Chapter 23
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Wish You Were Here (reprise)” by Pink Floyd
Help me with this!” my mother barks.
I can’t move. Time smears around me. Bas fragments into a blur. The two of them together heave the heavy iron table against the door. My mom kicks over a filing cabinet. On her butt in the dirt, she shoves with her legs until she rams it into place.
Nearby, just feet away, three skeletons stare with empty eyes, their ghost lights long since burned away.
I watched them stand.
I watched them die.
I watched each body get up over and over again until it couldn’t anymore.
I lost myself here. I lost my other half here. I lost everything here.
Mom climbs back to her feet. Rifle at the ready, she hesitates, pauses to grip my arm, stares me in the face. I stare dumbly back, frozen and cold, and I can tell she thinks that I’m afraid.
She says, “I’ll never stop fighting for you,” and looks me dead in the eyes but it doesn’t feel like a lie.
It feels like a terrible truth.
“Then you’ll die for me,” I whisper. “And who will ferry you across the river?”
Rifle slotting against her shoulder, Mom turns away.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
Doesn’t she know? It’s already burning.
Woken by my proximity, markings on the floor begin to glow beneath the brown and flaking blood.
Cold silver flows through every pictogram and cuneiform, every rune, every symbol.
And I can’t read it, can’t remember, but I know it spells my name in as many languages as my mother could learn.
The circle calls to me. It’s my cradle. My grave.
It’s a stained mouth and a sky full of stars.
A calloused hand splitting open a pomegranate, blue-raspberry kisses in the pouring rain.
My mind churns uselessly, unmoored in time.
Every soul follows the same path in the same direction: life, then death; then the winding river into our underworld kingdom. Every soul traverses it, and it’s only ever meant to flow one way. That way is blocked now, has been for seventeen years, my river dammed and banks broken.
But even still: the only way out of life is through it. The only way to fix death is to kill it.
I need to sail my river. I need to go home.
I feel the ward-wall standing in my way, its siren scream discordant, drowning out my distant heartbeat. A siphon in the stream—if I die here, it will divert the flow of me. I need enough power to overwhelm it. I need to make myself huge enough—god enough—to not just plug the pipe but destroy it.
Caught in two conflicting flows, my soul bleeds from the seams in my body. I crash to my knees, skinned palms stinging on the stone. At the very tips of my outstretched fingers, I can just tickle the distant ley lines, trapped and feeding into this corrupt generator.
“You said that thing works like a bomb?” I slur, mouth hazing between alive and dead. “As in, it releases a massive electromagnetic pulse all at once?”
Mom lurches toward me, hand outstretched to help. But bootsteps thunder down the iron grating outside. She swings around, levels her rifle at the door.
“It’s a spiritual EMP,” she says, shoulders steady, sighting down the barrel. “It will reroute a portion of the power from the ley lines, essentially deploying like a dam over the break in the world, stopping the hell seep.”
The door rocks on its hinges.
“That’s my cue.” Cain laughs and surges through the stone wall. Outside, someone screams. I have to bellow to be heard.
“But it’s like the ward-wall? The energy flows in one direction?”
My mom grinds her teeth, finger hovering over the trigger.
“Input and output, yes!”
“Good. Then I know how to fix this.”
Elbow over elbow, army crawling to bed down with monsters, a corpse returning to the undercroft below her bed, I drag my flesh-and-ghost carcass into the silver-lit circle.
“Jenny?” Bas’s eyes follow me anxiously, darting to the door and back, a question written in his whole body—
Is this what you want?
I force my flickering mouth to smile. I steal a second just to stare at him, the corded muscles of his forearm bearing up a burning sword, sunlight glowing on his sweet, stupid face.
“I would have liked another date with you,” I whisper.
Bas snorts, black eyes bright, now fully ringed with gold.
“Yeah,” he whispers back. “Me too.”
Grabbing him by the collar, Mom wrenches him around to face the door.
“Stop it! Concentrate! We’re not dying. Cain’s an ass, but he’s competent. They can’t have that many teams left. What he doesn’t take down, we’ll clear, buy ourselves breathing room to figure out the rest.”
I shake my head, rolling onto my back within the circle, my head aligned with the symbol of an oval sliced through the center.
“I’ve already figured it out. Or, well, you figured it out.
You’re the one who gave me the answer, you and Cain.
We need to reverse the ritual.” I flop a gummy hand on my chest, soul plucking at my skin.
“You came here with a bomb for a reason, Mom. We just need to aim it in the opposite direction.”
“Absolutely not!” she snarls, frantic. “That would kill you. Worse than kill you—it would siphon the soul out of your body, harvest all your electricity, and—and project it, amplified, at such a force and volume that it would…” She trails off, horrified understanding dawning.
Slowly, the gun droops in her hand. My mother turns to face me, sees me in my entirety for the first time in our seventeen-year history.
“It would destroy everything above it resonating at opposite polarity. It would destroy the ward-wall, reset the flow of the ley lines themselves,” she breathes. “It would destroy everything I’ve ever worked to build.”
“Mom,” I say. “Please.”
She hesitates.
The doors bow in, pounded by a battering ram laced with glowing crystal. They can’t shove the table we propped up away from the door—not far enough to force the filing cabinets out of place—but they bend the doors themselves, warping a gap.
I have a second to scream his name—“Bas!”—but the warning comes too late. A barrel jams through the broken latch. The gun fires.
A terrible red asphodel blooms across his chest.
The sword in his hand burns out. His knees crash to the ground. And I know he’s dying before the light evaporates, before the gold seeps from his eyes, his blood swelling into the runes beneath my too-small body, staining my sweater, my hands, and yet, stupidly, all I can think is—
“You promised,” I whisper. “You said you’d live for me.”
The shooter screams. Cain roars obscenities. Bas huffs something like a laugh—or maybe a collapsing lung. His fingers creep across the stone floor, calluses ghosting my hand. His lips move, soundless, spitting blood, and it sounds like my lost name.
It sounds like “I love you.”
It sounds like something worse, something deeper, older than the world.
It sounds like a promise, and I mean to keep it.
“There’s a med kit in the cabinet, second drawer!
” my mother screams, kicking the left-hand filing cabinet.
She shoves her rifle to the crack in the door, squeezing tight-burst suppression fire down the hall.
“Quick, there should be coagulant, gauze. I know it looks bad, but we can stop the bleeding.”
My cheek in the dirt, our bodies sprawled in yin and yang, I watch Bas’s cooling face until the steam stops seeping from his skin, the gold gutters in his eyes. My rib cage yawns, ravenous and aching. Tears pour down my face.
I feel only rain, the waters of an ancient river lapping at my ankles, a calloused hand outstretched across black water filled with stars.
“It’s okay,” I murmur, barely louder than the sound of someone’s body dropping in the hall. “It’s almost over. He doesn’t need a body now. That one took him as far as we needed.”
Grinning, magnificent and massive, Bas climbs out of his skin.
No longer a boy without a heartbeat, he swells into his true form, a god, not a ghost. I don’t think Mom can see him, but even she feels him.
She reels backward under the pressure of his light and heat and the summer-sweet promise of growing things.
His hair burns a halo around his head. Fire licks his arms. Sunlight boils from his smile, from his golden glittering eyes.
He kicks his way out of swiftly cooling flesh, shucking off his cocoon at last, and he is life itself.
I taste wheat in the breeze of his sword blazing back into his hand.
Seeds sprout in his cheeky wink. He stoops, so big he fills the room, and his calloused fingers scorch my cheek, reminding me what it means to be alive—
to be dead—
to press my lips against his in the blue-raspberry rain, in the asphodel, in Helheim—
(The high noon sun stripes his skin golden, dappled between shady olive leaves. He lifts the heavy hair off the back of my neck in greeting, blows a tickling stream of air, hotter than the one I’m trying to escape in the shade.
Laughing, I catch his hands. I lead him backward, into the waiting mouth of cool and sleeping earth.)
“Hello, dead boy,” I whisper, half greeting, half the fragmented edge of memory. “Welcome home.”
Bas laughs and I still know every hitch and dip of that sound, even when I lost my own name.
His monumental attention fixes on me for a second, blows a kiss and scatters into sparks.
Outside, a body scratches its way standing.
It snags a gun from the ground with clumsy fingers, shoves the barrel to the temple of the nearest man.
Confusion erupts, shouting and screaming, crystals shattering and ghosts—oh, my beautiful little lights—fill the air like floating lanterns, buoyed on blood and a delayed promise.
Eyes wide and terrified, my mother stares through the dent in the door. Outside, a body hits the doorframe, then another, a barricade of empty meat.
“What the hell is going on?” she whispers.
“That’s Bas,” I croak.
“That?”
“He’s buying us time.”
My mother swallows hard. Her shoulders straighten.
“Then we better use it.”