by Daryl Banner
“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.
Listen, he said. The tittering of tiny spiders I heard when my eyes were closed in the other chamber. The tiny spiders. His tiny spiders. He’s not here because …
“Are you ready?”
John waits for my answer too. Isn’t that the sad reality of our love? Almost here. Almost there. Almost with him. Almost totally alone. But without a doubt, in the end, completely, wholly, utterly Dead. Listen, he said.
We were always doomed. “No,” I tell him.
“Good,” he answers. “Then duck.”
C H A P T E R – S E V E N T E E N
C H O K E
At first, I don’t realize what he means. Duck? There’s still ducks in this world?
Then an arrow zips by my ear, nearly taking it off.
I duck just as another one zips through the room. Empress Shee shrieks, reaching for an arrow that’s lodged itself in her neck. Her voice is grossly distorted now by the arrow, and I watch as Grim body-slams into Shee and, for a moment, I’m not sure whether he means to wrestle her into submission or protect her.
Then, to my horror, Empress Shee is screaming and grunting madly, like some kind of sick animal, and I feel my insides shudder with a biliousness I can, in no amount of words, describe. The only thing I know it means is, her Warlock power is working, even though I can’t figure out how she’s even using it without the actual large Lock-stone present.
Where the hell is that damn stone?
When another arrow zips through the air and cuts through Marigold’s upstretched hands—slicing perfectly through the spider silk that binds them—I realize we have someone in the shadows helping us.
But while Shee is on the rampage, we are, all of us, vulnerable to her power. All of us except—
“THE HUMAN!” I cry out. “JIMMY! RAISE YOUR HANDS!—FREE THE HUMAN!”
At my shouting, a number of things seem to happen at once. The others begin scrambling around, attempting horribly to balance themselves on their bound-and-bent legs, rolling and squirming and struggling to get out of Empress Shee’s way as she is haphazardly buried in the bones with a blinded Grim on top of her.
Suddenly the Chief and Jasmine are freed and they’re working together to unbind the others. Still bound entirely, I thrust myself forward, then stupidly fall on my face. Orienting my chin around, I try to stay wary of the action, but can’t quite get a visual on what’s going on. I hear a scream and a loud shout of pain, I think from Jimmy. There’s a loud clang near my head, and I realize the Empress’s sword has fallen.
Empress’s? How dare I say that. The Judge’s sword.
MY SWORD.
There’s someone at my back, and then my hands and legs fall free. I look up into the face of the Chief for only an instant before he’s moved on to undoing the next person’s binds.
I’m on my feet and the sword’s in my hand, and it seems the Empress Shee has psychically (telepathically, magically, spider-sensibly, whatever) summoned her so-called Neo-Deathless to her aid. Marigold is wrestling or dancing with a large spider, I can’t tell. The teen is battling another, though for some reason she’s only her upper torso—her legs are missing utterly. Jimmy is nursing a spot on his arm that’s bleeding profusely while trying to push past a spider that is, apparently, guarding Shee. I cannot actually see her, save the scramble of upturned assortment of spider and cricket legs, with Grim on top of her.
There is a swirl of dust in the air, which is both annoying and unsettling as I can’t determine where it’s coming from and it makes it difficult to see everything that’s going on. The bone pile has become a
mess, spread out along the cave floor. As I push my way toward Shee with a hunch in my belly, I trip twice on a rib or a spine, nearly losing the sword in hand.
Someone at my side who was fighting a spider explodes into a cloud of powder and chunks, all of it swirling into my face and blinding me. I gag, coughing twice, when suddenly the spider launches into me, pinning me to the ground.
Joke’s on the spider, sadly, as when it lands upon me, my blade spears through its body. The legs turn stiff, appearing for a moment like the bars to a prison I just made myself.
I fling the beast off me, still choking on the dust that now wraps me like some horrible fog. It only now occurs to me that I’m choking on someone who just met their end. My eyes frantic, I spin around, trying to regain my sense of direction, but I’m confused and everyone looks like everyone else. People battling spiders battling people. I can’t even see Shee or Grim anymore.
Hurrying toward the first spider I can find, I howl with ferocity as I swing my blade overhead like an axe and let it down on the nearest spider I see. Half of three of its legs are bent the wrong way by my blade but are not broken. “Die!” I scream, swinging my sword around to hack it again at the same time that an arrow zips through the air and strikes the spider’s body.
The spider drops to the ground like a puppet who’s lost a hand. Mindful that arrows might be cutting through the air at any moment, I hurry in the direction of the next spider, this time with more of a plan in mind. Pulling back my sword, I aim to jab at the body of the beast, caring not for the legs of which, quite frankly, they’ve too many.
Just as I’m to plunge my sword, a spider catches me from behind. I shriek, genuinely caught by surprise, then find I’m the victim of two spiders who, with legs that seem to move faster than light, are trying to entrap me in another tangle of arachnid-goo. I try at first to steady myself, aiming my sword at one of them—which one I ought to strike first, I can’t figure—when suddenly the one I wasn’t eyeing springs on me and my world is knocked sideways.
On my back, I kick and shout and swing my sword in fourteen directions, I’m quite sure. Each time my eyes open, there’s another set of hairy spider legs in my face, poking and moving and flinching. We’re so outnumbered. I scream out, thrusting my sword. Its leg deflects my blade like it’s nothing, then jabs down and pierces through my chest, holding me to the ground. I scream again and drive the sword forward, this time scoring right where I mean to: in its fat little body. The creature titters and clicks, falling to the side and taking my sword with it, the hilt whipped out of my hands.
The second spider is suddenly grappled at by Brains who, surprisingly, clings to the creature with a strangely playful sort of dexterity. She cries, “I am distraction!” with what I reluctantly might call glee, and rolls away into the surrounding fog of war, possibly never to be seen again.
I grab the spider’s leg that was stabbed through me and, with two sick growls, I pull the cursed appendage out of my chest and climb to my feet. From the spider’s still carcass, I unsheathe my sword quickly.
“Winter,” he calls out.
I turn. John has emerged from the dust and the horror, his eyes burning deep and hungrily, his face rigid. I could just jump into his big strong arms and cry with manic ecstasy or furious despair, for how desperate my emotions are at the moment.
Instead, I say, “Where’s the stone?”
“There’s too many of them,” he says, answering a question I didn’t ask. “We have to run. We have to give up this stupid quest and run.”
“We need to complete the mission, John! The stone!”
“There is no stone,” he spits back, exasperated.
I only have a second to express my utter confusion to him when another arrow zips past my face. I have to wonder who the hell this mystery archer is aiming for, as nearly every shot I witness is a near-miss to my head.
John clasps my hand and pulls, dragging me through the fog and the noise. There are spider legs, growling, hissing and hollers in all direction. “Pull back!” I hear someone else shout. “Run!!” cries a woman, though John and I area already well on our way away from the scene, rushing toward one of six different tunnels that seem to lead out of this place.
Within the tunnel, the noise of the battling echoes horribly into my ears. Screams and battle cries swim around me like furious, pained ghosts. Who are we leaving behind? Who are we abandoning so selfishly?
“I can’t do this!” I shout out. “They’re our friends, John, our family. We can’t just leave them!”
From behind me, there’s a voice: “We’re here, rabbit.” I turn, shocked to find Jasmine and Marigold, their hands locked and their hair an utter mess. I’m not sure why that’s the first thing I notice, but it is. “Lead the way.”
Ash. Will. My innocent, clueless Raise. The Chief …
“They’re still in there,” I complain. “They’re all—”
“There are many tunnels,” says Jasmine, “and many ways. They will find us. Hurry, rabbit. Make speed.”
I push on with John’s hand gripping mine. Several times as we climb and shove through passages and oblong tunnels, I worry my hand will pull right off. I don’t even have a moment to consider the fact that it’s my old John who’s got my hand. He’s back, as if he never died, and we’re escaping the underground lair of Shee together, as if we were just on another one of our crazy adventures.
I wonder if it ever dawned on me, truly dawned on me, that I have John back. He never, in fact, left me.
And he never will again. “This way,” he says, pulling us down a left tunnel when the pathway forks. “I see the light of day.”
For some reason, I’m surprised. “You still see sunlight? Even after …?”
“Guess a fall at Garden didn’t really kill me,” he grunts back, the sarcastic tongue of my old John returning just in time to make a joke of his own death. “Guess I’ve just been in a bit of a daze this whole time, huh? Not really dead, not really alive, just almost alive.”
“Spider!” cries out Jasmine.
I push ahead of John, my sword becoming an extension of my hand as I effectively poke a very long, steel-forged finger through the leggy monster in our way. It shudders horribly, then stops moving, save one of its legs that keeps insisting on twitching. We climb over the fell beast as though it were a jungle gym.
“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” I murmur quietly.
“What? That I’m still full of my own blood? Yeah, I’d considered it too,” John mutters, expressing a conclusion that I had, in fact, not considered.
“I’d rather think you’re just special,” I say back. Yes, we’re having this sweet dialogue as we’re running for our lives, the four of us chasing through tunnels deep in the earth and scrambling for the surface.
“I was never special,” he spits back, sounding dark. We make a sharp right turn and crawl up a tunnel that bends almost too far up to climb without sliding back down. Every step we have to find purchase with our feet. “I was just unlucky, over and over.”
“We’re certainly lucky right now,” I remark.
“Not really. We’re all gonna turn to dust.”
Still climbing up the hole, I frown, thinking on his words. “What did you mean there’s no stone? Earlier, when you said it?”
As I reach for my next grip, the sword slips from my stupid fingers and, whizzing right past Jasmine and Marigold, it lands at the bottom of the tunnel with a loud and horrible clang.
“Forget it,” says Jasmine, reading the look on my face. “Keep moving on. We don’t need a weapon anymore.”
“That’s my sword!” I cry out.
“We’re almost there,” shouts John. “Keep pushing.”
With deep misgivings, I continue to climb. I picture the sword just sitting there, lost in the tunnel, abandoned just like my friends, no matter how little I knew them. They were my family, all of them, and I’ve just left them to fend for themselves, to turn to dust in front of Shee, to spend
the last seconds of their Undead existences knowing that, in the end, Winter was a coward. Winter ran to save her own ass, just like Claire would’ve done. Perhaps, in the end, we are not so dissimilar. Perhaps I’ve just been “in a bit of a daze” too.
We finally ascend to another horizontal tunnel, this one considerably larger. At its end, the tunnel feels more like a hallway that curves and slants upward, and quite soon, we see trees.
It’s a strange sensation when the silver lightlessness washes over us, knowing that we’ve spilled into sunlight after being dowsed in darkness for so long … I can’t see the brightness of the sky the way a Human can, but I know without a doubt it’s there.
We don’t stop moving. Continuing into the woods, I consider the things Empress Shee had said. “Twenty-one,” I murmur, thinking on the number of spiders in the cave. “She must have her whole army with her, all of them.”
“The spiders?” murmurs Jasmine at my back. “Yes, I thought that too. I think we’re alone out here in these woods.”
“And we’re only four of us,” I mutter, stopping near a tree and placing my hand on it, as if I were stopping for breath. John comes to a halt too, turning irritably to me and frowning. “I still can’t do it,” I tell him, then beseech Jasmine with my eyes. “I can’t put this on my conscience. We can’t leave them behind. Even Ann’s head is in there, somewhere.”
“And a Human,” Jasmine responds. “Yes, and he’s likely to die in there. The Shee-lady has too much power. Any Unliving who dare step near her are turned to ashes, poor rabbits. Our best chance in doing anything to her is with a Human, and … and the only Human among us is down there grieving. And he’s likely dead by now.”
I stare at the ground near Marigold’s feet, lost in dark thoughts and darker feelings. My fingers have curled into fists and I’m furious at everyone. Even John.
Even John, who I haven’t had time to caress, to kiss, to love and hold and hate again. “If we’re so confident that we can’t go back in there,” I whisper, defeated, “then tell me, Jasmine … Tell me we have a plan.”