I forced myself to assess how serious Gus’s injuries were and felt my chest tighten.
The sirens’ nails had done their work. There were deep gashes in his stomach. One in his neck was gushing. His cheek had been torn to the teeth and more than one bite had been taken out of him in various places. Flesh was missing from his shoulder and his forearm. I’d seen it all before. I’d seen worse… and yet this time, I barely had the stomach for it.
This was Gus.
I trembled, pressing a hand over a deep wound in his stomach. If his insides spilled out, it would ruin everyone. I slid my other hand gently beneath his head, lifting it so he would not choke on his blood. His tan face had gone pale and his eye was frantic as if trying to figure out where the hell he was. The patch that once covered his other had been lost in the tussle and I could see the vacant hole where his other eye had once been.
Already, the boat was filling with blood.
“Fuck,” he strained, “Thought I was dead there for a bit.”
“Nah, not yet,” I said, suddenly composing myself in the face of what I knew was coming. “Just scratched up is all.”
His expression mused over the morbid sarcasm before he brushed the jokes aside.
It wasn’t hard to understand the state of him.
I suspected he knew most of him was missing.
“Just scratched up, huh?” he said.
I feigned a poor smile to mimic the one he was trying to put on. “Just scratched up, Gus.”
“Liar.” His eye shifted to Dahlia and he forced the tiniest, gnarled grin. “Nice to die with a pretty f—face like yours lookin’ down at me. You take c—care of him. You’ve got a good soul. It’s a pretty one under all that hate, y’know? Protect him, ey?”
His eye turned back to me. My heart was hammering in my chest the more realization sank in. It was a slow, dull knife sliding deeper and deeper by the second, every moment more painful than the last.
“Th—thought I’d have more time to say something better bef—fore I died, but…” He winced, coughing up a lungful of blood. Then his hand moved from his stomach to clutch mine in a panicked motion like he was falling off a cliff and needed purchase. “My boy,” he forced. “You’re… just a boy.” I watched his eye glaze over, wandering far, far from that boat and into the void. “Myb—boy.”
I squeezed his hand, my jaw tensing to conceal the roar of anger and despair swelling in my chest.
“Gus,” I said, adjusting myself closer to him in an attempt to get his attention back on me, but it was no use.
His jaw bobbed a couple times to claw at his last breaths. His grip on my hand tightened for a blink and then his strength ebbed. His fingers uncurled, letting his hand slide down beside him where it lay limply in pools of salt water and blood. His breathing ceased. His eye froze, staring up into the dark sky.
The dead did not feel like the living. There was extra weight to a corpse that did not exist in life and I felt that weight in Gus when his heart stopped. His muscles melted into submission. His jaw went slack and then there was… nothing. What remained was a marred collection of flesh and bone with nothing inside. No soul. No light.
Nothing. In a blink… sweet Gus was gone.
Madness preys on those who listen
Those who let the whispers in
~ Father Teegan
I smelled the blood before I saw it. Thick. Metallic. It filled the water around me. Some of it was theirs. Some of it was Gus’s.
I knew in an instant that I was fighting for something they weren’t going to let me have. When they started closing in on me, I knew my rashness had finally caught up to me. They were going to drag me down to where no one could save me all because I let my own affections cloud my judgment. Seeing Gus plunge into the water turned me feral. I didn’t even think when I dove after him.
Another weakness they could exploit.
But as quickly as the shadowy, spindly bodies surrounded me, they dispersed. At one screeching command, they spread out, fleeing into the shadows. I took a quick look around but didn’t want to waste time wondering where the command had come from. I grabbed Gus and I swam for the surface, begging Lune to spare him.
But it didn’t matter.
Seeing Gus lying there dead in the boat, his insides nearly on the outside, turned everything upside down. I’d been so focused on protecting Vidar and as if the enemy spotted a vulnerability in my walls, they went for Gus instead. He was exposed because I wasn’t looking at him. I wasn’t protecting him.
And now he was gone.
