Delaney could see the dead.
That was the first thing she noticed. They stood like sentinels, for once silent and still instead of grasping and writhing, tearing at the ground where she walked. They stood posted at the edges of a ripped-open door, their faces gaunt and incorporeal, their eyes blazing hollows. They watched her and she watched them, and she had the distinct sense they were waiting for her.
They are, said the voice she’d come to expect. The voice she loathed, lamented. The voice she had, in the deepest, darkest parts of her, begun to trust.They are always waiting for you, Delaney Meyers-Petrov. You are the warmth to which dying things cling.
The room around her was aflame. To her right was a form. A figure, slumped and shuddering and afraid. His face was lined with tracks of red, gouges he’d put there by his own hand. His eyes were big and black. There was drool on his chin.
“Help,” said Richard Whitehall, trying and failing to stand. “Help me.”
She stepped away, out of his reach. Out of his direct line of sight. She was trying, as she had been for the past several minutes, to recall how she’d gotten here. Here, where she’d first run into Nate. Here, where she’d written her name on the wall. Here, at the end of all things.
She knew what it wanted her to do.
It wanted her to die.
It’s not that I want you to die,contested that ever-present voice.It’s only that you will, before the end. You are strong, Delaney Meyers-Petrov, but mortal bones only bend so far before they break. And the work I must do will snap each and every one.
“Why?” She asked the question aloud, turning the penny over and over in her hand. Clinging to it. “Why are you here? Why come at all?”
The doors have been open for too long. The path through Hell was not meant for living men to travel.
“What about Colton?” His name tasted acrid on her tongue. It twisted something up inside her. Colton Price, who she’d hated. Colton Price, who she’d loved. Colton Price, who had taken her hands and kissed her as the bowels of the afterlife thrashed all around them. Who had ferried her through Hell and back without batting an eye.
Colton Price, who was something other.
The boy is made of Hell, came the voice.And it of him. He bargained away pieces of himself long ago. In doing so, he earned the right to cross our fields unharmed.
Asphodel fields. Elysian fields. Her stomach was a stone. Her stories were coming true and coming true.
End this, whispered the dark.
End this, end this.
Across the screen of sputtering smoke, the figure of Richard Whitehall fell impossibly still. The feeble keen of his cries went quiet. Delaney probed herself, expecting to feel something. An ache. A terror. There was only the dull throb of emptiness in her chest. Only numb. Only a name, beating like a pulse.
Colton. Colton.
Colton, all full of secrets. Colton, who kept his true self shut away. Who’d carved pieces of himself out at her insistence. The dead took up her thoughts in an echo, the sound a fingerprint against their diaphanous pall.Colton. Colton. Colton.They gnashed their teeth. They tore at their scalps. They flickered in and out in wailing, winnowing blinks. She stayed resolutely still and stared at the body on the floor.
“Is he dead,” she asked. “Whitehall?”
A laugh moved through her like a shiver.My brother has slipped from his old body into this one. He is not acclimating as well as you. Already he has begun to wither. Already he has begun to waste. My brother is not a merciful sort. He has a hunger that cannot be sated. He loves playing games.
Boots dragged against the floor. Fingernails scrabbled. Unfolding from his heap, Whitehall rose to his feet. In what little light emanated from the pulsing rift before them, she saw the slack lines of her professor’s face, the unblinking dark of his eyes. His arms hung limp at his sides. His mouth opened and shut, opened and shut, as if the thing inside him was trying him on for size, testing out its new range of motion.
And now—now—a new voice joined the other. Where the presence within her felt like water bubbling over stone, this one was different, its edges serrated. Like a primordial snarl. Like something rising up from the deep. Something not meant to be heard by mortal ears.
But then, her ears had never worked.
“Kin,” it said, in the same voice that had spoken to her in Whitehall’s studio. “I am having a wonderful time among men. Have you really come to fetch me so soon?”
“Yes,” she heard herself say, though she hadn’t meant to. “It is time for us to go.”
Then, reaching for the shard of bone in her pocket, she cried out, “Wait.”
There is no time. The boy is coming.
“Wait,” Delaney said again, more insistent this time than before. All around them, the shadows fell terribly, resolutely still. Only the crackle of flames remained, the smoke filling and filling her lungs. Sweat ran down her skin in slick, silvery tracks. In her left hand, the bone was a blade, digging sharp. In her right, the penny warmed against her skin. She shut her eyes. She hoped she wasn’t making a mistake.
