Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I closed my eyes, bracing for the death I knew was coming. When all hope was gone, what did I think of? The mannequin’s Anxious & Horny undies and the fricking burrito.
The tattered smoke-thing screeched and cloaked around me with an air-stealing smother.
The tendrils of whatever it was made of wrapped around me, crushing what life was left in me.
I gripped the marble in agony, unable to speak or move as smoke entered my mouth and nose, literally pushing the air out from my insides.
This was it. Sert had died my temporary hero, but I bet he’d died in those daffodil panties.
At least I was wearing black. Sert’s death was going to be meaningless.
My lungs burned. My vision dimmed. This was it. I was dying, and it frigging hurt.
A voice sounded in my head.
I’m sorry, dear. It was the only way. It’ll be in your pocket.
The voice was Aunt Agatha.
Everything went black .
C oughing sent searing pain through my lungs, which felt like they’d dried out from the inside.
My entire body roared with pain, from the slice on my leg to the swollen agony of my wrist. I couldn’t check my pocket because I couldn’t move.
The only way I could put my hand in the jacket would be to let go of the marble, and that wasn’t happening.
I was alone. Mother-monster had disappeared, and the family album was lying by itself in the middle of the floor.
The two prone bodies near the door were human-sized. The bloody, glassy-eyed body of Sert was about ten feet from me. The slithering pit creatures had disappeared.
Wald.
It came out as a creak of a whisper. I tried to get up four times before I was able to roll onto my left hip.
The wound on my grated cheek felt like a gaping hole, and the blood from my sliced leg had crusted to the ripped leggings.
Every time I moved, it tugged on flesh. My left hand was useless, and frankly, I couldn’t look at it.
Every breath tore me apart from the inside, but I wasn’t dead.
Using my good knee and a balled fist, I inched toward the fallen Wald, every movement a descent to another circle of hell.
What if Wald was dead? I prayed to the God I didn’t believe in that I’d have the strength to deal with his death.
We hadn’t even slept together. Hadn’t had a chance to see if anything between us would work.
I needed him alive to help me fix my life.
If I was being honest, I needed him alive because I needed him in my life.
He had to be alive because alternatives were unacceptable.
It took me way too long to get to him. Ten minutes? Who knows. I can tell you it seemed like an eternity. The last two feet took endless days of agony .
Wald’s eyes were closed, and there was a pool of blood around him. It must have been from his back as I didn’t see any gaping cuts. His skin was far whiter than it had been on the sidewalk. His chest wasn’t moving, or I couldn’t tell.
I wasn’t stopping to see if his chest was rising or falling. My entire focus was on getting over to him.
I made it, but I couldn’t touch him.
The marble.
Knowing the marble had been the only thing that had kept me from death, it was the hardest thing I’d done today to let it leave my fist.
The round glass ball rolled out of my fingers. The touch of my bruised hand on Wald’s leather jacket was a thing you never forget, like biting into a ripe peach. A connection in time.
But Wald didn’t move. Didn’t rouse. He wasn’t breathing.
I dragged my body over his chest and pressed my lips to his firm, cold, smooth ones.
Nothing.
I would have cried if I could have made tears. The tightness in my chest quadrupled, and I sucked in shallow painful breaths.
He lay there as I yelled at him. “What the fuck? After all this, you had to choose now to die?” I wanted to beat at him with fists that weren’t in any shape to beat.
He couldn’t be dead.
He couldn’t be. It wasn’t fricking fair. I had gone through all this stupid shit, and now I’d be in prison with no hope of ever getting out, and Wald would still be dead. He had to be not dead or passed or whatever they called it.
Britannia’s body was closer to the door. I’d gotten this far. I could make it there, right? Every fiber of my being screamed, No, you can’t do it, Harlan . Give up. It’s over. But I wasn’t giving up on him.
I picked up the marble, and on my third attempt, I stuffed it into my jacket pocket.
Agatha’s voice echoed in my head, but I couldn’t move my one working arm across my chest or take the jacket off to check the other pockets.
It was probably minutes, but it seemed like an hour before I made it to Britannia.
Britannia’s makeup looked too perfect for it to be real, but she wasn’t breathing.
With any luck, she was finally dead or passed or whatever, although that probably meant Wald killed her.
For almost a second, I wished she wasn’t.
She’d helped Wald before, and maybe she could do something for him.
Britannia wasn’t bleeding, or at least there wasn’t blood around her.
She’d changed, and her fricking dress had ridden up.
Besides the pink garters, she was wearing pink panties with the words Eat Me labeled in black across her crotch.
Bile rocketed up. I screeched with the retching, and it made it worse, choking me with the searing gorge.
It was fucking fitting I vomited the remains of the burrito into her hair.
Britannia sat bolt upright and shrieked like a banshee.
“What the hell? Did you just throw up IN MY HAIR?” she yelled, clawing at it as if deciding where it would have to be cut off.
She kicked me in the stomach with her bare foot, and I doubled over, collapsing on the broken wrist. The air whooshed out of my lungs, and I lay groaning, unable to discern which part hurt the most. My wrist had swollen to double its normal size, and I’d probably cracked a rib or two.
It was a miracle that somewhere in the battle Britannia had lost her stilettos. They would have done even more damage.
Britannia finished pawing out the worst of the chunks, then got up. She walked over in ripped stockings and crouched down to wipe her hands on the bottom of my dress like I was a human dishtowel. She scowled, then moved to Wald, dropping to her knees beside him and covering his lips with hers.
I needed to get there and had no idea how the hell that was happening.
I rolled sideways and managed to raise a knee.
Crawling was my only hope, but crawling with two damaged hands was impossible.
I ended up doing the side-scuttling thing again to get to them.
Britannia had her tongue down Wald’s throat, and her hand was down his pants.
I stiffened, shaking with anger and gasping for breath like my lungs had stopped working again. Was she really raping a dead man? With this family’s history, I was not about to second-guess what was possible or likely. Next time, I’d make sure she was dead.
“What the… fuck… are you… doing?” I rasped out between four extremely labored breaths.
She looked up at me but didn’t stop kissing him.
A minute later, she pulled her tongue out of him, and my eyes saw what the brain was racing to catch up to.
Her bright pink tongue was like five feet long, I guessed, or like an entire tin of roll-up candy.
The forked end emerged from Wald’s lips, and it hissed at me before disappearing into Britannia’s mouth. Wald’s eyes snapped open.
Holy crap, he was alive.
I might let Britannia live.
“There, are you happy now?” she asked, getting up, brushing her disgusting hair back, and walking around the dead Devlyn. She picked up the family album.
“You can’t take that,” I rasped.
She gave me a maddening smirk, took the album, and left us there.
I guess asking her to heal me was out of the question .
I snuggled up to Wald, buried my nose in his leather jacket, and closed my eyes.
Safe.
I woke up in a car, half sprawled across the backseat. My ribs smarted as I sat up, but they were no longer cracked if they had been before.
Wald was driving. My heart soared. He was alive and well, and I was with him. I smiled like someone had brought me two dozen almost-black, red roses.
There were trees on either side of the highway.
It might be afternoon. I rubbed the back of my neck, then looked down at my hand, shocked I could move it at all.
The bruise on the wrist bloomed in a spectacular red and purple, but my ability to make normal motions was incredible.
Had it all been a dream? I looked down, and the dress was encrusted with dried burrito.
There were healing spots on my gashed leg.
No, all the shadowy-demon-wizard-monster stuff had really happened.
“Where are we going?” I asked, stuffing my wrist, which should have been in a splint or cast for weeks or months, into my pocket like it had never been damaged.
“I’m taking you home.” Wald replied.
“Your place or mine?” I said, giddy with the fact that he was alive, I was healed-ish, and in my hand was the ring. I held it up in the rearview mirror, and he almost drove off the road, swerving back into the lane at the last second. If the ring wasn’t cracked, the sunlight made it almost pretty.
“Where did you get that?” he snapped.
“Agatha put it in my pocket when I was in the bubble with her. ”
He paused. “It’s dangerous to have that in your pocket. Do you still have the marble?”
I nodded.
“Okay, go into the marble. Put the ring in your pocket and then take off your jacket. Leave the jacket behind. Got it?”
I didn’t like his deadly serious tone. “How can my jacket stay in this? That makes no sense.” I held up the marble and gave him the double-raised eyebrows that hopefully stated I was unimpressed with being ordered around.
“The marble is linked to a place sort of like a room without walls. Once you access it, you can leave things there and visit them. As long as you are holding the marble, you have access to that place.”
“Fine. Be right back.” Although that made no sense because when I was in the bubble it was like being right beside him, so I hadn’t really left. Or had I?
Out of the bubble and in the car again, I set the marble on the seat beside me and stared at it.
“What do I do with the marble now?” I whispered, wondering what it would be worth on the open market.
Probably enough that I would never have to work again.
Maybe worth the price of a desert island, with staff to service my needs.
Wald could come. I would have days upon days of languid tongue licking…
“Keep it close to you,” he interrupted, but his voice rasped like he needed water.
The gravel fed my island dream. Without the jacket, I had no pockets. I tucked the round smoothness into the center of my bra. That should be close enough. “Where are we?”
“Oregon border.”
“ Gah . Specifics please. With Idaho or California?”
“I stayed out of California and drove us through Nevada.”
Wow, I’d slept for hours. “How are you feeling?” I asked, looking him over. The pale skin over his jaw was a hard line.
“Fine,” he snapped back at me.
“Then why are you mad?” I replied, crossing my arms over the priceless glass ball.
“I’m not pleased Britannia still has the album.”
“Yeah, she does.”
“You shouldn’t have let her leave with it,” he said with a grimace.
“Like I had a choice. I saved your sorry ass. Without me, you’d be lying dead on the floor… probably.” I waggled a hand at him, but he didn’t bother to look in the rearview.
I’d done nothing to save him. Britannia had.
But I felt like I’d saved him. That had to count, right?
I recrossed my arms and sat back on the seat grumbling.
“Bas-turd,” I said under my breath. I pondered how breathing now didn’t hurt, while examining my non-broken wrist. How was that possible?
It must have meant licking. I bet a lot of licking.
A thrill blossomed up, warming my insides as I imagined a languorous tongue bath.
It was too bad I hadn’t been awake for that.
“By the way, where is Britannia?” I asked, pulling my hair off my neck and wishing for an elastic.
“I expect with Elizabeth. You left her alive, right?” He glanced at me.
“Seriously? If you wanted Britannia dead, you could have killed her yourself. You had ample opportunity.” I gritted my teeth.
“Britannia is hard for me to kill.”
“Let me guess. It’s a long story, right?” I rolled my eyes.
“Right.”
“We have time.”
“It’s difficult for us to kill those of our own kind. There is a curse that’s unleashed when the spirit transfers.”
“See, that wasn’t so long. I get it, kind of. It’s easier for me to kill her than you. So Britannia is cursed now because she killed Agatha?”
“Maybe, but she’s already cursed, and we don’t know for sure her hand killed Agatha.”
“What does that mean?”
“Even if there was a second death, we don’t know how it will affect her. Curses are personal, so it won’t be the same for her as it would be for someone else. It might be her forked tongue, and poison might become more enhanced.”
“That’s why you’re cursed? Because you killed your sister?”
“Yes.”
The silence that followed pounded in my ears.