Velveteen (14 page)

“But shouldn’t I remember? I mean, it must not have happened all that long ago.”

She had no answer for him.

“Velvet?”

She turned around then, serious. “Don’t question a lot of this stuff, Nick. You’re not remembering it for a reason. The moment of death is traumatic, especially for people like us.”

“Like us?”

“Well, yeah.” She shrugged, sighed. It was difficult enough to get someone to buy into their own death, but it was close to impossible to walk them through the fact that
they hadn’t gone to heaven or hell. Limbo was a tough sell. “If you weren’t like us, you’d have seen a nice big bright light and felt compelled to drift into it and stuff. But you didn’t. You got trapped in that crystal ball by a mean-ass banshee, and we’re going to figure out why. For now let’s just get you oriented. Get you feeling safe.”

Without even considering it, Velvet reached out and pressed her hand to his cheek and held it there.

“That feels good.” His head lolled against his shoulders.

It was hard to explain, but a soft vibration seemed to pass between them, and he was looking at her again, gawping.

She withdrew with a snap.

“Thanks,” he said quickly. “Thanks for saving me, but I really do need to get back home.”

Velvet raised an eyebrow. It was time to put her plan into action. He may not have wanted to go with them, but he was definitely going to. She slunk into him, closing the gap and slipping her arms around his waist. He pulled back, startled, and then relaxed as she rested her head against his chest.

“Uh …,” he muttered. “Are you okay?”

She tilted her head back and straightened onto her toes, her lips nearing his. “I am. If you’re going to leave, then I want to give you something to remember me by.”

“Uh …” Nick’s eyes widened.

She pressed her mouth to his, and felt a soft whimper escape him. Velvet parted her lips and sank into the kiss. The boy was clutching her now, buoyed by her actions, and groaning. He’d remember that particular detail vividly, and just one more. Enough for the pull focus, she hoped.

Velvet pulled away, leaned upward toward his ear, and whispered, “Where I’ll be, there are shattered walls. Cracks everywhere. It’s dark, but I’ll be a light.” She nibbled on his earlobe for good measure, pushed away, and then crouched to slip into the crack that split the sidewalk between them.

V
elvet tumbled forward into the murkiness of the Shattered Hall.

The gravelly floor grated against her hip as she skidded to a stop. She winced with pain but didn’t stop moving. She couldn’t. Nick would be right behind her. The last thing she needed was the boy to see her vulnerable and, worse, naked.

Nothing usurps authority like full-frontal nudity.

After scrambling over to the crate on her hands and knees, Velvet snatched her clothes out and wrangled her sore legs into the safety of her panties and jeans. But when she thrust her hand back in for her bra and shirt, all she felt was the slick leather of the combat boots, and beneath them, worn splintery pine.

“Dammit!” she shouted, and arced her hands back and forth along the cave floor.
So stupid
. She must have mistakenly tossed her bra and shirt out of the box when she’d
grabbed the jeans. The Shattered Hall could really use some decent lighting.

How the hell did millennia pass without someone stringing up a freakin’ gas line?

A thin whisper and an even fainter glow called Velvet’s attention back to the crack. By the time she craned her neck toward it, a soul was already spilling out, a small bioluminescent fog, tendrils as fine and fragile as paper doilies. She draped her arm across her chest.

The cloud began to solidify into a pale boy curled up onto his knees, shivering violently. Nick. And he looked terrible—incapacitated—his gray-blond hair plastered to his scalp and his flesh pulsing with luminous memory. He flickered like a candle and cast the shadows into the far reaches of the hall, just illuminating a mound of fabric bunched up next to the boy’s clawing fingers. Velvet snatched up her shirt and pulled it on quickly. At least that bit of crisis could be averted without too much drama.

If only Nick’s would wind itself up so easily
.

He was at once bigger and smaller than she’d expected. Vulnerable. She admired the flesh of his back. It was smooth and delicate, porcelain. He twisted his face toward her, and she nearly expected a crooked smile. She hoped for that. What greeted her instead was a tortured rictus of horror. Nick’s lips curled away from his teeth, which shined inside his mouth like dull diamonds. And then he screamed.

Velvet winced and clamped her hands to her ears, wishing that Luisa, Logan, and Quentin were there to help him. Luisa especially would know how to comfort him.

The sound echoed about the hall and pierced her brain,
jarring not a feeling of compassion but a memory she kept jailed deep, behind great stone ramparts of pain.

She had wandered the pasture surrounding Bonesaw’s shack for what seemed like hours—and had stood over the monster as he’d lain shirtless and breathless in the weedy grass, the full lamp of the moon turning great splashes of blood into inky sarcomas on his chest. That ignorant tattoo of his blessedly obscured except for a single word.

“Now.”

Yes
, she’d wondered.
What now?
What was this dull ache that followed her every movement? And what had happened in that darkened outbuilding? When could she go home, fall into her mother’s arms, and sleep?

The shed sat amid the knee-high dandelions, as still and quiet as a mausoleum.

Beneath her, he dozed, blissfully unaware of her presence.
How could that be?

Bonesaw had tortured her. She remembered that much.

Grated. Gored. Slit.

Her suspicions told her that every hurt he’d committed to her flesh lay inside the awful shed, balled up and red and perfectly still.

When could she go home?

She’d backed away from her killer and from that other Velvet—the one who had a chance to love and live and not hate—and wandered over the grassy knolls and hills.

It was merely by chance that she’d come upon the glen and the lightning-blasted oak, a faint glow tinkling within
its blistered bark. It had called to her, and she had wondered if the famed “light” those near-death people went on about was just vastly exaggerated.

Then she’d touched it and shut her tearless eyes.

And was tossed out into the station from the primary crack amid a star-white orgy of fear and revulsion.

Screams.

Nails dragging across stone floors.

Nick scratched at the gravel, his long slender fingers quivering, catching, and slipping. Tracks carved into the grit like evidence. Velvet hovered over him, her thick wool peacoat in her hands and the breadth of the boy’s muscled back beneath that. She was hugging him.

Shielding him.

Luisa stood nearby, Logan and Quentin blinking silently behind her outstretched arms. Already clothed, both of the boys had faces with masks of confusion. Luisa’s head was cocked to the side, assessing not the boy—they had all seen plenty of terrible reactions to the crossing—but Velvet.

Velvet shrugged. “What?”

Luisa shook her head. “Nothing. It suits you.”

Velvet recoiled, left the coat dangling atop the naked boy. She glanced down at Nick and saw herself that day so long ago now. And with her team watching, she fell atop him and held him tight.

“You’ll be all right,” she whispered over and over. “You’ll be all right.”

Eventually he stopped shaking.

“Thanks.” Nick’s voice was minuscule but there.

She shifted herself until she was beside him. Hunching there, close, she reached out to touch his cheek, and tilted his face to hers and said, in her most stoic tone, “You’ll be all right. Because you have to.”

He nodded, his eyes becoming less downcast.

“Because you’re strong.”

He nodded.

Luisa was smiling at her. On any other day, Velvet would have taken offense. Perhaps she should have, but something was pinching inside her.

Empathy is a memory, she figured.

She’d need to jot that down.

Luisa stepped forward, her patent leather shoes scraping away the melancholy. “Quentin, help Nick get into some clothes and meet us outside.”

Luisa looped her arm through Velvet’s and tugged her toward the gates that led out of the Shattered Hall. “Wow,” she said. “There are sides to you, girl, I’ve never seen.”

“Shut up.”

“No,” Luisa assured her. “I’m being serious.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Luisa nodded.

“Yeah,” Velvet agreed, then added quickly, “shut up.”

Behind them, Nick shouted—a welcome change to the maudlin emotionality, Velvet thought—his voice frantic and garbled, “I think I’m gonna hurl!”

The two girls turned back just in time to see him hunch over and heave an angry gush of sparks from his gaping mouth. They danced across the floor like firecrackers, snapping
and popping amid a slurry of white liquid that evaporated before their eyes.

He fell back on his butt and groaned, rubbing at his temples. “I think I have a migraine. I’m seeing things.”

“No, you don’t,” Quentin snipped. “You just puked up about six months’ worth of memories.”

“Yeah,” Logan said, and guffawed. “You’ll be wishing you had some of those to spare next time you get into a fight!”

Nick looked up at the boys, squinty-eyed and blinking, shading his brow with his hand like a visor.

“Are you two glowing?” he asked.

Logan and Quentin broke out in booming laughter. It echoed through the cavern and infected Luisa, and shortly after, Velvet joined in, doubled over and barely able to breathe.

“What’s so funny?” Nick shouted. “I fail to see the humor.”

Luisa fell into Velvet, riotously cackling.

“It’s your sparkling personality,” she shouted back to the boy.

Freshly outfitted in brown woolen trousers, dusty wing-tipped shoes, and a gray button-down shirt, Nick trotted up to meet them, the other boys hot on his heels. “Be serious!”

“You ever hear of phantom limbs?” Velvet asked.

His eyes drifted to his arms and the thin threads of light struggling just beneath the surface. She reached out and gripped his wrist until he winced. His eyes snapped back to her.

“Sure,” she said. “You’ve heard of it. Shark attack victims complaining about pains in a leg that isn’t there anymore
because a great white ate it and pooped it out a long time ago?”

Nick nodded, the hint of a smile breaking through the confusion.

“Well, this right here …” Velvet lifted up her arm and unfastened her cuff. She noted that his eyes narrowed as her fingers manipulated the button and hook. His jaw twisted a bit, his tongue splitting his lips slightly. It amazed her how boys worked. One minute vomiting, the next thinking about, well, things they shouldn’t be.

She pulled back her sleeve to reveal the same thin threads of light pulsing beneath her skin. “This is the reason why. When our bodies die, or even a part of our body dies, our spirits retain the memories in our nerves or whatever these sparky wires are. And so if we don’t die from the trauma, we continue to
feel
like the part is still there. It itches. Aches. All that. Well, down here we just happen to have the whole body, not just a chewed-off arm.”

“B-but we’re not ghosts anymore,” he stuttered.

Luisa strutted between them, clearly becoming annoyed with all the exposition. “Of course we’re not ghosts. We’re people; we just look a little different. Ghosting’s like our day job. A uniform, if you’d like. Now can we get this show on the road?”

Velvet nodded and the Shattered Hall’s gates swung open as they approached.

“Welcome to purgatory, Nick.”

His mouth dropped open and he stared into the Great Station in wonderment.

If nothing else, purgatory was perpetually resilient. It was a mere hour after one of the worst shadowquakes to hit the Latin Quarter ever, and recovery was well under way. Gone were the downtrodden refugees, replaced by a new consignment of souls flooding in, their blister-hot memories shining like a sun from the cordoned-off area around the primary crack. The crack itself, a vertical chasm running a hundred feet up the far wall of the station, hummed with energy. Impossibly deep, and wide enough at its base that souls shambled out of their own accord, ether-light, onto the station floor, the Primary pulsed with activity today.

An influx. Velvet wondered if there’d been a plane crash in the daylight or something likewise terrible to explain souls thrust through in such volume. As the souls shuffled from the corral, guides tossed ash into the air, shouting, “Welcome! Rub it in! Welcome! Faces, too!”

Others shouted directions frantically, as the perpetually long lines of new souls heading for processing had begun to coil around each other like a great swirling nautilus shell. The new souls moaned and screamed and pawed at Velvet and her team occasionally.

“What is this place?” they cried.

“Heaven? It’s heaven?”

No such luck, dude
.

Velvet watched Nick as they trudged around the intake lines, avoiding the jarring of elbows passing in the opposite direction, toward the tunnels and the funiculars. His eyes were cast skyward and his lips parted. Above them, souls shimmied and hung from ropes and black rubber gas lines.
They glowed nearly as brilliantly as the globes of light, all the better to perform the intricate work of replacing broken panels of the glass dome that covered the atrium.

Velvet couldn’t imagine passing into purgatory on this night. If there was one thing worse than waking up dead, it was molasses-slow intake workers at the far curve of the stadium of commotion. Luckily for them, and Nick, being on the Salvage crew afforded them a certain level of VIP treatment.

Not much.

But at least a smidgen of preference to set them apart from the rest of the dead. Velvet wove through the lines, meandering and nodding politely at the frightened ash-covered mass of humanity. They stared back, likely wondering why they glowed so brightly, expecting her to say something, provide some guidance.