Chapter 12 #2
“What right do you have to ask anything from him?” I demand, teeth bared and snarling at the cop.
“He doesn’t have to move for you—and don’t you dare pretend it’s for my sake.
I can speak for myself. Oh, but he had to make sure of that, didn’t he?
Since you all wanted to carry me off when I couldn’t say anything against it. ”
The cop holds up his hands. “Standard procedure—”
“Screw your standard procedure. I don’t care.
I’m done being dragged around, treated like baggage—like a procedure.
I’m a person!” I yell, pounding a fist against my hollow chest, roaring with a distant ocean, rising in a storm.
“I’m my own person. You can’t just—just force me into being something—” Smaller, a voice intones from the back of my mind. Something less than what I am.
The thought derails me, scares me with its wild strangeness, its barely contained rage.
“More convenient,” I croak, my throat closing on the words. I ball my fists, swallowing hard. I don’t know who I’m about to fight, but God knows I’m about to throw down with somebody. Hell, maybe everybody.
My mom steps up to be first in line, turning her glower back on me. “That’s enough. We are going home.”
I don’t move. I stare at her, every muscle in my body burning, and she looks like a stranger to me.
She looks like a prison warden staring into a locked cell and I’m small again and trapped trapped trapped, drained of language and sense.
But I don’t feel scared anymore. I feel cold and calm, as certain as I did when I reached out to let’s-call-it-seven ghosts and held their crying faces in my hands.
It should have killed me.
It should have killed me, but my mother isn’t even worried.
She knows something.
“Why should I go anywhere with you?” I demand, every word an accusation, a tomb door falling open. “I didn’t want to be here. I don’t belong here. You did this.”
Mom clenches her jaw, but not tight enough to hide her shock. Her eyes flare wide. She steps back without meaning to, catches herself, hands spasming at her sides.
She meets my eyes.
“We will discuss it later,” she says.
She lies.
I jerk my arm away before she can grab it.
A half second later, Bas wedges himself between us, unblinking, barely breathing.
Outside, thunder cuts off mid-rumble, the strange and sudden silence somehow louder than the storm.
The lights in the hallway burn too bright, light bulbs shrieking with the strain.
The temperature in the hallway climbs higher and higher, hotter than summer-cooked asphalt, a heat mirage billowing off Bas’s shoulders
“Haven’t you deformed the world enough in your narcissistic image?” he breathes, and when he steps forward, the building rattles like a loose tooth. His voice changes, deep and old and far away. “When will you be satisfied? Is this incessant torture not sufficient?”
Cain launches an arm out like an iron bar across Bas’s chest, tips his head down to growl a warning in his ear.
But something in Bas’s face—I know he doesn’t hear it.
He can’t; he’s not here at all. He’s somewhere far away, caught in an un-memory of his own.
And meanwhile the cop stands there muttering fast into his radio.
Everything’s gonna explode soon if I don’t do something.
Lurching forward, unsteady on my feet, I grab a handful of his hood, his sleeve, turning Bas around until he breaks eye contact with my mom.
But even fixed on me, he barely breathes, stops blinking entirely, his eyes far away and lost. God, he looks so lost it hurts me, every bone in my body screaming at the wrongness, and I don’t know how, but I’m certain my mother caused this.
The un-memories looped between us tighter than a shared headphone cord—I think this is part of what my mother started, seventeen years ago.
The broken sky. The abandoned boat. All the dead wailing, weeping in fear, as two halves of a whole desperately sprint across a crumbling asphodel field.
Our empty chests. The flowers when we kiss. The assembly of dead parading in our wake.
I think this—he—is part of why my mother keeps running.
Afraid to let go of him, I scrabble in my pocket with one hand until I find my MP3 player. Fumbling the knotted headphones out, I get one into his ear, juggle the other into my own, stab the center button until a song starts playing. Anything will work—I don’t care.
Forehead to forehead, I cup my hands around his ears, our breaths tangling, the red thread of fate strung once again between us like a missing piece slotting almost home.
I mend our broken edges as best I can manage with human hands and a vintage MP3 player, whispering, “It’s okay.
Go with your babynapper before you get in trouble. ”
Somewhere between lyrics, Bas remembers how to breathe. He blinks. His shoulders slump, body sagging, and suddenly he’s a teenager again rather than a force of nature—just a regular boy with an exhausted grin.
“I don’t mind a little trouble,” he murmurs.
His fingers tangling with mine, I press the MP3 player into his hands.
“Give it back to me later,” I say loud enough for the others to hear. And then, quieter, hidden in the space between us, the seed of a really bad idea inches hair-fine roots into my head. “How much trouble? Rough estimate? If you had to guess?”
Bas huffs the ghost of a laugh.
“At least three felonies,” he promises.
“What if I only need one?” I hesitate. “Well, like one and a half?”
“Do it in a heartbeat.”
“We don’t have heartbeats.”
“Well, then you know I’m really serious.” His smile lights up his eyes, warm again, twinkling with addictive mischief. He whispers, “I’d live for you, Jenny.”
I don’t have a heart, but I feel his fingers wrapped around it, making it difficult to breathe. Spinning the volume down, I remove my earbud, slotting it into his other ear.
“I’d live for you, too, dead boy,” I whisper. It tastes like a promise.
It tastes like something that’s already happened.
“Come on,” Cain says, dropping a heavy hand on Bas’s shoulder. But he pauses, looking at me. Something solemn crosses the lighthouse beam. He nods to me, once, heavy with an old and distant sadness that almost feels like an apology.
“You’re a weapon,” he murmurs, gray eyes fixed on mine. “Be careful where you aim.”
Mom shoulders between us.
“Don’t you talk to her!” she spits, shoving her hands against his chest. Cain lets her, but falls back only after a slow beat, a hesitation that makes it obvious he chose to move.
Bas’s teeth clench, his eyes seeking mine, but I shake my head, mouthing, go.
I pull the lip of my phone from my bra, wiggling it so he can see.
Bas nods. He turns away. Hands shoved deep in his pockets, he leaves. But Cain stays. For just a second, he stares my mom dead in the face.
“Timer’s at zero, Chloe.”
Mom’s lip curls. Her nails dig into my arm, dragging me behind her.
“Expect a restraining order on your doorstep by tomorrow.”
“Yeah, sure,” Cain snorts. “That’ll stop what’s coming.”
And then he goes. The heavy stairwell door bangs shut, leaving us in the hallway alone—a confused cop; my mother, pale-faced and shaking; and me. A feral dead girl percolating a really bad idea.
“Well?” I ask my mother, giving her one last chance.
Her hand grips me hard enough to bruise. She storms us past the cop, who ambles behind us with a resigned and tired kind of relief. Mom glances over her shoulder, sharp.
She says, “Not here.”