by Daryl Banner
Books By Daryl Banner
The Beautiful Dead Series:
Book 1 - The Beautiful Dead
Book 2 - Dead Of Winter
Book 3 - Almost Alive
The Whispers: A Beautiful Dead adventure
The OUTLIER Series:
Book 1 - Outlier: Rebellion
Book 2 - Outlier: Legacy
Coming soon:
Book 3 - Outlier: Reign Of Madness
Book 4 - Outlier: Beyond Oblivion
Book 5 - Outlier: Five Kings
The Brazen Boys:
A series of standalone M/M romance novellas.
Dorm Game
On The Edge
Owned By The Freshman
Dog Tags
All Yours Tonight
Straight Up
Houseboy Rules
Slippery When Wet
Other Books by Daryl Banner:
super psycho future killers
Psychology Of Want
Love And Other Bad Ideas
(a collection of seven short plays)
Copyright © 2016 by Daryl Banner
Published by Frozenfyre Publishing
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, groups, businesses, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places or persons, Living, dead, or Undead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover & Interior Design by Daryl Banner
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It’s a place to have fun, chat about everything Daryl Banner, and see glimpses of upcoming new releases, ARCs, giveaways, and more. It’s totally top secret, but I’ll show you the way in:
www.facebook.com/groups/darylsdoorway
Prologue
Chapter One - One Living Day Ago
Chapter Two - The Lightless Realm
Chapter Three - A Roof Would Be Nice
Chapter Four - Heart Beater
Chapter Five - Life Is A Trap
Chapter Six - Whispers
Chapter Seven - The Doom Girl
Chapter Eight - I Will See You Again
Epilogue
Excerpt From The Beautiful Dead
I want to give a deep and heartfelt thanks to all the readers, family, and friends who have followed me on this Beautiful Dead journey from the start, and those of you who joined us along the way. And to you kings and queens of the Doorway, I’d be nothing without you.
Yes, I know I sort of gave a pained goodbye speech at the conclusion of Almost Alive, but I’ve been hounded, I’ve been harassed, I’ve been downright threatened for more … and the more I tried to let it all go, the more I realized that there really is so much left in this dead-fabulous world that needed to be explored.
Where do the Dead come from? What happened to Winter and her friends? What the heck’s up with those green glowing eyeball-things?
Regardless of which questions I answer (or totally annoyingly don’t answer) in this book, the point is: none of it would exist without you. You’ve given me your love and support and cheer, and it’s the only reason I keep telling these stories.
Stick with me and let’s go on a hundred adventures together. Sexy and romantic ones. Post-apocalyptic dead-loving ones. Dystopian Legacy-hunting Outliery ones. I’m with you every step of the way.
~ ♥ ~ Daryl
“Blood.”
I lift my head quickly. Bones snap in my neck that oughtn’t. I grunt questioningly instead of using words; I stopped using words long ago.
“Blood,” she repeats, pointing. “Smell.”
Facing the dark and misty woods with my fingers and toes dug into the dry, cracked earth, I inhale deeply. It’s not for need of oxygen; I’m welcoming in the scent of anything alive within about a billion mile radius. That’s a deliberately gross exaggeration, of course, as time and distance mean nothing to the Dead.
I smell nothing. I hiss at her, annoyed.
She glares at me, her one eye glowing white through the mist and returning all my due annoyance. My sister’s made of nothing but bones, loose skin, and attitude. A decrepit shred of colorless fabric that used to be a dress gives her approximately two helpings of modesty. She has no hair left on her head. I’ve forgotten if she’s brunette like mom and I, or took after our redheaded dad. The colors blur in my memory. At a glance, it’s tricky to tell which of us is the sister and which the brother, so similar in our near-skeletal figures we are.
“Blood,” she insists stubbornly, then tears into the mist, swirls of grey coiling in her swift departure.
My knees snap loudly in protest as I chase her into the endless dark. Dead trees and white smoke whip past my face. That’s all that fills my eyes: dead black trees, swirling white smoke. Colorlessness. There is no color in the world, none at all, except …
“Blood.”
I find her at the foot of a fallen tree, its upturned roots tangled and thorny. Within its grasp there remains the bones of an animal. Deer, perhaps. Maybe a large dog. A horse. Elephant. Pigeon. What’s the difference? Animals are all the same now. Just bones and teeth. Loose, decayed flesh, if lucky. And if really lucky, there’s a speck of life left.
But not in this … carcass. I snort in frustration, my own little way of telling my sister she was wrong. So many false alarms. She looks up at me, her one white eye flashing with a storm of anger and sadness. I know, I’d say. I’m disappointed too. For a minute there, I believed her.
I wanted to believe her.
We move through the woods in silence, neither of us looking at the other. We could go for years without saying a word. It’s so rare to find blood anymore. Even a bird in the sky is a miracle, a fleeting and distant one. I’d plant my feet and twist my cracking neck to the sky just to watch as the free, Living little creature fluttered over the world. I’d give anything to be a bird …
If I wasn’t so sure I’d eat myself.
“Blood,” she whispers.
Not again. I huff furiously, shutting her up. There used to be twelve of us, but the others put themselves to sleep. That’s what we call it, anyway. Maybe they’ll wake back up if the sun ever rises. I doubt it’s risen in a thousand years. Darkness and greyness and nothing is all that fills the hours of our endless days. Even sharing stories of our pasts has grown old. I know everything about my sister. She knows everything about me. There is nothing new to tell. Even words are dead.
My throat quivers, a hiss escaping my nostrils. My sister seems to hear because she sighs and says, “I know. I miss them too.”
The others, maybe. Our parents. Our lives. I have no idea what she thinks I meant.
“Do you remember the one with the white hair?”
I scowl, annoyed somehow. I narrowly miss walking into a tree, distracted by her words. The mists begin to blind me. Everything looks the same. We can walk for hours and we’re still in the same place. We can walk for years and never move and never sleep and never be free from the realm of the Dead.
“Winter white hair,” she mutters at my side. “Funny. I can’t even remember her face. It was so long ago.”
I snort. I’m so tired of her stories. No matter the sun and the hope and the happiness they speak on and on about, it adds no sun to my days. Nothing ever will. The world is dead, and so’s my sister’s nauseating legends of mythic realms full of Livings and plants and water and … life. If such a place exists, I’d drain it of every last drop of blood. I would pin them to a tree just as I did the last clumsy heart-beating fool who dared to breathe the air of the Dead, who dared to walk the blight upon which our Dead feet tread, who dared to exist in our Dea
d, Dead, Dead realm. I’d give them one last look in their wet, quivery eyes before sinking my teeth into their delicious veins. I’d forget their face before they hit the ground.
The sound comes so suddenly, I mistake it for my sister’s groaning at first. We look at one another, startled by the rumbling that stirs the mists.
“What’s that?” she whispers.
My blank eyes are her answer.
Then, from above, we pay witness to the parting of the grey skies. Light flashes brightly, stunning us for a brief moment as the clouds are spread apart by a great metal bird. It roars loudly and shakes all the dead trees around us, as if jostling them to life. The metal bird moves fast, cutting through the mists above, roaring, growling, shaking the earth from its eternal rest.
It is not simply passing by; the great ugly beast is falling. It’s so low that the tips of the dead trees crunch, shattering into great black splinters that rain upon the earth below, making way for the beast’s descent. So low it goes that the trees begin to scream, cracking and snapping and breaking, brittle as bones. The metal beast thunders on through the distant mist beyond our view.
The sound is deafening. I haven’t heard a thing that loud, Living or Dead, in a thousand years. That’s yet another of my gross exaggerations.
Quite suddenly, the roaring stops and a ground-trembling boom tickles our bony feet. The great bird has landed. And not gently.
I stare at my sister, and her white eye glows with the same fear and fascination that flashes in mine.
We move through the mist in a hurry. The trees have bent and broken and fallen in the path of the beast. In a nest of shattered deadwood and dust, the metal thing rests in an eerie silence. Steam hisses from holes in its back, its own smoke swirling playfully from its wounds to dance with the mists of our Dead world.
“It opens,” whispers my sister softly as a breath of a Living.
The belly of the capsized bird splits apart like a great metal door. From its bowels, three heads of healthy hair rise, their eyes squinting against the mist and the dark. The one in the middle, a handsome male with a chiseled jaw and brawny figure, lifts his wrist immediately, shining a fierce light upon his surroundings. Just behind him, a woman with more flesh in her cheeks than I’ve ever seen peers about, her large and colorful eyes searching the world in wonder.
But it’s the third one who steals my attention, the one who actually appeared first. She turns her blushed and slender face to the left, then to the right. And she is terrified. Her wetted eyes reflect the fear I’ve come to recognize so well in any Living.
Then, despite the man’s light never gracing the Dead flesh of my sister and I, the woman’s keen eyes find mine in the dark. Her irises are bright and cold as ice, her hair white as winter.
The Living sees me. The Dead stare back.
That’s when I hear the purring in my sister’s throat, the sound of hunger that has been my song of days, our mantra, the Dead’s one and only craving.
“Blood,” I answer for the both of us—my first word in a million years—before we leap.
“Oh, yes! The Dead live, my child! The Dead live!”
I softly tap my device, typing: Crazy Lady Number Five. Her name is Dana. She smells like cat pee.
“Oh, yes! I’m getting a real, real, real, real strong sense here.” The bushy-haired woman in the silver robe rises, her veiny hands reaching up dramatically as if to snatch an imaginary bird from the air. Her big frog eyes blink once, two wet orbs shimmering, the irises grey as clay. “Oh!” she cries out. “Yes! YES! A really strong sense. Oh!” Her fingers wiggle in the air. “Yes! He’s here! The spirit world has unraveled her scarf! She’s unmasked her face! She’s lifted her tricky veil!”
“The spirit world wears a lot of clothes,” I remark.
Mercifully, she doesn’t hear me. “When the spirit world speaks, the Living must listen to her!” she cries. “Oh! Your father has spoken, Jennifer! His name is Tom!”
I shake my head no.
“Terry?”
No.
“Tyson?”
Nope.
“Tin… Tim… T’uh… Starts with a T?”
No.
“P?”
Nope.
“D?”
Nopers.
“Z? Zane? Zimmy? Zoom?”
I offer an apologetic smile.
The woman gives a dramatic wave of her hand, her bushy hair trembling. “Oh, the spirit world is such a haze today, such a haze! The spirits must be shy …”
I tap more words into my device: Dana is lonely. Her hair might be host to a family of pigeons. My tummy groans. I wonder if my roommate Marianne will want to grab some breakfast before her first class.
“Your father, he enjoys … music?”
“No,” I answer, considering if the bakery by the math building will be open this early in the morning.
“Glass art?”
“No.”
“Your studies? Oh, he loves your studies, yes?”
“He thinks my studies are a joke.”
“Oh. No, child.” The woman’s brow furrows. “There is certainly nothing of a joke with the Dead. The Dead do not laugh. The Dead do not dream in humors.”
“My studies aren’t in the Dead,” I reply patiently.
“Of course. You … You study the Histories.” A pointy grin consumes her face. I worry no one’s ever warned her of its effects; that smile could make children cry. “I adore the Histories. We will all be a part of it, someday. The Dead already are. And your father’s spirit—”
“Is obviously not here,” I finish for her.
“Oh, no! He is! He really is! He …” The woman looks up, searching for words, likely constructing the story in her head as she goes. Then her face flashes like she’s just discovered the meaning to life. Well, that or the sun got in her eye. “He looks so handsome in his beige suit and … and his cream-colored tie! Oh, it’s the cream of whipped vanilla bean, the stuff of clouds, of winter winds! Yes, I see it so clearly! He is here! He’s just arrived!”
Really, it would be wise to treat her politely. This poor woman’s sanity seems to be held on by a thread, and she hasn’t had a visitor in weeks. I have to wonder where the hell my sanity was when I thought interviewing a diviner was a good idea. Her kind are mocked, labeled as weirdos, scaremongers, fanatics of tired myths of zombies roaming the planet making midnight snacks of our blood.
But maybe I’m a weirdo, too.
“This is going into your research, isn’t it?” she asks suddenly, the glow in her eyes replaced with something else entirely, something darker. “What you’ve seen here? The haze of the spirit world? The contact we’ve made? The will of the Dead? Do tell me.”
I tap on my device: She’s hungry in the eyes. She does not see the spirit of my father; she only sees the dollar signs.
“Yes,” I answer.
“Seen and read and witnessed by h-h-hundreds?”
“Yes.”
She nearly faints from the thought. I’m certain she imagines all of the business she will gain from the article I will write about her as part of my dissertation. Hundreds will read it. Thousands, maybe. Despite all the attention I’ve gotten for my important findings on the Histories of the second millennia, I know, however, that the masses are only truly interested in the one tiny section of my studies. The section titled: The Beautiful Dead.
Maybe they all think I’m a fool, too. Maybe they are hungrily awaiting my words, just like this woman is, so they can laugh at me. The girl with the ridiculous dream. The girl who believes in tales told among children under their bed sheets to give one another a scare. The girl who believes that a society of Living Dead once existed.
“W-Where are you going?”
I’m at the door. “Thank you for your time, Dana.”
“B-But … But I haven’t even gazed into my crystal ball! Or, or, or turned over a card or two to surmise your future! Or given you a most significant message sent to me through the haze!�
�a message from your father!”
I close my device and pocket it, then lend the poor lady a look of disappointment. “I wanted to believe, Dana. Dana the Diviner …”
“You are a believer!” she sings. “You believe in the Living Dead, yes! The Precious Dead!”
“The Beautiful Dead,” I agree. “They, I believe in with all my soul. And I so wanted to believe you too, but my father cannot possibly send me a message from the spirit world, because my father is still alive.”
An unfortunate twitch suddenly occupies her left eye.
“You …” Her heart breaks before my eyes. “Y-You … You tricked me …?”
“Good day, Dana.”
The door is shut and I’m halfway down the road when I hear her call after me, crying out my name and cursing me for my deception. Yes, I deceived her, but with a good intention: I so wanted her to prove me wrong. I wanted her to know the truth through the haze of the “spirit world” she claimed to see. I wanted to believe, but …
“You evil little girl!” she screams.
It is the last thing I hear before turning the corner, her voice diffused to nothing but a vague noise at my back.
The shuttle arrives right on time, taking me up the long polished metal road lined with pretty houses toward the university, which looms with its tall spires and buildings that shine like long glass fingers in the angry glow of the rising sun.
At this early hour, I don’t imagine my roommate will be up, so I make a detour to the bakery near the math building to pick up a few fresh helpings for breakfast. The woman there is always sweet to me and asks about my progress in class, but today she is more subdued. Perhaps she senses my ire from the recent disappointment. I am not skilled at preventing inner emotions from warring across my face, regrettably. That’s a talent in which my roommate is a notable expert.
When I open the door to my campus condominium, the floor-to-ceiling glass window shows a breathtaking portraiture of the university burned orange and gold with the brilliant beams of the sun. To that magnificence, I huff and sourly gnash my finger into a button on the wall. Metal blinds flip shut, casting the room into darkness. I throw my coat over the couch, then drop the baked goods on the end table, certain the scent of them will rouse my sleeping roommate. Her door is closed and no light glows from underneath it. I pluck a croissant from the bag to answer the growing cry from my belly, then move slowly across the den to my bedroom. I open the door gently.
