He took two paces in my direction. We were close enough now to hold hands, a tender moment that anyone but the hobgoblin of Lethe would notice. Resurrection ruins equilibrium. My job is to keep the dead, dead. The Phlegethon compromises that.
As I stared blank-faced into Marin’s black voids, I saw a flicker of something, a memory even, that did not belong to me. I had not lived in the early twentieth century, nor had I donned a tuxedo and danced with beautiful women. What I did recognize from this memory, whoever’s it was, were the animal pelts hanging from the walls of Wrightwick Manor.
Blinking away the vision, I caught a subtle shift of Marin’s milky-smooth brow.
He saw it, too.
And he saw that I saw it.
“Why don’t you do your job with honor instead of being devious and pitting Stygians against each other?” I said aloud for everyone to hear, giving the Watchmen what they craved. When Marin said nothing in return, almost as if he was stunned by my audacity, I continued. “I know why you’re such a sneak. You’re manipulated, too. I saw it when you sent me to Montana. Now you’re desperate not to be ousted. That’s why you concocted this convoluted, piss-poor plan to take some Scriveners and Trivials down. You’re afraid of something. Or someone.”
Quicker than a heartbeat, Marin was an inch from my face. His hot breath pounded my cheeks.
I fear no one. His lips didn’t budge.
Panting, I fortified myself, even though my heart was in my throat. You reek of fear. Tell me who you’re afraid of. Is it Brent?
Errol Dennison?
Me?
He blinked. I leaned in, nearly brushing my lips against his to look beyond the blackness of his eyes to see what he was and what made him tick. His pasty brow didn’t move, and his lips remained motionless as if he had never experienced such intimacy with another. You’re not who you say you are, Marin. You’re more. You’re––
I’ve locked onto you, Scrivener. All I have to do is––
I put my nose to his, aligning my stare with his. He stilled. I saw something. No. No, I felt a nebula of emotions and sensations, feelings that were never mine—fury, duty, liability, remorse, even loneliness. They churned like an eddy of murky water. There was no question what this bizarre sensation was and why it came on so strongly here, within kissing-proximity of my ultimate enemy. I wasn’t reading the emotions written on Marin’s face.
I’m in his head. I’m in your head.
A snarl threatened his taut lips. The expression meant nothing, not when I saw shapes of tattoos, hundreds of them, sprawled across a macabre canvas of body parts. Underlying these shapes came the same frenzied rage that any other Scrivener employed.
What came from Marin’s vacuum of a mind were not the sentiments of a dealer of death like Brent or Papa.
I had to say it and say it quickly, “Errol was right. You’re a—”
The back of his hand was the last thing I saw before my world went dark.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Traitors come in various shapes and sizes. Do not trust outside of your own flesh and bone.”
—Buddy Hennessey, Noted Stygian Rebel
I awoke from the hit to find myself propped against a wall. My arms were splayed out at my sides, and though I tried to move them, they didn’t budge. There was nothing holding them down, no bonds or chains. An invisible force with the strength of metal kept my arms locked in place.
Blinking to clear my vision, I immediately recognized my surroundings even if this part of my time in Lethe had been erased before. The pedestal desk, and the mural of Québec City to my left revealed that I was in Marin’s private chamber—the same place where I’d sat days ago planning a peace treaty on his behalf. This was the place we had been sure he’d retreat to.
And here I was again.
Only once I had accepted that I couldn’t move or fight back did I see who stood at my feet.
“Chad?” I asked, my eyes still a little blurry. “Help me.”
“Not this time, Scrivie.” He put on the grin I had somehow forgotten during our brief alliance, the same one from outside of Gerard’s tattoo shop the day I had been forced to put my Deathmark on Eve. That I so easily recalled his wicked expression made me sick inside.
How could I have ever trusted him? Or had I? I had to wonder if I saw him as both ally and enemy to stay alive and safe. It was survival. Keep your friends close and enemies closer, they say. But how had I allowed my hate for him to pass into the background, and my trust to start to outweigh my suspicion?
Behind Chad stood Marin, and I knew that whatever questions I was asking myself at the moment were meaningless, and would likely never get answered. I was facing down my demise, however it would come.
“Dormier,” Marin said, and Chad, grinning with conceit, stepped aside. “I apologize for striking you, but it was essential that you did not expose me to my Watchmen. I could not let them know the truth.”
“You’re making it my fault?” I licked my lips and tasted blood.
Marin did not reply. He didn’t need to, either. Instead of breaking into a monologue about the balance of life and death, one that would attempt to solicit my pity, Marin kept to his fairly quiet, stoic demeanor. What I didn’t expect, not in a million years, was to witness Head Reaper Marin, who was forever clad in tight black clothing right up to his pointy chin, peel away the garment he was best known for.
My body turned to ice at what I saw. He was not ripped in muscle or deformed. He was not anything that would make a woman give him second glance. He was average, perhaps even below it.
“Oh my God,” I gasped, wishing I could cover my mouth from what I never expected to see.
“You were right to suggest that I’m not a Reaper,” he confessed as he stood before me, revealing the collection of black and gray tattoos spanning from his stomach to his chin and down the length of his arms. Tattoos. Skulls. Snakes. Roses. Quotes. Anything and everything that a person could imagine as a tattoo covered his torso in a bodysuit that would be the envy of tattoo aficionados. He looked much like Errol, covered in ink that surely told a compelling and twisted story of his life.
Marin didn’t reach for his belt buckle to reveal the rest of what was on his body. Instead, Chad handed him a cloth, and Marin vigorously rubbed it over his face and bald head. When he peeled the cloth away, I shuddered. Tattooed across the Head Reaper’s face, which was once milky white, was a skull. Teeth. Jaw. Nose. His black-as-night eyes disappeared inside his eye sockets. His face was a skull exactly like my Deathmark.
“It’s true,” I murmured, horrified and shaking from head to toe. How did I fight a Master Scrivener in complete control of his powers?
Marin knelt down and put his hands on my knees. I preferred his pale face to the skull that stared into my wide eyes, telling me how painful my eternity would be in Erebus.
“What about the souls…how do they get crossed over?”
A little smirk played at the corner of his mouth. “Most don’t. A technicality, I realize. Chadwick and I have worked together, Matched as some call it, to cross over a few at time, just to keep the order.”
“So Chad is co-Head Reaper?” I couldn’t believe it even as I said it.
Chad’s face lit up with electricity. “I never thought of it like that, but that seems a reasonable title, it does.”
“Shouldn’t you be Head Reaper then?” I asked Chad.
“Good question,” he said, and gave Marin a daring glance. “Why not, boss?”
Marin’s nostrils flared before he began in a silky, confident tone, “I have charisma that keeps Stygians in order. Chadwick does not.”
“You kept us in order through the threat of eternal damnation…that’s not fucking charisma, Marin,” I hissed, even though my heart and lungs felt like they were coated with thick tar. “How could you?”
“How can any of us do what we do with a clean conscience?” Marin countered. “We do what we have to do to survive. You have. I have. All of us have.
”
What I did as a Scrivener was not something that I enjoyed. It was my job. We all had jobs, even Head Reaper. I did what I had to do. But Marin did more. In fact, he did the opposite of what he had to do. “Why? Just tell me why.”
“Why not? I found myself in this role, and I liked it. There is no complicated explanation, Dormier.” That smirk grew into a wide toothy smile. On Marin’s face, even with the skull, it looked strange. Marin might have been a good Stygian once, very long ago, but even then that smile would’ve hinted to his true self. He, like the Trivials he sought to destroy, was a sociopath. He had to be. “Don’t be surprised. No one will know the truth except for the five of us. The rest of Styx will go on living in the lie. You have to admit, it’s an excellent story.”
There was a catch in my throat. “Five of us?”
Chad tossed Errol’s limp, unconscious body next to me. I screamed, kicking my legs to find traction. I wished that I had the intrepid composure that I’d had the day I stood up to Marin so long ago, but seeing Errol, another Master Scrivener, taken down and turned into a ragdoll caused my insides to melt into raw fear. Shallow breaths and panic-ridden glances were my reactions today.
“You…you led us into a trap.” I snarled. “You’re a piece of shit, Chad!”
“The only pieces of shit are the ones who thought I’d be capable of siding with underdogs, Scrivie.” What made Chad’s comment more grating was that he still wore the white shirt that bore egg stains from our breakfast at IHOP hours ago.
“Chadwick has told me you know about Matching, that you got your first experience with him at Wrightwick,” Marin said calmly. “He also said that you weren’t very good at it and that you wouldn’t be any threat with Brent or without. Too bad, Dormier. You had such potential.”
I didn’t need to be a genius to put together what he was leading to, especially not when he turned to Chad and gave the slightest of nods. Knowing how Marin feasted off of others’ horror, I wasn’t surprised when Marin rose and made an advance toward Errol.
“You son-of-a-bitch! He’s not even conscious. He can’t fight back.”
Marin paid no attention to my protest. He would not spend a moment longer letting this rebellion of ours have a voice. Errol was the example he would set. Then it would be me.
But where was Brent? Had he already fallen victim to Chad and Marin’s Match? Wouldn’t I sense it if he had?
“Wait, wait!” Chad cheered as he pranced around Errol’s body toward a closed door. “We can’t leave out the best part!”
Marin put his hands on his hips as if he was allowing his sidekick a moment of play, but really he wanted to get the deed done before anyone could ruin it. I, on the other hand, hoped that Brent would come in and destroy the moment for Marin and Chad. I knew he could. And he would.
“Are you ready, Scrivie?” Chad hooted. “Are you?”
I wanted to fire back “Are you ready for Brent to destroy you?” but I couldn’t, not when I saw who Chad brought into the room, his body as limp as Errol’s. Brent’s head hung down on his chest as Chad clamped his hands underneath Brent’s armpits and dragged him to lie prone alongside Errol. Like Errol, Brent wasn’t dead. He was breathing. But he was unconscious.
For a moment, I blinked and didn’t believe it. How could Brent have gotten captured? How could we get out of this alive? If there had been hope before, it fled the instant my lover was presented before me like a sacrifice for two fucked-up sociopathic rulers of Death.
“Brent!” I screamed to jar him awake. “Errol!” I did the same in the off chance he heard me, too. “Oh God, wake up!”
Marin’s bodysuit of tattoos went from unthreatening black and gray ink to a brilliant red. I thrashed my legs. Somehow, someway I had to stop this. The invisible bindings on my wrists didn’t give way. My feet were all I had, and they proved useless, particularly once Marin and Chad began their merge into one sickly, nightmarish being.
Death and its Harbinger were united into one being, a curious blend of misty darkness dancing around the bodysuit of vile, red skin. Their union was the most beautiful, twisted sight I had ever seen. Nothing had ever been quite so magical and evil at once. Although I knew Marin, being the underhanded Scrivener that he was, had the power to melt Errol of his own accord, he chose to go the route of Matching, which seemed excessive. He sought to make a spectacle just for my entertainment. As the demented executioner he was, he wouldn’t simply put a bullet into the head of the convicted. No, he’d bring out a dull axe and hack away until blood and terror ran like rivers.
“Please, please don’t!” I cried.
The Matched demon paid no attention to my call for mercy. I didn’t expect them to stop. I expected them to continue as I watched on in horror as they stripped my morale away.
That’s exactly what they did.
They knelt over Errol and put their hands on his chest, exhausting little time between their touch and the heat they forced into Errol’s body. Waves and waves of radiation rippled throughout the room, slamming me repeatedly with the reminder that I couldn’t save him, and that, unlike Dudley and Brent, the River Phlegethon would not save him once the deed was done.
I screamed my throat raw, for I didn’t know what else to do. I cried tears because the sight of watching one of my own die at the hands of another felt more like an awful dream than reality.
Chad and Marin’s body grew in intensity as Errol’s legs and arms convulsed. His head rolled from side to side. His eyes snapped open and rolled back. I held onto the comfort that Errol was likely not suffering, or even aware as he took in his last breath.
Whatever comfort that thought brought me faded when I realized that they’d do worse to Brent and then me. I would not have the luxury of dying in my sleep.
The final eruption came too quickly. The walls rattled. The floor quaked. I was smacked so hard with debris and energy that I nearly lost consciousness again. But as had happened before, the heat dissipated as fast as it had come. All that remained of Master Scrivener Dennison were pieces of his North Face clothing and—I shivered—his steel flask that held a sampling of the River Phlegethon. If there was anything left in the flask, I could throw it on Brent. It wouldn’t be much, but it could help.
My attention returned to Marin and Chad still united as one. There was an aura of a satisfaction around them for what they had just done. They wore their success like a serial killer wore trinkets from his list of victims.
“It has taken me decades to finish him,” Marin said, almost conversationally. “Had everything worked out as it should have, each of you would’ve been eliminated at Wrightwick. It was such a simple plan. Get my enemies in one place and destroy them.”
My body refused my appeals to appear calm. I shook. My teeth clicked. I could not mask that I was more terrified of Death now than I had ever been.
“You came back here. So it is here in Lethe that you two will finally die.” Covered in sweat from his display of power, he knelt before me again. His fingers traced the shape of my face as he gazed upon the fear written into my expression.
Nicodemus, Papa, and Delia had escaped, but if Marin won now they’d soon find themselves in this same predicament. The rebels who have been waiting on the edge of a knife for the chance to redeem Styx would fall if Marin took out his biggest threats tonight. Mama’s death would have been in vain. The tragedy slapped me in the face. This failure would follow me to my grave, where it would torment me for eternity.
I couldn’t breathe or move. The cowardice of attacking an unconscious Stygian, and now one who couldn’t fight back, would never be revealed to Styx.
“Please,” I whimpered.
They clasped my forearms, which were pinned to the wall. Magma pulsed from their hands and onto my flesh. The pain of this small connection was enough to send me into an ear-splitting screech, arching my back. The pain stole my focus for a moment. If I took time to dwell on the agony, I would be dead. Or Brent would be. I needed to break free of their g
rip, and the only way I knew how was a primal attack that I had learned from Papa when I was a teenager. Knees make excellent weapons, Papa had once told me. My weapon crashed hard against Marin’s groin, sending him back just far enough for me to regain control of my arms. The collision was enough to break whatever invisible bonds held me in place.
Chad, who appeared confused as to why Marin flew back from me, had no time to assess the situation before I swung a fist against his jaw. Papa taught me that move, too.
I went for Chad the betrayer, as Marin came at me.
I threw my shoulder into the traitor Eidolon’s side, and he barely moved. But it was just the edge I needed to put my hands on his face. Heat came on faster than ever before. Rage did that. Injustice stoked the flames. The fight for retribution was all that this Scrivener needed now. I wouldn’t need to summon hell to make things right. I would only need the determination of seeing Chadwick the Eidolon, the one who sent my Mama and too many others to the Afterlife, dead as a fucking doornail.
Marin threw his hands onto my shoulders, trying to deflect me from my victim by pumping heat into my body. What he was doing was exactly what he had done to Errol and what Errol had done to Pierre back at Wrightwick. And I did it to Chad. But I didn’t give a damn who got who first. In this very moment, I needed to put down a rabid dog.
Chad gripped my shoulders and sent me flying across the room. Marin stumbled backward into the table lamp that lit up the mural of Quebec. The lamp was crushed in half from his weight.
I landed on top of Marin’s pedestal desk. Pens, papers, and envelope openers scattered around me. The Eidolon screeched and launched in my direction, giving me ample time to clutch an envelope opener, one with a tiny skull engraved into the hilt. When he landed above me, I drove the weapon into Chad’s eye socket. He let out a shriek vastly different from his battle cry. His ghostly darkness receded as he stumbled backward and quickly removed the letter opener.
My feet collided with his stomach. This Eidolon would go down. He would die with a million letter openers in his face, or I’d melt him, whichever came first. The heat that I had been stoking with wrath and vengeance seemed to be the first and best choice for destroying him.
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