Chapter Ten
Ten
My first thought is the roots from my nightmare. They’re real.
But it’s not the roots; instead, it’s a woman’s gnarled hand. Despite the ghastly appendage, her face is kind, creased with worry and lines of aging. “You’re not from here.”
Her voice doesn’t match the rest of her. It’s silky smooth with a maternal quality to it. A soothing pillow I wish to sink into.
She scoots into the empty window seat beside her and pats the spot she vacated. “Care to sit?”
“I should get back to my seat.” I glance down the aisle.
“So soon?” she asks. “Are you lost, dear?”
“Oh no.” My laugh comes out brittle. “I was just using the restroom. I’m in the next car.”
“No, I don’t mean lost on this train. I mean lost in life.”
The gentleness of her tone tugs at my heart. I reach for words to refute her, but there aren’t any. “A bit,” I confide. “But hey, that’s what your twenties are for, right?”
“So young,” she muses. “It’s been a long time since I was in my twenties.”
How long? I wonder. “It feels like I’ve been in them for a long time myself.”
She frowns. “Yes, I can tell. There’s a weariness in you seldom found in people your age. A hurt. It radiates from you. Do you tire from it?”
Breathing is suddenly an Olympic feat. Her simple observations have cut me to the bone.
“Always,” I whisper, as if I’m admitting something else, something I’ve had thoughts of but distract myself from before I can dive too deep into any of them.
I am so tired. Tired of the nightmares and the grief.
Tired of barely being able to drive without triggering a panic attack.
Tired of the gaps my old life had filled.
A life with a clear future and friends and a partner and my parents alive and well.
I’m exhausted. And if I ever take a real moment to acknowledge it, if I don’t drown out every waking moment with work and reality TV and scrolling social media for hours, then it will be more apparent than ever just how tired I truly am. So tired I won’t be able to go on.
“No one should carry that kind of grief,” the woman murmurs, eyes shining with empathy. They’re a light brown, darker around the rims—my mother’s eyes. My eyes. I’m startled by how much she looks like an older version of my mom. A version I will never get to see.
I didn’t realize that at some point I sank onto the seat next to her. From her purse, she pulls a handkerchief and hands it to me. My cheeks are soaked with tears that drip down my jaw. “You don’t deserve to feel like this. You know that, right?”
“No,” I contradict. “I deserve every bit of it all the time. I deserve to never feel happy again.”
“Oh, sweetie, that’s not true,” my mom coos. But she’s not my mom. Just looks like her.
Right?
“You deserve to forget about the pain and guilt and grief,” she says.
“I want to forget.”
“I could help you,” she offers, her kindness a welcome change from Luke’s gruff demeanor.
Luke. I should get back to him. Surely, wherever he went, he’s back by now. I need to—
“Would you like to be happy and light?” she asks, taking my hands in hers. They don’t look as veined as they did moments ago. They’re soft and warm. “Do you want to be free from the pain and suffering once and for all?”
“That would be nice.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. It’s honeyed and haunted, like I drank too much to drown my sorrows, yet they still lurk at the bottom of the bottle.
Her thumb runs over the back of my hand. “Say yes and I can do it. I can make all the hurt disappear. It will be a little deal between us.”
Deal. Warning bells shoot through my head, ringing through the haze. I try to pull my hands out from under hers, but her grip is too tight and warm.
“You’ll never have to hurt again,” she promises. “Not from loss or lovers, art or anger. You will be blissfully happy for the rest of your days.”
“And how many of those will you graciously leave her with?”
The animosity in Luke’s voice is as stinging as a slap.
A needed slap. It breaks through the fog of my mind and startles the woman enough for me to tug my hands away from hers.
At the broken contact, a rush of clarity washes away the honeyed haze.
Luke tugs me to my feet, wedging himself between the woman and me.
“As many as you can count on all the fingers of your left hand,” the woman says. Her familiar face transforms into one of quicksilver trickery. She’s not my mom. Of course she’s not. It was a ruse.
“Five days?” I gasp. “I would have been dead in five days?”
“Not dead—happy,” she counters, mischief dancing in her now-black eyes as she takes in Luke with a strange sniff. “You could use some happiness, too, I reckon. Your grief is just as aromatic.”
“Let’s go.” Luke guides me down the aisle. I drop the woman’s handkerchief on the ground and he stomps over it with his boots. Using the cuff of my jacket, I dry my tear-soaked face.
“How did she do that?” I ask Luke, quaking from the interaction. “She looked like my mom. But she—”
“—is a demon,” he finishes as we go through the door at the end of the car and into the in-between section.
Before I can push open the door to our car, Luke stops me.
“She looked like you, but older. She was preying on your emotions and you almost just made a deal with a demon. A deal that would have had irreversible consequences.”
His voice shakes with barely leashed emotion. Mine is no steadier. “I’m sorry. I—” I break off, unable to finish what I was going to say. I didn’t want to hurt anymore.
As if he heard the words anyway, his tone softens. “That’s what demons do. They trick you by dangling what you want most in front of you. But that’s all it is—a trick.”
“She said she could take all my hurt away,” I say, still feeling the offer’s tantalizing tug. Maybe if I go back, it won’t be too late to take her up on it.
Luke gently grasps my chin, forcing me to meet his urgent eyes.
“This is how they work. They lure you in. How do you think she could take it all away? Even the bad is just a branch from the good of the tree. She wouldn’t have just made you forget the hurt, she would have made you forget the love that causes the hurt.
And that love is what makes you human. You wouldn’t have died in five days.
You would have lost your humanity. That’s even worse. ”
“What happens then?” I ask, breaking his hold to wipe my eyes again. Maybe I should be more embarrassed for him to see my tears, but it’s not that which makes me turn away. It’s the intensity of his gaze and, more aptly, the fear. He was afraid for me.
“You can’t go back.” His voice is heavy with the weight of the truth. “Lose your humanity and you won’t be able to pass back into the overworld.”
I shiver. “No deals with demons. Got it.”
“It’s not just demons,” he says. “The longer you’re in hell, the harder it is to leave.
Not only because it’s dangerous and the odds of not falling prey to its inhabitants aren’t in your favor.
The longer you’re here, the more your being will adapt to the underworld’s conditions to survive.
Pieces of your humanity will fall away. And if you’re here too long, you might lose it entirely. ”
“So our rescue mission really is on a timer,” I realize. “We need to be in and out before it dings. How long do we have before we go monster mode?”
He frowns, clearly unhappy with the term. “I don’t know. A week if we’re lucky. More than that and it gets dicey.”
“You said we can stay on this train for two days and it should bring us close to Beliar’s lair. Two days there, budget two days for the rescue mission itself, then two days back. Six days. That keeps us within a week.”
He nods reluctantly. “That doesn’t leave much room for error.”
I open the door to our car, glancing at him from over my shoulder. “Then we won’t make any errors.”
Before I can pass through the threshold, Luke grabs my arm. Unlike the woman’s grip, his spreads a comforting heat through me, his pulse palpable through his palm. Or maybe he’s gripping me so hard that it’s my pulse I feel. Either way, I kind of like it.
“You just had to say it, didn’t you?” he asks.
“Say what?”
But then I see what he’s looking at. I jinxed us.
At the back of the car, two massive men perk to attention at our entrance.
Grins grow on their faces to reveal jagged teeth with pointed canines.
Their ears are tapered as well, seeming to stick up past thick dark hair.
If anything’s abundantly clear, it’s that these are not lost souls.
Quite the opposite: they look like they’ve found exactly what they’re looking for.
Us.
“Shit,” Luke swears. He’s backing up, taking me with him.
“My bag!”
“We’ll get it,” he assures me. “But we need to lose these guys.”
“Do you know them?” I ask as we shoot through the door we just came from.
“We have a bit of a…past. I thought we’d have longer before they found us. We’re not safe.”
“Because we were so safe before.” I can’t help the sarcasm dripping from my tone as we burst into the next car. We make it halfway down the aisle before the men enter.
“Back so soon?” the woman with the honeyed voice asks, eyes alight with mischief.
“Not for you,” I grouch in passing. We reach the end of the car and go through the door. “How are we supposed to lose them and get my bag? Trains are kind of a one-way road, you know.”
“ ‘Lose them’ wasn’t the right phrase,” Luke says as we get through the vestibule and door of a third car. Like the previous two, this one is packed, but we run by too quickly for me to pick the damned souls from whatever else. “We need to get the upper hand.”