Dead Of Winter (The Beautiful Dead Book 2) (24 page)

“There are no guarantees,” he admits somberly. “But I also handled the body of the … the
last
Warlock. Who was also Human. After he was, well, dead. Really Megan should be resting. I told her not to get up, but …” He bites his lip, unable to go on, embarrassed. He’s never been the talking type. Until the Humans came, he was severely depressed and never spoke a word. His brother still runs the gymnasium, by the way. No one’s confirmed whether or not they’re
actual
brothers; we all assume it’s more of a death-brother, best-buddy sort of thing.

“Megan, no matter what we do next, we need to hide that eye,” I tell her. “No one can see it, Megan,
no one.
Especially not anyone who breathes.” Despite her look of disappointment, I turn back to Collin. “We need to come up with a story. Like … she fell and, and—ugh, I don’t know.” I slap a hand against my face. This isn’t going to end well, no matter how we spin it.

“I’ll handle the business,” Helena assures me. “We’ll have the Chief in on it. We’ll occupy her with some … fake task at the Town Hall. Maybe we can use Brains to figure out if this green eye has any
green
left in it. And—”

“My Raise?” I stop her right there. “You’re going to use my Raise as … as some kind of Warlock test subject?”

“Who else can Megan practice on? Don’t worry, I’ll send Marigold to look over her,” Helena decides, making all the choices today, apparently. “She’ll be safe, then. The Chief will have to convince Megan’s parents that she’s being kept busy in the Town Hall to distract her from, say, running off on another deadly adventure with her troublemaking best friend Winter. They’ll buy that one.” I shoot Hel a stinging look.

“I don’t want to be kept
busy
,” Megan complains. “I want to
help
. That’s the whole reason I—”

“And that’s precisely what you’ll do,” snaps Helena, rising off the curb to face the little one. “You’ll practice on Brains, to see if there
are
any powers in that eye. Might as well make do. But rest first. Winter, I suggest you bring John to the Town Hall. We have a lot to discuss.”

“Okay.”

Hel puts a hand on Megan’s back, guiding her off. Megan peers back at me over her shoulder, sadness in her eyes. Sorry: in her
eye
. I watch with a sickness brewing in me. The sight of that little girl and how she completely mutilated herself, all for the purpose of … what? For all we know, she may not be capable of anything. After all the failed attempts
we
made at using those Lock-eyes …

“Winter …”

“Go.” I can’t even look Ann in the face. I can’t look at the lung-bag of a boyfriend Jim either, nor can I face Collin at my back. “Please. Spare me.”

“But, Winter …”

“I SAID GO!” I cry out, Ann jerking back. Without another moment’s hesitation, she takes Jim’s hand and rushes off, disappearing into town. Behind me, I hear the doors open, then gently shut, the doctor silently excusing himself from my explosion of anger. I would too, if I were him and had any sense.

The gentle breeze still passes through the alley. I feel the quietness and the aloneness swallow me up. I peel off my stupid gloves and toss them away. Who was I kidding?

Nothing can touch me.

I stare at the ground, seething, my icecap blues feeling more like fiery reds at this point. I’m staring at some weed that’s sprouted from a crack in the cobblestone road. I don’t remember seeing it before. It’s an ugly thing, that weed. Gnarled, half-alive, half-dead, like most of us.

When I finally abandon my perch and walk home, I keep feeling like there’s raging flames behind me. I imagine it to be Grim’s army, slowly advancing on us. Even with the hint of fire growing in the distance, we will be taken over, ravaged, pillaged, destroyed, sucked into eternal lifelessness. I can’t even say confidently that Grim’s whole plan for a peacefully Dead world is still intact after our confrontation in After’s Hold.

Taking a different route, I pass down the street with Hilda’s Singing Seamstress. The sight of its unexpectedly quiet, vacant storefront sends a chill and half a lost memory through me. Further down the street, I pass the schoolyard where I first met Ann. At one point, I had wondered if the day would come when the Humans at last accepted us, finding their place in our society, and the children of a new generation begin attending the schools together—Human and Undead. I remember how I felt when I watched them fight alongside one another in the Battle For Trenton. You couldn’t tell them apart.

Human and Undead. Undead and Human. We fought for a common cause and we triumphed … we triumphed.

So why does it feel like we lost?

Suddenly, I realize I’m not walking home. I’ve made my way to another house entirely: Benjamin’s house. I push through the door and stare into the stagnant room. He’d left one of his windows a crack open, a quiet hum sneaking its way in through it, a wind song. On the table, I see the candle still sitting there, the one we let burn halfway down before running off on our adventure.

Why am I here?

I pluck a match from the table, strike it against my jaw—why not?—then gently bring it to the wick. It catches, glows red, purple, then green and blue, and suddenly I’ve created a tiny world of colors.

I watch the colors, feeling myself drawn into a trance of nostalgia. Benjamin and I at the Necropolis, pondering the future. Helena, me, Megan in a cage to the other side. All of us, united that day, never knowing that we’d paved our futures in that moment. That Benjamin would last until he met his end at the thrum of a quiet crossbow in a Town Hall, chatting about victory and plans and weapons. That Megan would get out of there alive too, help overthrow a city, then transplant her own eye.

We were united in doom. And we will be ripped apart just the same.

I remember how Benjamin nailed himself to the wall. He wanted to protect himself from the world. I wonder if I ought to do the same. I bit John while we kissed. I still can’t believe I let that happen. At least I haven’t seemed to progress from nibbling.

Watch out, world; I’ll nibble you into submission.

I’ve held the match for so long, my hand’s caught fire. I lift it up, curious, feeling nothing, and observe how the flame doesn’t quite touch my skin. It almost seems to burn the air around it. What sort of magic makes this possible …?

The next moment, I’m blowing out the match and the tiny flame on my fingertips. I don’t care.

I don’t care.

The streets are just as quiet and horrible when I leave Benjamin’s house. I force myself to smile because I’m tired of all the gloom and bad news. If Grim were to show up without any warning and burn the life out of every last Living and tree and blade of grass, when he finally comes to me, I want him to see me smiling. I want him to know he can take the life around me, but can’t take my smile.

Because contrary to what he might firmly believe, he cannot burn my spirit.

John’s on the porch, watching me as I approach. The steps creak as I ascend them, then the wood beneath my shoes creak some more as I sit in the chair next to him, a rocking chair. I stare ahead blindly. I don’t even hear John when he greets me, until he asks: “Did you find it?”

I reply, “No. But Megan did.”

C H A P T E R – F O U R T E E N

O N S L A U G H T

The air is calm. Too calm.

The Undead that inhabit the city walls have all been given steel projectiles, feeling it to be the best defense against an onslaught of fiery Undead that presumably—or rather, hopefully—are just like Deathless incarnate.

I try to picture Grim being assaulted by a rain of steel arrows, and suddenly Grim’s face becomes Benjamin’s, and then suddenly I see Grim looking the way he did on the very first day we met—fine black dress shirt, perfectly-cropped hair that cut down his face in tiny spikes—and all the stomach I thought I had for this is gone in an instant.

“How is Megan?” I ask Helena that evening when the Humans have all turned in for the night, and she just gives a roll of her eyes and says, “You can hand anyone a seed, doesn’t mean they’ll have you a garden by morning.”

We’ve made Megan a thick, warm bed in an unused office of the Town Hall. The Chief has convinced us that the parents have been taken care of; in fact, they’re downright pleased with the circumstance, thinking it rather resourceful
and
clever. “Keeping her busy will certainly encourage her not to … you know,” explained the father Ken, and Bonnie, clinging too tightly to her husband’s arm, nodded and smiled just as stiffly.

There is yet another interesting and just as unsettling development: Gill, the man whose wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl before expiring within feet of me, has been released back into the public. The Chief thought long and hard on it and had many discussions with the man, who convinced him ultimately that he was alright. Of course, he’ll never truly be alright, as he’s lost the only woman in the world he could ever love. Sweet Laura, he kept calling her. Sweet, sweet Laura. Two close friends of Gill had been caring for the newborn feeding her milk substitute powder. I suppose the Chief felt it was cruel to keep a father from his daughter, even despite the fact that Gill was clearly unstable. He’s apparently regained his senses and only wishes to spend time with his little nameless girl, especially considering how precious time has suddenly become, what with the impending invasion at hand. I heard he still refuses to name his daughter.

The day after he’s released, the air grows even calmer. The calm does nothing to rest my restless bones.

Another unit of Undead have taken to sealing the wall in the Burned Quarter, ignoring the fact that we really should have done something about it before now. One foolish Human that had come among a group to observe the work joked that if we can’t finish the wall in time, we ought to simply stack the bodies of the Undead high enough to make one. Two other idiots found that funny, their laughs turning to mist in the cold air, until I quietly informed them that that was, in fact,
exactly
the way the walls were built at the Necropolis, except I was quite sure not all of the heads were made of Undead. Their laughter died in their throats, and I felt a sick satisfaction from it.

The Square has been effectively shut down, along with all the markets and kiosks and other things that made life feel “normal” in Trenton. All of it has been replaced with stations manned by Human and Undead. Though, admittedly, the Undead seem to only be working alongside other Undead, and the Humans, bundled up in coats and scarves, only sit among their own. There are stations for threading steel to the tips of wooden arrows. Stations for melee training, should the gates or walls be breeched, where even the young Humans are taught basic defense and offense using our limited weaponry. I hear an old man telling his grandson: “No matter what, if it’s one of them and one of you who’s in trouble, you protect yourself and your kin first. No single one of us is gonna die for one of them, you hear me on that? They’re already
dead
. If there’s no other lesson you—” He draws silent as I pass, his eyes following me. I’m sure he isn’t meaning to glare, any more than I’m meaning to eavesdrop.

The air remains calm as a winter’s breeze, quiet as the dead. Another day drifts into night song and the snoring of Humankind as I crouch at the top of the northern wall. I scan the brim of the Dead Woods, searching the ever-sprawling lands of nothing. Where are you, Grim?

I search the night sky, which is really just the same as the day sky, and cannot find the ghost’s rainbow. That’s what we Undead have officially named it: the ghost’s rainbow. The great fire that once stained our sky and brought with it a haunting promise of doom. I hope Grim’s happy, as we’ve named him too: Sergeant Green.

Well, I guess they weren’t really serious about that.

The Chief has asked me many, many questions since our return. How many did Grim have with him? Do I think After’s Hold was corrupted and occupied before we got there? How long had Grim been gathering his forces?

And now, he asks about Ben: “I know he wasn’t one of the … one of the Deathless
beforehand
,” the Chief goes on. “He even helped during the Battle For Trenton. He’s handled lots of steel, enough to prove himself. When did that change? Was it something at After’s Hold?”

“It was before then,” I admit. Part of me is saying I should lie, protect myself, hide the fact that I was an accomplice in keeping Ben’s secret, but what would that earn me? The Chief has been reasonable so far, even with Megan’s outrageous recent act; he will be reasonable with this, too. “It was at Jasmine’s party. Ben’s hands burned when he held a fork to … to eat Marigold’s frightening excuse for a cake.” I wince apologetically. “I didn’t know what to do. We both knew what he wasn’t. We have no idea why he … why he …”

“And now we won’t,” the Chief finishes for me, his voice heavy and full of regret. “Gunner is quick, and he needs to be. But I’m afraid he was too quick this time. We could’ve used Ben a lot more alive. Well, you know what I mean.” He finishes his apple with a savage, toothy bite.