Dead Of Winter (The Beautiful Dead Book 2)

by Daryl Banner

  “I must admit—though I’m reluctant to admit it—but if she had to chase out of town with any Crypter … I’m certainly glad it was you.” He smiles respectfully, making his words sound like a compliment cased in gold.

  I want to correct him and say that I’m not a Crypter, but I’m not certain that’s true anymore.

  “Thank you,” I tell him.

  He rises from the bench and walks away, but I feel like our business is unfinished. There is so much more I want to tell him about his daughter, about the imminent war and the troubles lying ahead and how I’m not a monster, but nothing comes out. A careless wind throws a curtain of white hair into my face, and then the world is nothing but white, endless winter.

  Suddenly I feel a stab against my neck. Stunned, I turn around, expecting to find some crazy person with a knife, but no one’s there.

  Then I feel it again, except on my arm. It’s like a tiny needle, then another needle. I look into the sky, alarmed, and realize what’s happening. Quickly, I hurry across the Square toward the Town Hall as the rain begins to pour. It’s so sudden, I’d sooner believe the heavens decided to dump barrels of water over my head.

  The pain is unrelenting. I am being burned alive.

  It seems like an eternity before I make it to the steps of the Town Hall, and that’s where I collapse. Screaming, I claw at every step, dragging myself. For some reason, my legs no longer work. I pull myself up two steps, a third, a fourth. I have no idea how many are left and I can barely lift my head to see.

  I scream for someone to help me. I scream and I shout and then suddenly it’s like I don’t have a mouth anymore. Nothing happens. Nothing comes out.

  I grab at the next step, but it’s like I’m trying to thrust my hand through a room of thickened caramel. Then the very hand I’m reaching with falls off.

  The rain pummels me mercilessly, and considering there have been no new Raises, and even my Undead friends are dying, I have to wonder if the last surviving bits of dear Mother Nature herself are waking up to battle us, ridding our kind from the world forever.

  Washing us away.

  Nature’s own self-cleansing system.

  Then two mystery hands grip me by the shoulders and drag me the rest of the way up the steps, depositing me somewhere under the canopy and out of the rain. I can’t believe I’m still capable of processing what’s going on. I blink several times, but being flat on my stomach, I can’t manage to turn myself around to see my hero.

  Instead, I get this picturesque glimpse of the Square, where nearly every Human in all of Trenton has come out of their homes, awed at the rain. A man spreads his hands, letting it drench him. Two women have gathered buckets, collecting the rain and scrounging around for more containers. Children are running around screeching and laughing. An older couple stands by the stage holding each other, as if slow-dancing to music only they can hear. A pair of ladies are cackling hysterically, spinning around with their mouths wide-open to the heavens.

  My savior finally lifts me from the ground, cradling me in his arms. When my head is brought to the right angle, I find Gunner’s oily eyes, and he says, “Sorry I wasn’t quicker.”

  I try to make a joke, like, “I was enjoying the view,” but my mouth doesn’t seem able to work. All I can do is form a strange sort of lop-sided smile. I am in agony.

  Gunner brings me into the lobby and lays my body down on a bench-seat. I feel like a bag of turnips. “Blink if you’re comfortable,” he says. I’m pretty sure he’s joking, but I blink anyway. “As soon as the rain stops, I’ll get the dead doctor guy. Conner, Collin, Colvin. Sorry.”

  I try to thank him and my jaw falls off.

  He smirks. I won’t call it a revolted reaction, because Gunner doesn’t ever seem to express emotion. Anger and joy and fear all look the same on his face. Thinking quick, he loosens a shoelace from his boot, then ties it around my entire head, from chin to crown, securing my jaw in place. I bother not to thank him this time.

  “I didn’t know rain does this to the Dead,” he says, his voice low.

  I did. Last time, it was Grim and I, caught in it. It was the first day I met the Deathless Army.

  Gunner sits with me while we listen to the relentless downpour of rain outside. He says nothing. He’s become a statue, hypnotized by the party he’s witnessing through the glass windows. The elated oohs and fits of hysteria that reach my ears are so muted and twisted by the storm that it sounds like the ghosts of liquid memories. I’m drowning, slowly sinking, deeper and deeper into a lake of despair, and the whole world is waving goodbye.

  Even after Gunner’s saved me, my eyes still burn with pain at what he did to Benjamin. Or maybe it’s the rain in them. I look at Gunner now and all I see is that final, horrible moment of Benjamin’s Second Life. I see the crossbow risen with expert speed. Too expert. I hear my own shout and Benjamin’s last words being sealed within him, struck to the ground in an instant.

  And the promise I’d made to him. Gunner took that promise from me. Gunner … He’s broken my promise. These are the things I’m thinking as the little pellets of rainwater drip down my face, gently burning my cheek on their leisurely way to my chin.

  Look at that. I’m crying for the first time in this life.

  “The rain is getting lighter,” Gunner points out. Half an hour or more must’ve gone by. “You still with me?”

  “Yes,” I croak. I guess I’ve dried up enough to speak.

  “Do you know what that thing in the woods was?”

  A giant killer tarantula-monster? “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  I tentatively wiggle a few fingers on my gloved right hand. “Look.”

  He looks. He smiles, which kinda looks the same as him not smiling. “Good. You’re still with us after all. I’ll go speak to the doctor. Maybe he can help remotely.”

  “Okay.” My words sound bizarrely over-pronounced, what with my jaw that’s literally hanging on by a thread. Then I remember I lost a hand on the steps. “Hand.”

  “What?” Gunner takes a glance. “Hand?”

  “Hand,” I confirm.

  He nods, understanding. “I’ll get it for you. I’m sure that lady at the pink place can reattach it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure.” He scratches his chin, appearing pensive for a moment. The wind and the rain stirs on the other side of the windows and doors. “Better go before it starts up again. Never seen a rain like this.” He glances at me. “Try not to move. I’ll speak with the doctor.”

  “Okay.”

  Gunner leaves. I hear the front doors swing open—the sound of still-sprinkling rain rushing in with the chatter of men and women, all of them alive, all of them happy, all of them wet—and then the doors shut behind him.

  A silence passes that is not unlike another death.

  Slowly, patiently, I sit up. I’m almost dry. I can move, I discover. Trying not to press my luck, I very slowly test some weight on my left leg, then my right. Slowly, ever so slowly and as cautious as a cat, I make myself stagger to the door. One foot, then the other. One foot, then the other. I’m not heading for the door out, though; I’m heading for the door leading further in.

  And down.

  As I’m ever-carefully descending the stairs into the basement, I realize it’s my left hand that was first to fall off in the rain. My left hand. Again. I could laugh about it if I wasn’t so sure I’d literally rattle apart my ribcage and break an arm and lose my hipbone in the effort.

  When I arrive at long last to her cell, she’s silent. I say her name and she doesn’t react. I say her other name and she still doesn’t react. I tell her I love her and that I ate blood and that I feel him too. Yes, I sense him, I know him, and he’s that way, and he’s soon coming this way, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.

  She finally turns around. Her brains are still exposed, her nose missing, her left eye melted halfway down her cheek, she moans her favorite words: “I am Deathless.”
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br />   I lean my head against the door. “Me too, sweetie,” I choke. “Me too.”

  C H A P T E R – T W E L V E

  L O C K E D

  Staring up at Marigold while she repairs my body, I’m sad to say the fingers are still there.

  “I thought maybe I’d replace them with eyes.” She shrugs, hammering something into my hip. “But I doubt they will function. Otherwise I would’ve installed a tiara of eyes on my scalp. I’d be able to see all around me! Or perhaps a belt of ears … I’d never miss the latest gossip!”

  Snap, crack, pop. It’s the strangest sensation, lying on a table perfectly awake, feeling nothing except for your body jerking at every pound of the chisel and hammer. I amuse myself for a while thinking Marigold is mining for diamonds and ore in my abdomen.

  “Good as new!” she exclaims when I hop off the table. Indeed, I feel as normal as normal can be. All my fingers and toes wiggle, my joints bend, and my neck turns. I stretch my jaw, opening it wide, then shutting it. “See?” she says, giddy. “I know, I know. You don’t have to say it. I’m a genius and—and—and you don’t have to say it.”

  “You’re a genius,” I say, smiling.

  “Say it again!” She swats me on the butt. “Now go out and show the world how beautiful you are! Do tell them it was my work. Not that self-important Roxie who won’t even come in anymore.” Marigold huffs.

  I study my forearm and those bones I’ve stubbornly refused to cover. “Got any … spare flesh for my arm?”

  “Never thought you’d ask.” She giggles and opens a drawer to get some other tools out.

  I smile wistfully at her backside. “I hope someday we have so much work that you’ll never have to leave.”

  Her eyes light up. “You promise?”

  I wish I could.

  The streets are damp from last night’s rain, and I realize that, despite the slate-grey sky that always feels so like a permanent winter afternoon, it is the middle of the night and most of the Humans are asleep. Most of them were smart and filled every bucket and barrel they could find with the rainwater.

  I stop by Jasmine’s house on the way home, sitting across the cul-de-sac like an empty, abandoned box. She still hasn’t returned. I heard three men and a little girl from the Human Quarter dropped by to check on her backyard garden and greenhouse after the storm ebbed. At least someone is tending to it.

  The door to my house opens without protest. I find John at the table with a candle burning in front of him, the only light source in the house. The light from the candle spills in a million hues across the walls, the ceiling, the floorboards.

  He looks up. “Hey.”

  I’ve so missed his face. “Hi,” I return. With Marigold’s Upkeep of me, I probably look like new, showing no evidence at all of my near-second-death experience. She really is a genius at her craft. “Did you take advantage of the rain?”

  “Filled two buckets and half a vegetable canister.” He lifts a brow. “Did you get caught in it?”

  I think John forgets sometimes what the Dead can and cannot withstand. Or maybe I never told him. Either way, I’m not in the mood to educate. “Megan tried taking out her eye.” John makes a puzzled expression. “I’m pretty sure she’s trying to become a Warlock. To save us. Her parents are upset. Naturally, they blame me. Kinda. I don’t know.” I drop into the chair across from him.

  John stares into the flame. His eyes are smoldering, the way the candlelight plays across his face, accentuating his strong cheekbones and chiseled jawline.

  “I did a lot of thinking,” says John.

  I lift my chin. “Want to share?”

  He’s still staring into the flame. At this point, I’m just about prepared for anything he’ll say. To any bad news and horrible tidings and inevitable things like death and wars led by armies of flame, I feel downright invincible.

  “I’m not disgusted,” he finally says. The flame plays in his muddy irises, turning them into iridescent pools of brooding molten chocolate. I hate to sound too mushy or nauseating, but the beauty of rainbow candlelight—which used to fascinate me beyond anything the natural world could offer—holds nothing in comparison to the show of John’s strong, handsome face.

  “Of …?” I ask quietly.

  “You,” he answers. Not even so much as a smile breaks the stone he’s made of his face. “Me … Us … What we have. If anyone—If anyone were to hurt you, or try to come between us, or tell me it’s wrong to feel what I feel for you, or say it’s …” He licks his lips. I watch them now, studying his lips as they move, how they caress his every word. “What I’m trying to say is, I’d die for you.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “If it came to it, Winter …” He runs a hand along the table. I can hear the roughness in his hands. The work in them, the texture he makes of the table, of his skin, of the hours upon hours of work those whitesmith hands have performed their whole life long.

  Then his eyes finally meet mine, as if he hears my longing. I return his stoic glance with an unreadable one of my own. My foot touches his under the table. He doesn’t react. He only stares at me, his eyes almost appearing dangerous through the harsh glare of the candlelight. I let my foot graze his again.

  “I’d die for you,” he repeats, quieter.

  “I’d rather you not,” I admit with a smile. “I would … really miss your heartbeat.”

  I realize that, when neither of us is speaking, it’s the only thing I can hear. The soft drumming fills the room. Just like the first day I met him … the rhythm of John, my favorite song.

  “You can have it,” he says.

  His eyes smolder.

  “I love you, John.”

  What did I just say?

  “Winter.”

  His fingers pinch the candle flame, throwing his world into darkness. But I still see him.

  The table chairs go flying back, and our lips are locked again. I have no idea how he finds me so perfectly in the dark, but he does. And he does again, and again and again. He presses me against the wall. His serrated breathing is all I can hear.

  We flip. I’m pressing him against a wall now. He loses a shirt. I lose my shoes. Then he loses shoes, too.

  I stumble over a loose floorboard. John topples over me, and we’re laughing. And then we’re very much not laughing because our lips are locked again.

  This is a night in which I will forever argue that I, in fact, became alive. As alive as any girl with blushing cheeks and a pulse. As alive as any boy with real tears and a bad, stinging gash down his arm.

  I give myself to John. John gives himself to me.

  A long while later, the bed sheets are wrapped tight around our bodies. I feel him shivering, but as his own heat gathers enough for the both of us—and his heart calms down from a most gracious height—I feel him smiling into my neck as he drifts into another world of dreams. His strong arms close around me, and for once I’m trapped in a prison from which I hope never to be free. I’m a totally different person. I close my own eyes. I pretend-sleep, revisiting my life with John in the post, post, post-apocalyptic world where civilization has once again found its footing, and children are born.

  “Do you think we can coexist?”

  I stir, opening my eyes and abandoning the daydream I was having. Really, no matter if it’s day or night, when you’re dead, every dream is a daydream. “What?”

  “Coexist,” he repeats. “You and I. Do you think this … Do you think we can make this work?”

  I love his voice right now. It’s so boyish and curious and full of hope. I never thought I’d hear John sound like this. “You tell me.”

  “I think we can.” He squeezes me tighter.

  “I suppose I … can age with you, somehow.” I laugh. “Maybe Marigold is more talented than she knows. I can age a year for your every three.” He chuckles into my neck. “I can’t let my youth go that easily.”

  “But this is only our First Life,” he says. “When I die, you can just Raise
me. Then I’ll be yours forever.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Of course it is. Everything is.”

  The smile on my face begins to wither. “John.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have to tell you something.” I make sure my hand is gripping his. I’m not sure why that’s important, but it is. “We … haven’t had a Raise in months.”

  “I know,” he mumbles. “So?”

  “And we don’t know how Raises are … Raised.” I squeeze his hand again, though I’m not sure which of us I’m trying to reassure. “We looked through all the notes from the old Judge. From Enea, and … It just doesn’t make sense. Whispers. Mists. Helena has tried. I’ve tried. I think it might have been some sort of ‘arrangement’ with the old Mayor, to be honest. I think maybe the amount of Undead in the Harvesting Grounds was, well, finite. Limited. And, well … once the Whispers ran out …”

  I draw silent. He’s holding his breath, I can tell. “So … you mean there’s no more Undead?”

  “No more.”

  He turns me around. I look into his eyes, lost at the sight of him all over again. “Look at the world we live in. Anything’s possible. Look around you, Winter. Warlocks with magic eyes that can raise the dead. People who can walk and talk, just like human beings, with no heartbeats. Beautiful people. The beautiful dead, like you.”

  And then he goes in for the kiss, pressing his lips into mine, and how in the world can I counter that?

  I’m pacing the den, I’m stuck dwelling on all of the words John’s poured into my ears over the last several hours. He’s basically baked my emotions into a spicy casserole and I have no idea what to make of it.

  No matter how many times I dream it, the reality is, John and I will never have children. I cannot bear a child. The Dead don’t bear offspring that way, unless his fantasy of our “life together” included pulling some poor child out of the earth while they’re screaming and reassuring them over and over that they’re only undying, that there’s nothing to fear, that all the haze and noise and horrifying atmosphere is normal.