Dead Of Winter (The Beautiful Dead Book 2)

by Daryl Banner

  Time isn’t supposed to matter to an Undead. Maybe Grim was right. Maybe the world would be better off if …

  Maybe it’d be easier if …

  I scoop John up in my arms, lifting him from the only green bed of grass left. The whole mixed community of Living and Dead seem to stop what they’re doing, just to witness my next move. It’s like they’re afraid of what I might do, all of them, even the ones I’ve never met. For the first time since John’s death, I survey the destruction Grim has brought down on this beautiful, impossible place. I see all of the eyes and the mouths of the Undead who no longer burn with an eternal, hateful flame. I hold John in my arms, his head leaning against my arm, his legs dangling. He could be asleep, dreaming of funny things, bothersome things, a clever idea or two.

  It’s up to them to find their own peace. Mine left with the man in my arms, the man whom I will never leave.

  The only one left to blame is you.

  I carry him across the dead and dying Garden. No one follows, but everyone watches. The few patches of grass and bursts of green and purple that survived against all odds seem to smile at me as I leave.

  I don’t smile back.

  No one follows me, but with John in my arms, I’m never alone. The hole through which Grim’s Army came, that’s where I take my leave. I carry John through the winding tunnel. The only sound I hear are my own damp footsteps coming back to me.

  Emerging from the tunnel and into the wasteland beyond Garden’s moat, I continue without interruption. An Undead can walk until the end of days. I may do just that. I wonder how many days that is, exactly.

  As long as John never leaves, it could be all eternity.

  The harsh land seems to kiss my feet with every step. It seems to know I don’t fear it anymore. I’ve been here before and I’ve seen worse.

  You did this to yourself.

  The farther I walk, I realize there may be no one else for tens and twenties of miles in all directions. No one alive and no one dead. John in my arms, we are alone.

  John in my arms, we’re all we need.

  The rest of the world is gone.

  Trees engulf my vision. Dead trees. Pointy ones. Thorny ones. Fallen ones. Then dry lands, then rocky lands, then sands of varying shades of yellow and slate and nothing. When you cross the world of the dead, every terrain is like every other terrain.

  The land beneath my feet grows white and the ash in the air turns cold. I am marching now through the first snowfall I’ve ever seen with these dead eyes. I feel Claire welcoming me to her domain, a wretched place of endless regrets and bitter tongues from which there is no escape.

  It doesn’t matter to me, and John’s in my arms.

  The air grows thick with mist that kisses my skin, leaving a gentle, stinging sensation. I press on because I’ll never feel anything again. The enormous wall of a cliff emerges through the haze of cold and desolation. It’s toward this wall that I slowly head. I won’t be afraid of what’s about to happen, if anything at all, because Grim has given me the ultimate gift of invulnerability, as now nothing can hurt me ever again, and John’s in my arms.

  When I reach the foot of the cliff, I find only snow. Laying John down in the cold, my fingers claw into the white. I dig here, I dig there. My fingers sting mercilessly, but I feel nothing as I move with patient, uncaring hands the snow that has buried what I seek.

  I scrape away enough of the snow to disinter her head, still attached to an armless torso. Her long, colorless hair seems to disappear in the snow, and until I say her name, she does not stir.

  “Mom?”

  Her eyes, a sick hue of pale pink and nothing, twist to find mine. With a gentle lift of her brow, she seems to have trouble making her lips work at first. Her cheek twitches, the absent parts of her face—namely, all of it—seem to shift around uncomfortably, stretching, snapping itself in and out of place. I wonder if she’s made her face work at all since dropping off the cliff at the end of my steel sword.

  “C … C-Claire,” she murmurs at last.

  I find my bottom lip quivering. It’s the way it used to quiver when I was alive, just before I let out my pity-me tears. Every tantrum I ever threw seems to rush back to me, the way an ocean wave crashes into the back of your head and threatens to turn you over.

  “All is lost, mom.” I’m crying without tears. I feel it all breaking apart. I never confided in my mother, my whole life. She was cold and horrible. I was worse. “Mom, I can’t do this. I … I … I … I want to die and I can’t, I can’t because I’m already—I’m already—”

  “Claire.” It seems to be the only word she can say. The tiny bit of skin above her eyebrows pull in, as if to convey sadness.

  “I need my mom.” I’m not Winter anymore. She died with John. I’m Claire. My name is Claire Westbrook, it always was. “I need my mom back.”

  “I’m here, Claire.” This disgusting thing without arms because she obviously shattered when she landed here, this piece of a person who hardly has a face. “Mommy’s here. Claire. Please, please don’t cry.”

  “I can’t cry!” I shout at her, enraged suddenly. “We’re dead, mom. Deathless Queen. Mad Malory. Whatever you want to be today. I’m dead. You’re dead. John’s dead. I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to go home.”

  What the hell am I saying? Do I think the house in the north still exists? Do I think it’s still prom night and this was just one elaborate dream I had when I got back to the lake house? I must be losing my mind, because suddenly I’m begging my mom to take me home. I’m begging this piece of a corpse, this thing, I’m begging her …

  “Mom …” I wipe away the imaginary tears on my face with the whole length of my arm. My hand returns to me dry and I say, “Mom, I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes meet mine. I don’t care what they look like. I don’t care how ugly and horrifying they are, I still see my mom. I see the person who fixed my prom dress. I see the woman in the wheelchair and I see the three or four times she smiled at me.

  “You have nothing to apologize for,” she tells me. “Claire. I’ve waited so long for you to come back to me. I’m the one who’s sorry, sweetheart, I let the madness control me. I thought I’d lost you forever.”

  “Did dad die?” I ask suddenly. All of the questions of my life that have gone unanswered rush up my throat, catching in my mouth. The last memory of my dad is him in a hospital bed. He was poisoned by a cut of rusted steel. “Did he die in the hospital?”

  “He got better, dear.” Her scary face forms a smile. For some reason, I needed to hear that. I needed to hear that because maybe someday I’ll get better. “But I’m afraid I never did,” she adds, hissing every other word, her deformed mouth struggling with a syllable here and there. “Your father and I never knew what happened to you. Claire, you were …” Her eyes seem to search mine, those sickly pinkish things. “You were gone.”

  “I snuck out,” I confess instantly. “I snuck out and I ran away with Gill and my friends to prom.”

  “Yes, I know, sweetheart. They were the ones who reported you missing. Please, sweetheart. Claire. Put me out of my misery and tell me what happened.”

  After a moment of watching her horrible eyes as they pour pleadingly into mine, waiting for the story, yearning for it, I realize it’s not only my own past that desperately needs closure, but hers as well. My mother and I, we were twice torn apart from each other; once in the First Life, and again in the Second.

  So I tell her how I died. Running into the snowy woods with a boy who would eventually abandon me. The snowfall and the endless winter and the ice cracking below. The cold, the eternal, and the moment of clarity.

  “You froze,” she whispers, gently hissing through her teeth. “What a comfort, to finally know. I froze too, but in a very different way.” Her shoulders seem to shift, as though she would be reaching to touch my face, had she any hands or arms. “I was trapped in a wheelchair. I lost my legs and then I had lost my daughter. I felt so useless. I’d taken s
o much pride in my appearance, but after you were gone, I took pride in appearing vile, ugly. I wore my misery. Oh, I imagined a hundred different ways you may have died. Until I was brought into this Second Life, I spent every day hating that I could not be out there in the world looking for you. I hated my useless, inadequate body. Dead, long before I’d died. But the truth is, Claire, we are more than just our bodies.” She purses the black pieces of skin that still serve as lips. “I’m in pieces. I’ve fallen apart to nothing and I am still your mother. I’ll forever be your mother and you’ll be my daughter.”

  “I am Deathless,” I tell her suddenly. “His steel ring burns my fingers and I don’t know why. What happened, mom? What happened to me?”

  “The blood,” she answers. A gentle breeze picks up her colorless hair, making it dance. “It will take the death right out of you for a brief, beautiful moment. And a part of it will stay within you forever. Deathless, forever be.”

  “And him?” I watch her achingly, longingly, praying she will have another answer. The one I’m looking for. “John? Is there anything left in him? Or is his … or is his Anima …?”

  My mother’s eyes drift. I don’t know if she can see him, or if she’s even looking for him. She says nothing.

  The snow is still falling.

  “Please,” I beg, and I’m not certain who I’m begging anymore. I’m desperate. I’m lost. “Mommy, please …”

  I’m a child again. Claire, begging her mommy again. Claire, begging for yet another thing. The mist doesn’t even sting. The careless snow is coating my already white-as-winter hair.

  “You do realize what it would mean?” she asks.

  I watch her eyes. “Yes.”

  “He won’t remember you.”

  My gaze is cast to the wall of the cliff where John’s body rests. He looks so peaceful, sheltered slightly from the long and patient snowfall. What’s the price, I wonder?

  What’s the price for another Life with the man I love?

  “Our Second Life is far from over,” I say and realize at once, still watching John from across the drifts of white. “A second chance waits for us all.”

  “Claire …”

  I look down at my mother. Her eyes are light with a peace and happiness I’m certain she has yet to feel in this wretched world. Being the Deathless Queen couldn’t give her the peace she knows now. Being Mad Malory, or even Magnificent and Marvelous Malory couldn’t grant her the smile that crosses her ruined lips.

  “I’m coming back for you, mom.” A smile finds me too. “This is not your end. And this is not mine. It is the dead of winter, and we will never hurt again.”

  I bring John into my arms for our final journey.

  T H E F I N A L C H A P T E R

  F I R S T H A N D

  The Whispers are grey and white today. I’m kneeling before a hole in the ground and my fingernails carry the mud and earth. I lay John to rest. The snow isn’t yet falling here, but the world feels cold nonetheless. Gently, I place the stone on his chest, the one that protected him. I kiss his lips one last time, then put my love to bed with a blanket of earth. I still hold my own stone, pressed close to my unbeating heart.

  If I close my eyes and listen, I can still hear the gentle drum of his heart from the first day we met.

  I see the surprise in his face when he encountered me in the tavern. The wetness of his eyes. The red in his cheeks. His parted lips.

  “Wait.” I remember it so well. “Do you hear that?”

  “No.” His deep voice, the fear in his warm, brown eyes, the panic.

  From my pocket, I remove John’s ring. It’s been there ever since the day it burned me. I slip his ring on, and my skin reacts with a soothing whisper and a mist that starts to rise from it. I don’t ignore the pain; I embrace it with a smile and I look down at his grave and wait for the Whispers to answer me.

  “I hear nothing,” he’d said.

  I wait for the Whispers to answer me.

  Time to an Undead is a very strange thing, isn’t it? I can wait here for several hours and have it feel like the ticking of seconds. I can wait here for the rest of the day. I wouldn’t even know. We simply can choose to disregard time entirely. Maybe I can do just that.

  Maybe I can wait here forever.

  Days may pass. Days may be passing right now. Days that lift the remaining Humans from the ruins of Garden and give them strength to move on. Days that reconcile the newborn Undead with the Living there who know better. Days that watch the rebuilding of Trenton. Days that include the reuniting of old friends, Living and not.

  Don’t worry, you’re just dying—I rehearse the line in my head, just like Helena taught me, just like I taught little Megan.

  Undying, of course. Undying is what I meant.

  The passage of time is a numb and unknowing one. Weeks may pass as I wait here with John, never leaving him, not for a moment. His steel ring burns my finger, and I take it as a sweet reminder that he’s still with me.

  “Wait,” I told him, still straining to hear the sound, the sound of a gentle drum. What was it that I was hearing? “Just listen … Listen.”

  Months may pass. Megan may grow up. The baby Laura may have her first step—the sisters and the twins applauding little Laura. She turns one year old and Marigold makes her a cake, surely; a cake no one can eat.

  “Listen,” I urged him.

  The Chief may have a Dream and remember his name. With no more green fire in the world, they may rebuild Garden again. Nature’s green takes root, bringing life to the barren wastelands, quenching the thirst of a dry and dying planet, feeding the groaning bellies of plains and rolling hills and mountainsides. I can even feel it all around me, the green of nature’s roots sprouting in all directions, everywhere, for miles and miles, a big world bursting back to life. I can feel it like a distant dream.

  Years. I still wait for the Whispers to answer me. I never leave John’s side. I never take off the ring.

  Years more.

  I stay with him like I promised.

  The mist that hugs me goes almost unnoticed until I lift my chin to pay it mind. Are you listening? The winds stir, picking up dust and letting it dance around me in whirls of chaos and fun. It’s like … a gentle drum. I can almost hear laughter in the wind, laughter in the furious whispers. Funny, I’ve never heard anything pleasant from the whispers before, not until now. The wind howls so loud, for a second I can’t even remember my own name.

  Do you hear it?

  And his hand bursts forth from the earth.

  E P I L O G U E

  After the Dreaming Death has found you, it won’t matter at all what’s transpired in your Second Life. Quite suddenly, the only thing that exists is your First.

  His name is not Grimsky.

  He is neither the Green Fire nor the red, nor the Fury With The Eye nor the ghost’s rainbow.

  He remembers a pretty girl from his First Life. A girl he loved and lost. It was his fault. He remembers her and the fire.

  He remembers taking his own life too. He remembers the letter he wrote and how one of the last things he regretted was lying to the girl about what he did for a living. But he confessed it all in that letter. Surely someone would forgive him someday. Surely he would be absolved for all his wrongs.

  He remembers one of his last thoughts being: I’m so happy I’ll get to see her again.

  The fire may be out, but something still burns within him. He drops to his knees. He clenches shut his Eye, then releases all the fury in one blistering cry that’s certain to shatter the heavens, sunder the earth before him, cast lightning from the sky and emit a thunderous boom that rolls halfway around the world. When he opens his Eye, none of those things have happened, and he’s still alone.

  Maybe he’s finally realized that fire can burn many things, but it can never burn away a Waking Dream, when it at long last finds you.

  He reaches into his face and removes the green, glowing culprit. He lets it slip from his fingers and
doesn’t listen to where it ends up. He looks blindly to the left, sees his beginning and the girl and the fire. He twists his neck blindly to the right, sees an endlessness and a hundred regrets. He’s created a world for his love and finds there’s nothing left to set fire to.

  Table of Contents

  B L O O D

  H A P P Y

  S H I V E R

  B U R N

  D E F I A N C E

  A L L I A N C E

  C O E X I S T

  G R I M

  E Y E S

  S K I T T E R

  T H E P R O J E C T

  L O C K E D

  R E C K O N I N G

  O N S L A U G H T

  A F A M I L I A R P L A C E

  T H E B E A U T I F U L W I N T E R

  S O M E O N E E L S E ’ S H O M E

  E V E R A F T E R

  T H E N E V E R D R E A M

  D E A D O F W I N T E R

  F I R S T H A N D