Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Ophelia screams but the body around her refuses. Not a whimper. Not a tear. She can’t even part its lips.
She can only watch from the floor, caged within the Yoga Wife, who is now devoid of whatever magic let it move.
No matter how she rages, it won’t obey, and it won’t let her go.
She can’t even move the eyes, only able to see what was in their line of sight the moment Ethan dismissed the spell that powered this spandex and pumpkin spice freak.
This is hell.
This is worse than hell because she’s been in hell: three days trapped outside herself, watching Mateo try to die for her.
But he’s not trying this time. He’s done it.
And it’s her fault. Again. If she hadn’t agreed to come in with him.
If she’d made him wait for Ulla. If she hadn’t agreed to take the job in the first place, a thing he was only doing in his roundabout and nonsensical way for her.
She could stop him. She could always stop him.
There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. That was their whole thing.
But in those critical moments, she never stops anyone. Not her sister Juliet, not her mother, not her father, not herself, and now not Mateo.
And she knows why she hadn’t. Because she likes Topher.
But also because of Mateo. Because he likes Topher and that’s so rare.
Precious. A seedling to be nurtured, set on a windowsill, moved from room to room to follow the light without direct exposure to the elements.
She’d wanted a friend for him so much. Someone more positive than her.
Somewhere in her happy and softly fucked up life with Mateo she’d forgotten the fundamental truth of herself.
Everyone else dies.
Ethan dismounts Mateo’s still form and vomits onto the ground on the opposite side of the table from Ophelia in the Yoga Wife’s body. Whatever’s wrong with Ethan, he needs a few minutes heaving. She hopes he heaves out his entire fucking guts.
Eventually, Ethan wipes at his mouth with obvious distress, gets to his feet, wobbly, and starts circling the table. What’s left of Mateo is dripping onto the floor all around her, the steady splitch and Ethan’s ragged breaths the only sounds.
A moment of savage hope pierces Ophelia’s soul at the slow and considering way Ethan circles.
Something had been happening to Mateo as he’d struggled with Ethan, that black stuff bubbling out of his eyes, mouth, nose, and ears, like his insides had liquefied and they all wanted out of his head at once.
Her angle for it was bad and hasn’t improved.
She can’t see what Ethan’s seeing now. Can’t see why he leans close to the head of the table, over where Mateo’s face is. Ophelia’s world constricts to Ethan’s expressions. Is Ethan seeing movement, signs of life, something to indicate Mateo’s still alive?
Ethan grimaces. “Fucking yuck,” he mutters, then turns his attention to her.
All those years ago, she hadn’t been confused about why Mateo’s reaction to seeing her dead was to crawl into death beside her.
She was the only thing that had ever loved him, and he didn’t have it in him to return to existing without her.
But that kind of sad surrender isn’t her.
Even without a body, she continues to voicelessly rage.
She’s nothing but misery, no tactile senses or flesh attached.
As always, her anger can exist even when no other part of her does.
Mateo thinks Ophelia never cries, but she just never lets him see it. It upsets him. But he isn’t here to see her cry. And she isn’t here to actually cry. So, she screams, sobs, and curses and it doesn’t matter, the same way it’s never mattered to anyone but Mateo.
Ethan squats beside her, but it’s not her he’s looking at.
He rolls the Yoga Wife onto its back, gazing right into her face, a hand beneath the nose to check for breath.
His face, still streaked with red and black blood, twists into annoyance.
He doesn’t know Ophelia’s in there. Wouldn’t care if he knew.
The aftermath of their lives is a series of annoyances for this wizard cosplay Wall Street prick.
Ethan stands. Leaves her. Approaches Topher.
There is no heart in the chest she occupies but a phantom sensation of thumping starts as she’s racked with impotent terror and anger anew.
Yoga Wife’s head lolled to the side, so she can see Topher crumpled on the floor, only a few feet away, seemingly still alive, with a trickle of blood trailing from his nose and pooling under his face.
This can’t happen. Not again. She can’t be the only one to survive again. Though survive is a laughable way to describe this prison she’s stuck herself in.
A bare foot to Topher’s hip and Ethan shoves him onto his back.
Topher groans but doesn’t otherwise stir.
Ethan walks away again, but it’s only for a moment.
When he returns, he ungracefully dumps Ophelia’s actual body onto the floor beside Topher.
There’s no disorientation at seeing herself over there. No novelty. She’s used to that view.
Ethan squats and starts repairing the circle around Topher and her empty body.
Ophelia—while piloting Yoga Wife—had broken the edges of both magic circles to let Topher and Mateo out.
Which at least means Ethan wants Topher alive for now.
What will it mean if Ethan traps her body in there?
Will she get sucked back into it? Trapped out of it forever?
Whatever the answer is, she’ll figure something out. She’ll ruin him.
Using the blood dribbling from his fresh chest slashes, Ethan works on the first ring. He’s nearly done when his attention shifts back toward the table beside her.
Ophelia can’t see what he’s reacting to, can only hear the liquid squelch of Mateo’s dripping blood. Though, the sound is different now. Thicker.
Ethan stands, approaches the table, and squats beside Ophelia as he examines something on the floor.
Disgust flickers on his stupid face, and then he delicately picks something up.
It’s a wet, palm-sized mass, black and dripping.
With obvious revulsion, Ethan tries to make sense of the thing, locating the edges and picking at them until he’s holding up a sodden piece of paper with the tips of his fingers.
The background noise of drips and dribbles is interrupted by a solid thwack, like raw meat impacting concrete, but Ophelia can’t see the source.
Ethan jerks, drops the paper, head turning sharply toward the table Mateo’s corpse is on.
Then he’s up, a frantic lunge at the smeared, broken parameter of the circle around them.
Whatever he meant to do, he doesn’t. He’s shuffling around panicked, a confusing scramble of limbs trying to distance himself from something she still can’t see.
Ethan ends up crab-walking backward, nearly beside her again, breathing heavily.
She follows his gaze as best she can. Something is crouched in the circle with Topher and her body, just at the edges of her vision.
It’s hard to look at, a flickering, undulating darkness.
Some basic humanity within her shies away from it, a flickering of nightmare images without detail or form.
She can’t see them, but she knows there are teeth.
There are claws. And even in her disembodied state, its hunger is suffocating, the sensation of a mouth opening and opening.
It’s Mateo, she realizes with a victorious shriek of her soul.
Except it’s not.
Because the thing hunched over her physical body is only comparable to a human in that it seems capable of standing up. It’s like if dark could hurt like light, the shadow blinding, and the eyes of the Yoga Wife are watering as Ophelia uses them to look at it.
The dark thing is pressed close to Ophelia’s physical body, but she can’t tell what it’s doing. Is it Mateo? She doesn’t know. But if it’s not, if it’s the demon, she hopes it kills her. Let them be together, even if together is dead inside of it.
A slap of feet, and Ethan, thus far ignored by the creature, makes for the stairs.
The creature doesn’t move, and Ophelia’s going to die furious if Ethan’s the only one who escapes.
But something is happening, and she’s slow to understand.
The thing that used to be Mateo isn’t just a mass of shadows, it’s leeching the light from the basement, smothering Ethan’s ocean breeze–scented candles.
Rapidly, she’s not just trapped and immobile, but in the pitch dark.
There’s no noise but Ethan, the loud groan of stairs as he takes them two at a time. He must be nearly to the top when there’s a scuffle, shriek, and crash. She still can’t see anything but has to assume that was him eating shit off the stairs.
“I’ll pledge myself to you!” Ethan screams, voice shrill in hysteria.
More silence. Ophelia waits because it’s all she can do. Is it killing him? Is it considering?
“I can be helpful. Useful. Get you people. Whatever you want,” Ethan assures it, his voice loud and quivering in the darkness.
When it speaks, it’s a whispering voice she can hear inside even this stolen body, scraping against the very bones. “I’m just not that into you,” it says.
Ethan draws in a sharp breath that would be Ophelia’s if only she had working lungs.
“Mateo?” Ethan tries, voice desperate. “You don’t have to do this. I’ve made some mistakes, yes. But we can figure this out. Get you help. Help your friends.”
The laugh is a lance, hurting teeth that aren’t hers. It’s not Mateo’s laugh. Not a human laugh at all. But she loves it desperately.
“What are you?” is the last thing Ethan says before the darkness is shattered by his screams.
They go on for a very long time, and she loves that too.