I expected her to remove the mask then, but she only leaned closer. “I’ll reaffix the mask, take you back to the surface, and hang you upside-down—the soul drains entirely that way, you know. Then I’ll let ravens strip the flesh from your bones at summer’s height. I’ll let dogs gnaw on your bones. I’ll let beetles clean out the inside of your skull. But this mask will keep your consciousness alive, and I’ll take great pains to do the same just so I can toast to your smothering soul every morning over my first cup of joe. You murdered my main reason to live. So you can damned well become my new one.”
And before I braced myself, she ripped off the mask. Lindy’s face appeared—eyes bulging, blood oozing from her jaw and hairline, face so red it was purple. There was no hesitation. Every ounce of breath stored in that living mask rocketed toward my candle, snuffing it with her terrorized scream.
And I was gone.
20
The pain was the difference, I decided, as Lindy’s scream faded. The wall of smoke created by the extinguished candle still probed at me, seeking entry into my body via my pores, pressing against me like it was a searching, living thing. The noxious smoke still slow-crawled its way along my skin in prying tendrils, testing, the sulfuric stench forcing me to hold my breath. Yet it didn’t invade my bloodstream as before, vacuuming the air from my chest, and breaking down molecules and cells as it sheared away my soul. Finally a cool blast of air penetrated the void.
The sense of physical reality returned, and the abyss surrounding me lessened. Surprisingly, lights appeared first. The wicks in each boxy pagoda lantern glowed like reassuring beacons, but even brighter now, signals that safe harbor lay ahead. I knew that wasn’t true, of course, but as I’d been expecting more darkness, their luminosity along the paneled oak walls was an unexpected relief. I still wondered how soon it would be until Solange would sense the bump in energy created by the arrival of Lindy’s slivered soul. Because once she did, she’d be after me.
A quick survey showed the room was still cleared of poker tables, again awash in the same golden-brown patina of an early nineteenth-century photo, and still filled with dozens of shrunken heads. Even more macabre in the brighter light, their dried, prunelike heads were tufted with thin, patchy hair, and their tattered, tied and dyed necklines hung in jagged threads. Each glinting, jeweled stare was fixed on me, and each mouth gaped as far wide as the sewing strings would allow as they watched my gaze settle on the room’s newest addition.
The cocoon was larger up close. It had to be to accommodate a man as big as Hunter, though even I would have found it constricting. I assumed that forcing him to hunch—literally making him bow—was intentional. Carlos told me that Hunter refused to take on the appearance of Jaden Jacks—his identity when he and Solange had originally met—ever since she’d tried to kill me. It was a small defiance, but noteworthy enough in a world where Solange was never denied. There was also nothing she could do about it. He’d used a Shadow agent’s soul to make the crossing between worlds, as I just had, so she technically owned nothing of his soul.
Yet she had full possession of his body, and this close, it was clear that the time he’d already spent in the cocoon had worn on him. His skin was sallow, the circles beneath his eyes deep as beachside shallows. There was a fresh bruise on his face, and his lower lip was bloated and split. So he’d seen a small portion of Solange’s rage after their child’s death, I thought. Small, because if it were great, he’d already be dead.
But she was saving his death for me.
I darted between the heads, all oddly silent—undoubtedly ordered quiet by Solange—and found myself face-to-face with Hunter for the first time since he’d left me, alone, in Vegas. Face-to-face, that was, if you didn’t count the mounded layers of silken webbing trapping him inside. Thousands of tensile lines glinted in taunting iridescence, both a soft and deadly barrier between us, much like Solange.
Recalling how strong even a single strand had been, I didn’t dare touch it. Instead I looked around for something sharp.
“So. You like to play with matches.” The voice boomed, surrounding me. “You like to play with knives.”
She stood, poised at the top of the left-leaning staircase that led nowhere, as if making an entrance, like she was still beautiful instead of a woman trapped in a creature’s body. Again, all she wore were the simple gold earrings, the kundans, that she always had, now riveted directly to her skull. She stared down at me and there was nothing human in the gaze. All that lived in her now was madness, both bright and dark at the same time. The matchbook I’d used to set her web afire was in one seared hand, while Mackie’s blade was gripped tightly in the other.
“Unfortunately for you,” she said, trying for a smile, “so do I.”
That was a given, so I said nothing.
She tilted her head, and something cracked. “But how noble of you to return to save your love. Inventive too. I never did care for Lindy Maguire. She always defined herself by another person. Though it took you long enough to figure out how to force someone else into paying for your passage.”
“Ruthlessness doesn’t come naturally to me.”
“I know,” she said, clearly considering that my fatal flaw. “Which is why you’re now boxed in. Just as I planned all along.”
“So are you,” I told her coolly.
Charcoal flaked from her raised brow. “How do you figure?”
I shrugged. “Set this world afire, Solange, and you go up with it.”
“You forget. I know which of these lanterns leads to the thirteenth entrance. The Serpent Bearer will set me free.”
True freedom for all comes through the Serpent Bearer.
The portent, still to be fulfilled, was the only thing that kept me calm and focused. Sure, things looked bad now, but it was a miracle I’d lived this long. So I could milk even the slimmest of chances. “I forget nothing. Access that lantern and you’ll be met on the other side by a supernatural cabal.”
Her eyes rolled like loose marbles. “Please. I can easily terrorize your entire little troop of grays. Ask Carlos.”
“With your face alone, yes,” I retorted, then continued to lie. “But that’s not who’s waiting there.”
She had to think about it for a moment, and I took the opportunity to glance at Hunter. Was he drugged? Because he just stood, hunched and vacant-eyed, like he had nowhere to go and forever to get there.
“The Tulpa?” Solange finally said, then shook her head. “No way.”
“Why not? He hates you almost as much as he hates me.”
“Because if he knew how to gain soulless access to this world, he’d have already murdered us both.”
One side of my mouth lifted. “Then you’re the one who’s forgetful. You should know he’s much more cautious than that. He’ll send someone else along first. In fact, we shouldn’t have to wait much longer.”
Her eyes inched to my right before she caught herself, and I allowed myself a small smile. The thirteenth entrance, it seemed, was across from the pipeline’s, where I’d entered. That meant it was one of the two interspersed between the bar, the red door, and the wall of most-wanted posters hanging tattered and forgotten in the corner. Realizing she’d granted me that much knowledge, Solange’s face crackled as she motioned grandly around the room. “Then you won’t mind having a little party while we wait. As you can see, I’ve invited all your friends. Though they are being quite rude, aren’t they? Everyone say hello to Joanna,” she commanded.
“Hello, Joanna.” The softly swaying heads gave the expected, rote response, chiming like a classroom of recently disciplined children. I looked around, wondering what on earth there was left to do to these poor souls, when a new voice, belated and oddly bright, froze me in place.
“Hello, Joanna.”
My knees threatened to buckle, and I whirled, no longer concerned with Solange, heedless even of Hunter. I hadn’t heard that voice in almost a year and a half. Unless, of course, you counted the way it i
ssued from my own throat after I’d become a superhero.
After I’d been turned into my sister.
Solange’s cackle surrounded me as I searched for the source of the sound, but I’d know that soft cadence anywhere, and when the next whisper came—my name again—I pushed through the heads to my left. They swung like angry pendulums, screaming their protests, and it was all I could do not to rip them down as Solange’s laughter rose as well.
She’s dead! It can’t be her! Yet I couldn’t stop the instinctive and feral need to protect my sister, even while knowing I’d already failed to do so. “Olivia!”
A shriveled head lunged for me, and I batted him away, dodged another, and wiped sweat from my brow. And then I heard her clearly, making such a lost, agonized sound right behind me, that when the same head lunged for me upon my return, I ripped him from the ceiling and cut his own cry short. Solange laughed harder. “Olivia?”
“Joanna? Here, I’m here.”
The voice was coming from a string-hewn mouth on a head the size of my fist, blackened and shriveled and topped with a grotesque matting of blond curls. I felt myself sway, but ironically, Solange’s now-maniacal laughter propped me back up. If she knew how it fortified me, I thought, swallowing hard, she’d shut the hell up.
Taking another step, I studied the dangling head. Solange had given it waxy lipstick that colored the strings, along with eyeliner, which lay smudged around gems the color of backlit blood.
“It’s me,” the strange mouth with a familiar voice said. “She brought me back to life. Saved me, even when you couldn’t. Even after you stole my body and life and left me to rot.”
My own head automatically jerked. “That’s not true.”
“It is. But Solange has given me new life . . . and a voice, even though you tried to steal that too.”
The accusations were said lightly, airily, but struck as sharply as a steel blade. I glanced back up at Solange, still looming at the top of the staircase, and her pleased laughter battered me, attacking from all sides though she never moved. I cringed, my shamed gaze flashing to Hunter, whom I saw shaking his head furiously before I again looked away.
Shaking his head, Joanna.
That voice, my inner one, was a gong, momentarily crowding out all the others.
Then Olivia’s was back. “I think you were always jealous of me. Always hated me. You could have saved me from that mortal fall—all you had to do was reach out—but I think you wanted me dead. Me, an innocent! And you, who were never truly that.”
I began to protest, but forced myself to bring my own voice back—and without looking at Hunter—his image back too. Shaking his head. He didn’t want me to believe this was true.
So as the desiccated head began spewing insults like poison, and with more vitriol and expletives and accusations than my sister would ever use, I examined the eyes closer and realized, of course, that they weren’t hers. They couldn’t be, after all; she’d never crossed into Midheaven, or given up precious ounces of her soul. But I had.
I pulled up a mental image of the deformed gems Solange had fashioned with my soul, sacrificed on my first two visits here, and came up with a match. No wonder the sound struck such a chord in what was left of my soul. Those words were soul-based fears. What if I had failed Olivia? What if wanting, needing to be different than my sister meant I did hate her in some way? What if I truly could have saved her from that fall?
I grew dizzy again, and this time the Olivia-head’s voice seemed far away, like I was going to pass out.
Hunter, shaking his head.
It was a trick. Solange’s laughter was a confirmation, but it was hard to uproot and deny the soul’s fears. So what I did next was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and defied the most sacred part of me. I reached up, snapped the string, and silenced my sister’s voice, right in the middle of telling me how useless I was. Then I ran back to Hunter through a shocked and silent field of heads. If I would do that to my own sister, they seem to be thinking, what would I do to them?
But Hunter was the reason I was here, and I hastened my pace. Knocking a shrunken head aside, I narrowed my gaze on his silk-spun prison, put Solange’s sadistic trick behind me, and tried to figure out a way through.
Solange stopped laughing. “Step away from Jaden’s cell.”
“No.” Instead, I threw the head, stuffed with my soul gems, at the gooey mess. Imbedded in the sac’s side, it made a perfect handhold, and scoop, to tear at the gossamer cage.
Solange growled, smokily. “Fine.”
I looked up in time to see her arm shoot to the side, latching on to a thread of webbing that glinted as it stretched from her hand to the ceiling. She tugged, and I instinctively cringed before being doused by a wash of liquid. Not just liquid, I realized as I pushed sodden hair from my face, coughing. Petrol, I thought, catching Hunter’s eye through the webbing of his cell, now soggy and pasted together. A shudder passed between us.
Above, Solange lit a match.
Despite their previous orders to be silent, the heads behind me whimpered. Solange stared down at me, eyes heavy with hate and grief, then lifted another strand of webbing I hadn’t seen. It draped over the banister like a paper streamer . . . and I knew it would catch fire just as fast.
“You’ll incinerate too,” I tried again. “Destroy this world and you destroy yourself.”
“You think I care? You killed my child!” And she set the thread alight.
It sizzled like a fuse, and we all watched it—even Hunter, through his sodden, filmy shell. Solange let out a ragged, victorious cry as the thread began whipping down the banister, fire trailing in its wake. If I’d had a little more of Solange’s beloved ruthlessness I’d have lunged for one of the lanterns flanking the opposite side of the room. Instead I dove for Hunter as if jumping into a pool, using the head to rip at the shell before merely pushing the strands apart with my fingertips, digging my way in. The petrol actually helped at first, melting a few hundred strands together in a gluey, movable mass, but there were thousands. Hunter began digging as well, while smoke filled the room.
Solange stayed where she was, imperious and content to watch from above. Why not? She’d been scorched within an inch of her life. Now was her chance to watch us burn.
The dangling heads began to choke, then came sounds like corn kernels popping in hot oil. Something hit my back, dull but hard, and the screams erupted in earnest, followed by more pops. Closing my mind to what was happening behind me, I kept digging. Smoke danced as if alive, billowing in earnest, and the fire sped down the railing, closer by the second. Yet my palms were weighed down from the outside, the thick webbing pressing them together, as if folded in prayer. Yanking furiously, I realized too late that, like Chinese handcuffs, this only served to further tighten them. Then, unexpectedly, fingertips touched mine.
I looked up. Hunter was once again shaking his head, this time sadly. His mouth moved, and even though I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I could make out the word love forming on his lips again and again, so regularly it almost soothed.
The warmth and strength in that gaze and mouth and those fingers was greater in that moment than even the encroaching fire. I teared up as smoke pushed between us. I choked, but held Hunter’s gaze, as well as his fingers, tightening around mine. It’s not a terrible way to die, I thought, fighting to keep my eyes trained on his. As soon as the fire cauterized my nerve endings, I’d grow cold. Then I’d feel nothing. And, yeah, we would die, but I’d never carry the same questions and regret that lingered in my soul as I did after Olivia’s death. I knew I’d done everything I could to save Hunter. From the look on his face, he knew it too.
The smoke suddenly obscured everything. I cried out as I lost sight of Hunter, though I could still feel his fingers tensing around mine. Then the cocoon burst into flame.
“No!” I instinctively turned away as the fire leaped for my petrol-soaked body. My arms were aflame, and then my neck and hair, and then I was
fully engulfed in fire . . . though those fingers remained, still clenched around my own.
He was safe in there, I remembered. So maybe if Solange had tipped him to which lantern connected the Serpent Bearer entrance, he still had a chance of making it out of Midheaven alive, after I was gone, after . . .
“What the fuck is this?” I heard next to me, and I glanced over, squinting. Solange’s enraged, blackened face—inches away—peered into mine. As expected, the fire didn’t bother with her, and it wasn’t even because of the lopsided kundans dangling from what used to be her ears. There was, very simply, nothing left on her body to burn.
“Why aren’t you frying?” she said, biting off each word.
I met her confused gaze with one of my own, then caught Hunter’s wide eyes through the clearing smoke—though fire still roared between us—before looking down. “Oh.”
The shield. My personal power. I’d never removed it after ambushing Lindy. Adrenaline and panic were running so hot and high through my body that I hadn’t realized I wasn’t feeling the pain associated with burning, only anticipating it.
“Oh,” I said again, shifting to see myself in the bar back mirror, immediately wishing I hadn’t. My true self was shown there, though the face and body I’d been born with looked like flaming saganaki. It was as if the remnants of my old self had gone up in flame. It made me wonder, if I survived this, what exactly I’d be left with.
Solange growled next to me. Another swift motion, and I was pushed to my knees by a second pounding wave of liquid. Only my hands, still cuffed in the webbing, remained aloft as I choked on the stew of smoke and water.
The greedy, controlling bitch hadn’t planned to burn down her world after all.
“How did you do that?” Solange asked in the sodden silence. I looked up at her through the lightening haze of smoke. Her face was indistinguishable from the soot floating like black snowflakes in the air.
The Neon Graveyard Page 25