Chapter 51 Helena
Renwick.
It seemed a fitting name. Sharp and quick, but also lyrical and, in a way, elegant.
I let the scene unfold before me, in awe of this version of Grim that, from his dated attire, our rustic surroundings, and the absence of any of his tattoos, I could gather was a memory.
As the two figures spoke, making their deal, I held my breath as Grim, my Grim, took the scythe from his opponent.
The moment he did, the tool, the reaper, the former reaper, vanished, unfurling to mist and vapor just as Sir Black had done.
The boy turned his head away, resuming a previous position, and Grim seemed to wake up.
Frowning, tears burning his eyes, he peered at the boy, his nephew. Then, after raking a hand through his hair—which currently lacked its white streak—he hurried to the door, which he opened.
I rushed to meet him there, but the instant he stepped out, something strange—something else strange—happened.
Grim blipped out of existence before reappearing with his back to me, as though the threshold represented some invisible portal that sent him straight back into the house.
“No,” he muttered, gripping his hair with both hands now.
“Grim,” I said, “I’m here.”
I surged forward, desperate to go to him, to embrace him, to let him know he wasn’t alone anymore. And that I’d come to get him.
That invisible barrier worked the same way for me as it had for him, depositing me in a flash back into the darkness and the night instead of allowing me into the house.
I whirled to find him pacing now, anxiously glancing from the doorway he could not get through—that he could not see me standing in—and that small boy he’d been forced to abandon.
His pain—the anger he carried with him everywhere, and in every fiber of his person. It all made so much terrible sense.
Right along with why he didn’t want to remember.
That one life Grim had been granted by the prior reaper—Johann must have realized right away when I’d told him about Cedric trying to barter with Grim for my life that Grim had used his own credit to save someone he loved. And how saving that life had led him to take up the scythe.
In saving Phineas, though, Grim had also left the boy behind.
And he’d spent all this time—centuries—blaming himself for that.
“Grim,” I called again, tears burning my eyes, too, because I wanted so badly to put a stop to his angst, to this agony that worked to eat him alive.
When the figure of the Grim Reaper rematerialized in the far corner of the hut, unfurling from gray-black smoke and mist, my stomach plummeted.
The memory—it was about to begin again.
How many times had Grim already relived it in the hours—the days—since he’d been here, in the Black Basin?
“Grim!” I tried again as the door, moving on its own, slammed itself shut, sealing him in with what had to be his darkest moment.
Though I tried to shove the door open, it refused to budge, which sent me scrambling back to the window.
“Demon,” said Grim, my Grim.
“I am but the hand of death,” corrected the reaper, a response that had Grim whipping his head toward Phineas before, panic-stricken, glancing back to his unwelcome guest.
“I’ll not let you take him.”
And just like that, the memory began again, forcing Grim to participate, to revisit, to relive every excruciating second.
How could I stop it when he couldn’t see or hear me?
When, to him, I was the phantom, and these shadows represented his current—and unending—reality?
This. Wasn’t it the true riddle? Its answer much more difficult, much more elusive than the puzzle Sir Black had presented me with. But then, Sir Black had well and truly been me. Did that mean Grim had encountered his own Sir Black, too?
To be here, he must have. He did not grasp what was plain to me—that he did not have a prison guard here. None outside of himself.
This torture. Grim was doing it to himself.
Which meant I had no power to stop it. He would have to.
One thing I could do was to try to be a better mirror than the one he found himself staring into now. The distorted one he showed himself.
The one he could not escape. Because it was his only perspective.
With just a few words uttered to me in The Judge, hadn’t Grim done the same for me? Adjusted my view. Shifted my soul. Just enough…
“You did everything you could, Grim,” I said, calling to him from the window.
He didn’t hear me. None of the figures within the hut did. Impervious to my efforts, the phantoms and my poor Grim carried out their play, their reenactment.
“You saved his life, Grim,” I said. “Even if he never knew it, even if he thought the worst, that was still worth it… wasn’t it?”
Grim again hurried to put himself between the reaper and the boy, spreading his arms as the dark figure started toward Phineas.
“You tried to do the same for me,” I said. “Remember? Because you love me. I understand that now—even if I didn’t before. And you loved Phineas, too. That’s what matters. That’s all that matters. That’s all that matters now.”
He didn’t seem like he could hear me.
But then, a shaft of bright golden light shot out of me and into the hut, illuminating it.
I glanced down at myself to find the beam emanating from my heart. Another beam, born from my collar, joined the first.
Finally, I had Grim’s attention.
He looked to the window, eyes widening on me.
But the only reason I’d caught his attention was because the draft of the Black Basin had begun to wear off.
There was no way to know how long I had—how long either of us had—before I got expelled and the two of us were separated forever. Or for at least as long as this fever dream of guilt decided to hold on to Grim.
“Grim,” I called to him when he just kept staring at me like he didn’t recognize me at all.
But then his expression broke, his eyes softening.
“Helena,” he said. “It can’t be you.”
“It is me,” I said, hope filling me to the brim, something that sent another shaft of light bursting through the flimsy shield the potion of the Black Basin had placed over my soul.
Pushing away from the window, I rushed to the door of the hut, which, this time, opened for me. I shoved my way through, stumbling into the sparse room, which dissipated the moment I entered, our surroundings reorganizing themselves into a certain nighttime balcony.
An autumnal breeze rushed between us, the air laced with the distant aroma of bonfire smoke.
Somehow, I’d been returned to my homemade costume of sunshine and rainbows.
Grim stood just as I’d found him that night, hooded and robed, solemn and alone with his scythe gripped in one hand.
I rushed over to him as more light broke through my being, casting our surroundings in a bright glow.
When I reached Grim, I grabbed his free skeletal hand, lacing my fingers through his bony ones.
“Helena,” he said again, this time with his dark voice, which emanated from within the shadows of that concealing hood. “I failed you.”
“No, of course not,” I said, pressing his knuckles to my cheek, the bones of his hand clicking, the imprint of those bones cold against the “flesh” of my ethereal form.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I came to get you,” I said, lifting my hands to the hood of his cloak, gently guiding the fabric back to reveal the face I’d only glimpsed through shadows and partially in the moonlight before now.
A grimacing skull peered down on me with empty sockets. I pressed my hand to his bony cheek even as that hand went radiant, the glow of my being intensifying.
“To stop you from falling,” I whispered wistfully, giving half a glance to the portion of the balcony that had crumbled that night when I’d tipped backward, when he’d reached for me.
“I… forgot all about him,” Grim said, his voice originating from his skull now rather than that dark hood, though his jaw never moved. “I don’t even remember getting him. And I made myself—let myself—forget. That was the only way I could…”
“You felt guilty,” I said when he trailed off. “That’s understandable. But… you shouldn’t. You saved him.”
“Did I?”
“He lived,” I whispered.
“Without me.”
“He would have been without you in death,” I said.
Grim hung his head.
“You gave him a gift,” I pressed. “Like you did me. A gift of time. Love. Life.”
“I forgot him,” he rasped. “On purpose.”
“And now you remember him,” I said. “Because now you can. And that’s okay. And who knows, Grim? Maybe… sometimes the Fated… There’s so much we don’t know about how this all works. And, well, couldn’t it be possible that sometimes the Fated are sent here to live instead of die?”
“Beautiful soul,” Grim said, that skeleton’s hand coming to my cheek.
Grabbing it, I squeezed and pressed it into my skin as more shafts of light broke through, shooting every which way, uncontainable.
“What has happened to you?” he asked. “Are you an angel now?”
I smirked, peering up at him. Then I smiled. “I’m not sure what I am now,” I admitted. “If I’m dead or still alive. A ghost or even, like you say, an angel. The only thing I want to be, though… is yours. Your love. Your fate…”
Grim leaned down, placing his bone forehead to mine. “I’m stuck here.”
“You were,” I whispered. “Come with me, Grim.”
“Where?”
“Home.”
“The Hallowed Halls?” he asked.
“Your place or mine,” I said with a wistful smile. “I’ll totally let you pick.”
“How?” he asked.
“Just hang on to me,” I said, grabbing his hand and wrapping it in mine. “And whatever you do, don’t let go.”
Grim didn’t answer. He did, however, release his hold on the dream scythe, which misted away like all the other elements of this strange realm, this Basin with no true warden or guardian. None but the one created by each of its tenants, all of whom had, like Grim, sentenced themselves here.
“Hold on,” I repeated, “don’t let go, and believe what I told you. That it wasn’t your fault. That you did the best for him. And… that I love you.”
Grim grabbed me and pulled me to him, crushing me against his skeleton’s frame.
I wrapped my arms around his shoulders again as the last of the Black Basin potion wore off, my essence eating through the darkness, banishing it. Mine at least.
Some invisible force, too strong to fight, lifted me into the air, and because I kept Grim in my grasp, he went with me.
In an instant, we reentered that black nothingness. Instead of free-falling, though, I went sailing backward. This tore us apart.
Almost.
I kept one hand clenched around Grim’s, drawing him after me, with me.
He gripped mine in return even as he peered up at me, those empty sockets seemingly full of uncertainty and fear—fear that he wouldn’t be able to leave with me. That he shouldn’t.
Ultimately, that choice would be up to him.
But me? I would never let go.
But just as the atmosphere began to thin, Grim’s fingers seemed to lose strength.
“Grim,” I said, my voice pulsing through my now-amorphous being. “Seat belt.”
Right away, he unfurled to vapor. But those tendrils, still dark, wrapped and held on to me, clinging to me like vines around a sun-soaked trellis.
Then the two of us, together, broke the surface tension of liquid black, our entangled souls propelled upward, nearly to the pinnacle of the dome in the Basins’ chamber.
I kept my hold on Grim’s soul even as mine began to free-fall again, hurling back toward Johann, Flora, Pluto, and the body I hoped still breathed.
Grim went with me, and I prayed as we plummeted together that the Black Basin, or rather Grim’s regret, his guilt, his pain, and his unhealed wounds, would not try to suck him back into his own imprisoning solitude.
But then, the colored and masked figures pluming into view, gathering around us in a circle, each expelled by one of the other Basins, told me that, even if his demons didn’t try to reclaim him, we both still had more hell to pay.