Chapter 18 Helena
Grim’s expression, so hard and impervious before now, faltered under the scrutiny of his own repeated glare.
Hadn’t I also experienced the trepidation that gaze instilled?
Even poor Bryce had almost imploded under that terrifying stare.
Apparently (and paradoxically), Grim himself wasn’t immune to its effects.
While I yanked at the arm that imprisoned me—an arm belonging to a bona fide wizard—Grim peered from left to right and back again as the crowd of imitators closed in, their glowers bearing down on him from all sides, something about their stares putting an unmistakable crack in his previously impenetrable demeanor.
That collage of unblinking gazes drove his to the floor, as if they radiated some truth—some condemnation—he couldn’t face.
I didn’t know how to help him. I didn’t know how to help me.
“Do you have any idea how long it takes to extract oneself from a body bag and then a morgue drawer?” asked Cedric. “My powers took just long enough to start recirculating with my blood that I almost asphyxiated first.”
“Tell me you saved the toe tag,” snarled Grim as he gripped his scythe between both hands. “Suddenly, I have the urge to start a collection with your name on it.”
I blinked at this because, for someone who’d judged me for joking my way through a life-and-death situation, he certainly seemed to possess the talent himself.
“You think you’re funny,” said one of Grim’s doubles, mimicking his low and smoky voice.
“And you are,” grunted another, “but not the way you think.”
“What are you doing?” I asked, yanking again at Cedric’s unyielding arm.
“Torture, of course,” muttered that sly voice, a grin implied in his tone.
“You fucked up,” said another of Grim’s doubles. “Again.”
“But you keep fighting the consequences,” said another, their verbal onslaughts piling on faster now.
“Your deficits will catch up to you soon, though,” said another.
“You descend on everyone eventually,” said another.
“Why would it be any different when it comes to you?” challenged yet another.
“And then.”
“Everything.”
“Will.”
“Fade.”
“To.”
“Black.”
“Enough!” roared Grim as he sliced through one group of doubles, dispersing them before turning his scythe—and fury—on another. All while Cedric laughed softly in my ear.
Despite Grim’s efforts, the green smoke regathered, more doubles taking shape and splitting off from one another, their black-clad forms cramming the emptied restaurant.
Above us, the lights flickered while, outside, the wailing sirens screamed nearer—close to closing in on us.
“Phineas,” hissed one of the doubles before the same name fell hushed from the lips of another—and then another.
Grim flinched, his distress growing as the room filled with whispers, enough that the name itself became lost—indiscernible in the rushing and unrelenting hush of sibilant syllables.
“Stop it!” I demanded, wrenching in Cedric’s grasp again, trying to get to Grim, who, grimacing, braced his free hand on his brow, eyes screwing shut like the voices had invaded his head now. “Why is this hurting him? Who or what is Phineas?”
“Must admit I haven’t the slightest,” said Cedric, whose grip loosened by a fraction, the blade of his dagger no longer threatening to break skin.
“My minions are mirror chimeras, capable only of reflecting what they’re fed by the subject they’re instructed to torment. I’ve… never seen him like this.”
Torment. Torture.
Though I’d been Cedric’s target earlier, everything he’d done since entering had been enacted with the aim of hurting Grim. Including, I now suspected, threatening me.
Maybe I couldn’t save Grim like he’d saved me. Maybe I had no more power to stop a wizard than I did death. But I could, if I was lucky, bring the reaper back to himself and remind him… of how he could.
“Grim!” I called, and as if my voice had somehow broken through all the others, he opened his eyes, head snapping my way.
His gaze locked with mine as I bore down on the wizard’s immovable arm, fingernails digging into the fabric of his sleeve. “I think Cedric could really use a seat belt.”
The barrage of whispers ceased. Grim’s expression changed, the heat of his anger giving way to a much colder—and more frightening—rage as the fumes that had wafted about him returned.
The wisps swelled to sweep his hood up and over his head, securing his face once more behind the darkest mask of black shadow—but not before I caught a glimpse of the transformation that, in one fell swoop, overtook him.
Just as his eyes vanished into darkness, the flesh of his jaw and chin evaporated to reveal a skeleton’s grin. In that split second, I had my answer to what he looked like in this form—even if I’d already assumed.
“Shit,” said Cedric.
After that, everything happened too fast to track. A legion of hissing vaporous vines shot forward like striking vipers.
A sickening snap of bone—loud in the ear Cedric had whispered into—froze the blood in my veins.
The wizard’s grip on me fell limp. His dagger went crashing to the floor—followed by his body.
Then those dark smoke tentacles had ahold of me. Cold but also dry, like the breath of a ghost, they wrapped my wrists, my arms, my waist, giving me no choice but to surrender as they drew me to him.
As sirens howled in the parking lot, red and blue lights flashing through the big windows, Grim swept me up in bony arms while those tendrils loosened their grips to gather and, as one, dive into my chest.
His invasion didn’t hurt. On the contrary, the sensation that filled my rib cage could have been likened to drinking fresh water on a blistering summer’s day.
I… liked it.
I liked him, too, and even as a strange drowsiness stole over me, I still found strength to loop my arms around his shoulders, literally holding on to him for dear life. Or so I figured…
“Is this it?” I murmured, overcome enough by the sudden onslaught of lethargy to rest my head on his shoulder. “Are you taking me now?”
“I’m not your fate,” he said in that dark voice that hummed through me, igniting a flare of heat, that odd desire he’d stoked in me before. Though, perhaps not so odd?
His words invoked a rueful ache in my spirit, too—one that echoed on as I faded out, compelled into oblivion by his cold caressing of my soul.
He’d said he wasn’t my fate.
But those words did nothing to stop the strange longing that, in a different world, another time, another life… he could have been.