But the ill sensation strikes me first, again, this time twice as bad, enough to fold me over and bring me to my shaky knees.
I glare at the Lock from the top of my face. “I’m going to put a sword through your—”
And then my left hand starts to disintegrate.
It was only a matter of time. The Lock, at last able to turn me to dust … My left hand gone, my left arm begins to crumble.
So, this is how it ends. This is my end.
It isn’t until he’s gone up to my elbow that I think to drop my sword and grab the box of stones I’d fastened to my belt … the stones Megan gave me. One finds its way to my palm …
The stone, white-hot, it burns my unliving flesh.
The effect is instant. My arm stops crumbling to dust, and the queasiness vanishes. The stone I’d pulled out, it’s furious and green in color, vibrating.
My left arm might be gone, right up to the elbow, but this stone, green and angry, it protects me.
“Nice eyeballs!” I shout at the Lock. I reclaim my weapon, bare my teeth, and throw it blade-first at him like a mighty javelin.
I was never a good aim. The thing goes past him and hits the pavement with an ugly clang, missing its target entirely.
But my action inspires many others. From nowhere I can see, war cries bellow out from all directions, and chaos explodes. From the tops of buildings, people emerge throwing shrapnel and steel pieces, much to the pain and agony of Deathless below.
Even the just-a-second-ago organized crowd of the Town Square has scattered into screams.
My eyes instantly search for my companions in the crowd, for Jasmine and Megan and the others—but all is chaos and rage and noise.
Then I spot the Warlock disappearing in the crowd. Clouds of ash fire out as if from cannons, but to my great pain, I know otherwise: He is without restraint killing any Undead in his way from here to the gates.
Too quickly to have noticed right away, the King—or shall I call her by her true name, Malory—is rushing away just the same, and only in a matter of seconds is lost to my eyes.
Even bladeless, I will not give up.
“Don’t you run away from me you coward!” I scream out, darting off the stage. I don’t even regard the cage of heads that the King left behind which Grimsky is now gripping like a blanket, passing it on my race to catch up to Her Mad Highness.
The stone burns in my quiet fist, my only remaining weapon.
As I cut through the crowd of dueling Deathless and Undead, I narrowly miss someone’s arm flinging by my face. The next moment, a piece of metal slices through the air like a ninja star, lodging itself in the back of a decayed man-thing. Pursuing the King and her dwarven minion, my right arm pushing through the battling mobs, I realize how I might mirror my own Raise, the remainder of my left arm dangling …
The Warlock, wherever he is, was, and has gone, left a frighteningly thick ashen trail in his wake. I cringe, even running as I am now, at the thought of how many of my friends he’s turned to dust in his effort to escape.
When I round the corner of a building in pursuit of Mad Malory, I’m frozen by the sight of John in the midst of hacking at a walking skeleton-thing with no jaw.
John.
He grunts, one final dramatic blow, and slices the thing in half, crying out, “Die, you murderous, soulless, damned!!”
Even in pieces, the skull twitches like a bug on its back, dancing in slow desperate circles.
“I think you killed it,” I mutter.
He faces me as though prepared to fight, his eyes intense, his mouth locked. I can see the anger’s overtaken him like a drug, every minute of his tortured history extended violently through his hand to the sharp and deadly tip of his blade. With my left arm nearly gone, I wonder if he recognizes me at all … if he even regards me as one of the enemy.
Then he says, “I’ll never be able to kill it.”
The agony in his eyes … I know what he really means with those words. If only it were so easy to reach into him and fix all the agony and loss he’s had.
“I should’ve told you sooner,” I tell him heavily.
His gaze is heavier, and he says, “The camp believed in you. The chief led them here. They are fighting too, the living among your dead.”
My face softens. “Don’t die, John. I kinda need you.”
“You sure?”
Getting back to the priority at hand, I ask, “Did you happen to see a faceless nightmare race by?”
“That way,” he points stoically, “and take this.”
He hands me a blunt blade he must’ve gotten from camp. And in this moment of accepting the weapon, I realize the scene I’ve entered. All around us, the Humans from the camp are also fighting off the terrifying visions of death before them. They’ve followed us, led by the mighty chief who, in all his glory, is cutting down Deathless like weeds in a garden.
But that isn’t what strikes me. Among them, citizens of Trenton are fighting too. I wonder if either know who they’re fight alongside. Just a glance over the battle, I can’t tell one apart from the other … Human or Undead.
Human and Undead.
“Winter!” I hear from the edge of the street. My eyes seeking its source, I find Jasmine armed with a jagged piece of—something—and she’s waving me over. “Here! Winter, they’ve gone down here!”
“Go,” John tells me, turning the blade in his hand and bracing himself for another encounter. “Go and make this right.”
His hard tone, the anger I know he harbors, I fear I’ll never make this right for him. Or anyone. Really, what will putting out a few more immortal lights solve?
YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.
“Stay alive,” I order him.
“You too,” he orders back.
Against all my instincts, I leave him and rush forth to join Jasmine. “To the gates,” she tells me as we break into a run down the chaotic, steel-and-bone clattering street. “They’ve headed to the gates.”
As we run, I carefully press a stone into her palm. “Do not drop this,” I urge her. “It will protect you.”
“I saw you at the Square,” she breathes back excitedly. “These things really worked a charm, didn’t they?”
Rounding a corner, we’re two streets away from the closest gates where the Lock and King are rushing. With a jolt of fear and excitement, I see the top of the King’s crown over the hordes.
“Fight on, ladies!” exclaims a boy from a nearby rooftop. I look up and nearly fall when I realize who it is. Benjamin, my Necropolis buddy. “Yeah!” he yells out, a broad smile spreading across his face, encouraged by my spotting him. “Shoulda taken my arms too!” he shouts, grabbing a bucket full of metal junk and dumping it in the thicket of Deathless below. “Back to the grave, suckers!”
I want to stop and say something, shout out an encouraging word, express my utter joy at seeing him alive, but too soon we’ve rounded another corner and the gates grow closer and closer.
And so does the end.
Pressed against the wall, there’s the King, watching as her hateful, squinting Warlock faces off a crowd of oncoming, too-brave Trenton citizens from all directions. Someone at the foot of the crowd crumbles apart like a sand castle. Another, a blonde lady, disintegrates too.
Before I make a move, someone I wasn’t expecting appears at my side, as if she was always there. “Get ready, Winter of the Second,” says the Judge, “because this scene is about to get impolite.”
Brandishing the longest steel blade I’ve ever seen, the Judge looks as ready as a panther to pounce on our unrighteous adversaries. To her confusion, I fasten my third and final stone to her wrist, figuring that to do the trick. “This will protect you,” I tell her, my voice shaking, “from the one with the eye. Beware, Enea.”
“Ah,” the Judge grunts. “Been a while since I’ve heard my name. Such sweet sentiment.” Her eyes soften. “My first mother, in my First Life, called me Miranda.”
Another two fall to d
ust before us.
“Miranda …” I say, touched by her sudden sincerity.
The Judge braces herself. “Never thought the day would come,” she mutters, snarling, “that I’d get the pleasure of sinking my steel into a Lock.”
And then she tears away from my side, her sword up high, crying the greatest war-scream I’ve ever heard. Every fiber of her being drives her weapon toward the heart of the metal-legged shorty who, in all his squinting angst, cannot affect her with his deathly talent.
What the Judge did not see was the Deathless who was charging for her as well … A Deathless with a long blade of his own …
A blade that slices cleanly through the Judge’s arm.
Clang, to the pavement it falls, along with her sword.
“Enea!” I cry out.
The Judge without missing a beat brings the sword up from the ground with her other hand, still charging for the metal-legged man, her war-scream unbroken. What a sight it is, her unmatched bravery, her fury, her power.
And then before our eyes, to ash the Judge dissolves.
The sword falls once more.
“ENEA!!”
Jasmine doesn’t hesitate. It couldn’t have been better choreographed, her grace like a dance of death, she moves to the abandoned sword through the ash of fallen soldiers and the Judge herself, invites the hungry weapon into her slender hand.
“For my daughter,” she breathes of focused anger.
And hurls the steel.
Through the air, a screaming song.
And into his very eye.
Backwards he flies like paper, the sword through his skull, he’s pinned into the wall like a sad note to the corkboard. Silence swallows his body where once a fury of green lived.
I have no time to process the loss of the Judge, the agony of her death being the price for the Warlock’s, no time at all, for the King already has fled through the gates, making her escape into the woods.
No time at all, even to acknowledge Jasmine, or the Humans fighting around us who can still bleed, the Undead who battle on in despairing rage over the ashen piles of their friends.
The stone I’d given the Judge glints at me from the arm that had been severed … Green no more.
With wild conviction, I unsheathe the Judge’s sword from the Lock’s face with my only remaining hand. Glistening in unseeable moonlight, it whispers a bleak and steely salutation to me. I respond to its sweet song by exploding through the Trenton gates.
The. Only. One. Left. To. Blame. Is …
The King rushes ahead … Malory … Her tall crown’s fallen to the dirt below, her infinity of colorless hair like a cape waving in a windless wind. I chase her mighty shadow. The empty air of a dead world rushing by in my furious clambering toward victory.
“You cannot run!” I belt out.
Lifeless trees whipping past my ears, I leap over branches and stones in my pursuit.
The shadow of Malory grows closer and closer. The end is near.
I scream: “You will fail! I will catch up to you and you will die!”
The. Only. One …
It was some ugly fate that brought me to the cliff, and a beautiful one that brings me back. The shadow called Malory stops at the very same edge I once stood before, the world of mist waiting patiently below. I stop running and plant my feet, sword up and ready. I don’t dare stand too close, not when I don’t yet know if she’s armed, if any foul tricks remain up her infinite, skeletal sleeves.
Oh, but the one wicked trick she indeed still has.
Her back to me, she says, “I forgive you.”
“Save your words, Malory. For all the lives you took, I shouldn’t allow you even the decency of last words. You don’t deserve them.”
“I forgive you for what you’re about to do.”
My hand squeezes with its fatal commitment.
“And I forgive you,” she presses on, her colorless hair thrashing about in the empty, miserable breeze, “for the last words you said to me … for breaking all my china … for flooding the house … for, at last, running away …”
I aim the sword, pointing it at her back with its final intention.
“But I will never forgive myself,” she chokes.
The Judge’s prized steel grows heavier and heavier.
“The only one left to blame … is me.”
My one arm may tremble, but I am not afraid. I will not falter. I refortify my stance and prepare to end the existence of the Deathless King. I will not question the demise I’ve sentenced her to … I am not listening to her.
I’m not listening.
They never listen, they never listen to me.
“I did this,” she says, her voice losing composure, her body quaking, “to myself.”
YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.
I charge.
“Claire,” she pleads.
They never listen, they never listen, they never—
My sword rushes into the back of the Deathless King, driving her over the cliff, but not yet letting go. Seething steaming steel punctured through her skeletal body, my blade is the only thing that keeps her from a long and terrible fall into the mists. I literally hold her existence at the end of my weapon …
And just as she’s slipping.
Just as she starts to slip.
Just as the blade is letting her go …
Wouldn’t you know it, of all possible moments, this is when my Waking Dream at long last chooses to find me.
C H A P T E R – N I N E T E E N
D R E A M
My name is Claire Westbrook, and I hate everything.
Was Claire Westbrook.
Hated everything.
My mom is Julianne and my dad is Samuel and I had no brothers and no sisters and I hated everything.
And the two-story mansion I lived in when I was little.
I hated the neighborhood girls Carla, Jan, and Victoria because they always wanted to play with my dolls.
My favorite doll, I named her Princess, and Victoria pulled off her head when trying to pry it from my hands.
I got a puppy when I turned six and I hated the puppy because it wasn’t the snowy-haired one I saw in the book. I refused to name it and it got hit by a car before my seventh birthday and I didn’t cry.
I hated my birthdays because mom and dad never listened to me, they never got me what I wanted.
They never listen, they never listen to me, ever.
Nameless puppy was buried in the backyard by the petunias and I hated petunias.
Mom’s always on the phone. I fell in the kitchen and cried and cried and mom’s still on the phone.
I wasn’t really hurt, but I cried anyway.
I saw my dad once a week and I hated how he always told me, “Not now.”
When I broke the porcelain lion, no one yelled at me.
We moved into a three-story condo by the ocean and I hated the ocean. I screamed for three days because I wanted to live in the city. “Not now,” he said.
I hated the sound of pens scraping against paper because that’s the only sound my dad ever made.
A teacher called Ms. Rhodes that I spelled Roads didn’t pick me to play the part of the princess in the fourth grade school production of The Dragon and the Toad.
I told her in front of the whole class that I thought she was stupid for picking Hannah over me, Hannah with the braces and the pigtail. “Princesses don’t have braces,” I explained because she was stupid and how else would she learn. How would any of them learn. They’re all stupid.
The whole play was written in rhymes and lyric and poetry anyway.
And I hated poetry.
My first friend was Bethany and I hated when she’d ask to ride home with me in the car every day, and the only reason we became friends was because I finally got tired of saying no.
A kid in my class named Jared died from a snakebite.
My driver Eddy who’s known me since I was five, he was so dumb, he said I should try having a
friend, that it couldn’t hurt.
He was so dumb and wrong and I hated how Bethany smelled like baby powder.
I left the bath running on purpose once and it flooded the house, a shampoo river with a purple shower pouf running down the hall, a shampoo waterfall into the den, a shampoo lake on my father’s nine-thousand dollar rug.
“Grounded!” said dad, and never did.
When I turned fourteen, Bethany was the only person I knew in high school, but I didn’t invite her to my party because there were other girls like Erica and Myra and Lindsey and they all thought I was cool.
They knew the cool boys, and I felt like a queen.
They liked coming over to my big house and they liked my pool and they liked my dad’s beer. I had beer for the first time that New Years’ Eve when I kissed Connor. It made Kayla mad because they were going out but I didn’t care. I wanted to kiss him so I did.
I put on my mom’s green, shiny emerald earrings.
Glinting in the bathroom mirror, my ears like queens’, I smiled and kissed my reflection, practicing my role and saying, “I’m yours, Connor,” over and over because I heard it in a movie, kissing myself over and over.
I’m yours. I’m yours. I’m yours.
“Because you smell like a diaper,” I told Bethany one day when she tried to sit at my lunch table. She was so dumb to even try, it was embarrassing.
Why did she do that to me. Didn’t she understand.
All my friends laughed and I felt so proud of myself.
I called her a crybaby and I felt pleasure as I watched her posture break before me the way an insect wrinkles in the sun, the way paper burns, the way tulips die.
I hated Bethany and I spent two more years hating her. I loved my new friends, they made me feel big.
I wore mom’s sparkling emerald earrings to school.
At my sixteenth birthday when Alicia and Elisa and Maggie and Marcy and Ellen and the two cute boys from class Jesse and Cortland were hanging out on my back deck drinking my dad’s beer, I learned to hate my parents all over again because they bought me the wrong car.
I broke my dad’s keyboard and threw half his reports in the upstairs aquarium. Little fishes nibbled on them for hours, little pink and spotty fishes.
The Beautiful Dead Page 25
