Chapter 19
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“The Carnival Is Over” by Dead Can Dance
Horrified by the sudden silence, I cut the projector.
I snap back into a body already vomiting, face down and heaving in the wheel well.
A sick and gutting guilt rots me alive and for a second, my aching head spinning, I can’t figure out why.
The car? It’s totaled. A couple half-digested pancakes won’t hurt it any extra and the insurance company won’t know this was an act of God to deny the claim—
Act of God.
I heave up bile, choking, my chest seized so tight I can’t breathe.
A thick, bitter dust fills my mouth when I try, coating my teeth, my acid-burned throat.
The walls clamp down on me, airbags crushing from every direction.
The gearshift threatens to bore through my rib cage.
I scrabble at the door, but I can’t make my fingers close, clawing uselessly, staring at my hands with a cold and visceral dread.
Light flares through the dust. Metal screams. The entire door peels away like a tin can opening, flung away, over Bas’s shoulder.
He reaches for me and time doubles in my battered brain.
Wild-eyed, I stare across the passenger seat—across a widening abyss, the sky crashing down and every soul screaming—and grapple forward.
“Hold on, I’ve got you,” he urges, fending off my hands, “I’ve got you. Give me a second, Jenny, for crap’s sake.”
Fumbling under my belly, he unclicks my seat belt.
One hand punching down the airbag, he scoops me out and into him with the other.
My head tucked tight into his shoulder, we spill in a tangled heap to the ground.
His palms climb my shoulders, cup my cheeks, dragging me forward until my forehead presses tight to his, fever-hot but fading into something almost normal. Almost human.
“Breathe, Jenny,” he insists, each word a wildfire against my mouth. “You have to breathe.”
I can’t.
“I killed them, didn’t I?” I hiccup. “I killed them.”
He snorts, trying to laugh for my sake, trying to turn this into a joke. But his throat gives him away, closing on the words, “Pretty sure that was me.”
My hands clutch uselessly at the fabric of his hoodie, burnt away to the elbow and still smoking. The heat of him, the steam, the smell—
I clench my fists. I can still feel them, every little light winking out.
Irreplaceable.
Irrevocable.
One moment of carelessness—no, one moment of caring too much, a mortal grief that weaponized divine and fathomless rage. Now those souls are gone. Forever.
Did Bas see? Does he know? I can’t bear to look him in the eyes but force myself.
“Bas, I extinguished them,” I whisper, confession splintering against my teeth.
I didn’t witness their memory or welcome them home. I held their lives in my hand and destroyed them. They will never exist again. They will never reincarnate. They’re gone, forever, for the sin of being human, for choosing the wrong side, for making a mistake.
Did I make a mistake? Did I have another choice? Was my death, Bas’s, Cain’s worth the cost of what I did?
I stare at my hands—at Bas’s eyes, gold melting back to black—and I expect to see hatred, disgust. Expect to see twelve little cigarette holes singed into my bones, evidence of my hateful blasphemy. But only my own unmarred skin stares back at me, my sweet dead boy determined to live for me.
“Well, excuse the hell out of you for not being super chill about a bunch of dudes trying to kill you!”
“Can I even be killed?” I wonder. “Can either of us? Did my mom break death or just make it mortal?”
Oh shit, mortal—
“Cain!” I launch myself forward but my knees give out, spilling me to the ground. Screw it. I don’t have time to coax my flesh into functionality. I scramble along on whatever parts of me still work, scrabbling across dirt and dead bodies to the RV door.
I wrench the handle, break my fingernails on the latch.
The door won’t budge—locked. I lever myself almost standing, slap my palm against the window, bruised fist slamming into the spiderwebbed glass, howling his name.
My chest creaks around the sound, laced with a terrible inevitability.
This close, the stench of copper overwhelms me.
I can’t breathe without the taste of mortality filling up my mouth, asphodel kissing the toes of my boots.
Too rough, Bas latches hands around my shoulders, prying me away.
I’ll bruise tomorrow, but I barely feel it now, the open terror on his face a knife in my missing heart.
Wasting no time, his skin still bright with dregs of sunlight, Bas cracks his elbow through the last remaining window.
Reaching in, he grips the inside handle and rips the entire door away.
“Cain,” he whispers, knees crashing to the RV floor.
Cain lolls his head, flashes us something almost like a grin.
He sits slumped in the aisle, long legs crumpled at odd angles, wedged between the dinette and the back passenger seat.
And I’ve always hated the hideous mauve shag carpet in this stupid RV but today it’s worse, marred by a terrible spreading stain.
Ripping what’s left of his hoodie over his head, Bas lurches forward, balling it into Cain’s side.
“Stop,” Cain mutters, prying weakly at his hands. “Why the hell are you here, you moron, I bought you time.”
Bas fights hard to smile, an awful choking noise trapped in his throat.
“Driver picks the playlist, old man; she said no unnecessary deaths today.” He shoves the hoodie hard enough to make Cain wince, trapping it in place. “We gotta get you through this or Jenny’s gonna be so pissed at you.”
“Then she’s gonna be pissed at me.”
“Don’t say that. You’re gonna be fine.”
“Bas,” he coughs. “Sebastian. They got me in the liver.”
“Shut up.” Steam glitters in the corners of his coal-bright eyes. “You don’t know that.”
“I’ve been in this job a long time. Long enough to get slow.” Cain’s hand flutters vaguely, gentle as a leaf against his shoulder. “Kid, I’m sorry, but I know.”
“No,” I whisper. Stuck in the doorway of the RV, chest heaving, I shake my head. “I veto. You’re not allowed to die. I’m a god, aren’t I? I decide when. I get to choose.”
And I chose to end who did this. I drew the line in the sand—what I would forgive and what I wouldn’t. And faced with Cain bleeding out in my mother’s RV, faced with Bas sobbing, my regret for all those soldiers’ souls evaporates.
We didn’t ask for this. They broke the world, dragging us out of hell. They ripped us through the fabric of reality and sprang a leak so big all hell’s ghosts came with me. And it wasn’t Cain’s fault—he was a glorified bodyguard—but he took responsibility.
No. I won’t allow it. The memory of soul-weighing scales sears into my palm, but I don’t need them to know this isn’t fair. This feather weighs too much. No obol is worth this. I won’t take it. I won’t. I won’t force Bas to ferry his own chosen father across the river.
The ocean in my chest roars, loud as the engine overhead, the DNR helicopter circling back with the storm dimmed. I stare at its approach, fury building in my bones, tamping down my terror with teeth bared.
How dare they? How dare they hunt me and mine? How dare they hang out the door of the helicopter, even knowing what I am, and have the audacity not to be afraid of me.
Why am I the only one afraid of me?
At my feet, a radio crackles on the belt of a dead body.
It’s a long shot, but I rip it free, striding out past the circle of idling SUVs.
An easy target in an empty flea market street, I stare up at the helicopter, hovering so low now I feel it pulsing in my feet.
From its open door, a rifle dangles like a string of drool from the mouth of its emblazoned asps.
Unflinching, unblinking, I stare down the scope.
“Your bullshit got my friend hurt. Got a lot of your friends dead,” I say over the radio, through my teeth. “Put your gun away and bring the helicopter down. We need to get him to a hospital.”
A megaphone screams on the underside of the bird.
“Persephone Green,” it screeches. “You are ordered to surrender by the authority of the US government. Get on your knees, hands in the air.”
The man with the rifle flexes his hands. He wears a black helmet that covers his entire face. Probably not the one speaking then, and wow, how brave of his driver to make demands while hiding behind him.
I bring the radio to my mouth.
“You are not hearing me. I am the only authority here. I am the only thing you should be worried about. Bring the helicopter down.”
The megaphone spits static. The bird hangs in the air, dangling like a lost Christmas ornament from the sky. And every second they wait is another grain of sand in the hourglass, Cain inching closer and closer to death.
Because of them.
Because of me.
Because of what they did to get me.
“Miss Green,” the pilot says at last. “We understand there are extenuating circumstances at play here. Surrender now and your cooperation will be taken into consideration. You have three seconds to comply before we will be forced to fire. Three. Two—”
I tried.
Body crumpling, I surge up and out. The man in the open door has enough time to jerk a leg back in, “What the h—” he starts before my fingers close bone-deep in his body, gripping his soul around the scruff.
I drag him halfway out. In these close quarters, I grab the pilot for good measure.
Rage flows out of me, a frozen mist boiling, creeping up its iron guts, icing over the windscreen.
Grinding my teeth, I force my hands open just a little—don’t squeeze, don’t hurt, even if it’s what they deserve.