Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) (33 page)

The Empress-Or-Whatever Shee emerges from the grey-green veil of the woods, her countless insect legs tapping along the jagged rock as she slowly approaches.

Clearly a number had been done to her in the spider-battle in the cave, as a huge chunk of her bubblegum-pink hair has been torn off, leaving half her head bald. Tiny spindles of hair are all that’s left by that ear, which still shimmers with metal jewelry. Many of her insect legs seem crooked the wrong way or functionless entirely, just dragging behind her like deadweight.

“Please, don’t run,” she almost whispers, her face devoid of the psychosis she displayed only hours ago. “Please. Please. Please.” Her eyes search among us, furious and purple and pink, her eyes so filled with anger despite her sounding so calm. “Don’t run anymore.”

“Don’t chase us and we won’t run,” retorts Jasmine, snarky as ever.

Shee bows her chin and clasps her hands, silent.

“Shee,” calls my mom. Shee glances at her, eyes wide and curious. “We will do you a fair exchange. That’s our only option, simple as that. You have something we want. We have something you want.”

“But it was mine,” Shee pouts, her eyebrows twisting. Her voice takes on the stubbornness of a little girl and I’m reminded uncomfortably of the way Claire sounded—of the way
I
sounded when I didn’t get what I wanted. “Both of them. Both of them belong to me, they’re both mine.”

“Sharing is caring,” grumbles the odd, high-pitched voice of Lynx, who emerges from behind a tree. His hand still clasps the end of the leash, and though I can’t see him, I know who’s at the other end of that leash, still hidden behind the tree.

Shee’s eyes grow larger still when Lynx is in sight. Her head seems to spin, taking in each of us one by one. The fact is not lost on any of us that Shee still has the power to obliterate all of us in the blink of two luminescent purple eyes. I notice a bulge at her navel that I’d never before paid mind to. It gives Shee the look of being pregnant. Oh, what a curious thing to be pregnant with: the very salvation of Undeadkind.

“Fine,” Shee decides, putting up no further argument. “Give back my Prince and you can have my treasure.”

“You have it backwards,” states my mother boldly, daring to take another step toward the Shee-thing. I’m reminded in this moment that my mother used to be Queen Of The Deathless, commander of an army and feared by the Living. She is a force against which no person in their right mind would dare stand. “You give us the Anima Stone first. Then we will release your Prince Grimsky to you.” Her eyes are steel. Her words, too.

Empress Shee turns her proud face on each of us once again. When her eyes meet mine, I feel a deep, unsettling energy lance through my body like a cruel icicle. It’s almost like she’s playing with her power one last time before handing it over. I even see the wickedness play in the subtle smirk of her big, bubblegum lips. With half her hair missing, the effect is disturbing.

At once, the smug look is replaced by sadness. Shee reaches in front of her, pulls upon the skin of her abdomen, lifting it like the curtain of a window. Two of her spider legs in front come off, dropping to the jagged terrain with two sickly thumps. Her hand disappears into the folds of her own stomach from underneath. I am not mercifully spared the additional sense of sound as her bony fingertips dig.

Then, her hand emerges, and clutched in her palm is a misshapen, crude shard of glass. At least, that’s what it appears to be. Transparent, which surprises me, and also quite sharp and jagged on either end, which also surprises me as I’d expected it to be round. It’s about the size of a human brain, if I were to guess, and though it is like glass, the thing seems to glow with a greenish hue that is so intense it’s a mawkish yellow.

“My treasure,” she murmurs sadly to the thing in her palm, as if she were saying goodbye to a cherished friend. “Take it.”

My mother, with no caution whatsoever, strolls up to Shee as though she means to hug her. Then, to my surprise, she does. I’m certain all of us share a look of shock when my mother embraces Shee, wrapping her arms around her tightly. Even Shee doesn’t seem to know what to do, astonishment flashing in her red eyes.

When my mother pulls away, she is smiling. “We could’ve been Queens together,” she says gently. “You never did me wrong. You were just misunderstood, weren’t you? Misunderstood and banished for doing absolutely nothing wrong at all.” My mother runs a hand along Shee’s artwork of an arm, tracing the little dragons and beasts that run down it. Shee’s eyes, like two giant red orbs, follow. “Truth is, I admire you, Shee.”

“You do?”

“I do.” My mother softly strokes her pink hair, or whatever’s left. Shee’s expression, contorted with quite an assortment of warring emotions, changes at the touch of my mother’s hand. “I consider you like a daughter of mine, really. I’ve … I’ve a way with wayward daughters.”

My mother allows herself a smile, and she is gracious to
not
look in my direction after saying those words. I feel my lips parting, emotions both ice-cold and passion-warm bathing me.

Then, quite chillingly, my mother’s eyes move to Lynx, who is similarly disturbed by her play of affection. “We, Deathless, honor our agreements,” she states. Lynx is visibly ruffled, his jaw setting and resetting, hard. “Return Prince Grimsky to his Princess Shee.”

“Empress—” Shee stops herself, her face screwing up in thought. “Princess,” she echoes, curious. “No, I like that. I like that more, much more, oh yes. Princess.” She giggles, overcome, then lifts her bright purple eyes to the little Lock, who looks anything but bright and happy. “Yes, please! Bring me my Prince! I cannot wait another second to be reunited with my love!”

Lynx turns his beady eyes on me. I know his thoughts.
Remember our terms
, his murky gaze seems to say.

My mother asserts herself once again, more sternly. “You heard her. Hand over the—”

“Lynx,” I say, cutting in and stepping forward. “Perhaps we can make this a more direct exchange. Lynx is the one with … with Grimsky.” My eyes move to him, careful that my words are plain. “Let Princess Shee hand the stone to Lynx, who will release his hold on Grimsky.”

Lynx seems to enjoy that direction much more, his face lightening—or perhaps it is the excitement I’m seeing that plays in his greedy eyes. Yes, I’ve decided now, I much prefer him with the creepy green eye as opposed to these two slimy, beady ones.

“Accepted,” mutters Lynx, then draws himself away from the tree.

Grim emerges at last, stumbling behind him, his hands bound to the leash. Grim moves too slow, and twice the leash tugs harshly on his hands as he moves. I know that John is watching him with a dark hunger for vengeance in his own eyes. I know that Jasmine is glaring at the little Lock with a fury in her own, too. Neither of them will know or ever expect to know the sympathy that, even now, I still carry in my body for these damaged fools.

Lynx passes by me on his way to Shee. He stops a step or two in front of me, his shadowy eyes lifting to meet mine. A tiny spider rests directly on one of them and Lynx minds it not at all as he whispers, “Any last words?”

I turn to face Grim, the first person I ever thought I could love in this ruined world. His handsome face, pale as death. His sleek hair, black as a void. His lips part, the lips I’ve kissed many times long ago …

In more than one Life.

“Gill,” I whisper.

He turns his head when I call him that name, and I watch the show of emotions play across his eyebrows, his only means of expression.
Gill
…

I don’t have to ask and he doesn’t have to say it.

“I forgive you,” I whisper to him, and I’m not sure if it’s a lie or if it’s something that might someday become true. Forgiveness is a cruel, untimely and unfair creature.

“I let you die,” he whispers back.

“I forgive you,” I say again.

“They accused me of murdering you. I had to move far away. And the woman I later met and loved, long after I threw your life away, she lost everything in a fire. All I know how to do is burn … burn … I lived a life of lies and deceit and pain after you.”

“I forgive you.”

“I took my own life. And I swore, I
swore
I’d do better, if I had the chance to do it all again. This was my chance and I did it again, Winter, I killed you, I killed John, I burned it all down. It’s over. We don’t get a Third Life.”

“I forgive—”

He pushes his lips to mine. The world is gone in an instant and the poet’s lips are making a dream of my own. I haven’t felt Grim’s touch in so long, I’d forgotten truly the magic he and I shared. Before the deception. Before the betrayal. Before the Garden and the Green Fires and the Warlock’s Eye.

For this one moment, it doesn’t matter what anyone’s done. For this one moment, I’m convinced that what we had long ago was real enough for the both of us.

When he pulls away, I know it’s goodbye. I know it’s goodbye forever. I know I will never see Grimsky again. I know that, with that kiss, we’d both just let go of our First Life together, the misery of Claire and Gill and their last, cold night together in the dead of winter.

“On with it,” grunts Lynx, tugging the leash.

The little Lock leads Grim to his ever-waiting Shee, whose hungry eyes seem to have disregarded our kiss completely, as if she hardly noticed it. When the spider queen is reunited with her love, all is forgotten, and the ugly stone—the Anima Stone, my mother called it—is carelessly tossed to the ever-eager Lynx like it doesn’t mean a thing.

Lynx stares down at the coarse, ghastly thing, as if he can’t with his own eyes believe what he’d just been given. He backs away from Shee, the leash and Grim and the world forgotten as his eyes stare longingly into the yellowish glowing glass.

But I’m not watching Lynx. I’m watching Shee, the Princess Shee, the Empress Shee, the Almighty Master Of Spiders, the freak, the anomaly, the everything … I’m watching the expression of adoration as she clings to the thing she so adores. Her arms squeeze her Grim so tightly it’s a wonder he doesn’t break. But of course he doesn’t; a thing so already broken has nothing left in it to break.

With his chin resting on her bony, inked shoulder, Grim turns his sightless face in my direction. Though his eyes are gone, I can feel him looking at me. Grimsky, somehow, staring at me through the nothingness, the lonely dark, the eternal void …

“We had a deal,” Lynx quietly reminds me at my side, the fat rock in his palm glowing with a sickly hue.

I feel the wind stirring up my hair as I watch the two hold each other tenderly, and for a moment, I forget that Shee even has insect legs. I’m convinced it’s just two people, two lovers, two Humans in love who embrace with the sweetness of eternity in their unbeating hearts.

Grimsky, my poet, now and forever.

“Deathless I am,” I recite, though no one in the whole world can hear me but Lynx. “Deathless, forever be.”

This is a lot harder than I thought it’d be.

It might be a silly play of my imagination, but in Grim’s colorless, handsome face, I can swear I see the hint of a smile on his lips. He looks almost peaceful. He looks almost Human. He looks almost … almost …

“Ready?” asks Lynx, and I’m so impressed with his decency to ask that I don’t answer for a while, savoring this final moment with my poet.

It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it?
he once asked me as I hung onto a cliff, long ago.
I don’t want to be helped,
I insisted, annoyed at him, staring up at Grimsky’s welcoming eyes. He had such beautiful, dark and welcoming eyes.

Then why are you hanging on at all?
he asked.
Let go.

Let go.

Without looking away from Grim’s pale, happy face, I remark: “Such love shouldn’t be separated.”

“I know,” agrees Lynx with a dour nod. “I listened.”

The stone pulses like some big ugly yellow heart and, in the warm calmness before us, Grimsky and Shee fall apart together and join the dancing wind in another sort of embrace … an embrace that’s certain never to let go.

C H A P T E R – N I N E T E E N

T H E   N O W H E R E   M A N

There is a deep rumbling in the distance, almost like thunder. When I hear it, all I feel is calm in every bone of my body. The others have run ahead to scour the tunnels for survivors. What an ironic use of the term, calling any Undead a survivor.

But we kinda are survivors. We survived death.

John sits on the boulder next to me, his eyes on the side of my face. There is a chill in the air that has nothing to do with temperature and my mind is so far away, it’s a wonder I even notice that the love of my life’s there.

“You alright?” he asks.

I nod slowly.

“Do you …” John bites his lip. “Do you know how to use it?”

The yellow stone resting in my lap, he means. It’s been there for the last hour as I’ve been staring curiously at the sky. Even Lynx went to help search for the Dead, forgetting utterly about the stone and its power, once his own purposes with it had been fulfilled.