The Beautiful Dead (31 page)

I still hear
the drum, and it’s all I can hear.

The thumping,
the drumming.

Within him.

“Please,” I
beg, though I don’t know who I’m begging. “Please, please, please.”

I hug him so
tight, his body against mine. Every hug I couldn’t give him in the cramped,
unfeeling confines of my little Trenton house. Every word I couldn’t say.

John’s blood
dances on my lips.

His blood
kisses my cheek, my earlobe.

“We just need
to watch him,” Collin says, “because he’s lost a lot of—”

“If you
survive,” I tell John, so quietly, so quietly that I know he can hear me, I
have to know he can hear me. “If you survive, I vow to you, we will find
Garden.”

I can’t let go
of him.

His warmth.

“I won’t hold
your past against you. No matter what’s in it, please, I’m begging you, I need
you to keep your promise to me because I kept mine to you.” I squeeze him. I
want him to feel me. “I’ve learned my past. John, I’ve learned everything.”

I’m choking,
frustrated by my body’s inability to make tears, to tremble, to shake and
scream with the agony I’m feeling inside, to … to …

But maybe it
is.

“Even bad
people can learn to be good,” I whisper. “No soul is lost … No soul is
poisoned. No mistake cannot be unmade, John, we make rights by our wrongs.”

His blood on
my tongue.

I’m feeling
tears in my eyes, impossible tears. There’s no way, but I’m feeling his warmth
like a terrible fever.

“Please, John,”
I beg him, and I’m shaking.

I’m crying and
I’m shaking all over.

And the room
grows brighter.

Taste of iron,
of metal …

I look up at
the strange, otherworldly light, the large window that’s kept us company. The burning
light of a sun that’s so soon to break the horizon.

I gape.
Squeezing him, I’m staring at the fire in the sky, the burning light. It’s just
like at the top of the tower, the sight I’d so narrowly missed …

“John, look,”
I breathe.

And I smell
him, his scent, his humanity. His body, hot to the touch, so joyfully hot in my
only arm, my only hand. The taste of iron on my lips, his blood, and I say,
“John, look, the sun!”

The gentle
drum keeps on.

He flinches.

“The sun is
rising. Look …”

He grips my
arm, holds me, feels my heat, our heat. His eyes open at last, and the light is
showering on both of us, a sight that for once in our lifetime, we both share.

I turn to him,
the great candle of the sky illuminating my Human in the way I was always meant
to see him, in all his warmth, in all of mine.

Our eyes
meeting, they share so much more than our stupid words could express.

“Good morning,
John,” I say anyway.

He smiles faintly,
whispers, “Still alive.”

And the sun
rises.

The land rots
beneath his every footfall.

Blades of
grass, green one moment, dead the next.

Dragging at
his side, the Queen’s fallen crown, its tip cutting a trail in the earth as he
marches.

The tall,
heavy mess of metal she called a crown.

Whatever was
left behind of the Necropolis, it isn’t worth its weight in the ashen remains
of dead innocents. Stone and cinder and death, he can almost smell it in the
air, each foot carrying him closer to the Black Tower.

At its top,
one lonely Deathless remains. Their eyes meet—Deathless eye to emerald eye—and
no words are shared.

He places the
crown on the once-throne of the Queen, and he doesn’t smile, and he doesn’t care.
Fire may not touch the damned, this much he knows is true, but as his Queen was
the ultimate example, the damned still burn.

A squint of
his eye, and the Deathless rises to his feet, departs the tower. It’s a curious
thing, that the Deathless did precisely what he thought it ought to do. As
though compelled … As though its Anima received an unseeable, unknowable
message. Quite the coincidence.

This
coincidence inspires a nearly undetectable smile.

To the throne
and the Black Tower, he sets it afire.

Beautiful, the
rainbow of furious colors twisting up into the grim sky.

To the
barnyard and the buildings and the prisons and the factories and the walls and
the churches and the tall signs that once proudly boasted the names of
family-owned businesses from the centuries of Humans Past, he ignites them with
the twist of matches. Patiently, piece by little piece, setting his dark world
on fire.

The living bones
in the earth, still reaching.

The Well and
the silent wall that hugs the city like a sad, dead friend.

Of lost lives
and death.

He is
surrounded by nightmares.

As he walks
calmly, carelessly, soundlessly out of the city, a stray whip of fire catches
him. He doesn’t feel a thing as he burns, uncaring. The harmless fire wrapping
him like a cloak, bathed from foot to face in glorious fire, he leaves the city
of the dead forever. Into the burning horizon of a sunrise he cannot see, a
sunrise shared by Human and Undead across the world, across an abyss of
desperately reaching dead, he’s gone.