All to reach her, assuming she needed my help. I knew nothing of her state—I still had not looked her way because I was certain to do so would be the end of me. Instead, I remained a ball of furious fierce motion, cutting and stabbing, moving everywhere, never stopping.
Killing.
Killing.
Killing.
Until I got their numbers down to eight, a fight I could handle with ease. Until the only sound filling my ears was that of their dying moans.
Until.
“One more move, Dutch, and she is dead,” Khan growled into my consciousness.
“Don’t stop, Dutch!” Juma shouted over him. “Kill them all.”
Then I heard him hit her. And I knew I should have listened to her and kept slashing and attacking until all of them were felled by my knives and their blood soaked the walls and floors, but that sound. His fist meeting her cheek, steel into soft and the crack of bone. I knew that sound, it kept me up nights and woke me from sleep, it fueled my rage and lived in my blood.
I couldn’t not hear it.
I couldn’t not stop all forward motion.
It was my sound. Not hers.
And he knew it.
The remaining fuckboys were on me in seconds, and had me splayed, arms wide, legs kicked apart, immobile and at my weakest. Basic training, day three as a Keeper for The Gate.
“Tie her up,” Khan said to Darsh without taking his eyes off me, “to the wall. And make it tight.”
Juma lashed out at Darsh, bit and scratched him, kicked and flung about, until he stabbed her in the rib cage with his short knife and abruptly put an end to her fight. I knew her—there was no way she would scream and afford anyone the gift of her pain—but her eyes registered shock and a touch of horror and all of me wanted to kill everything moving.
Thing of it was, I’d played this game before and already knew fighting only made it worse.
“Khan,” I shouted, “let her go and do what you will with me! I killed James and Veda, I’m the one you want, not her.”
Khan placed his hands on his hips and stared, as if he were considering me for the first time when he and I both knew he never considered me at all. “I must admit, Dutch, as often as I’ve bemoaned the fact you are my son and sole heir to all this power, as much as I despise the air you breathe into your lungs and exhale back into the world, I admire your gift for gab.”
“This is no gab,” I promised. “I swear, I will do whatever you like, just let her go. There is no need to start any needless nonsense between The Gate and Death when you and I can settle our differences, just the two of us.”
Darsh finished tying Juma up and came to stand next to Khan, the two of them looking like a brown, sinister version of Abbott and Costello.
“Ready to see how many lives this pretty thing has left?” Khan asked his brother.
“No!” I shouted, and although I knew better, I fought the fools holding me down. “Do not fucking touch her.”
Khan laughed. “The symmetry of this moment begs me to touch her. It’s Kajal all over again. I mean, look at her, Dutch,” and here he moved out of the way so Juma and I had unimpeded views of each other. She mouthed to me that she was okay, and I was sixteen all over again. “I almost wish Shema were here to see this—she would be amazed at the similarities. And disgusted by the fact our son the Keeper has a sick obsession with fierce, independent, beautiful Poochas.” Khan ran a finger down Juma’s cheek as she closed her eyes and moved as far from him as she was able.
I kicked and spat and fought like hell as I called upon the gods and even begged for Shema and her magic, anything to put an end to this nightmare. And somewhere in the mix of all that madness and indiscriminate fury, the red of my rage, I heard her calling to me, begging me to calm.
“Dutch.” Juma said my name and it sounded like love and time and tenderness, and we had no more of the latter and lifetimes of the former, but I couldn’t bring myself to focus on any of it, I was too far gone.
And still, she persisted. “Dutch. Please. Dutch, listen to me.”
“Son,” Khan spat the false endearment, drowning out her voice, his lips curled in a wide smile, “I believe this is what they call life coming full circle,” and he grabbed a fistful of Juma’s hair and bared her throat as his free hand fisted a shiny blade and I shouted and begged as my ears filled with his maniacal laughter.
And underneath all the noise, the sheer insanity, Juma called to me.
“Dutch.” Her quiet incantation became a steady beat in my blood until I calmed and stilled and all of me became focused on her and she knew it, she could feel it. And even though her head was pressed into the wall at the most awkward angle, she found me in that room and we locked eyes.
“Right here, Dutch. With me. This moment,” she pleaded, and I did exactly as she said and I stayed right with her, in the moment. I stopped fighting and listened to her and intermingled in all the many right here, with me, this moments she uttered, lived our goodbyes.
Our love.
Our kisses and laughter.
All of it existed in the spaces and the breaths and the silences.
And because I loved her more than I had ever loved anything in my life and wanted her to believe I would be okay, that I would survive this madness, I held her gaze as Khan drew his blade across her throat and I watched as the life poured out of her and her eyes closed and her head sagged gently to the side and she took one final gasp and died. And even though I knew she was gone, I could not bring myself to turn away from her. She was my love and my life and all things good, she made the impossibles of my existence possible, she breathed light and laughter into my darkness. She was my everything.
Nothing or no one could make me turn away from her.
In life.
Or death.
So I stood and I watched her and I waited, and when her skin turned ashen and began to flake, a telltale sign she’d suffered her final death, Khan turned to me, shrugged his shoulders, and laughed. “Well, that was too goddamned easy. I suppose she’s not like Kajal after all.” Then he gathered his fuckboys and they departed and I pulled myself together, untied her body from the wall, and sank to the floor with her in my arms.
CHAPTER THIRTY: DUTCH
There was no timeline for grief, no maps, no patterns. When it ripped through you, it was as if everything stood still and moved too slow and moved too fast, and all of it became nothing. Where you began and where you ended were immaterial, because your existence was beholden to nothing but grief.
I had no idea how long I remained on that floor with Juma in my arms, I only remember being touched and shrinking into myself and holding her tighter only to find she had become more ash than body, and watching as parts of her became part of me, her ash blending into my skin until it was impossible to know where she began and I ended. And by and by, all that remained were the physical things, the clothes and jewelry and belt, parts of the whole woman, details that mattered little until they were all I had.
“Dutch.”
I looked up from my now-empty hands to find Frist, my lavender-haired mad scientist kneeling before me with glassy eyes and a tremble in her lip. I reached out and touched her hand and her cheek, and then wiped the wet of her tears. “You know I hate it when you cry, Frist,” I said with gravel in my voice, and she laugh-cried and held my hand and I felt like dying all over again.
Instead.
“Come on.” I kissed Frist’s hand and pocketed Juma’s necklace, took a deep breath and stood. And when I did, the morning light filtering in through the windows captured the ash that fell from my clothes and floated in the air, and it glinted and glittered as if it were dusted with magic and all of it seemed so very Juma. I caught Frist watching me and I smiled because even though I felt like death, there was life that needed to be lived, promises that needed to be fulfilled, shit that needed to be handled. And it couldn’t get done if I was falling apart.
“Where are we going?” Frist asked, and pulled me
out of my head and my thoughts and Juma.
Juma.
Juma.
I paused and gathered my words and told myself I could speak them, I would speak them, and it would be okay.
“Dutch?” Frist touched my arm and considered the action before doing so, and I loved her so much in that moment because even though it was okay for her to touch me, I could handle it without lashing out, I appreciated her thoughtfulness. In a lifetime filled with thoughtless acts, it was the tiny kindnesses that made all the difference. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I replied and lied, and she knew it was a lie, but she went along with it anyway. “I’m okay. I just need a second,” I said, and walked away from her and toward the wall where Juma had been tied. The red of her blood caught my eye and suddenly I needed to be close to that wall. And I knew it had been hours since she was bound there and her blood had dried ages ago, but I pressed the flat of my palm to the wall and closed my eyes anyway, and for a few beats of time, felt close to her again. The nearness was all in my head but such details were irrelevant. What mattered was the space and the fact it was the last place she had been alive.
I needed to touch it. Then I could move on.
Long minutes later, when I turned back to face Frist and let her know what we needed to do next and why and how, because I knew she would ask all those questions because Frist always asked those questions, there stood Rani. The two of them so quiet, one so tall and pale and purple and the other so tiny and brown and black, both of them watching me with eyes I couldn’t read and didn’t bother trying. Face-to-face again with the diminutive Keeper, my ages-old nemesis turned half-nemesis, I recalled our last conversation where she commented on Juma’s love for me and how it kind of made her skin crawl, and then I stopped myself because I couldn’t go down that road yet and make it back alive.
Instead.
“I see you got your hand.” I nodded in her direction and she lifted it and almost-smiled.
“I told you,” she replied, “I know a guy.”
“I thought you were going back home to watch Khan,” I maybe accused her, maybe didn’t.
“That’s exactly what I did,” she shot back maybe defensive, maybe not, “until it was time to deal with the hand,” and she raised it again as if to prove her point.
I furrowed my brow and noted. “Heavy price to pay for a hand.”
“That’s the same fucking thing I said,” Rani replied, then looked around and added, “He said none of this was the price.”
We let those words settle around us for a few seconds, the enormity of their truths a black cloud that could weigh us down, if we allowed it. But as I said, I had promises I fully intended to keep, so black cloud or no, soul collectors and their foreshadowing, it was time to get going.
“I told you not to fuck with that guy,” I maybe joked, and Rani rolled her eyes and neither of us looked happy but both of us looked all right with the presence of the other.
“Fuck you, Dutch,” she replied, then turned to me and added, “And you did warn me, but if we’re going to right the wrongs of this world, and rescue fancy-ass Avery while we’re at it, I’m going to need a hand.”
I shot her a look and was about to make some asshole comment or another when she and Frist crossed the threshold of the room and walked down the hall, and for several long quiet seconds where all I could hear was the beat of my heart and the sound of my breath, I remained rooted to the spot. Unable to move forward or backwards, just stuck, and I knew it was because this room was the last place Juma breathed and spoke and lived, I just couldn’t admit it yet.
Frist turned back and stopped walking and waited. And when I didn’t join them, she spoke.
“I saw her, Dutch. She was running across the field, charging straight into the madness of the Black Copse’s departure, and I watched her kill anything moving. She was chasing Avery. And she almost got him.” First smiled at the memory and I envied her that vision and not the one that made up my last of Juma. “So let’s bury Kash and go get Avery,” and here my face must have flashed every worry I held for my best friend, “even if we’re too late, we’re bringing him home so he and Kash can be together.”
I saw Rani and Frist ahead of me, waiting patiently, and I heard Frist and the words she spoke, and inside my head a voice explained to me to put one foot in front of the other and then the other and then the other, but I couldn’t make myself leave the room. Because the other voice in my head kept saying it could feel her everywhere, this was her space, her ashes littered the rugs and her blood painted a tapestry on the wall. And even though I did not want to succumb to a macabre milieu of dust and gore and last-breaths-taken, I felt it happening.
“DUTCH!”
I jumped, yanked out of my dark reverie.
“Stop acting like a pussy and get the fuck out of that room,” Rani shouted, “before I walk back there and drag you out! And you and I both know what happens when I’m forced to touch you.”
I stared at the tiny Keeper long and hard and wondered where she got off speaking to me in that tone, using those words, threatening me. I’d been so good about keeping my feelings for her in check and under control. I’d even joked around with Rani a little, tried to keep things light between the two of us. But for real, I goddamned despised her. And she knew it. She knew her voice grated on my last nerve and made my ears ring with murder and mayhem. She knew she rattled me. And now she would have to deal.
I crossed the threshold and headed in her direction, my stride steady and determined, all of me wanting all of her dead. Her birdlike neck was the perfect fit for my hands, easy to wrap my long fingers around, give it one nice, long squeeze and—snap!—no more Rani. These thoughts filled my head as I neared her, and I could tell she sensed what I was thinking, her eyes betrayed a hint of fear mixed with a little panic because unlike all the other times she’d bullied me or taunted me with her voice and her words, this time neither James nor Juma was around to prevent me from putting a very finite ending to her bullshit excuse of a life.
Then it hit me.
I’d left the room.
Thanks to Rani and all her fuckery, I crossed out of that terrible space I’d shared with Juma. And even though part of me died back there, I managed to escape with enough of me left intact to finish what Juma and I had begun that first night we spied each other in Frank’s.
“Fuck you, Rani,” I growled as I passed her in the hall and made my way downstairs. I could feel both Frist and her watching me take the staircase two steps at a time, winding my way to the main floor, and when I reached the bottom, I looked up, smiled a smile full of death and danger, and gave her the finger.
Rani rolled her eyes and almost-smiled, then spat over the ledge instead.
“Fuck you, Dutch.”
And even though damn near all my life felt finished and what wasn’t would never be the same again, I thanked the gods above and took comfort in the persistent and consistent bullshit of one Rani Rao.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: JUMA
“Juma! Come! Now!”
Marina barreled into me as I walked down a hallway that seconds earlier had felt so familiar, covered with Picassos and Mapplethorpes, artwork I’d spent hours lying beneath and contemplating as a teenager during the quiet moments I spent alone in Death’s realm, but was now miles long, narrow and dim, lit only by sporadic naked bulbs casting an eerie low light. The air chilled and goose-bumped the skin on my bare arms, and where the walls had once been a soft linen I’d loved running my fingers along as I slowly made my way wherever I was headed, now they appeared to bleed.
“Is this my final resting place, Marina?” I asked with a tremor in my voice as I realized the hall was everything I could not bear. “Has the Mistress decided this shall be my hell? After all the years I loved her and devoted myself to her, is this how I am to spend the rest of eternity?” I asked as the sob that escaped my lips quickly turned into a full-blown panic attack. I dropped to the floor and leaned into the bloody wall, my
tears coming fast, my breath faster.
“Juma.” Marina took my tear-streaked face in her warm hands and made me see her. “Listen to me, mami.”
But I was past the point of hearing much of anything anyone in this place had to say to me. I had just died my final death, and quite frankly, they could all fuck themselves.
“She has left me a world with no light, no art music books. She has stolen everything I loved and even that is not enough for her,” I cried. “What will she steal next? My memories?”
Because I knew and Marina knew I knew. The Mistress could do it. She would do it. I had seen her do it to others. Day by day, a layer of themselves taken away, one detail at a time, until nothing remained and they were but a whimpering pile of flesh and bones in the middle of the floor. It was a hell far worse than anything Dante had conjured and the Mistress took pride in every long, never-ending, tortuous second of it.
This hallway was only the beginning, of that I was certain.
“Juma, I need you to listen to me, okay?” Marina asked, and all of her looked kind and soft, and she was so warm to touch, but I knew better.
“No!” I pushed her away from me. “I spent years listening to you, believing you loved me and that was why you spent time with me, cared for me in ways you didn’t care for anyone else around this place. I thought I was special,” and as the words fell from my lips, I laughed at their foolishness, “when really, I was just a goddamned fucking idiot.”
Marina’s eyes filled with tears as my words hit her in all the places I wanted them to hit.
“You are a liar of the worst sort,” I hissed through my tears. “I expect the Mistress to be so duplicitous, she knows no other way. It is her nature. But you? You, Marina, have broken my heart beyond repair. In this place of darkness and despair and all sorts of ends-of-the-road, I thought you loved me. But you are no better than she.”
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