Chapter 53
It’s the noises that rouse me. Not from death, which is taking its time despite my ravaged body, my bloodless limbs, my blurred and broken vision.
But from the unconscious oblivion. I’m teetering on the edge, and the pain is so great, the terror of the emptiness that lies beyond so crushing, I pray for the end to hurry up.
Take me, I cry, though there are no words and no tears and no sounds from my lips.
But the noises—
Slow, agonized grunting as chunks of stone and concrete are shoved aside. Toppling quietly on top of one another as something drags itself through.
A bloodied hand reaches my face. Brushes the debris from my cheek with gentle care. With another tortured heave of breath, a face blurs into my vision.
Soulful, tear-streaked eyes. Pale as moonlight.
Deacon.
Barely alive, but I’m not one to talk.
He lowers his lips to mine.
A goodbye kiss. An end for us both, bleeding out, crushed, never to wake—
No…Not a kiss at all.
His bloodied thumb gently coaxes my mouth open.
It feels like breathing—
The heat in the air is biblical.
Fire and brimstone heat. A frog-being-simmered-in-a-pot heat. Heat that sinks below your skin and deep into the marrow of your bones. Sweat beads on my forehead. Prickles under my arms and behind my knees.
It’s nighttime, and I’m standing on the bluffs of a cliff. A wide expanse of beach stretches far below me. Black sand, rocky coves and outcroppings. There are stars in the sky, and the ocean is a churning body of liquid flame.
I’m still in my ruby-red ball gown, but the spot between my collarbones is blistering.
I yank off my locket, and the silver sizzles in my palm.
In my shock, it clatters to the ground below.
I inspect my hand to make sure I’m not dreaming.
That this isn’t some last hallucination of my fading synapses as I succumb to death.
When I stare, unblinking, at my palm, it’s not a palm at all.
It’s beastly. Black as the night sky or the sand on that beach down below.
Scaled and sleek and vicious, tipped in snow-white enamel.
I focus, willing my pale skin and black-polished nails to return to me, and am astonished when that’s exactly what happens.
I will the dragon-like claw back, and it returns.
Out of the suffocating quiet, a voice purrs. “You’re a quick study.”
I don’t have to turn to know who it is. I’d know his voice in dreams, in nightmares, in the darkness that existed before he or I ever did.
But this is something else.
“I’m sorry,” he says behind me. “I didn’t know how else to save you.”
When I turn, Deacon is still in his ripped tuxedo, but the blood from his wounds is all gone, as are his antlers. He steps closer, gilded by the red-orange glow of a street lamp that hangs over us, solemn and wilted. As if melting from the heat.
He’s alive. The wound from Caspar somehow not fatal for him after all. He was able to crawl out of the collapsed chamber. He could have escaped into the city. Left me to die. I’d sealed the Chasm. I’d already made everything right. He didn’t need to take my soul. He didn’t need to save me.
But even if leaving me behind wasn’t an option…Even if he couldn’t stomach my death…Deacon didn’t have to follow me down. Not when doing so condemned him to an eternity here. The Chasm is closed. There’s no way out. He’s made a terrible, terrible choice.
Only then do I notice the panic—the utter dread—that carves his beautiful face as he takes in the darkened street. The molten beach below us. Inhales the sweltering air. Not remorse when he looks at me. Fear. For us both. For what we are about to endure. Together.
I study the tattoos on his neck as my heart finally begins to thud with horror.
The place I’ll never return to. The place I never left.