Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3)

by Daryl Banner

  “Empress—” Shee stops herself, her face screwing up in thought. “Princess,” she echoes, curious. “No, I like that. I like that more, much more, oh yes. Princess.” She giggles, overcome, then lifts her bright purple eyes to the little Lock, who looks anything but bright and happy. “Yes, please! Bring me my Prince! I cannot wait another second to be reunited with my love!”

  Lynx turns his beady eyes on me. I know his thoughts. Remember our terms, his murky gaze seems to say.

  My mother asserts herself once again, more sternly. “You heard her. Hand over the—”

  “Lynx,” I say, cutting in and stepping forward. “Perhaps we can make this a more direct exchange. Lynx is the one with … with Grimsky.” My eyes move to him, careful that my words are plain. “Let Princess Shee hand the stone to Lynx, who will release his hold on Grimsky.”

  Lynx seems to enjoy that direction much more, his face lightening—or perhaps it is the excitement I’m seeing that plays in his greedy eyes. Yes, I’ve decided now, I much prefer him with the creepy green eye as opposed to these two slimy, beady ones.

  “Accepted,” mutters Lynx, then draws himself away from the tree.

  Grim emerges at last, stumbling behind him, his hands bound to the leash. Grim moves too slow, and twice the leash tugs harshly on his hands as he moves. I know that John is watching him with a dark hunger for vengeance in his own eyes. I know that Jasmine is glaring at the little Lock with a fury in her own, too. Neither of them will know or ever expect to know the sympathy that, even now, I still carry in my body for these damaged fools.

  Lynx passes by me on his way to Shee. He stops a step or two in front of me, his shadowy eyes lifting to meet mine. A tiny spider rests directly on one of them and Lynx minds it not at all as he whispers, “Any last words?”

  I turn to face Grim, the first person I ever thought I could love in this ruined world. His handsome face, pale as death. His sleek hair, black as a void. His lips part, the lips I’ve kissed many times long ago …

  In more than one Life.

  “Gill,” I whisper.

  He turns his head when I call him that name, and I watch the show of emotions play across his eyebrows, his only means of expression. Gill …

  I don’t have to ask and he doesn’t have to say it.

  “I forgive you,” I whisper to him, and I’m not sure if it’s a lie or if it’s something that might someday become true. Forgiveness is a cruel, untimely and unfair creature.

  “I let you die,” he whispers back.

  “I forgive you,” I say again.

  “They accused me of murdering you. I had to move far away. And the woman I later met and loved, long after I threw your life away, she lost everything in a fire. All I know how to do is burn … burn … I lived a life of lies and deceit and pain after you.”

  “I forgive you.”

  “I took my own life. And I swore, I swore I’d do better, if I had the chance to do it all again. This was my chance and I did it again, Winter, I killed you, I killed John, I burned it all down. It’s over. We don’t get a Third Life.”

  “I forgive—”

  He pushes his lips to mine. The world is gone in an instant and the poet’s lips are making a dream of my own. I haven’t felt Grim’s touch in so long, I’d forgotten truly the magic he and I shared. Before the deception. Before the betrayal. Before the Garden and the Green Fires and the Warlock’s Eye.

  For this one moment, it doesn’t matter what anyone’s done. For this one moment, I’m convinced that what we had long ago was real enough for the both of us.

  When he pulls away, I know it’s goodbye. I know it’s goodbye forever. I know I will never see Grimsky again. I know that, with that kiss, we’d both just let go of our First Life together, the misery of Claire and Gill and their last, cold night together in the dead of winter.

  “On with it,” grunts Lynx, tugging the leash.

  The little Lock leads Grim to his ever-waiting Shee, whose hungry eyes seem to have disregarded our kiss completely, as if she hardly noticed it. When the spider queen is reunited with her love, all is forgotten, and the ugly stone—the Anima Stone, my mother called it—is carelessly tossed to the ever-eager Lynx like it doesn’t mean a thing.

  Lynx stares down at the coarse, ghastly thing, as if he can’t with his own eyes believe what he’d just been given. He backs away from Shee, the leash and Grim and the world forgotten as his eyes stare longingly into the yellowish glowing glass.

  But I’m not watching Lynx. I’m watching Shee, the Princess Shee, the Empress Shee, the Almighty Master Of Spiders, the freak, the anomaly, the everything … I’m watching the expression of adoration as she clings to the thing she so adores. Her arms squeeze her Grim so tightly it’s a wonder he doesn’t break. But of course he doesn’t; a thing so already broken has nothing left in it to break.

  With his chin resting on her bony, inked shoulder, Grim turns his sightless face in my direction. Though his eyes are gone, I can feel him looking at me. Grimsky, somehow, staring at me through the nothingness, the lonely dark, the eternal void …

  “We had a deal,” Lynx quietly reminds me at my side, the fat rock in his palm glowing with a sickly hue.

  I feel the wind stirring up my hair as I watch the two hold each other tenderly, and for a moment, I forget that Shee even has insect legs. I’m convinced it’s just two people, two lovers, two Humans in love who embrace with the sweetness of eternity in their unbeating hearts.

  Grimsky, my poet, now and forever.

  “Deathless I am,” I recite, though no one in the whole world can hear me but Lynx. “Deathless, forever be.”

  This is a lot harder than I thought it’d be.

  It might be a silly play of my imagination, but in Grim’s colorless, handsome face, I can swear I see the hint of a smile on his lips. He looks almost peaceful. He looks almost Human. He looks almost … almost …

  “Ready?” asks Lynx, and I’m so impressed with his decency to ask that I don’t answer for a while, savoring this final moment with my poet.

  It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it? he once asked me as I hung onto a cliff, long ago. I don’t want to be helped, I insisted, annoyed at him, staring up at Grimsky’s welcoming eyes. He had such beautiful, dark and welcoming eyes.

  Then why are you hanging on at all? he asked. Let go.

  Let go.

  Without looking away from Grim’s pale, happy face, I remark: “Such love shouldn’t be separated.”

  “I know,” agrees Lynx with a dour nod. “I listened.”

  The stone pulses like some big ugly yellow heart and, in the warm calmness before us, Grimsky and Shee fall apart together and join the dancing wind in another sort of embrace … an embrace that’s certain never to let go.

  C H A P T E R – N I N E T E E N

  T H E N O W H E R E M A N

  There is a deep rumbling in the distance, almost like thunder. When I hear it, all I feel is calm in every bone of my body. The others have run ahead to scour the tunnels for survivors. What an ironic use of the term, calling any Undead a survivor.

  But we kinda are survivors. We survived death.

  John sits on the boulder next to me, his eyes on the side of my face. There is a chill in the air that has nothing to do with temperature and my mind is so far away, it’s a wonder I even notice that the love of my life’s there.

  “You alright?” he asks.

  I nod slowly.

  “Do you …” John bites his lip. “Do you know how to use it?”

  The yellow stone resting in my lap, he means. It’s been there for the last hour as I’ve been staring curiously at the sky. Even Lynx went to help search for the Dead, forgetting utterly about the stone and its power, once his own purposes with it had been fulfilled.

  I ignore his question and ask another. “Did it bother you when he kissed me?”

  John looks down, picking at his fingers. Even the way his hands move reminds me of the old John, the worker John, the whitesmi
th who beat against metals with heavy hammers, who always had the stains of grease and dirt on his mannish palms and muscled arms.

  “No,” he finally decides.

  “Why not?”

  “I could tell it was goodbye.”

  The Anima Stone is such an ugly, jagged piece of glass that has no business harboring such power. I don’t know why I expected it to be some beautiful, glowing piece of art. It isn’t even daunting or impressive.

  “I’ve missed you, John.”

  He’s still picking his fingers. We haven’t had a proper talk since his Waking Dream, what with being prisoners trapped in separate spider cocoons and all.

  “Yeah,” he agrees sullenly.

  I smirk at him. “‘Yeah?’” I repeat, annoyed. “‘Yeah?’ That’s all you got for me, really?”

  He turns his head now and those burning brown eyes smolder me. Somehow, his grey eye is no more; both of them are brown and tortured and heavy with unspoken words. And he doesn’t need to speak them at all, it turns out. He lifts a hand to the back of my head and draws my face into his, and I feel the tenderness and the strength of his hungry lips as they meet my own.

  It’s his kiss that tells me my John has returned.

  When our lips separate, for quite some time it feels like they never separated. I smile despite myself, revived, and watch as even the hardness of his own face softens. He licks his lips, then comes in again for yet another.

  Where words failed him, his kisses say it all.

  Ever since Shee’s departure of this world, the spiders seem to have lost all sense of organization—scattering, hiding or abandoning the underground lair altogether. From the bowels of the battlegrounds, the surviving Dead are brought outside. Ash staggers out of the cave first, Jasmine guiding her. Upon seeing each other, I rush to Ash and give her a tight embrace. She’s been through Garden’s fall as a Living and Shee’s madness as a Dead.

  “The Chief,” she tells me, her voice heavy, her eyes unable to meet mine.

  I nod, bring her head into my shoulder and hug her tightly. “He’s at peace now,” I tell her. I’m likely just trying to tell myself, feeling stupid in my miniscule, wimpy attempts at consolation. Maybe now the Chief and Helena might, in the ethereal plane of existence where all stray Anima goes, meet. There, I’m certain he’ll have the courage to tell her he loves her. And she will have the wisdom to hold back her sass and accept it.

  The tall teen girl was unlucky as well. Sara turned to dust right at the start of the battle, Willard tells me when he’s brought to the surface. He and Ash sit under a tree, despairing over their lost friends before taking to silence, letting the calm breeze play on their faces.

  Half of Brains is recovered. Somehow, her legs were torn off along with half her left arm. It’s like she’s back to the way I found her when I Raised her. “I … am …” She can’t decide how to finish that sentence. She’s set in a sitting position under a nearby tree where she stares peacefully into the sky, pondering that third word.

  I join Jasmine and Marigold at the mouth of the cave where Jimmy has taken to cutting into the walls with his nails. His fingers are red and bloody and his face is wet with tears of rage. Nothing the girls say can touch him. I fear that nothing at all in the world but Ann could touch him now. “All she wanted,” Jimmy grumbles. “Heroes die free,” Jimmy mumbles. “The things in this world,” he groans, just phrases and broken sentences as he keeps sniveling and muttering nonsensically. His fingers bleed and he digs and digs. Even across the way in the spider woods, we can still hear his sobs of despair.

  When I return to the remaining Dead, they fall silent. Marigold and her chipper cheeks. John and his brooding pout. Jasmine is hugging herself, patient. Lynx leans against a tree, flanked by Ash and Willard and a carefully-balanced Brains who seems to have taken to humming.

  My mother stands slightly apart from the rest, her steely eyes on me. For some reason, I feel the whole of them waiting on me to say something significant. My body hurts in so many ways, heavy with the weight of a hundred worlds and memories, I can’t bring myself to utter a single thing.

  “The Lock-stone,” one of them says suddenly, Ash. Her voice is solid, invigorated. “We have it now. It’s ours, right? Doesn’t that mean …” She looks to her friends for support, then returning her eyes to meet mine. “Doesn’t that mean we’re finally safe?”

  The yellow lump of mineral still in my hand, I shrug and say, “I suppose so.”

  “I feel stronger already,” mister Willie confesses.

  “Me too,” agrees Marigold, the cheeriness returning to her otherwise vacant eyes. “I feel like—like myself again!”

  I stare down at the stone. How can the presence of this ugly thing be responsible for so much joy and so much pain? I study it, my mind clouded and obsessed. This stupid, ugly thing that carried us across the land and caused us to lose so many of our friends along the way.

  “What now?” asks Ash. “Do we head back?”

  I frown. “Back? … Back where?”

  “To New Trenton,” she answers, as though it were obvious. “Where else? The Undead will receive us like heroes. The Humans will come to embrace us again, after hearing about the sacrifices we’ve made.”

  “And we’ll be returning with Julianne the Jubilant!” says Willard, inspired, turning to face my mother. “That’s what they call you, Julianne. You’re a hero to us,” he tells her, grinning with fiery passion. “Without you, we would be dust in a cave.”

  At that, my mother only issues one uninspired huff, then says, “I am anything but jubilant.”

  Jasmine keeps her face blank. John too, observing Ash and Will with a sullen stare. Lynx only twitches, whether tickled by a spider in his ear or otherwise. I imagine we are all thinking the same thing. We are the only ones who know Julianne’s true identity, that she is my mother, former Deathless King, Mad Malory, the one who made the world come undone.

  “Don’t worry on our losses. We’re all heroes now,” Ash says, misunderstanding my mother. “We saved Undeadkind! We ought to be celebrating. We will honor the lives of those we’ve lost and we will cherish—”

  “My name is Julianne Westbrook,” my mother says, her voice commanding attention, “but I have had many names.”

  Her eyes meet mine importantly. I watch her with eyes as blank as the endless grey sky above us.

  “Malory,” she mutters, letting it out, “was my first name in this Second Life. It was given to me when I was Raised by a kind woman named Brianne of the Seventh. They called me Magnificent Malory.”

  Ash seems confused, not following. Of course she wouldn’t follow just yet; she was a Human at the time of Mad Malory and doesn’t know the story. Willard’s face, however, reflects otherwise.

  “No, that’s a lie,” he decides, announcing it. “No.”

  “After I had my Waking Dream,” my mother goes on, “I learned I had a daughter. I spoiled my daughter and turned my back on my daughter and neglected my daughter in favor of friends, in favor of a career, in favor of riches and houses and clout. She died and I wasn’t there.” She’s saying all of this to me, now, her face heavy and anguished. “She died and I wasn’t there.”

  Willard, realizing her identity, turns slowly to me, comprehension stinging his eyes.

  “I tore off my face and adopted a new name. King of the Deathless, you might know,” my mother says to Ash, whose face now registers with alarm. “The Deathless King surely rings a bell. A funeral bell, perhaps.” She chuckles darkly, then tosses her crossbow to the ground. “Whether it harms you to hear it or not, I am not what I was before. My mistakes cannot be forgiven and I don’t want them to be. I’m at long last reunited with my daughter and I have played my part in saving our kind.” Her eyes turn tender, and in this moment, I’m touched by the familiar face of my mother, showing through the false one somehow. “Return to the City of the Dead, if you must. But I cannot, I will not go with.”

  “Neither will I,” decides Jasmine. As
h and Will turn to her, startled. “I am not alive. I am not one of them. I don’t belong there.”

  “I don’t either,” says Lynx, licking his lips. “I’m hated by all … and rightfully so. I played my part too.”

  Marigold makes a strange chirping sound, drawing our attention, and then she says, “I want to be where my friends are. You are my friends.” She smiles brightly, all her teeth showing, her fingers wiggling, even her ears. “You’re my home and I’m at home wherever you are.”

  “This isn’t right,” grunts Will, twitching with a furious anger he is, most visibly, holding back. “None of this is right. No. Not right. NO!”

  My mother is about to say something when, quite suddenly, Willard lunges for her, a scream of rage wresting out of his throat and shattering the peaceful air. Jasmine and Ash are quicker, grabbing hold of him and keeping his flailing hands from reaching my mother. He doesn’t relent, pressing and pushing against them until his elbow crunches into Jasmine’s cheek—a snapping sound echoing across the field—and he breaks free from their clutch, tearing after my mom.

  She lifts the crossbow with a second’s notice. Will stops, her readied weapon aimed at his nose. The rage still sends tremors down his every limb as he freezes there, furious, practically snapping with bared teeth.

  He turns finally, surveying the alarmed faces of all of us who just paid witness. His look of anger is traded for one of deep sadness. “But why?” he asks simply. “Why?” His eyes find Ash, his friend. “Even you?” She can’t seem to produce an answer, pressing her lips tight and hugging herself. “She’s … This … But this is the Deathless …”

  “We’ve all done wrongs,” says John, to the surprise of all, even me. “We’ve done bad things we aren’t proud of. This woman and her Deathless Army, they’re responsible for the deaths of my parents. They’re responsible for the deaths of many of our loved ones. Mayor Megan’s own brother, even. But she is also the reason Winter is with us.” His eyes land on mine. “We all have our demons.”