Dead Of Winter (The Beautiful Dead Book 2) (32 page)

“You’ve taken my friends for
slaves!
” I shout at him, glaring through Jasmine’s cold, dead eyes. “There’s no forgiving what you’ve done, Grimsky, but it is
not
too late to undo it. Please. Stop this.
Stop this
…”

Jasmine reaches her hand toward me—Grim reaching his hand toward me, and he pleads: “You should see how the north glistens, my sweet Winter. I’m witnessing my first snowfall in this Life … and it does not burn.”

I cling to John, the fury coursing through my body, all the way to my curling fingertips.

It does not go unnoticed. Jasmine’s eyes darken, watching. “He is temporary. He is a blink. You’re not. All of eternity waits for us, Winter. You should see this … the
snow
, which will soon cover Trenton. The cold will cover the world. The snow and the ice and the immortal cold,” he says through Jasmine’s dead, languid voice. “It is the dead of winter, my love, and you will feel no more pain.”

Gunner looses a bolt from his crossbow into Jasmine’s face. She doesn’t react. The thing jutting out of her cheek, she goes on: “No more hunger. No more sleep. No—” Gunner looses another into her neck. Her voice raspy now, she continues: “No more blood. No more—”

And then Megan’s between us. “Grim!” she shouts.

Jasmine slowly peers down at Megan. It seems to take her a while before she realizes what she’s looking at, her ghostly eyes squinting. “Ah. The little one. Hello.”

“You have no power here,” she tells him. “Give us our friends back, or we’ll take them from you.”

“Even you,” says Jasmine, and a weak attempt at a smile curves her lips into a crescent moon. It’s deformed somewhat by the arrow protruding from her cheek. “You would feel deep relief joining me, little one. Imagine, to forget the pain of your brother … and forever.”

“I’ve an Eye now,” she whispers back, deadly, biting, “and I choose to remember him. Forever.”

In an instant, Megan rushes up to Jasmine, grips her by the neck, and brings the old woman’s drunken face down to her own as if to plant a granddaughter’s kiss on her papery cheek. Gunner keeps his crossbow aimed, prepared for anything. I’ve clapped a hand to my mouth, scared, unknowing of what Grim might be capable of, even from far away …

“WINTER!” shouts Jasmine, shouts Grim, a last plea.

And then Jasmine collapses to the ground, released from Megan’s hands. I don’t hesitate a second, wrapping an arm around Megan and pulling her away from the limp Undead woman on the ground. I thrust Megan behind me protectively and watch Jasmine.

Finally, she stirs. Slowly, Jasmine lifts her head. She appears bewildered, blinking several times. After glancing to her left, then to her right, her eyes round upon John. “John? Where’s—” She turns, spotting me. “W-Winter?”

The change is like night and day—for a Living. Our Jasmine is back. “Grim took you. Oh, Jasmine.” I make to wrap my arms around her, then realize it isn’t practical with two arrows sticking out of her head. “Sorry. We had to, um … Forgive me.” I gently pull Gunner’s arrows out. Even though I know it causes no pain, I’m afraid of wrecking her appearance too much.

“I’ve been shot,” she observes, staring at the arrows I’ve pulled out of her face. “Did I … do something?”

“Grim did.” I glance at John, relieved. He smiles back, his face having broken out in a worrisome sweat. I peer back at the Humans, finding half of them consoling Megan and the other half still warily watching Jasmine. I guess that’s to be expected. “We’re heading to Garden.”

“Garden?” She screws up her face, glances at Gunner questioningly, then at John. “Why’ve we left Trenton?”

I nod sadly, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’ll explain it to you on the way,” I tell her, looking right into her eyes and no longer seeing a hint of Grim. His bond to her has been broken. “We’ve a lot of catching up to do.”

Everyone recomposes themselves, preparing to go on. When I hand the arrows I’d collected back to Gunner, I stare cautiously at the steel tips to them as though peering at a deadly flame. Gunner doesn’t seem to notice my odd attentiveness, grabbing the innocent bolts from my palm and cleaning them briskly before returning them to his quiver.

No one knows. Back at Trenton, on that fateful day of the bug invasion, I was shot in front of them all, and no one seems to have noticed. I wonder if it even matters, my little Deathless secret. I wonder if Helena saw, the day the insects burst from the Trenton Square. I wonder if she’s the only one who knows.

Yet another secret to sit heavily in me, infecting my otherwise uninfectable body with guilt.

As we resume our journey, I tell Jasmine everything. How we escaped After’s Hold. How Grim had developed his powers. How the giant insects invaded and our city was torn apart. Jasmine listens in a horrified silence. I wonder if the worst bit of news for her was the destroying of the greenhouse and all their hard work.

The little Trenton gardens were her pride and joy. I lean into her, consoling her however I can, and I say, “Just you wait. You’re about to have more garden than you can handle.”

My tale is punctuated with the sounds of Megan filing her knives, the scraping metal noise flitting through the trees as we walk. The twins are asking the Humans all about Jasmine, curious to catch up themselves. Robin, especially. She asks what life in Trenton was like. The Humans are remarkably patient; even Gill, though I catch his eyes rolling several times.

John stays at my side all the while. Twice, I catch him looking at me through the side of his face. I can’t say for sure what he’s thinking or why he keeps glancing at me, but I already can’t wait for the next nightfall. I miss the tight, nightlong embrace.

Just thinking about it, excitement lances through me. It’s almost painful, how good it feels. I can’t stop glowing.

Halfway across a desolate waste of grey sands and beige, indistinct boulders, my storytelling is concluded, and there’s little else to say. The whole group has drawn quiet. The sun passes over us, according to the Humans, while Jasmine and I peer up into the silver nothingness.

We stop once more an hour past the massive stretch of nothing to give the Humans a chance to regain their strength. Shelter is found by a spread of rocks and fallen-over trees. From a glance, I could almost convince myself that the trees might still have life in them. I might also be kidding myself, like a man lost in the desert, constantly convincing his agonized thirst that an oasis awaits him on the other side of the dune. It’s quite possible nothing awaits us, that what we chase is just another Dead girl’s daydream. Like a life with John. Like children.

I ignore the impatient glances from the Chief. It’s in these moments that I’m thankful to be dead; I can easily hide the doubt that I know where I’m going, or that we’ll even reach our destination at all. I have to be confident and not let these Humans lose hope. Sometimes, I’m practically convinced it’s
hope
that keeps them alive, even more so than food or the very blood in their veins.

Keep the hope alive, and it’ll keep the Humans alive.

Hours pass. Hours more, and the sun has set. We reach a heavily shaded area, the branches of the half-dead trees reaching one another high above us, as if shaking hands. The ground is soft. The air is thick and breezy. Wind hisses through the trees, bending their branches and creating a song of earth that rattles lightly all around us.

John curls up into me and I stare into the labyrinth of webbing trees and gnarled branches. John’s heavy arm lays limp over my lap and he’s already snoring lightly. Megan and Jasmine share another tree, and the rest of the Humans are huddled over a campfire, quietly discussing a plan for tomorrow. Rations are running thin. We haven’t crossed a single source of food, save a bush of nuts here and there. The man, Nelson, even started gathering leaves from any bush or tree he could find, thinking he’d chew on them in a desperate measure. “To save myself from eating one of you,” he had jested, though no one seemed to find the joke funny.

The Chief eyes me again. I resist the urge to glare back.

The calm night soon swallows the day. The fire is put out when the Living drift to sleep, and I am secretly thankful for that. With Grim occupying so many Undead eyes, I feel like he can even watch me through campfire flames. Isn’t that terrible? I don’t even trust fire anymore.

I feel the heartbeat of my favorite Human vibrating through me, his breath tickling my arms. Yes, John, they tickle, and I wish there was a way to have that tickle of your life, of your body, of your being with me forever and always. And for once, I’m the one that squeezes him, bringing John in for a tight, crushing hug. He squeezes back sleepily, his head nuzzling into my neck, and in the dark, which for me isn’t dark at all, he searches for my lips and meets them with his own.

I know nothing of what happens for a solid hour, lost in the confines of John’s soft lips, of John’s strong arms, of John’s breath and his tickling and the words he whispers in my ear: “Don’t ever leave me.” I know we’d both like to do a lot more than this, even in the dark where it’s possible no one might witness us, but lips are certainly exciting enough, at least for now, and the memory of our special night in Trenton will have to suffice for us both.

When he drifts back to a warm, snuggly sleep, I watch Jasmine’s backside as she holds Megan in the night like a granddaughter. I’m touched for a while, unable to think much of anything.

I wish I could live within this peace forever.

Maybe it’s the silence of the night after a long, trying day of travel, but the enormity of our situation begins to sit heavily in me, and I have to confess the truth to myself:

We are not safe.

Alone now, I let myself process the true consequence of Jasmine having encountered us. Before Megan broke Grim’s control, even before any of us knew that Jasmine was under his control, I told her where we were heading.

That means he knows, too.

C H A P T E R – S E V E N T E E N

S O M E O N E  
E
L S E ’ S   H O M E

Before the others are awake, Jasmine has freed herself from Megan’s clutch and I’ve slipped out of John’s arms. The only other one who’s up is Gunner, who’s taken to scouting the area ahead. Only Jasmine and I can see him, our ghostly eyes proving once again useful when looking afar, and utterly useless when looking up.

The silver untelling sky twisting above, Jasmine asks, “So, Grim knows?”

“Yeah, I imagine he does.” I fold my arms. “It’s not your fault. He’s … manipulative. I used to love him. Our story’s a complicated one. He saved me from a cliff, then sent the Deathless to a tavern to abduct me. That’s where I met John.” Jasmine smiles warmly; I’d told her that story before, long ago. “Grim saved me again at the Necropolis. I saved him in return at Trenton. That’s all it’s been, really. Just a long series of us saving one another. Now he thinks he’ll save the whole damn world by ending it …”

“Sometimes, trouble is a drug,” says Jasmine. “People are drawn to it. People are born by it. Grimsky is a man who’s never had his Waking Dream. We can’t know what really troubles another’s mind. It’s not for us to know.”

“We’ll never know what troubles his,” I point out. “He told me the price of becoming Deathless—it’s to give up one’s First Life. He’ll never have the Dream, Jazz. He’ll never know.”

I understand a lot about troubled minds and secrets. All those months spent with a less-than-kind John taught me as much as I figure I ought to know.

“That’s a most unfortunate tragedy,” Jasmine agrees.

“Yes.” I look back at the group. A few of the women have stirred, one of them picking through the satchel of food rations. The satchels are growing lighter. The lighter they get, the heavier my heart gets. “I don’t want them to starve. What if … What if we never find Garden?”

“It was certainly a risk to journey so far from Trenton. But I say, a far better thing to have risked taking such a journey and die reaching for that dream … than to not have taken one at all.”

Our conversation draws to a close as the Humans wake and begin nibbling on their rations, which have all been portioned even smaller than before. John is among them, offering some of his rations to a quite-fatigued Megan. None of the Humans thought they’d be in this position again; starved, tired, surviving on scraps and barely hanging on each day in a harsh, spent world. I watch them from a distance, amazed at how cooperative everyone’s being. Even Gill with his suspicious, pain-ridden eyes. I still remember his wife in that last moment, her breathy final words that I never heard, her hand reaching for me.

What a horrible thing, to be given someone’s final words and not to have heard them.

“Chief,” calls out Gunner, returning from his scouting just as the other Humans finish gathering up their things. “There’s a river not more than ten minutes ahead of us, fifteen at most. Water. Real water.”

He’d filled a canister, which is quickly passed around to the most in-need. The Chief slings a backpack over his shoulders, eyes us all with his hardened stare. “Onward, then. Let’s make to the river.”

A real river. Water. That must mean life, right?