Dead Of Winter (The Beautiful Dead Book 2) (21 page)

“Well, Jim didn’t think it was a bad idea. I mean, we
are
sort of desperate for a way to help out, right? Grimsky is a bit of a formidable power, considering.” She bites her lip and squints at me. “So, y’know … Desperate times and all that, am I right?” What the hell is she getting that?

“Excuse me,” says a voice from behind.

Really? “What??” I turn around to find the polite face of Megan’s father, Ken, standing so close to me I can smell his dinner with my Undead can’t-smell-a-thing nose. I find myself taking a step back, caught by surprise. “Oh, hi.”

“Oh, hi,” he agrees, his voice quiet as the flap of a fly’s wing. “May we speak in private?” He eyes my friend Ann with a look that is only a touch less friendly than the one he gave me.

“Ann.” I keep my gaze on Ken and only turn halfway to address her. “Do you mind if—?”

“Yeah, I’ll go. Just, like. Y’know. Don’t be mad.”

I hear her walking away. At this point, just bring it. “I know what this is about …” I start to say to him.

“No, I’m afraid you don’t.” Ken makes a motion with his hand, indicating a nearby bench. “Let’s have a seat?” He says it so kindly, I feel like we’re about to sit and discuss gardening.

“Sure.” I put myself at one end of the bench. He puts himself at the other and gently crosses his legs. There is space for half a family between us.

“My sweet daughter Megan just tried to cut out her own eye,” he tells me.

I gape. On a long list of horrible things I was expecting him to say, considering all that’s transpired since Megan snuck out of Trenton to accompany me, this didn’t even touch it as a possibility.

“She took her knife,” the dad continues to explain, calm and as composed as a moonlight symphony, “a knife I was certain I had taken away from her, and gave herself a number of unsightly scrapes and cuts along her cheek, a nip across her eyebrow, nothing more. I am relieved to say that she still has both her eyes. My wife and I have taken the knife from her.” I am impressed by his poise, which I’m certain is taking every last ounce of patience within him to maintain. “When confronted, she explained something about saving all of Trenton from green-eyed demon people. She said it was a friend of hers that gave her the idea, insisting it wasn’t you. Ann, the one from the Heads. Y’know, that teenage
gang
of troublemakers. But I know better, and I know that the only person who can put an idea into her head is you.” He smiles gently.

“No,” I say right away. “No, no, no. I gave her no such idea. Why would I tell Megan to—? No, no. She’s—She’s desperate to help, desperate to do something. You said it yourself, Mister Ken. She’s very stubborn, and—”

“Just Ken will do.” He smiles again. “Can you tell me what cutting out her own eye would achieve?” He asks the same way a nurse might ask his patient where it hurts.

I know exactly what she was trying to do. Trouble is, I don’t think telling him that his daughter apparently wants to become a Warlock would help. “I told Megan to keep safe. Nothing more. The other children, Ken, I told her to hide with them. I told her she needs to … to hide.”

So that’s where my missing stone must’ve gone.

“I believe you,” he says. I look up, surprised, and meet his eyes. He’s shaking his head. Then he places an arm on the back of the bench, leaning toward me. “That Megan’s been such a brave soul, even before she lost her brother. I don’t think there’s a thing you
or
I could say to change that.” He smiles again. “Poor girl’s going to be doing these things all her life. Wielding swords before she’s even twelve. Trying to cut out her eye. Chasing dreams and Crypters and fire.” He chuckles lightly, though it makes little sound. “Bonnie and I really have our work cut out for us, trying to keep that one in check.”

“She is very brave,” I agree, careful not to say a single word out of place that may wreck this sudden connection we seem to have found.

“I must admit—though I’m reluctant to admit it—but if she had to chase out of town with any Crypter … I’m certainly glad it was you.” He smiles respectfully, making his words sound like a compliment cased in gold.

I want to correct him and say that I’m not a Crypter, but I’m not certain that’s true anymore.

“Thank you,” I tell him.

He rises from the bench and walks away, but I feel like our business is unfinished. There is so much more I want to tell him about his daughter, about the imminent war and the troubles lying ahead and how I’m not a monster, but nothing comes out. A careless wind throws a curtain of white hair into my face, and then the world is nothing but white, endless winter.

Suddenly I feel a stab against my neck. Stunned, I turn around, expecting to find some crazy person with a knife, but no one’s there.

Then I feel it again, except on my arm. It’s like a tiny needle, then another needle. I look into the sky, alarmed, and realize what’s happening. Quickly, I hurry across the Square toward the Town Hall as the rain begins to pour. It’s so sudden, I’d sooner believe the heavens decided to dump barrels of water over my head.

The pain is unrelenting. I am being burned alive.

It seems like an eternity before I make it to the steps of the Town Hall, and that’s where I collapse. Screaming, I claw at every step, dragging myself. For some reason, my legs no longer work. I pull myself up two steps, a third, a fourth. I have no idea how many are left and I can barely lift my head to see.

I scream for someone to help me. I scream and I shout and then suddenly it’s like I don’t have a mouth anymore. Nothing happens. Nothing comes out.

I grab at the next step, but it’s like I’m trying to thrust my hand through a room of thickened caramel. Then the very hand I’m reaching with falls off.

The rain pummels me mercilessly, and considering there have been no new Raises, and even my Undead friends are dying, I have to wonder if the last surviving bits of dear Mother Nature herself are waking up to battle us, ridding our kind from the world forever.

Washing us away.

Nature’s own self-cleansing system.

Then two mystery hands grip me by the shoulders and drag me the rest of the way up the steps, depositing me somewhere under the canopy and out of the rain. I can’t believe I’m still capable of processing what’s going on. I blink several times, but being flat on my stomach, I can’t manage to turn myself around to see my hero.

Instead, I get this picturesque glimpse of the Square, where nearly every Human in all of Trenton has come out of their homes, awed at the rain. A man spreads his hands, letting it drench him. Two women have gathered buckets, collecting the rain and scrounging around for more containers. Children are running around screeching and laughing. An older couple stands by the stage holding each other, as if slow-dancing to music only they can hear. A pair of ladies are cackling hysterically, spinning around with their mouths wide-open to the heavens.

My savior finally lifts me from the ground, cradling me in his arms. When my head is brought to the right angle, I find Gunner’s oily eyes, and he says, “Sorry I wasn’t quicker.”

I try to make a joke, like, “I was enjoying the view,” but my mouth doesn’t seem able to work. All I can do is form a strange sort of lop-sided smile. I am in agony.

Gunner brings me into the lobby and lays my body down on a bench-seat. I feel like a bag of turnips. “Blink if you’re comfortable,” he says. I’m pretty sure he’s joking, but I blink anyway. “As soon as the rain stops, I’ll get the dead doctor guy. Conner, Collin, Colvin. Sorry.”

I try to thank him and my jaw falls off.

He smirks. I won’t call it a revolted reaction, because Gunner doesn’t ever seem to express emotion. Anger and joy and fear all look the same on his face. Thinking quick, he loosens a shoelace from his boot, then ties it around my entire head, from chin to crown, securing my jaw in place. I bother not to thank him this time.

“I didn’t know rain does this to the Dead,” he says, his voice low.

I did. Last time, it was Grim and I, caught in it. It was the first day I met the Deathless Army.

Gunner sits with me while we listen to the relentless downpour of rain outside. He says nothing. He’s become a statue, hypnotized by the party he’s witnessing through the glass windows. The elated oohs and fits of hysteria that reach my ears are so muted and twisted by the storm that it sounds like the ghosts of liquid memories. I’m drowning, slowly sinking, deeper and deeper into a lake of despair, and the whole world is waving goodbye.

Even after Gunner’s saved me, my eyes still burn with pain at what he did to Benjamin. Or maybe it’s the rain in them. I look at Gunner now and all I see is that final, horrible moment of Benjamin’s Second Life. I see the crossbow risen with expert speed. Too expert. I hear my own shout and Benjamin’s last words being sealed within him, struck to the ground in an instant.

And the promise I’d made to him. Gunner took that promise from me. Gunner … He’s broken
my
promise. These are the things I’m thinking as the little pellets of rainwater drip down my face, gently burning my cheek on their leisurely way to my chin.

Look at that. I’m crying for the first time in this life.

“The rain is getting lighter,” Gunner points out. Half an hour or more must’ve gone by. “You still with me?”

“Yes,” I croak. I guess I’ve dried up enough to speak.

“Do you know what that thing in the woods was?”

A giant killer tarantula-monster? “No.”

“Me neither.”

I tentatively wiggle a few fingers on my gloved right hand. “Look.”

He looks. He smiles, which kinda looks the same as him not smiling. “Good. You’re still with us after all. I’ll go speak to the doctor. Maybe he can help remotely.”

“Okay.” My words sound bizarrely over-pronounced, what with my jaw that’s literally hanging on by a thread. Then I remember I lost a hand on the steps. “Hand.”

“What?” Gunner takes a glance. “Hand?”

“Hand,” I confirm.

He nods, understanding. “I’ll get it for you. I’m sure that lady at the pink place can reattach it.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure.” He scratches his chin, appearing pensive for a moment. The wind and the rain stirs on the other side of the windows and doors. “Better go before it starts up again. Never seen a rain like this.” He glances at me. “Try not to move. I’ll speak with the doctor.”

“Okay.”

Gunner leaves. I hear the front doors swing open—the sound of still-sprinkling rain rushing in with the chatter of men and women, all of them alive, all of them happy, all of them wet—and then the doors shut behind him.

A silence passes that is not unlike another death.

Slowly, patiently, I sit up. I’m almost dry. I can move, I discover. Trying not to press my luck, I very slowly test some weight on my left leg, then my right. Slowly, ever so slowly and as cautious as a cat, I make myself stagger to the door. One foot, then the other. One foot, then the other. I’m not heading for the door out, though; I’m heading for the door leading further in.

And down.

As I’m ever-carefully descending the stairs into the basement, I realize it’s my left hand that was first to fall off in the rain. My left hand. Again. I could laugh about it if I wasn’t so sure I’d literally rattle apart my ribcage and break an arm and lose my hipbone in the effort.

When I arrive at long last to her cell, she’s silent. I say her name and she doesn’t react. I say her other name and she still doesn’t react. I tell her I love her and that I ate blood and that I feel him too. Yes, I sense him, I know him, and he’s
that way
, and he’s soon coming
this way,
and
there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.

She finally turns around. Her brains are still exposed, her nose missing, her left eye melted halfway down her cheek, she moans her favorite words: “I am Deathless.”

I lean my head against the door. “Me too, sweetie,” I choke. “Me too.”

C H A P T E R – T W E L V E

L O C K E D

Staring up at Marigold while she repairs my body, I’m sad to say the fingers are still there.

“I thought maybe I’d replace them with eyes.” She shrugs, hammering something into my hip. “But I doubt they will function. Otherwise I would’ve installed a tiara of eyes on my scalp. I’d be able to see all around me! Or perhaps a belt of ears … I’d
never
miss the latest gossip!”

Snap, crack, pop. It’s the strangest sensation, lying on a table perfectly awake, feeling nothing except for your body jerking at every pound of the chisel and hammer. I amuse myself for a while thinking Marigold is mining for diamonds and ore in my abdomen.

“Good as new!” she exclaims when I hop off the table. Indeed, I feel as normal as normal can be. All my fingers and toes wiggle, my joints bend, and my neck turns. I stretch my jaw, opening it wide, then shutting it. “See?” she says, giddy. “I know, I know. You don’t have to say it. I’m a genius and—and—and you don’t have to say it.”

“You’re a genius,” I say, smiling.