Dead Of Winter (The Beautiful Dead Book 2) (36 page)

“It was worth every drop,” I whisper. And then at once I’m struck by a realization. “Jasmine, I don’t have the Lock-eye. Did you—?”

“Oh!” She bites her lip and looks at me uncertainly. “I suppose I left it on the riverbank …?”

“Actually,” I realize, remembering how I’d set it down next to her. “I think it was me. You stay, I’ll run back.”

Panic settling into my gut, I dash back to the woods, hurrying through thorns and shadows. On the way, I spot two slithering shadows, only to realize it’s a pair of large spiders skittering up a tree. “Garden’s full of them,” I have to remind myself, out loud. “They’re super good for the plants and stuff. He told me all about it. They help the environment by doing … um … what was that big word John used the other day?”

When I break out of the trees and onto the riverbank, the little green stone is glowing in her palm. She’s staring at it, puzzled, curious.

“That’s mine,” I tell her gently.

She quickly looks up, as if surprised by me. Her brows lift, her bubblegum pink hair jumps, and the insect wings on her back give a little flutter.

Then she moans the words: “It’s
beautiful
…”

The Shee-lady is not her normal self. She seems oddly calm, composed, focused. I take a few cautious steps toward her, my eye on the Warlock’s Eye.

“Winter,” she says.

I stop and look into her eyes. Only after a stretch of long, bewildered seconds do I realize whose eyes I’m
really
peering into.

“What do you want, Grim?”

Shee smiles, and it’s Grim smiling.

Of course, that’s what happened. The half-scorpion lady flew back to Trenton after dropping me in the pit. She must’ve arrived during the invasion of Grim’s Army. She’s Undead, so Grim took her over. Another pet for his arsenal, of course, and this one has wings.

“Are you okay, my love?” It doesn’t get any less eerie, communicating to Grim through these different voices, these different people. “What are you doing out here, in the middle of nowhere? Are you safe?”

Is he truly concerned, or is he fishing for information? He already knows. He must know; I’d stupidly spilled our whole plan when he’d assumed control of Jasmine.

“Yes,” I answer cautiously. “I’m just fine. You can … You can leave me alone now. But I’ll need that back.”

“I saw Megan,” she says, he says. “Her eye. Is that the plan? Are you turning your Humans into Warlocks, now? To … to protect yourself from me?” Her face looks pained and, impossibly,
so
like Grim’s face when he is pained. I could almost trick myself into believing it
is
him I’m speaking to. “Winter, that makes me feel so awful. I feel so awful that Megan did that to herself, just because I—”

“Because what you’re doing is villainy, Grim.” I speak firmly and calm. “You’re enslaving the Undead. You’re ending lives long before they want to be ended.”

“Tragedies happen every day,” he reasons, speaking through Shee’s curved, wicked lips, “that Humans have no choice in. But after suffering them, they grow. They are thankful for those tragedies because without them, they would be weaker, they would be lost, they would never learn. I’ve been around for over a hundred years, Winter. I know loss. I know guilt. I know starvation. I’ve seen it. What I have to offer is a gift.”

I reach her in one quick dash, grabbing the Lock’s Eye, but she’s caught a hold of me just as powerfully, and I find our hands locked, struggling, neither of us relenting.

“Please, Winter,” she begs me, he begs me, those red-or-violet-or-pink eyes tunneling into my mind. “I’m trying to build an eternity here, please,
don’t
have me spend it all alone! Please!”

Her wings begin to flutter. I’m still clinging to her hand, arm-wrestling the scorpion-lady for the Lock-eye in her powerful grasp. The wings flutter faster, and I’m lifted off the ground with her.

“He’s a
Human
,” Grim hollers out, frustrated, angry. “Your love will go
nowhere
with him! Why
him??
”

We’re spiraling now, spinning in the air. Her wings flap harder, more desperate now, and the dead woods fall below us, stretching on and on as we fight in the air.

“LET GO!” I cry out. “GIVE UP, GRIM!!”

“I can’t let go, Winter. I need to see you. Please, just come and speak to me face-to-face. You’ll feel it again! What we shared in our meadow, the tulips, our dates. It was
real
, Winter, it was
as real as the blood in their veins
…”

The night air spins around us, and far below, I see the river bending around the awesome, massive crater in which Garden hides. The land dropping farther below me, too far, and I’m clinging to the Lock-eye and screaming for him to let go.

“Just one more chance. Look in my eyes. You’ll see—”

And then I reach behind her and, in a moment of madness, I grab her left wing and pull. She starts to spin the wrong way, sharply drifting to the side and grunting. I yank on the stone with a guttural cry, then pull again on the wing, and pull again, and pull again—

“You’re the only one I will ever love, Winter.”

The wing breaks off. Shee plummets, only one wing thrashing madly to keep her afloat, and failing. Plunging back down to the earth, I find myself atop her, prying at her long, desperate fingers, until at long last the stone breaks free—but slips from my own and falls out of sight.

Four seconds later, we crash into the river.

I thrust myself toward the inner bank with psychotic drive. I don’t even feel the furious burning, nor do I look back. I kick my legs at the Shee-lady in the water, thrust myself onto land and, with an intense sting traveling up and down my legs and spine, I hobble awkwardly toward the mouth of the woods and claim the fallen green stone.

When I turn around, Shee has drifted to the opposite bank, where the scorpion legs are slowly and so tiredly digging against the mud and the dirt, clawing their way out of the water. An agonizing amount of seconds later, the scorpion legs—almost acting like some separate entity—dumps her upper torso onto dry land.

She lifts her head off the ground, bewildered. Her human arms don’t seem to work, and half of the scorpion legs have melted off her body, floating lazily in the water. Two of her limbs twitch, shudder, and then she croaks: “My friend. My friend, friend, friend, friend. You’ve come to save me?” She slowly grins with teeth, the creepiness of Shee returned to her eyes for only a moment. Then, her head drops heavily back to the earth, as if taken by sleep.

I sit there on the bank, the stone gripped so tight in my hand that I wonder if I’m trying to bury it there in my palm. I grow numb to the pain of the water stinging my Undead skin, regarding it not at all.

If I had breath, it would all be stolen away. My eyes, they would be welled with tears of exasperation. My heart, it would be yearning for that day in the meadow, that day when I thought I’d found a true peace in this dead, peaceless world. I remember it all, Grim.

What’s happened to you?

I stare at Shee’s unmoving body. It isn’t until a full ten minutes later that I realize I’m still clutching the broken wing with my other hand. Letting it drop to the soil, I bring the stone up to my lips with both hands and kiss it. The Warlock’s Eye that I’d given to John, who then gave it right back to me for protection. My little piece of John.

“Winter?”

Coming from behind, John has emerged, taking a few steps in front of me. He observes the creature on the other side of the river, cautious, alarmed.

He turns back to me. “Are you alright?”

“Yes.”

“How … How did it find us?”

“Grim.” I say, “I don’t think he has control of her anymore. When she wakes,
if
she wakes, she’ll be herself again.” I look up at John, despair in my eyes. “He knows where we are. We went up into the sky. He saw Garden. Or maybe he knew all along. I feel like …” I can’t even say it, the words trapped in my chest.

John crouches down in front of me. His eyes focused, stern, fiercely connected to my own. “Don’t keep nothing from me,” he demands. “I see it in your eyes.”

I kiss John, if just to interrupt his sudden rage, our lips touching for a second, before I finish: “I feel like he was … making his final plea to go willingly, before he …”

“That Green Monster doesn’t belong here. He knows he doesn’t. He can bother the whole rest of the world with his killing wishes and his green-eyed curses, but he can’t have you.” John pulls me in for another kiss, and then we drop to the bank. I lay myself on his solid body where I get to feel the pleasure of every twitch and squirm and movement of his muscles beneath me. His arms squeeze so tight, I fear I could snap.

John tells me the moon is bright tonight just before he drifts off to sleep and the deep breathing takes him over. “I love you,” I whisper to the side of his sleeping face, holding him close. Full and pale and bright, that moon, and I imagine what it might see if it could peer down on the two of us. I wonder if it could tell our kind apart, Human and Undead, or if it would simply see two lovers on the riverbank … trapped in one another’s arms.

Not an hour later, there is a distant scream.

John stirs, flicking open his eyes. We both sit up, listening to the eerie, distant cries. Are they coming from Garden?—or is someone screaming in the wilderness? I almost can’t tell. Our panicked eyes find each other.

Quickly, we tear through the thorns and the vines and the deadwood, rushing toward the crater. The screams sound distorted and strangely hollow, whisking through the trees on their way to my ears. Twisted coils of color bleed into the sky. My feet can’t carry me fast enough. John trips twice, falls behind, but I’m still running.

At last, I reach the wall of the crater, pull myself up to the lip of the ridge and peer into the valley.

At first glance, it looks like Garden’s being showered mercifully by a gentle rain which, by the light of a sun that is not in the sky, casts a rainbow upon their world. But there is no peace in the surprise invasion of Grim’s Burning Army as they pour like ants from an enormous hole in the earth. Grim didn’t need to get past a silly moat; he learned from the mastermind Shee, the insect queen, and burrowed his way in. Spiders and scorpions and dragonflies and hundreds of other bugs I can’t name are swarming with such angry temperament, one might think them a buzzing black storm cloud that’s descended on Garden. But the thunder one hears is in the form of men screaming for their lives, of women shouting like wild animals, of steel licking steel and sparks flying. Among the madness down there, I know that Marigold and Helena and countless others are, against their will, fighting on the wrong side of this war. Until it’s over, there is nothing good I can do to stop them.

In a flash, John rushes past me, flinging himself over the ridge and tearing down the steps of the crater. I hardly flinch before John’s thrown himself into the chaos.

“JOHN!” I cry out. “DON’T!”

But my plea is lost on the Human with which I’m in love, the Human who must charge in to save his friends. Seeing as Jasmine is not here, she must have run down there too. Somewhere else in that madness, the Green Death himself, Grim, is working heartily to claim every last ounce of my happiness left in this world.

I plunge onward, teeth bared and ready. It’s time for his green reign of fire to end.

C H A P T E R – N I N E T E E N

T H E   N E V E R   D R E A M

The closer I get, the closer the green gets.

Every step is a fateful step into the Garden in which I never thought I’d permit myself. Somewhere deep within the imagination of me, a heart thrashes.

Thump, thump … with my every step.

I’m still running and the first blades of grass become the first victims of my Undeadly presence. I keep on, and soon there is plenty of green beneath my feet. But behind me as I pass, it’s green no longer.

The screaming swallows my skull until it’s all that I am. Megan’s scream is in there too, and the Chief’s, and Gunner’s … and somewhere lost in there, John’s. In the earthen bowl of Garden, there is no escape from the sound and the sights and the hellfire.

At once, I spot Grim, his green fire burning in an unnatural hue contrasting horribly with the green of the world around us. He’s perched on a stone, calling out to the warring crowd: “Come willingly and this chaos will end! The world is doomed anyway!”

And doom he casts here, doom he casts there. The flames of the Undead swallow the cries of the Living, until I can’t even hear the bite and scrape of steel anymore. Buzzing and skittering among them are unrested bees and flies and critters with too many legs.

Even with the flames burning, I can’t for a while distinguish Humans from Undead. I push through two people and narrowly miss receiving an ugly haircut from someone’s throwing axe. Somewhere ahead of me, a fiery Undead reaches out desperately to take hold of the Human’s sword that’s swinging toward his head, but he is too late, and where once he was one part, now he is two, and then three, and then four …