Chapter 14
Nikki
Nick groans, his head rolling forward as his lashes begin to flutter.
"Rise and shine, sleepyhead." I croon, brushing hair from his face with delicate fingers.
It takes a moment for awareness to come to him as he fights the comfort of sleep, but when he finally wakes, it's with a start, his eyes widening as he tries to determine where he is.
"What's going on?" He tests his bondage— the pretty strand of Christmas lights. What can I say? I was inspired by Noah's use of them with Brant.
There's no light inside of him, clearly, so I had to get creative.
I could have just stabbed him and been done with it. I could have run him over with his own car. But I made a list in my head, and when I checked it twice, I realized that I'd forgotten someone. So, now, I'm killing two birds with one stone.
"Nikki?" He snaps his head every direction, searching for me, as if it will make a difference whether he can see me or not.
But I let him see me— not as an angel, not as the dead version of myself... just me.
"Nikki." He sighs in relief when I materialize before him. It's misguided, a foolish belief that he can talk me out of this. He doesn't even know what this is, but he knows karma's a bitch. "Nikki, I'm sorry. I never meant for you to get hurt. You know that, right?"
I appraise him in the dim light of the confessional, which is too small of a space for us to be in together. I may not take up space, but being closed in with him is cloying.
My mind goes back to that closet in his basement, his hand on my mouth as we hid together from his father.
But I'm not a kid anymore. I'm in charge, now.
"You never meant for me to get hurt." I repeat. "So, what did you mean to happen?"
"It was just supposed to be fun."
"Fun?"
I can't even muster outrage. My voice is flat, calm.
He's delusional.
"It wasn't supposed to go like that. We were just going to have a little fun and then take you home."
"A little fun." I say again, because I almost think I'm the crazy one here. "Fun for you is taking away someone's autonomy?"
"Nikki..." He chides, shaking his head. His irritation is written on his face, and it bleeds into his voice. "Stop making this something it isn't."
"You're the bad guy, Nick." I tell him, leaning down to be closer to his face. His breath leaves him on a silvery plume of air, and he shivers. I guess my proximity is chilling, effectively sapping the warmth from him. That's a small victory all its own. "You know that, right?"
"Jesus forgives us of all our sins. Mine are already forgiven." He smirks ever so slightly, as if I will agree with him and put an end to this. "And you told me you forgave me too."
"I forgive you for being a shitty friend." I tell him, thoughtful. "And I forgive you for not protecting me when we were kids, because you were as much a victim as me."
His throat bobs as he swallows, his eyes sharpening on me. "What do you mean?"
"Crazy what lengths our brains will go to, to protect us from reality." I don't have to say anything more. We both know what I mean. "Even crazier, how much your soul holds onto once your body releases it."
"Nikki..."
"I forgive you for it, Nick. What you did to me..."
"I love you!" He rushes out, straining against where his arms are tied down at his sides. "I always have. And I'm sorry that we didn't end up together. I fucked up our happily ever after..."
"Our happily ever after?" I nearly choke on my disdain. "Nick, there's no such thing."
"There could have been. If you'd chosen me... all those years ago. All I ever wanted was you."
"All you ever wanted was to control me... to smother me. And you succeeded, in the end. I'm dead, Nick, and there's no going back."
"I know, Snow Angel. But I can join you. I can—"
I have to laugh this time. It starts as an astonished chuckle, but it cascades quickly out of control; the absurdity of it is too much. It takes me over for a moment, the humor possessing every inch of what's left of me.
If I was still trapped inside the husk of my body, I'd probably be out of breath with tears leaking down my face from the force of the laughter. As it is, I simply laugh loudly and openly as Nick glares at me, clearly offended.
I do my best to compose myself before trying to explain.
"You're really not getting this, are you?
" I shake my head. I'm ready to phone a friend for help getting through to Nick, but my friend is a little tied up right now.
"I don't know what happens when I get justice for what you did.
I don't actually care that much, because I know who's going to be there with me. "
When he stares at me expectantly, I snort. "It's not you. You can't really think we're going to the same place?"
I don't know if Heaven and Hell are real; it doesn't matter at this point. But I do know that regardless of whatever follows this, I won't spend a second of it with him by my side.
When he only continues to stare at me, though, I have to ask.
"Where do you think you'll go... when you die?"
He doesn't miss a beat. "To heaven."
Heaven.
The place they lorded over us our entire lives.
The reason behind every choice we were supposed to make, because bad boys and girls turn into bad adults and bad adults don't get into Heaven. If you aren't good in this life, you'll get sent to Hell, which means an eternity of misery.
Maybe life was the eternity of misery, though. Because right now I feel more free than I ever did in life.
"You're no Saint, Nick." I speak the words slowly before him, so that he can watch my lips move to affirm every one.
In hindsight, it's kind of funny how low the bar was set for him his entire life.
The old church ladies called him a good kid and Saint Nick because he did the bare minimum to not be a shitty human... at least in public. Clearly, deep down, he was always rotten, festering.
A boy can obey his father and we praise him as good, even if what his father has him do is objectively not.
A kid can show up to church every Sunday because their family made them, and we herald them as devout.
A teenager can hide the darkest parts of their soul, covering pain with drugs, and we applaud them for not being difficult.
I suppose Nick is a monster who was created.
It doesn't make me forgive him or excuse his shitty choices and the bad company he kept, but it does make me pity him.
His own father never loved him, and once his mother died, he had to learn to live without all of that.
Sure, he may get praise from the community, proud croons from my mother, assurance from the congregation that he was good.
He stares at me, like I just ripped a band-aid off of him without warning.
"Nikki..."
I loved him... as a friend, a cousin, maybe even at times as a brother. I loved him, and he rejected that because it wasn't the type of love he wanted from me. That's when he became friends with Brant and Cole, and I lost a little more of him by the day.
"I know it hurts." I soothe, brushing my thumb over his face.
"Realizing just how far you've fallen from grace?
Has it even really sunk in yet?" I tap his forehead with one finger, like maybe I can help speed up his digestion of everything that's happening.
"Ten commandments, and I think if you're honest with yourself, you've broken them all, haven't you Nick? "
He swallows, shaking his head as he prepares to deny til the bitter end. Of course, I didn't expect him to relent so easily.
"Honor thy parents. Do you think your mother would forgive you for what you've done?
" I don't give him a chance to answer, letting that revelation spear him as I load my next weapon.
"You shall not covet. We know how that ended.
" I snort, still a little overwhelmed by his delusion that all of this was just some misguided act of love for me.
It's obsession, if anything. "You shall not bear false witness.
That ship sailed when you walked investigators right past my body all day. "
Nick blinks at me, the fight and indignation abandoning him as the reality sinks in.
"Thou shall not steal. You fucked that one up, too, I'm afraid, when you raped me."
He closes his eyes now, like he can escape me. But he's not getting off that easily. I grip his cheeks and yank his head back so that his eyes snap open, locking against mine. "You raped me, Nick. In a fucking church."
"Nikki..."
I swallow, trying to tamp down the rage so that I don't rip his head off right here and now. I don't want to kill him before it's time. "And then you let your friends do the same."
"Stop..." He pleads, his voice so pathetic and broken that if I was connected to my body, it probably would have made my heart twinge in sympathy. But my body is trapped beneath ice, bobbing among hibernating gators, swallowed in darkness and plunged in a cold that there's no coming back from.
"It's almost over." I promise him. "I'm sure you've broken all the commandments, committed all the deadly sins, but there's one last one I think I'm forgetting. Help me out, Nick? My head's feeling a little... fuzzy."
Nick blinks and then screams when I shift slowly back into what I must have looked like last night, when he killed me. Pale as a ghost, covered in blood, the deep gash on my forehead from where he hit me with the snow globe.
I don't know how things would have ended if he hadn't managed to snatch it away from me.
I wasn't strong enough to kill him, even if that's exactly what I had wanted to do in that moment.
I think I was dying even before I tried to hit him.
.. everything had disappeared. The pain, the shame, the disgust.
It's like my brain powered off, and then my body decided to follow.
His scream tapers off, turning to sobs as I straddle his lap, covering his body with my incorporeal one.
Beneath me, Nick trembles, his breaths coming in sharp gasps as the cold sinks into his bones.
"N-N-Nikki--"
"Thou shall not kill." I tell him. "I think that may be the most important one, don't you?"
His teeth are chattering now, and I wonder how much of it is the cold and how much of that is because the grim reality of how horrendous he really is is washing over him.
"It's okay, Nick. I broke that one, too."
I laugh when his eyes round, surprised by that admission. "Who?"
"Cole was my first." I admit. "It was really special. I chopped his head off and then baked him into a pie."
Now that I say it out loud, it sounds insane. But sanity is a mortal construct, and I'm dead, so I don't particularly care.
"Cole? He's dead?"
"Of course." I laugh. "He's the worst of you all, you know?
Because he knew what it's like to not have the world at your feet, unlike you and Brant.
And he still took from innocent people anyway.
Making him mincemeat may have been a little overkill, but I really needed to be sure Brant could grasp the full scope of things.
" I sigh. "He was not a fan of it, go figure.
But I think he was more pissed off about the humiliation than he was about the reality of eating his best friend's flesh. .."
"You're a fucking demon." Nick says, shaking his head. "You're a monster."
"A monster?" I laugh. "No. I'm just mad."
"Mad?" Nick chokes on his laugh. "You don't force people to eat their friends because you're mad. You're mental."
Maybe I am. Maybe my sanity snapped in those last precious seconds of my struggle. When I was having everything ripped away from me, maybe my sanity decided to go right along with the rest.
Or maybe I'm divine justice. Karma, in a way that can't be stopped. Maybe the universe recognizes the need to tip the scale, and it kept me here so I could help bring balance.
Or maybe my rage just seared into me so deep that my soul imprinted on the last place I was alive.
It doesn't matter, whatever the reason.
"You'll be my last kill, and it's not for the reason you think."
I can sense him opening his mouth to ask questions, but he's a moment too late. I hear the door opening, the slow creak and the shuffle as someone takes the space across from us in the dark confines of the confessional booth.
"You can't atone for your sins." I tell him. "Not enough time for that, I fear. But you can do the next best thing."
He doesn't ask what, torn between horror that he's trapped here with his father inches away, and yet entirely at my mercy.
"Confess."