Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) (30 page)

“We could’ve been
friends
,” Shee whispers, and her last word seems to hiss throughout the cavern like a great, monstrous snake in the shadows.

“I … am … friend.”

Shee turns her head, annoyed at the interruption, and I realize Brains is immediately to my right, just next to me. Her strange, aloof face stares unblinkingly at Shee, and her lips seem to be trying to smile.

“What in the world are you?” asks Empress Shee.

“I … am … sssssspider.”

Is Brains truly as brainless as she seems, or is my Raise actually showing signs of intelligence and working some sort of angle here?

“Please don’t speak while I’m speaking, dear, it’s just rude.” The Empress shudders, as if putting away the memory that this queer little exchange happened, then turns her full attention back onto me. “Anyway. I had thought I’d caught just another stray band of Humans. Just like the last ten or eleven bands who dared to straggle through my Sheewoods. That’s what I call them: my Sheewoods.” She titters excitedly, overjoyed at having named a forest after herself, a forest she has no right to name. “When I heard there were Dead among you, oh … Yes, I was quite excited by that prospect.”

“I … am …”

“And so,” Shee goes on, talking over my Raise’s odd and ill-timed attempts at communicating, “I told myself I would pick out the useful ones from the bunch. And if you’re among them, well …” She smirks.

I debate quite hard whether or not I should speak. For some reason, I worry any word I utter might mean another Shee-caliber temper tantrum, and that could result in half my friends shattering to dust before my eyes, including John, including myself. I opt to hold my tongue.

“Bad things make good things go bad,” Shee decides, speaking to me so directly I feel a cold focused needle pressing into me, her every word pressing it harder. “Grim was good and you made him bad. I was good and you made me bad. The Deathless King was good and …”

The Empress shudders, suddenly quite bothered. She takes a moment to recompose herself, and then her eyes, deadly and full purple now, reel in on me again.

“First, to make you feel the unkindness that Grim feels, I am going to pull your friends apart one at a time and make a house using their arms and legs.” She cackles suddenly, finding that imagery amusing, I guess. “And then I’m going to add their heads to my throne. I learned how to cut them off the right way so they don’t speak. Do you know who I learned that from? The Deathless King herself. I met her, I did. She teached me things.”

Teached
. I doubt her lessons included grammar. My eyes grow small, the world feeling suddenly like a tunnel. I’d been hoping all this time that my mother had turned to dust or never ran into Shee at all, but it never occurred to me that Shee might’ve caught her,
used
her …

“I am the Neo-Deathless and this is my kingdom. Do you know what
my
Deathless believe in? Suffering. That’s all Life was. That’s all Death is. Regrets and suffering and never getting what you want. Grim didn’t get what he wanted. I didn’t get what I wanted. And now I get to waste your dumb little Second Life and teach you a thing or two about
wanting
. Hey, pay attention!” Empress Shee skitters off her mound of bones and comes right up to me, unsettlingly close. My face is inches from where her waist turns into insect parts and I stretch back, bending as far away from her as my stupid, sticky binds will allow.

“Y-Yes,” I say. “Suffering. Wanting. I’m listening.”

Listen,
the little Lock advised me.
Listen
. That was his strength. Just listen and you will hear all you need to hear. Listening has become my only weapon.

I give a quick glance to some others nearest me, but realize I can’t find Lynx’s gritty face. Marigold. John. The Chief. Jasmine. The other teen girl to my left. Brains. Ash. Willie. Red-faced Jimmy … Where’s the little Lock?

“Good.” She does not smile. “Good, very good.” Her face is cold and unflinching. Her eyes turning muddy, their color indeterminate. She lifts the sword and touches it to my neck. “I could cut off your head and turn you into that other head-thing I found. A head without a body.”

Ann. I hear a grunt from somewhere in the circle. If I had to guess, it was a reaction from Jimmy at hearing Shee mention his girlfriend.

“I keep little things safe,” Shee says. “I had my spiders bury her big ugly head deep, deep, deep within the walls.
I
don’t even know where it is. I made sure to cut her neck just right beforehand, sliced just as I was teached. That way, no one will hear her screams.”

“YOU DIDN’T!” cries the only Human in the room. “NO! NOOO!”

“And I’ll do that to yours. And to your friends.” Shee grins, her chest tittering with a maniacal laugh she hasn’t quite released. “You thought I’d get angry and turn you to dust? No, no. That was an accident. It’s always an accident.” Her face turns worried suddenly, staring off, recollecting something. “My tummy gets all funny when I’m mad and … and then Dead things fall apart. I’m always so scared I’ll get mad and … and
I’ll
fall apart.”

When she’s mad, her tummy gets all funny. I squint at her. I’m
listening
. And I picture Ann’s severed, mute head buried deep in the walls somewhere … anywhere in this massive underground network of tunnels and caverns and holes.
She could be anywhere.
And soon, we’ll all be silently joining her, each of us somewhere else in the ground, each of us apart, each of us waiting for the rest of eternity to turn to dust … the rest of our Second Lives spent suffering and silent and alone.

Jimmy is sobbing now all over again. He makes no effort at quieting down and Shee doesn’t even seem to notice him. “My spiders do what I say now. It’s sweet. They even do what I
think
.” To demonstrate, I guess, she squints her eyes and suddenly there are four spiders crawling from different shadows in the room. They come to flank her, each of them bigger and hairier than the next. “They’re like a part of me now. Family. I’ve never had a family. Now I have a
big
family.” Shee grins, putting a hand on one of the spiders, petting it like a lover. “And I have a Prince.” She giggles, turning her head to give Grim the slightest glance. He’s still lying there, ragged as a doll that’s been thrashed about for years by a psychotic child.

And I’m still listening.

“How big is your family?” I quietly ask.

Thankfully, Shee seems softened, her voice nearly singing when she answers, “Twenty-one spiderlings. I named them all Neo-Deathless, just like the Deathless used to do. We’re all Neo-Deathless. But I am Empress Shee.” She frowns, making sure that last sentence stuck.

Her demeanor is like some hyper-imaginative girl on the playground, sulky and bossy and a hundred ideas in her head at any moment. I fear such chaos in one mind.

We
were once twenty-one. Now we’re eleven.

Twelve, if you count Ann’s head buried somewhere deep, far away, trapped in the bowels of the planet.

Soon we’ll be ten. Then nine. Eight. Seven.

Soon we’ll be one.

Soon we’ll be gone.

“Empress Shee,” I say aloud, figuring I’ve nothing to lose. “You are Empress. That means you rule an Empire.”

“A
planet
,” she corrects me, taking a tone.

I was trying to go in a different direction, but okay. Let’s try hers. “You rule the planet,” I agree lamely. “You rule the planet and you are Empress Shee, Empress of the planet. But … but after you’ve taken all our heads and have destroyed everything … what will be left to rule?”

“You have nothing to offer, stupid
Winter
. Just saying your name makes me want to cut off all your hair and boil it into spaghetti noodle foods!” The sword still rests disquietingly on my neck. “I have my
Neo-Deathless
now. I have my
Grimmy
now. I don’t need anything anymore. It rains outside and the rain hurts and it doesn’t rain in here and so I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m
safe
. You’re not safe. You’re stupid. You came here and that makes you …” Her eyes narrow, bleeding with dark intensity. “I have everything. I don’t need anything from you anymore. Not even our friendship-that-could-have-been.”

“I have nothing to offer but my words.”

“I don’t want your
words
, especially!” Her sword arm flinches, as though preparing to hack off my head in a quick and horrible impulse to forever end said words.

“But does your Prince agree?” I blurt out. “A smart Empress always consults with her … trusting … Prince.” My gaze moves to the dour, battered shape of Grim on the bone pile. He doesn’t flinch, even at the mentioning of him. He remains still as a corpse, only his head inclined toward us as if vaguely listening. Without either of his eyes, he’s impossible to read.

“Grimmy,” the Empress murmurs soothingly. “My dear, sweet Prince.” She brushes a strand of pink hair off her forehead, sighing with due patience. “Want a word?”

He doesn’t move. I wonder if his Anima’s vacated him somehow, his body yet to realize it can turn to ash now.

The sword slips absentmindedly from my neck as she skitters over to the bones, one of her legs kicking a stray femur in my direction. “Tell me, my sweet poor sad little Prince.” She crouches next to him, loosing a skull or two from the pile. One of them rolls so far it touches Marigold’s knee, who peers down at it curiously. “Do you think I should listen to her?”

Grim lifts his chin some more. His eyeless face is so eerie to behold, his mouth and wrinkled nose the only means of expression he seems to have. Somehow, I feel like I can see all the pain and longing and regret of his Life in his twisted face. Maybe I can’t see a thing at all. Then his forehead wrinkles, as if in surprise, his eyebrows lifting slightly. “Winter?” he finally says, quiet and airy.

I wonder if he means for me to answer.

“W-Winter?” he repeats, his voice so tired and far away. I don’t know whether to answer. I can’t tell if he’s just saying my name or calling for me.

“Yes?” I finally dare to say.

To my surprise, Shee doesn’t pay me any mind. Her entire attention is drawn to Grim, her sword-bearing hand resting on his back, the blade pointing up, and her free hand runs its pointy, skeletal fingertips up and down his bare chest. Grim’s mouth turns pouty, his chin wrinkling. He doesn’t even seem to notice her. “Winter?”

Has he lost his hearing too? “Yes, Grim,” I say, a touch louder.

“Don’t say his name,” murmurs Shee calmly, still stroking his chest and keeping her full attention on adoring him like some cute animal she were preening.

“Winter?” he asks again.

“Yes,” I repeat. “I’m … I’m here.”

He licks his lips. Shee keeps running her creepy hand up and down his body soothingly, caressing him, her eyes unblinking and full of adoration.

He asks: “Are you ready?”

I can feel the force of everyone’s eyes on me, on him, on the world. Everyone’s waiting. “Ready?”

“To die,” he finishes, but the words are not uttered unkindly. He says them sweetly, the tone of voice he might’ve used long ago to ask me out on a date. Like when he took me to dinner. Like when he took me to the knoll … back when we were just neighbors in two rickety side-by-side houses. “To die, Winter. Are you ready?”

Neither Shee nor Grim can see me. I turn to lay my eyes on John. It is only now that I finally see him looking back … and the pain in them is evident. The pain in them is crushing. He knows everything now. He remembers Grimsky. He knows how he died and he knows what we had … and he also still knows what we’ve had
since
his Raising. Both his Lives have now become one, somehow. I see it all in his eyes.

Or maybe it’s just what I hope I see.

“Are you ready?”

Returning my attention to Grim’s blank, hanging face, I have to wonder if, after all his deceptions and tricks and trading of loyalties, has he finally settled on the one with which he’ll be true? Is Shee, the mad Spider Queen and self-named Empress of the world, his final love? I have no idea how long ago they found each other. Was it just within this past year since Shee’s been away from Trenton? Or did they meet in secret during one of Shee’s ample diggings, their love—or whatever—growing over the many, many years that I was knelt at John’s grave?

Maybe Grim’s feelings have changed. Maybe I’m no longer the girl with his heart. Maybe the fall of Garden was the fall of our love, too. Maybe I’m just the cold.

“I …” My world is spinning. Some of my friends are here. Others are far away. Megan and the twins. I didn’t want to die like this. “I’m … I’m …”

“Are you ready?” he asks again.

Marigold waits for my answer. The Chief. Jasmine. Brains and Ash and Will and the Human Jimmy. But Lynx is not here. Lynx is not here.