Chapter 21 #3
She means it. God, why does it hurt worse that she means it?
I dig my knuckles into my chest, trying to force the tears back.
My eyes sting. My body threatens to crumple at any second, screaming a hundred complaints—why now?
Why in front of her? I killed a dozen men this morning, erased their lives so completely from the fabric of reality they might as well never have existed at all.
I watched a man I didn’t know die, but somehow, he mattered more to me than all of them combined.
My school nurse tracked me down to murder me, so I shattered the ghost trap on her chest and summoned an army.
And yet, looking at my own mother’s face, broken in concern, unmakes me.
“So did we,” I tell her, voice cracking.
“It’s too dangerous for you here!”
Through my tears, I can’t help laughing.
I gesture helplessly at the broken bodies in the road, the ocean of ghosts shattering against oncoming SUVs.
Cain launches himself through a driver’s-side window.
The man inside claws at his face, his eyes, blood streaming down his cheeks.
A second later, he grins. He winks at me across the distance with eyes gone black and wrenches the SUV to the side, crashing it into another, both of them spinning away in a screaming tangle of metal.
The front wall of a ramshackle house shatters.
“You don’t think we’re past all that?” I ask her.
My mother turns, staring at the chaos as if seeing it for the first time. Then she rallies. Her face hardens into something like the woman I remember.
“Fine. You’re right. We can’t stay here. Follow me.”
I start forward, hand in hand with Bas, but Mom shakes her head, sharp. She brings her rifle up, the barrel brushing Bas’s missing heart.
“Not you,” she says, voice hard. “I’m sorry for your loss. I really am. But you are not taking her again.”
The worst part is—Bas doesn’t flinch. He expected it. Sword held in numb fingers, burning in the dirt, he turns and looks at me. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need to. He said it already: I’d live for you.
Well, the only thing I’m really good at is dying.
Stepping forward, too tired to even be angry, I grab my mother’s rifle by the barrel and shove it to my breastbone, gripping it there with both hands when she tries to jerk it back.
Quietly, I tell her, “Together or not at all.”
Tears well in Mom’s eyes. My stomach churns. Despite all the times I’ve sent her into screaming rages, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her cry. But even now, she doesn’t face me. Won’t look at me. Her gun dimpling my chest, she stares at Bas.
“Leave my daughter alone. For god’s sake, it’s been seventeen years, let her go. Can’t you admit that you lost?”
And suddenly I realize why she hates him. Why she can’t ever seem to look away from him.
“Chloe,” I whisper quietly. “He isn’t Death.”
“The hell he isn’t—”
“He’s Harvest,” I insist, voice cracking. “Can’t you see it? He’s holding the sun in his hand. I hang the stars, he takes them down. When I was stolen, he followed. Of course he did. How can you blame him? It’s his nature.”
“No!” she chokes. “Don’t you talk to me like that.
Don’t call me Chloe like I’m some stranger to you.
I am your mother. He took you from me!” Shaking her head, tears streaming down her cheeks, she yanks her rifle back, but I hold on with flesh and ghost, death staring down the barrel of death, and it can’t move.
“This is all Cain. He filled your head with nonsense.”
My eyes leak, a little of my ocean escaping. I try to smile, even if it quivers.
“It’s okay. I understand. I get it now. I know why you did it. You were just trying to get your daughter back—but that’s not Bas’s fault. He was only doing his job. He’s my ferryman.”
Trembling, foundations cracked, Mom shakes her head.
“That’s not true.”
“I’m so sorry she died,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I had to take her. But she was safe, Chloe. She was loved—”
“Stop.” Mom sobs, openly weeping. Then, a whisper, muffled by the nearby gunshots. “Stop. I—can’t. Not here. Not now. I need to get you somewhere safe.”
We stare at each other, two strangers meeting on a strange lawn.
Last month, I’d have seen this as a cheap shot, a lie, an attempt to hide.
But I know better now. It isn’t—it never was.
Mom wasn’t shunning me, not really; she was only protecting a wound, still festering seventeen years later.
She was hiding from herself. From the truth.
From the price of the thing that cost so terribly much.
I think she knew. The way she looks at me now, an open casket unearthed in her eyes, I think she knew I was never the daughter she lost. And she tried to ignore it.
She named me Persephone to hide the loss, to pretend she’d won a victory against death itself, but every day she looked at me, every school physical she had to fake to hide my missing heartbeat, every ghost she passed that watched me, she knew. She’s always known. She’s responsible.
I’m responsible.
“You must be exhausted,” I breathe, meeting her eyes. The music in my ear sounds so far away—even the drone of the ghost fence made meaningless by distance. The only thing that matters is us, here. Our shared responsibility.
We are both weapons. It is time to aim.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “You don’t have to carry it alone anymore. We’re here now. We’re ready. You can put it down.”
Finally, finally, my mother breaks. She lowers the gun, curling inward, wipes a brusque arm across her face. Bas’s sword melts from his fingers.
“Take us to where it started,” he asks.
My mother swallows. She turns away.
“This way.”