Chapter 63
Alex slammed back into her body. The pain returned in a stampede, too loud, inescapable.
She could no longer feel the shape of herself, her arms, her legs.
She was only the wound. Her armor was gone and she was in the clothes she’d worn to begin her climb.
The artifacts lay in pieces around her. She could see the jagged gashes in her T-shirt, the black fabric sticky with her blood.
Darlington loomed above her, his horns silhouetted against the thunderheads, and here, another shadow: Golgarot come to gloat, ready to drag her past the gate and into an endless torment.
But the figure that knelt beside her was not the demon.
“Dawes?” She was crying, her freckles bright against her cheeks, her red hair mussed. Alex had never seen a more glorious or distressing sight. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“It’s okay,” Dawes said, wiping her tears with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “I can heal you.”
“It’s not safe here. Golgarot—”
“Turner can keep him back. Alex, you’re going to bleed to death. Just let me help.”
Turner was here too? What had happened? Had Wheelwalking somehow broken the containment of the ascent? Had they traveled back with her over the spoke?
She felt Dawes lifting her shirt and heard her release a sob.
“Bad?”
“It could be worse?” Even she didn’t sound like she believed that.
“Dawes, let me go. Save the others. Get yourself out.”
“I’m not leaving you here.” Her fingers were rubbing something into the wound and it hurt. Alex clamped her jaws shut, trying to endure the pain. She drew in a ragged breath. It felt like Dawes was pulling apart her ribs.
“I can’t—”
“I know it hurts,” Dawes said. “I’m sorry.”
Black spots filled her vision. She closed her eyes and felt herself starting to drift away. This was too much.
“Alex!” Dawes demanded. “You have to stay with me.”
“It’s not working,” Alex gasped. “Please, just go.”
“I can’t. You’re the only thing that matters, Alex. The only one who matters.”
Dawes’s fingers reached deeper and Alex could hear her own flesh giving way. “Please—”
“I have to root out the bad. But it’s all bad.”
“Please—”
“Selfish, stupid. We could have offered you up to Golgarot and Darlington would still be safe. Tripp would still be alive.”
“Stop,” Alex begged. “Stop it.”
“I will never stop. I will devote eternity to your misery.”
Not Dawes. Of course not. One more illusion. One more distortion. One more game, and this time she was going to lose. I don’t care, she thought. This means Dawes is safe and I can die.
“I want to feel your heart in my hands when it stops beating.”
Golgarot was still talking. He was enjoying every moment of this victory.
She opened her eyes and looked at him, still disguised as Dawes.
That was foolish of him. Because the sight of her brought Alex only peace.
Dawes would find a way to turn the tide, to bring Darlington out of hell once more.
They would find a fourth to walk the Gauntlet again. Maybe Mercy would agree to help.
She took a final look at Dawes’s red hair in its messy bun. Death was here at last and she was beautiful. Alex reached across the spokes of the Wheel, trying to find the Bridegroom.
North, she pleaded. Don’t let hell take me.
She felt herself rising up from the arena, away from the stadium, the crowd.
She saw her limp body, the illusion of Dawes bent over her, Darlington in his demon form, and then the field was gone.
The campus glittered beneath her, and the city beyond: New Haven.
New Heaven. Just as cursed as she was to try and to fail, to hope and to suffer for it.
The Bridegroom was beside her. She remembered when she’d seen him fighting the gluma. That had been the beginning of the debt between them. His face was sad and solemn, but it was always sad and solemn.
“It’s time,” he said. “This is the only chance we’ll have.”
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“No more than this.”
Alex realized this was how she would appear as a Gray, in her jeans and T-shirt, a gash across her sternum, blood on her lips and chin. It was like taking a bad school picture. This is how I’m going to look in the yearbook?
Far below, she saw Harkness, lit up like a watchtower. She heard the chiming of the bells. Soon the clock would strike midnight. The end of it all.
Dark shapes drifted up from the tower roof, their flight silent. The owls. Had they been waiting for the moment of her death? To make sure her father’s mistake was erased?
“This is the last moment, Galaxy Stern. Take my hand and follow.”
Alex saw his ghostly fingers, his dark sleeve. She grasped his hand, and for the first time, North was solid, physical, more than a phantom. She saw the path to the Veil open before her—the end of everything and she would never have to hurt again.
Here was the Wheel alight before her, the spokes infinite, touching every soul in New Haven, alive or dead. Alex could feel all of them.
“There is love,” whispered the Bridegroom.
He was right. Alex could feel it, a pulse that burned across the Wheel.
But beneath it, something else—relentless, familiar, an endless font of resentment.
In the dead because they had not lived longer. In the living because life was so very hard.
A man flexing in front of the mirror, cursing his lost youth.
A woman speaking into a camera, wondering why no one paid attention.
A father bent over an engine in his garage, asking, Would it be so goddamn hard to get a thank-you?
A mother bouncing an infant on her lap, sure she’ll never have a chance to finish her novel.
All the petty grievances and jealousies and frustration eddying around the nexuses, society members wondering, Why not better? Why not more?
Dawes grieving Tripp.
Turner waiting for divine intervention.
Mercy chasing after Nell and in both their heads the drumbeat that demanded, Why me? Why her? Why me?
On and on they went, grudging and grasping, their anger throbbing like a bruise, a chorus that drowned out any hope of peace, a refrain Alex knew so well because she felt it too, felt it even now in these last moments, because the world had no place for her, because every way she knew how to survive had been the wrong one.
If she came out swinging, she was unstable.
If she worked up the courage to bare her neck, she was playing victim.
Troublemaker. Delinquent. Liar. Fraud. The only good and graceful option they had left her was to lie down and die and pretend it was heroic.
Wouldn’t that be easier on everyone? On her mother and her father and all the people who loved her but who knew, somewhere in their generous hearts, that she was a magnet for mess, that inevitably she would cost them more than they could pay?
But everybody loved a dead girl, someone to mourn, to dress up in flowers, to remember as sweeter and more gentle than she had ever been, to make into a cautionary tale. When she was dust, they could cry over her coffin and congratulate themselves for trying to be kind to someone so difficult.
And that was why she could not fucking do it. She had never had it easy, so they didn’t get to have it easy either.
“You are dying,” warned the Bridegroom. “There are no more tricks to play. Hell will claim you and I will be powerless to help.”
An eternity of torture. Of servitude.
Well, then she’d have an eternity to make Golgarot miserable too.
She seized hold of the Wheel, grasping the spokes, reaching across them, drinking from that vast, nourishing ocean of resentment.
Why not more? Why not me? When is it my turn?
She knew she could consume a whole soul like Belbalm had, take it all for herself like Kittscher.
But a good con knew to just skim a little off the top.
She let all of them feed her, even the Bridegroom, still mourning Daisy, still wondering what might have been.
Even Golgarot, forever railing at the unfairness of it all.
“What are you doing?” North demanded.
“Taking more than my fair share,” she admitted. She let go of his hand.
She fell, fast and heavy, back into her body.
Golgarot had hold of her ankle. He was dragging her toward the gate.
He had the form of a minotaur now, his pointed horns shining, a burning crown suspended between them.
The gate was maybe twenty yards away. Darlington waited obediently beside it, and between the black columns she glimpsed shapes that writhed in anticipation, eager for the opportunity her blood would buy. The door to hell was opening.
Alex touched her chest. The wound was gone. So was the pain. She dug her hands into the black soil of the arena, using every bit of her new strength.
Golgarot whirled on her and she kicked out, scrabbling backward, putting distance between them. He roared and she saw the yoke gleaming in his hand, the one that had been made for her, that had been waiting for her, maybe since the Gauntlet had first been built a century ago.
“Soldier,” he bayed. “Your hour is past.”
Maybe so. Hellfire bloomed over her body.
“You know that can do nothing to me,” he said. “Greet your fate with dignity in this, the final act.”
“Dignity is for the weak.”
Alex let her flames scorch the circle of grass around her, testing. An idea had formed in her head, one born on the beach near Savin Rock when she faced Reiter, made solid when she had fed on Golgarot.
“Do you mean to burn the stadium down around us? A last act of destruction from a girl who built nothing in her life?”
“You make a good point.” She was a wrecking ball, after all, not an architect or an engineer. Maybe it was time she learned to forge something new.
“There’s nowhere left to go,” he continued. “No more friends to call upon. Take the yoke as you were born to. Or…” He gestured to Darlington, who stood at the ready. “Let your lover finish you off and I’ll place the yoke upon you myself. What’s a little more pain in a life full of pain?”
“Here’s the bargain—” she began.