Dead Of Winter (The Beautiful Dead Book 2) (22 page)

“Say it again!” She swats me on the butt. “Now go out and show the world how beautiful you are! Do tell them it was
my
work. Not that self-important Roxie who won’t even come
in
anymore.” Marigold huffs.

I study my forearm and those bones I’ve stubbornly refused to cover. “Got any … spare flesh for my arm?”

“Never thought you’d ask.” She giggles and opens a drawer to get some other tools out.

I smile wistfully at her backside. “I hope someday we have so much work that you’ll never have to leave.”

Her eyes light up. “You promise?”

I wish I could.

The streets are damp from last night’s rain, and I realize that, despite the slate-grey sky that always feels so like a permanent winter afternoon, it is the middle of the night and most of the Humans are asleep. Most of them were smart and filled every bucket and barrel they could find with the rainwater.

I stop by Jasmine’s house on the way home, sitting across the cul-de-sac like an empty, abandoned box. She still hasn’t returned. I heard three men and a little girl from the Human Quarter dropped by to check on her backyard garden and greenhouse after the storm ebbed. At least someone is tending to it.

The door to my house opens without protest. I find John at the table with a candle burning in front of him, the only light source in the house. The light from the candle spills in a million hues across the walls, the ceiling, the floorboards.

He looks up. “Hey.”

I’ve so missed his face. “Hi,” I return. With Marigold’s Upkeep of me, I probably look like new, showing no evidence at all of my near-second-death experience. She really is a genius at her craft. “Did you take advantage of the rain?”

“Filled two buckets and half a vegetable canister.” He lifts a brow. “Did you get caught in it?”

I think John forgets sometimes what the Dead can and cannot withstand. Or maybe I never told him. Either way, I’m not in the mood to educate. “Megan tried taking out her eye.” John makes a puzzled expression. “I’m pretty sure she’s trying to become a Warlock. To save us. Her parents are upset. Naturally, they blame me. Kinda. I don’t know.” I drop into the chair across from him.

John stares into the flame. His eyes are smoldering, the way the candlelight plays across his face, accentuating his strong cheekbones and chiseled jawline.

“I did a lot of thinking,” says John.

I lift my chin. “Want to share?”

He’s still staring into the flame. At this point, I’m just about prepared for anything he’ll say. To any bad news and horrible tidings and inevitable things like death and wars led by armies of flame, I feel downright invincible.

“I’m not disgusted,” he finally says. The flame plays in his muddy irises, turning them into iridescent pools of brooding molten chocolate. I hate to sound too mushy or nauseating, but the beauty of rainbow candlelight—which used to fascinate me beyond anything the natural world could offer—holds nothing in comparison to the show of John’s strong, handsome face.

“Of …?” I ask quietly.

“You,” he answers. Not even so much as a smile breaks the stone he’s made of his face. “Me … Us … What we have. If anyone—If anyone were to hurt you, or try to come between us, or tell me it’s wrong to feel what I feel for you, or say it’s …” He licks his lips. I watch them now, studying his lips as they move, how they caress his every word. “What I’m trying to say is, I’d die for you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“If it came to it, Winter …” He runs a hand along the table. I can hear the roughness in his hands. The work in them, the texture he makes of the table, of his skin, of the hours upon hours of work those whitesmith hands have performed their whole life long.

Then his eyes finally meet mine, as if he hears my longing. I return his stoic glance with an unreadable one of my own. My foot touches his under the table. He doesn’t react. He only stares at me, his eyes almost appearing dangerous through the harsh glare of the candlelight. I let my foot graze his again.

“I’d die for you,” he repeats, quieter.

“I’d rather you not,” I admit with a smile. “I would … really miss your heartbeat.”

I realize that, when neither of us is speaking, it’s the only thing I can hear. The soft drumming fills the room. Just like the first day I met him … the rhythm of John, my favorite song.

“You can have it,” he says.

His eyes smolder.

“I love you, John.”

What did I just say?

“Winter.”

His fingers pinch the candle flame, throwing his world into darkness. But I still see him.

The table chairs go flying back, and our lips are locked again. I have no idea how he finds me so perfectly in the dark, but he does. And he does again, and again and again. He presses me against the wall. His serrated breathing is all I can hear.

We flip. I’m pressing him against a wall now. He loses a shirt. I lose my shoes. Then he loses shoes, too.

I stumble over a loose floorboard. John topples over me, and we’re laughing. And then we’re very much not laughing because our lips are locked again.

This is a night in which I will forever argue that I, in fact, became alive. As alive as any girl with blushing cheeks and a pulse. As alive as any boy with real tears and a bad, stinging gash down his arm.

I give myself to John. John gives himself to me.

A long while later, the bed sheets are wrapped tight around our bodies. I feel him shivering, but as his own heat gathers enough for the both of us—and his heart calms down from a most gracious height—I feel him smiling into my neck as he drifts into another world of dreams. His strong arms close around me, and for once I’m trapped in a prison from which I hope never to be free. I’m a totally different person. I close my own eyes. I pretend-sleep, revisiting my life with John in the post, post, post-apocalyptic world where civilization has once again found its footing, and children are born.

“Do you think we can coexist?”

I stir, opening my eyes and abandoning the daydream I was having. Really, no matter if it’s day or night, when you’re dead, every dream is a daydream. “What?”

“Coexist,” he repeats. “You and I. Do you think this … Do you think we can make this work?”

I love his voice right now. It’s so boyish and curious and full of hope. I never thought I’d hear John sound like this. “You tell me.”

“I think we can.” He squeezes me tighter.

“I suppose I … can age with you, somehow.” I laugh. “Maybe Marigold is more talented than she knows. I can age a year for your every three.” He chuckles into my neck. “I can’t let my youth go
that
easily.”

“But this is only our First Life,” he says. “When I die, you can just Raise me. Then I’ll be yours forever.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Of course it is. Everything is.”

The smile on my face begins to wither. “John.”

“Yeah?”

“I have to tell you something.” I make sure my hand is gripping his. I’m not sure why that’s important, but it is. “We … haven’t had a Raise in months.”

“I know,” he mumbles. “So?”

“And we don’t know
how
Raises are … Raised.” I squeeze his hand again, though I’m not sure which of us I’m trying to reassure. “We looked through all the notes from the old Judge. From Enea, and … It just doesn’t make sense. Whispers. Mists. Helena has tried. I’ve tried. I think it might have been some sort of ‘arrangement’ with the old Mayor, to be honest. I think maybe the amount of Undead in the Harvesting Grounds was, well, finite. Limited. And, well … once the Whispers ran out …”

I draw silent. He’s holding his breath, I can tell. “So … you mean there’s no more Undead?”

“No more.”

He turns me around. I look into his eyes, lost at the sight of him all over again. “Look at the world we live in. Anything’s possible. Look around you, Winter. Warlocks with magic eyes that can raise the dead. People who can walk and talk, just like human beings, with no heartbeats. Beautiful people. The beautiful dead, like you.”

And then he goes in for the kiss, pressing his lips into mine, and how in the world can I counter that?

I’m pacing the den, I’m stuck dwelling on all of the words John’s poured into my ears over the last several hours. He’s basically baked my emotions into a spicy casserole and I have no idea what to make of it.

No matter how many times I dream it, the reality is, John and I will never have children. I cannot bear a child. The Dead don’t bear offspring that way, unless his fantasy of our “life together” included pulling some poor child out of the earth while they’re screaming and reassuring them over and over that they’re only undying, that there’s nothing to fear, that all the haze and noise and horrifying atmosphere is normal.

I somehow doubt that’s the vision he has.

Of course, not all people have children. Not all people marry. When I was alive, I had an uncle on my dad’s side. Well … Claire did. Claire had an uncle. His name was Humphrey and his wife June never had children. But they did have six puppies, two fish tanks and a parakeet.

Uncle Humphrey gave Claire one of his most prized fish for my—sorry,
her
—twelfth birthday. It wasn’t the one Claire liked with the purple stripes, however, so she refused to feed it. What an awful, spoiled girl she was. My—sorry,
her
—housemaid fed it instead, then eventually took it home to give to her own son.

At least Claire didn’t manage to kill
that
pet.

There was a friend of Claire’s mother, a lady from the tropics named Zoe. She didn’t live a very conventional life, never found love, and she always seemed happy as can be. She might’ve been the only person that I … that
Claire
liked. Zoe was a painter and she always smelled like paint, but Claire never minded because she always gave the best birthday and Christmas presents. Zoe was going to move into a house near us, but then my dad got the promotion, throwing us into the snowy north and far away from everything I knew, and …

My
dad.
My
mom. I can’t keep dissociating from her.

When I think about my dad, I feel a strange, ripping emptiness inside me. He was always there, yet never there. Like a wallpaper you see in an old picture of your house. It was there the whole time, yet you swore the wall was painted banana yellow. My dad was a ghost to me until he was dying in the hospital. How ironic.

And I think on my mom. She was miserable. She was icy. She was kissing my forehead sweetly and then she was tearing a hole in my prom dress. In my last moment of life, I was racing through the snowy woods, desperate for her forgiveness, for my dad’s forgiveness, insisting that I’ve changed. Too late. The winter beneath my feet had found me. Snap. Crack. The world went away.

And in that final-final moment … when I was still kicking, reaching toward the heavens in slow motion, a thousand icy knives cutting into my still-living, still-aware, still-alive body … I had a moment of clarity. Helena mentioned it once long ago, this moment that happens just before you die … this moment of clarity …

Every memory you had, every regret, every hilarious joke you’ve told, every sandwich you made yourself, every song you cried listening to, every argument that ended in a hug, every stumble, every paper cut, every glass of pink lemonade you poured, every class you fell asleep in, every bright light bulb you accidentally looked into, every undisturbed second you spent staring at your own reflection in the mirror, every person you craved who never paid you any attention, every doubt you had about a story you heard, every bitter disappointment you couldn’t voice, every embarrassing thing you ever said to impress someone, every grunt you made ascending that staircase, every bit of bad news you ever gave a friend, every smile you faked … it waits for you.

It waits so patiently.

It knows, because in this final moment of your life, just when the moment of clarity is upon you … it’s right at the point when you go from being alive to being dead.

Floating down into the shadows, I stopped kicking. My legs wouldn’t work. My arms and hands … even my eyes couldn’t find the break in the ice, the thing I ought to blame for my death, the doorway that welcomed me to the wintry abyss of doom.

The tragedy of the moment of clarity is that it is too late. Always. Staring up at the shattered ice, I thought, but there is so much left to do. The prom. Gill.

My friends. Didn’t I have any? My mom at home …

I thought, but there is so much left to do and to say.

And my dad at the hospital. What about him?

There’s so much left to learn. My hair coming undone and my heart slowing, slowing … There is so much left …

Wait, wait, wait. Not yet. Please, wait.

I can’t even see the ice anymore, or the sky. Nothing. It’s all going grey the further I sink, and I wonder who’s going to pull me out.

Who’s going to pull me out.