seemed to have.

“Stop it,” I tell his hand, which runs up the side of my body, as if his icy fingers could convince me of changing my mind. “Get off me.”

Suddenly the joy is ended, and he slumps off my body, kneeling in the snow next to me. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks—Grim asks—his breath turning to fog before his face. He flushes redder by the second.

“Y-You’re the poison,” I spit at him, angry that I let him take me out into this cold waste. And for what? The trees all look dead. The lake is nowhere. The wind cuts angrily through the woods like a million knives and we’re out here freezing in the midst of it. I can’t feel my feet, my fingers, my anything. “You’re p-p-poisoning me.”

“Whatever, crazy bitch.” Snow is kicked up into my face as he stumbles to his feet. It isn’t until I’ve wiped my eyes clear that I see he’s marched away.

“Hey!” I cry out, but I’m met with a mouthful of snow and he doesn’t stop. In the furling curtains of wind and white and grey, he’s out of sight in a matter of seconds. “G-G-Gill! C-Come back here!”

I don’t even know if his name’s Gill anymore. The dream is getting confused. Something’s wrong.

“G-G-Grim!” Which name did I call out?

I fight with the snow, struggling to get to my feet. I chase after him, driven suddenly by a fear that he could actually ditch me out here in the frozen waste. I march against the wind in the direction I’m quite certain he’s gone. The cold fights my every step, and I’ve already gone too far when I realize I didn’t even grab my four-hundred dollar fur coat, still lying back there in the snow, likely buried by now.

Walking blindly, my head down to shield my face from the unrelenting wind, sight robbed from me, I resort to seeing other things. Like my mother in her wheelchair. Like her disapproving, heavy-lidded eyes.

Then those eyes change.
Claire?
they seem to say. I see her mending my red dress, even though I never witnessed the actual mending of it. Carefully choosing the thread that would perfectly match it. Painstakingly needling the dress, sewing up the hole she’d made. The thoughts in her mind, regret, deep apology, kindness. She isn’t all monster and madness. Surely there’s more to her than that.

And what of me? If there’s kindness in her, then there must be kindness in me. I have to be made of those things too. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper into the wind. The wind takes away my words, uncaring, and the bitter bite of winter crawls down my throat.

The trees part and I’m crossing a great wintry expanse. White in all directions. I miss the summer. At my old houses, the one by the beach, the one in the city, the giant mansion by the park, it was always summer. Here it’s a joyless, lifeless hell. The trees near me even cry frozen tears.

Ahead, I think I see Gill. Or Grimsky. Or both of them. I think—I think he’s just a bit further on, surely …

Nothing decent comes from a person who doesn’t make right by her wrongs.
I know, mom. You don’t have to keep saying that.
There’s more than one kind of poison
. I know, dad. I’m not poisoned.
There’s a poison of the soul, Claire.

I’m not poisoned, dad.

No. The world is.

“I changed my mind,” I call out, wanting for the warmth of my bedroom again, wanting for the pillow I smothered myself with, crying, bawling, anger spilling out from my eyes and my slobbering mouth. By now, my mom would be making me a sandwich in the kitchen. She’d have to make it herself because we let go of our chefs and maid services after leaving the last house. We would be talking about how lame prom would’ve been. We would be casually tossing out ideas about college. I would make a joke about the boys I’ll meet, and she’ll make a joke about the sororities I’d join, and we’d laugh and, for the first time, I’d feel like my mom was a friend.

“Mom, I’m so sorry, I changed my mind.”

Or maybe she mended the red dress for another reason. Maybe she thought it a means to encourage me to break free from my tower. Maybe this was planned all along.
The only one left to blame …

But maybe the one to blame is no one at all. In death, we are all blameless. In death, we are all equal. Kings. Queens. Rich and poor, frozen or burnt alive.

“Mom.”

Then the ice opens below to swallow me intact.

There is a moment of clarity that happens when you die. It’s a merciful reprieve from all the chains that, during your Life, hold you back from Life’s greatest revelations. In that instant, you’re free from everything your mother and father taught you. You’re free from your stubborn emotions that don’t let you see truth. You’re free from your own intellectual limitations. You’re free from your friend’s opinions. You’re free from feeling judged, no matter how dark or embarrassing or frightening your discovery. You’re free from government, free from religion, free from sexuality, from inner fear, from habit, from expectation, from desire, from lack, from society, from material, from skin and body and ability.

In this moment of clarity, I realize I love my dad. I realize I love my mom. I realize I’m always inclined to fight things before learning to love them. I realize …

I realize …

“WINTER!! HELP!!”

My eyes snap open.

C H A P T E R – S I X T E E N

A   T H R O N E   O F   B O N E S

The world shatters into screams and the tittering of spider legs. I’m hanging upside-down again, the dream of my death vanishing in one horribly jarring instant. The spiders have returned for the rest of us. I twist to my left and find long strands of spider silk hanging, which startle me, as I realize Lynx’s cocoon is missing. Was he cut down already?

Before I’ve had a chance to orient myself properly, I feel a tug near my feet, and then the weightlessness of falling turns my stomach twice. I slam into the cave floor face first—insert crunching sound here—and the only thought I have is: I hope I’m still pretty.

Instantly, the ever-diligent spider drags me away. Facedown, it’s not the most comfortable experience I’ve ever had. My forehead and nose seem to catch on every stray fissure or bump in the cave floor. I don’t remember much of the experience of being brought into the cave, but I am delighted with the experience of suffering my way out of it. The ground slopes upward and my nose carves a pretty line in the dirt. I’m certain with another five minutes of this, my nose will be ground to nothing.

Then abruptly my orientation shifts as I’m hauled up a vertical passage just as quickly as I was dragged through the horizontal one. I dangle beneath the spider as he pulls me effortlessly up the passage. The screams of Marigold still echo through the tunnels, though they are notably distorted by now. “WINTER!” she cries, far off, figuring me to be the only person who can help her apparently. “HELP! HELP!”

And then I spill into a cavern twenty times the size of the previous one. It is so vast, I can’t even see the walls. I’m pulled deeper into it, then am dumped into what I perceive to be its center. The silk is torn off me and my limbs feel the first freedom of movement in hours. But it is short-lived. Too soon, the spider has oriented me into a kneeling position and silk is expertly wrapped around my thighs to my feet, trapping me in this position. Just the same, my hands are bound by spider-goo in the front. Even struggling all the while, the spider keeps perfect grip on my body and I can’t in any way find a means to resist.

Then the spider vanishes and I’m left to observe yet another tall mound of bones, about five feet high if I had to guess. Surrounding this deathly throne in a misshapen circle are my companions, all of them bound, kneeling, their faces and bodies exposed. Some of them have lost clothes. None of them wear armor anymore, either.

Four people to my left, I see John.

I feel my face contort just at the sight of him. Emotion pounds against my chest, against my face, against my bound hands and legs, and for a moment I could almost trick myself into believing that I’m still dreaming, that I’m still a stupid Human girl on prom night. If I focus hard enough, I can still feel her heart beating in my chest.

There is movement on the bone pile, and when I turn my head, I am truly terrified by the sight of Empress Shee perched at its top. Her pink hair is striking and gathers into two bunches of curls where her breasts would be and she carries in one of her hands a sword—the Judge’s sword—and the enormous half spider legs still protrude from her ears like two antennae. They even seem to move and twitch with her, twitching and irritated.

She twists her head, showing me her beautiful face. Yes, she is, despite it all. Then those fierce red-purple eyes focus on me, and her expression is not tender. Fury and pain fill her eyes, and the coldness of dread fills mine.

Even in this moment, I think on what I learned of Shee and how the Humans of the Necropolis would not accept her. The laughter. The jeering. How she traded her legs for Human ones and even that wasn’t enough. I think of all these things, despite the horror of my current circumstance, and what I realize I’m seeing before me is a creature that has exhausted all possible avenues of trying to fit in to the happy-smiley world. What I see now before me is a person who has given up on pleasing others and, instead, works only to please herself. The world of the Living
and
the Dead have exiled her, and so she’s exiled them. She is the freak of freaks, the oddity, the anomaly.

I was once the freak, the oddity, the anomaly.

“Win … ter,” she sings, ever slowly, pulling apart my name into syllables. “Wiiiin … terrrrr.” She repeats it, tasting the two syllables of my name over and over and over until it doesn’t even sound like a word anymore. “Winter, Winter, Winter.” She’s tapping her fingers together again, tap, tap, tap, and I realize only now that her fingertips are missing flesh; she has skeleton bones for fingers. It gives her hands the appearance of fingerless gloves, only her gloves are made of flesh.

Is it strange that my thought in this moment is, who should I mentally say goodbye to first? The list of things I wish I’d had time to do in this Second Life is so long, I can’t grasp at or name a single thing. I am about to die. I am about to turn to dust. This woman-thing is going to end my existence. Goodbye Second Life.

Next to her, Grim is seated. His legs are sprawled out carelessly, the way a person might collapse into a big armchair after a long day at the office. Even his head droops tiredly, his jaw hanging slack. But when he hears my name, he lifts his chin only a little bit, just a miniscule amount, so subtly it goes almost unnoticed.

“I want to kill you,” Empress Shee declares proudly, as if it were the headline of today’s news. “You are the reason for all of my dear Grimsky’s suffering. The poor thing.” She regards him with a tiny sigh. “You’re also the reason I can no longer fly.” Though I can’t see it, she seems to flex her back at those words—only one torn wing flutters near her shoulder. I’d torn off the other one entirely, twelve years ago. “No more large fly-beasts in the world, I’m afraid.” Her eyes turn dark, hungry. “Grim needs me and I need him. My Grimmy. He’s the sweetest. And
I
know how to take care of sweet things.” Shee puts a hand in his black-as-night hair, her skeletal fingers playing in it like she might at some furry kitten’s ears.

My eyes flick over to John. He’s staring straight ahead, emotionless, expressionless, almost as if he’s been turned to stone. The sight of it kills me.