Chapter 27
As soon as Death left, the girls came undone.
Riley kicked one of the benches hard enough to topple it.
Chloe sat down on the floor, pulled her knees to her chest, and cried.
Iona rubbed circles into her back, murmuring the sort of nothing promises that people make when things are bad enough, little lies to fill the silence… take the edge off the fear.
“What now?” Naomi asked Shiloh, her eyes brimming with tears. A few of them spilled, and blue eyeshadow bled down her cheeks. “There has to be something else we can do.”
Shiloh dragged a hand through her hair. She shook her head. “I—I don’t know.”
A message played over the intercom about a missing patient.
“We need to get out of here,” I said, turning to Shiloh. “They’re looking for you, and they’re sure to transfer you to a psych ward if they find you. We need to go. Now.”
We managed to navigate out of the hospital, bursting through a fire exit to a chorus of sirens.
We sprinted to the pickup truck, which the girls had driven last night, chasing after the ambulance.
There wasn’t room for all of us, so Chloe and Iona rode in the bed.
Riley told everyone to hold on and peeled out of the parking lot so fast the tires burned.
And then we were on the road again, back to Monica’s. The front door was unlocked, but the house was dark. She wasn’t home. A note left on the kitchen island explained that she’d gone to visit a friend.
“Well,” said Riley, sitting hard on the couch, “I guess this is as good a place to die as any. And who knows, maybe we’ll have an audience. Skye? Can you hear us? If you’re not haunting this place, you should. You’ll get quite a show when Death comes to slaughter us all tonight.”
“So we’re just giving up?” Iona looked to Shiloh for answers, but there were none to be found with her. She turned to me next. “This is the end?”
I racked my brain for an answer, some hope to cling to.
And then…I found it.
“When Death touched me that first time—to give me his power—I felt like…I was falling through time,” I said, whispering, afraid that Death could hear me. And maybe he could. Maybe we would all drop dead the moment the words fell from my mouth, and that would be it for all of us.
I found the bravery to speak anyway, determined to say this even if it was the last thing I ever did. “I saw Adeline when he touched me. I saw her dying in the playhouse, almost like I was there. The vision of her was just as vivid and real as you all are standing before me now.”
“I had a vision like that too,” said Iona. “I got dragged into the past, to my grandmother’s death.”
“I saw my cat dying,” said Naomi in a little whisper. “When he put the touch of Death in my hand, it was like I was there with her, under the house where we found her. It didn’t make sense to me. It was years ago, but it was so real—”
“What of it?” said Riley. She didn’t mean to be unkind, but we were running out of time, and she was impatient. I couldn’t blame her for it. “What difference does a bunch of visions make, and how are they going to save us?”
“What if they weren’t just visions?” I asked. “What if they were real?”
A quiet fell over the girls as they considered my idea.
Shiloh spoke, her voice thin and ragged. I could tell she was weak from the overdose, tapping the last of her energy just to speak. “What are you trying to say?”
I thought back to that first night with Death, when he put the power of his touch in my palm, showed me Adeline in the playhouse.
“Death told me that he doesn’t experience time in the linear way that we do.
He’s lived through many eons—out of order or simultaneously, I don’t know.
The point is he’s not a thing of flesh but spirit.
He can be where he wants when he wants to be there.
When everyone meets the same inevitable end, how you get there or when stops mattering. ”
Naomi’s eyebrows knit together. She reached for me and faltered, her hand trembling in the air. “Roslyn, look, you’re tired. Maybe—”
“Hear me out.” I wheeled to face them all. “I saw Adeline when he touched me, in that playhouse where she died. If I touch him again and go back to that moment, what if…what if I’m the one who kills her? And when I do—”
“You fulfill his demand,” said Shiloh, nodding as the realization came to her. “He wanted us to kill one of our own.”
The girls went wide eyed as they processed what she was saying.
“You want to go back in time with Death and kill your own sister?” Riley asked, skeptical. “That’s your grand plan?”
“You really think you could do that?” Naomi asked, eyeing me. “You think you can kill your own sister?”
I couldn’t answer that question. The reality was that I didn’t know. I would never know until the moment I met her there, at the scene of her death. Part of me felt like I was still there with her, like I always would be. Unless…I found a way to set us both free.
Shiloh shook her head. “And what if he refuses? What if he just kills you with his touch?”
“Then you all live. Right?” I managed a weak smile even though I felt like crying. “If I die when I touch him, then I’ve sacrificed myself. Fulfilled the final dispatch.”
“I’m not going to let you do this,” said Shiloh.
“Well, you don’t have a choice.” I sat down beside her, made sure our gazes were level. “This is my life, Shiloh. I’ll do what I want with it.”
Tears stood in her eyes, threatening to spill over. “Roslyn. Please just—”
But I wouldn’t hear her. “No, you don’t get to choose for me anymore.”
And I meant it. I was done letting others chart the course of my life. If it was going to end, it would happen on my terms. No one, not Shiloh or Adeline or even Death himself, could take that from me. I wouldn’t let them.
“She’s right.” I turned to see Riley standing behind me.
“If she wants to do it, we should let her. The way I see it, this is the best way forward.” Riley turned to me now, resolute despite the fact that she was shaking.
I don’t think I had ever really noticed just how afraid she was, how young she looked when she wasn’t hiding behind her near-perpetual scowl.
“I’ve got your back. I’ll make sure you can reach her if it’s the last thing I do. ”
“You realize that it might be, right?” I asked, wanting to be sure she knew what she was getting into. What this might mean for her.
“I’m ready,” said Riley, and the other girls followed suit, offering their assurances and promises. They were ready to fight back, tired of waiting for their futures to be decided for them.
Death was right about them, about all of us. We would rather die free than live under his shadow.
Shiloh drew forward, conflicted. I could tell that she hated this, that she wanted to drag us back from the brink. That she blamed herself. I wanted so badly to take the guilt away from her, but I knew that I couldn’t.
“So, what, we just wait for him here?” Chloe asked.
“No,” I said. “No more waiting. I’m sick of being a sitting duck. Death said that he’d give us twelve hours, so let’s make the most of the time we have left. So that, even if we die tomorrow, we’ll have lived well today.”
“And what does that look like?” Naomi asked, the idea so distant to her, to all of us.
We’d had our fun on the road, sure. But we had always been riding the swift tides of Death’s agenda, going from one dispatch to the next.
We were free from that now, and the idea was almost startling.
What was there to do with a day that might well be your last one?
“I want to go to the ocean,” I said, and then, a little embarrassed, “I’ve never actually seen it.
Not for real, anyway. I’d always planned to go with Adeline; she promised me this big cross-country road trip, from the East Coast all the way out to LA and then back again.
An eighteenth-birthday trip and gift for me.
But, of course, that won’t be happening.
I’d still like to see it, though. I know it’s a bit of a hike—”
“It’s about two hours down the highway,” said Shiloh. “Three if there’s traffic. But we can manage it.”
And just like that, it was decided.