Death

by Madhuri Pavamani

  And I was right.

  As soon as that bitch hit the ground, she was up again and flying at me. She cut across my lower right arm as I swept Simone up and over, slicing through her wrist as we passed one another. I could see bone in my arm, but that damage paled in comparison to Veda’s near-severed hand.

  “You unbelievable piece of shit!” she shouted as her hand dangled at the wrist, then lifted her weapon and lopped it off herself. “You thought that was going to stop me, Dutch?” She laughed and grabbed a scrap of dirty cloth lying on the table in the corner of the room to wrap her stump. “Come on now, big brother. You know me better than that.”

  What I knew was the unending, bullshit chatter was part of her strategy. It was Psychological Warfare 101 and it reeked of immaturity and unsophistication, and if I were a different man and she were a different woman and we didn’t have years under our belts of despising each other, if we weren’t from one of the most fucked-up families in the history of fucked-up families, I would have maybe felt sorry for her. I might even have taken her aside and let her know when up against skilled fighters, the best killers from The Gate, the coldest deadliest motherfuckers walking this planet, pointless chatter was certain death and she was better off moving in silence. But I was Dutch Mathew and she was my sister, Veda Mathew, and there was no fucking way I was going to help her do anything but die.

  “Are you sad about your girlfriend?” Veda asked, and moved behind Juma, kicking her lifeless body, hoping her words and actions would get a rise out of me. “How many lives does she have left now, Dutch? Three of them belong to me.”

  I glanced at Sevyn on the floor and wondered at the symmetry of the tableau, she and Juma lying opposite each other, casualties of this game of lives. There had to be some meaning in it, a message from the gods of death or life or fuckery—because trust me, there was a god of fuckery, there had to be. And when I died and went to wherever the dead go, I fully intended to seek out that bastard and let him know I was not amused.

  Veda moved to kick Juma again and I slid into her sideways, from an angle she least expected, and took her feet out from under her. Before she could recover, I was on top of her, my knees pinning her arms to the ground as I wrested her blade from her bloody fingers.

  “Rani!” I shouted into the dark space and heard the injured Keeper approach. “Pull Juma back with you and cover her.”

  My gaze never left Veda as I shouted to the last person I ever expected to side with in a battle. Rani was a mess but with her one hand she grabbed Juma around the ankle and pulled her back into the dark corner.

  “That’s so cute.” Veda craned her neck around me and sneered. “Let me guess, Dutch. Every time sexy brown thing over there dies, you go and find her and nurse her back to health?” She laughed and spat in my face and it took all of me not to wipe her smirk away forever.

  Veda caught me staring at her and her eyes widened. “What, asshole? Don’t like me talking about your girlfriend? What are you going to do about it, Dutch? Huh?”

  She went on and on like this and I knew she was goading me into something, anything at all because she believed that would be her chance to wrestle me off her and either kill me or escape, but that wasn’t happening. Now or ever. That didn’t mean for those five, six minutes Veda was cackling like a maniac about slicing Juma to bits and the black magic running through her veins and how Khan was going to string me up and feed me alive to the vultures I didn’t want to take my knife and cut out her tongue, because I did. I thought of about six different ways I could do it. But she and I were past that shit.

  “Dutch! Come on, kya?!” Rani shouted from behind me. “Kill her already before her goddamned voice kills us both.”

  Veda kicked the ground, her legs free and mobile as my knees kept the rest of her pinned to the ground, but fuck that shit. I leaned back, reached under my shirt to pull out my short blade, and sank it into her thigh. No words, just action.

  She screamed and cursed and swore I would die for any further transgressions against her person—she literally used those words because once upon a time Veda went to law school and firmly believed speaking such nonsense made her sound smart—but she couldn’t move and that was all that mattered to me.

  Unlike Rani, I had no problem with her carrying on. I’d tuned her out the second her blade sliced through Juma’s chest.

  “You don’t honestly think this pussy is going to kill me, do you, Rani?” Veda laughed as she changed tactics, engaging Rani when she couldn’t get a rise out of me. And part of me applauded her scheming, it was rather brilliant going after the Keeper with the shorter fuse. The other part of me didn’t give a fuck because if Rani got any ideas in that head of hers and started acting a fool like Veda, I’d just kill them both.

  I’d been wanting to kill Rani for a while now.

  And I fully intended to kill Veda.

  In due time.

  “I know you’re smarter than that, Rani,” Veda said to the back of the room as I pressed my knees into her arms harder and she grimaced but she didn’t move. “You know Dutch is too soft to finish this fight. You know it’s going to be up to you and whatever you were plotting with my stupid mother. You didn’t know I saw the two of you, noticed you over the years, spending all kinds of time together, whispering like lovers, did you?”

  “I even told Daddy,” Veda kept up her one-sided conversation, “to watch you, that you were making moves on Mummy, probably manipulating her with sex and power and whatever else Mummy wanted out of this life. But he just laughed and told me to take his word for it, even you wouldn’t want to fuck Mummy.”

  Before I could consider Rani’s reaction to Veda’s rants, before it even crossed my mind to think she cared or was listening at all, Rani pounced, pushing me out of the way in a desperate bid to get at Veda. But she had only one hand and when she realized the minimal damage she could inflict with it, she stood and resorted to the steel toe of her boot instead. Smashed into the side of Veda’s cheek, again and again, until I put my body between Rani and Veda and made the one-armed Keeper halt her assault.

  Veda’s eye socket and left cheek appeared broken and sunken in, but it made no difference. As soon as Rani backed off and I shifted, Veda spat blood and continued her verbal assault right where she’d left off.

  “See? I told you, Rani.” Veda spat at me, blood and spittle mixing with all the other gore caked on my jacket. “Total and complete pussy. He won’t even let you kill me!”

  I watched Veda and wondered how she and I shared blood and bonds. Where did the similarities exist? Was there ever a moment in this life where she mattered to me?

  “I cannot wait until the next time Daddy straps you to that table. I’m going to be there and I’m going to help him and you know what, motherfucker? I’m going to carve you up myself, with my hands and my own set of knives, you pathetic piece of shit.”

  I smacked her across the mouth with the back of my hand because Rani was right, this bitch needed to shut the fuck up. And for five, maybe six blissful seconds, the room fell into a hushed quiet and it was goddamned glorious.

  Until her laughter cut through the peace.

  So I hit her again, this time a fist slammed into her already-crushed cheek.

  Veda spat blood and laughed.

  “Bitch,” she sneered. “I want to see you kill me. Fuck you, Dutch, and all your soul-searching, life-contemplating bullshit, forever worried about who gets to live and who must die and how all of it wears down your oh-so-weary shoulders. Boo-fucking-hoo. Daddy was right, I should have been a Keeper, not you!”

  Veda caught my eye and for a second she and I saw each other for our true selves. And then that second passed and she opened her mouth and I knew it was going to be more of the same insane bullshit.

  “Fuck you, Dutch.”

  Without a word or much fanfare, I dragged Simone across the delicate skin of Veda’s throat, cutting her deep, slicing her larynx, silencing her post-curse. Her eyes bulged with the realizatio
n her pussy-ass big brother had the balls to damn near decapitate her. Then she gasped, choked on her own blood, and died.

  The words of Mark Twain came to me in that moment of fratricidal silence—“But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind”—and I hoped Veda’s was the exact opposite.

  I stood and wiped Simone on my jeans, then slipped her under my belt, and stepped around Veda’s body. Rani joined me and after a few beats of fraught silence, I looked over and met her stare.

  “Didn’t think you had it in you, bitch-ass motherfucker,” Rani deadpanned.

  “Fuck you, Rani,” I replied.

  “You wish, asshole,” she said with death in her eyes, and all of her sounded serious but maybe somewhere in there, between the spaces of our words, existed bits of strange affection. “Khan’s going to buy a brand-new set of cutlery to deal with you after this.”

  I shot her a look and she shrugged.

  “How does it feel?”

  “How does what feel?” I asked as I kicked any weapons near Veda’s body into the far corners of the room lest she pull a Glenn Close à la Fatal Attraction and rise one last time.

  “Ridding the world of the menace that was your baby sister,” Rani replied as she watched me move around Veda’s body until I circled back to her side. “For all the noise she was making, her death was rather poetically silent.”

  I looked down at Rani and almost-smiled. “Fitting.”

  “Timely.”

  “Necessary.”

  “And so goddamned satisfying.” Rani smiled wide. “The way you cut her open without a word of warning. Thank you, Dutch.”

  I raised a brow and shook my head in slight disbelief. “You’re welcome, Rani.”

  “I still fucking hate you,” she added. “But I do appreciate the art of your kill.”

  “Good,” I concurred. “Because I hate you, too. Now, let’s get out of here. It smells like shit,” I breathed, and coughed.

  Rani glanced at our kills sprawled on the floor, bloody messes of gangly limbs and long hair, brown skin and big eyes.

  “We can just leave them, right?” she asked.

  “That was my plan,” I replied, and checked my phone. Juma had been dead one hour and seven minutes. Too early to start making my lists.

  As if able to read my mind, Rani glanced in Juma’s direction and asked the question I often found dancing along the furthest edges of my consciousness whenever Juma passed: “Is she coming back?”

  “I hope,” I replied, and moved to Juma’s side.

  “Stop.” Rani wrapped her stump and collected her weapons scattered around the room.

  “Stop what?” I asked as I felt for Juma’s pulse.

  “I saw her look at you,” Rani said with a grimace. “She’s coming back.”

  “A fact you apparently find quite pleasing,” I said as I pulled Juma into my arms and stood tall.

  “It’s kind of gross,” Rani stated as she watched me, and I girded myself for some bizarre lecture on sticking with my kind and how Keepers need to perpetuate ourselves and all kinds of other bullshit I’d heard repeated over the years. Instead. “All that affection makes my skin crawl.”

  I laughed and waited for her to slip into her jacket, took one last glance at Veda—even though I knew she was dead, I couldn’t help making certain—and departed. As soon as we stepped into the dark and stinking hallway, I could hear those goddamned bats overhead, as if they knew I hated them and made a point of dipping and swooping to keep me on my toes.

  “Come on, Rani,” I called out as she followed behind, chuckling to herself, at my expense no doubt. “I want to get out of here and to the portal.”

  “Three things I’ve learned since rescuing you from the clutches of Khan,” she said with what sounded like laughter in her voice, “you are disgustingly in love, you’re not the pussy I always suspected, and you’re fucking weird about animals.”

  I glanced back at her like Huh?

  “You’re afraid of bats and you talk to roosters. Case closed,” she replied, and even if I wanted to say something, I couldn’t because she kind of had me with that one. For god’s sake, I had pointed out Winston to her, mostly because I needed someone else to acknowledge his bullshit. “Also, I hope you’ve considered the fact that you can’t take her through the portal with us.”

  Rani’s blunt truth sucked the life out of me.

  I knew I couldn’t take Juma through the portal, but the words were bumping around inside my skull. Rani gave them life and, without meaning to, made everything feel very goddamned real. And impossible.

  “You did consider that, right?” Rani persisted. I pushed open the door to the castle and we stepped into the dark night, walking in silence for a few minutes, moving around the bodies of Black Copse Juma and I had killed earlier, as I wrapped my head around the current situation.

  “It’s pretty far to walk to the next town,” Rani continued. “And not like lover girl’s a slight thing.” Rani’s eyes ran over Juma’s body and came to rest on her hips.

  “Jesus fuck, shut up.”

  I stopped walking, turned sharp with Juma in my arms, and her feet wound up kicking the tiny Keeper. Rani grimaced and shot me a dirty look, but remained quiet, and even though I knew nothing had changed between the two of us—she hated me and I goddamned motherfucking hated her—there seemed the chance that in another time, another place, where lives weren’t made of steel and blood, and we weren’t birthed into a cesspool of shit and viscera, we might be friends.

  Or at least maybe wouldn’t have spent the bulk of our lives gnashing teeth and spitting venom.

  “The Dosha warn against attempting to take a live body through the portal,” I spoke aloud as an idea took shape in my head. “We are forbidden from transporting anyone ‘not of The Gate.’ Those are the words of our oath.”

  Rani stared at me with a look on her face like she was waiting for me to utter something intelligent.

  “Juma’s dead,” I stated the obvious.

  “Juma is not of The Gate, Dutch,” Rani warned. “She will be ripped to shreds.”

  “But she’s dead,” I repeated as we walked along the path headed in the direction of the portal, the dark woods quiet but for the sound of our footfall.

  “I heard you the first time,” Rani hissed in irritation. “Your desperation is making you stupider than usual.”

  “No, Rani, desperation is forcing me to think outside the box,” I said, countering her logic. “No one has ever tried it because no one has felt the need, probably because no Keeper has been stuck in the middle of this godforsaken shit-hole of a forest with their dead lover in their arms. This is not desperation, this is fucking brilliant.”

  Rani stopped walking and I turned back to find her staring at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  She approached and I noticed how gaunt and pale she appeared. Anyone else would ask if she was all right, see if she needed anything, maybe find out what had happened back there in that dark room in that decrepit castle when she fought my traitorous bitch of a dead wife. It was her bad luck she was stuck out here with me because I didn’t give a fuck about any of that. I just wanted to get the three of us into the portal and out of Romania.

  “This is not brilliant at all,” Rani said as she jabbed her remaining pointer finger in my face. “You are messing with her life.”

  “She is dead!”

  “Just walk, Dutch.” Rani stepped around me and headed up the path. “Be a man for once in your goddamned life and walk her out of here.”

  Rani touched the tree that was too large to really be a tree but was also strange enough to be right at home in this place of no life, little light, and maleficent energy. A door cracked open and awaited her entry.

  The portal.

  The one portal in The Gate with no Dosha and an exit to anywhere you wished. This place was such a shit-hole that if you were unfortunate enough to wind up here, the least The Gate could offer was an exit ticket straight to an e
mpty beach in the Maldives.

  “We’re getting somewhere, Dutch,” Rani whispered, and I wondered if the trees had ears. “Shema always believed Veda was the key to it all. Cut her down and Khan would tumble with ease.”

  “Fuck Shema,” I growled.

  “Fuck you!” Rani snapped. “How dare you speak of that which you know nothing? Carrying around so much anger is a waste of time. Put it toward killing Khan instead.”

  “The fact you believe Shema’s bullshit proves you’re a fool, Rani,” I replied, hardly moved by her emotional outburst. “Veda’s death will not crush Khan’s resolve, it will only fuel it. And if you believe the Black Copse is tied to Veda, I have no words for you. The Black Copse is all Khan, he birthed them, he controls them. The fact he allowed Veda to run the show for a minute was nothing more than a perverse performance piece for his own amusement. Trust she was little more than a figurehead. He always assumed he would bully or blackmail me into accepting that crown of rot and malfeasance, his mistake was never considering I might kill him first.”

  My words shocked Rani into silence.

  “You and Shema were so worried about Veda,” I scoffed. “You fools should have been worried about me.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: DUTCH

  It was true.

  Those idiots spent years focused on everything and everyone but me.

  They liked nothing better than to harp on my lack of desire for unfettered power or my distaste for all things gratuitous—it was a means to justify their bad acts. Those committed against me and others. It allowed Khan to eat his meals at the same table where he carved me for the kill. It made it easy for Shema to set aside her role as a mother and turn a blind eye to the sins of the father. It puffed up James’ chest and satisfied Rani’s need to feel strong and capable and equal to her male counterpart. It validated Veda’s very existence.

  And more than anything, that version of Dutch Mathew—the tormented world-weary soul—afforded me every second of every day since I’d crossed paths with Juma.

  That version of Dutch Mathew, the one they expected and needed, made it so my evolved self could fuck up all their twisted and deranged plans. Khan never expected me to give myself over to The Gate, but I did so for Juma. James never expected me to kill him, so he let down his guard and found himself on the wrong end of a blade. And Veda, sweet charming Veda, so convinced I didn’t have it in me, until she learned I did.