Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) (26 page)

Shee glances up, looking from face to face. “Hmm.”

I keep my eyes as blank as I can manage. Will she recognize just my face without my signature hair? When she sees me, will her memories be fond ones of how I almost became her sorta-bestie for a day? Or will she remember when I battled midair with her, tearing off her wing and sending us plummeting into a river below?

“That one,” she decides, looking somewhere to my left. “Oh, and that one too. And this one,” she also decides, nodding at someone to my right.

Spiders come from nowhere, fluttering up the walls and detaching the requested cocoons. I watch all of this with my nauseatingly inverted view, trying my best to identify her latest three victims. When they tumble to the floor, only two of them get to their feet, disoriented as they are. The spiders tear away the silk with legs that move faster than I can follow, and then standing before Shee is the meek, trembling figures of Collin, blue-haired Kaela, and the old man.

“What’s your name?” she asks generally; it’s no telling to whom, exactly, she’s directing the question.

Collin volunteers, taking one tiny step forward, the tiniest that he dares. “I am Collin … Remember me? I was called Doctor Philip Brian DeAngelis in my First Life.”

“Doctor,” she mutters, her face winkled as if the word repulses her. “What a queer first name.”

“Philip was my first name,” he explains patiently. “Doctor was my title. Much like … Much like your title is Empress, and your first name—”

“I AM EMPRESS SHEE!” she shrieks quite suddenly, inspiring the three before her to jerk back in surprise. “Yes! Empress of the Dead! Did you know I’m Dead?”

Collin studies her for a moment, then says, “Yes.”

“Can you tell? I’m so pretty otherwise.” She runs a hand through her hair. Her fingers seem strange, thin, though I can’t catch a good enough glimpse of them to figure why. “What is a Doctor the ruler of?”

Collin appears confused. “R-Ruler?”

“An Empress rules a whole planet,” she announces. I guess some unseeable deity has granted her the power to change the definitions of words. Okay, whatever, crazy Shee-thing. “What does a Doctor rule?”

“The body,” Collin answers smartly. “A Doctor can open a person up and … and know what’s wrong and … and a Doctor can fix them.” He doesn’t seem willing to clarify the difference between the types of doctors; he only cares to define his own: a surgeon of the Old World.

“Hmm.” She taps the side of her face with her fingers. I struggle again to get a good look, but fail. “That one’s hair is blue. Let’s fix her!”

“W-Wait—” stammers Collin.

But the spiders have already converged on Kaela, and she releases the shrillest scream I’ve ever heard—more shrill even than Megan’s when I first met her in the Necropolis cages—and it’s ended as quickly. Kaela puts up little fight, despite the strength she showed in the woods, and before long the spiders have pinned her body to the ground, her head split open and blue straw strewn across the ground. I hear a wail of terror from one of the nearby cocoons—I imagine it’s the one that houses Ash or the other teen girl, Sara.

“Can you fix it?” Shee asks, untouched by the screams.

Collin emits a single, miserable sigh. He looks up at Shee, his eyes heavy, and I watch him take three tiny steps before saying, “I could fix
you
. Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?” Her fingers click against one another like tiny castanets.

“I gave you Human legs,” he says, sounding genuinely surprised that Shee seems to be treating him like a person she’s never met. “I fixed you up whole. Made you just like a normal person. I gave you two proper, perfect legs. Marigold and I, both, we fixed you.”

“Oh.” She regards him nervously now, her fingers clicking, clicking, clicking together, faster and faster. “Yes. No. No, I didn’t like the legs. I much prefer thirty of them. You didn’t fix me. You failed.”

“Shee—
sorry
—Empress Shee, we only meant to help you better fit in with the Trenton populace. Your legs—”

“I was born broken,” she announces, her awful voice thrashing loudly against the walls in this stifling cave, echoing into my skull and sending tremors down my Unliving spine. “My kind are beyond the repairing attempts of foolish Doctor-Emperors like
you
, Philip.”

“I don’t want to harm you,” Collin assures her. Then he takes an entirely different tack: “I came here to check on the Warlock stone you discovered. Do you realize its powers may be responsible for slowly killing off all the Living-Dead, my Empress?”

“I DIDN’T DO IT!” she shrieks, all her composure shattered in a second.

When she shrieks, a horrible sensation courses through me—something between extreme queasiness and a feeling like everything I know and love is about to abandon me utterly. When the sensation passes, I realize there’s only one other time I’ve ever felt such a desperate, crippling feeling: in the presence of the little Warlock himself long ago, back when he had his powers.

This realization does not in any way comfort me.

“I … didn’t mean to upset you,” Collin says, lifting his hands, as if to signal to her that he’s perfectly harmless.

She seems to interpret said hand motion as a maneuver to steal the scorpion legs out from under her. “You’ve come to take my treasure? Is that it?” Her eyes squint suspiciously, her tone nothing nice. “You’re going to have to get through me to get it, Doctor-Emperor.”

“I don’t want to fight you or harm you at all,” Collin insists, taking the tiniest steps closer and closer to her. His foot slips on a loose skull, but he maintains balance. “We are all family, really. All of us Dead. Please, Shee—”

“There was a joke there,” she explains, her tone shifting quite dramatically to a casual drone. “You have to get through me to get the treasure. Get it? Come on, my humor isn’t
that
off.” Quickly she glides down the mound of bones and onto the patiently-waiting old man, who grunts when her weight pushes him over, her legs pinning his frail body to the stony floor. “Did
you
get it, grandpa?”

The old man grunts and moans. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard him speak before. Not one word.

“You know us,” Collin says, trying to appeal to some imaginary heart he must mistakenly think Shee has. “We were all friends, once. Even your—Even your favorite one, Winter.”

“WINTER,” she growls, absentmindedly spearing the old man in the shoulder with one of her ample legs. I would try to hide my face, but I’ve no means whatsoever with my arms fastened to my sides. “YOU DARE SPEAK TO ME OF WINTER?”

“I … I’m, well …” Collin finds himself out of words.

“I’ve a special thing in mind for
Winter
, oh yes.”

I am caught between an instinct to thrash my body around until I’m facing away, or break loose, or remain perfectly still and hope not to draw her attention. I feel a sick spinning within me, a terror so deep that ice couldn’t touch it.

“That wretched girl,” Shee nearly sings, carrying a melodramatic agony through her words. “That fraud. That pasty …
pimple!
I hate her with every—with every—here, come here,” she calls to the nearest spider. It hops up to her with proud confidence. Shee plucks from it an arm—it doesn’t seem to mind—then snaps the arm in half and jams them into her ears, furious. “I HATE HER
THIS
MUCH!!” screams Shee, her voice breaking.

With a half of a giant spider leg protruding from either ear like antennae now, she pulls the old man off the ground—accidentally tearing off a foot of his own, as she’d still had it pinned to the ground—and she presents it to Collin like some blanket she just whipped off a couch, her face bent into an ugly frown. “Who is this old thing?”

Collin, notably and visibly very unsettled by her explosion of rage, stammers several times before finally producing any words. “He’s—It’s—That’s a man who was saved from the Necropolis a very long time ago. He was prisoner to the Deathless King until—until someone freed him. We do not know his name. He’s a mute.” Collin’s eyes lift, watching Shee quite cautiously.

It’s only now that I realize who the old man is. I am such a fool. He’s the old man that was among our group that I’d rescued from the Necropolis long ago. He knew the way out of the Necropolis and, until the Judge pointed it out to me, I didn’t even realize he was Undead.

“A nameless thing is a broken thing,” Shee decides.

“He might not have a name,” Collin tries to reason, pushing out every word with such effort, fighting the fear that so clearly lives in his chest, “but he is very capable of many things. He is an excellent weaver, a tailor, a spinner. The very pants I’m wearing right now, in fact, he made with his own unique talents, and I’d even say—”

“I don’t like clothes,” Shee announces flippantly. “They’re just another way we lie to each other.” With that, as if by telepathic command, two spiders come to either end of the old man, ripping him out of her grasp and tearing him into pieces. Even in his violent demise, the old man utters nothing. “And I,” she says, stamping the ground, “don’t,” she says, clenching her fists, “like,” she says, tittering two of her cricket legs together, “LIES!”

At that last word, a breath no greater than the beat of a fly’s wing is heard, and then Doctor Collin, formerly Philip Brian DeAngelis, shudders backward and crumbles into dust and bone. His clothes drop with a soft sound.

Shee gasps, a hand moving to her mouth. Her eyes flash with fear. “It happened again!” She looks to her left at the now-seven-legged spider, then to her right, then up at a cocoon or two. “It—It—It happened again!”

No one moves or utters a sound. The cocoons don’t even seem to sway, not even mine. I’ve lost all interest in Shee quite suddenly, instead staring down at the pile of … things that used to be a person. The person who was just a depressed, wordless lost soul when I first met him. The person who was supposed to survive, to carry on the legacy of his brother. The person who was the semblance of saving lives, of saving deaths, of fixing the unfixable.

How’d she even do it? Where’s the Lock-stone? Isn’t that what’s responsible for the Undead turning to dust?

“GRIMMY!” she screams, her hands trembling, her insect parts tittering. “GRIM! GRIM! HELP! … GRIM!”

My heart turns to ice in my chest.

“GRIM!”

Her tone carries the whininess of a helpless lady calling for her husband to come kill a spider. Except her husband is the Prince Of Darkness and
she’s
the spider.

“GRIIIIIIM!”

C H A P T E R – F I F T E E N

T H E   D R E A M I N G   L I F E

From a bed of bones, a figure rises. This figure is not a graceful one. Clumsy, uncoordinated, this person stumbles to his feet, lazily kicking bones out of the way as he slumps to her side. He has hair as black as night and a face as white as the bones under which he was hidden. A scrap of fabric is tied around his forehead, though it has fallen somewhat to conceal his eyes.

“Yes, my Empress,” he says tiredly.

Upon hearing his voice, a new wave of cold washes over my body. I’m frozen to the core now, and I worry not a part of me will thaw, not when the dead of winter himself has arrived and uttered a word.

“Grim,” Shee says to the person, Grim. “It happened again. The Doctor-Emperor broke apart and I didn’t even mean him to.” She pouts out her lip, wrings her hands nervously. “Will you fix him for me?”

The weak and frail thing that is left of Grim stumbles in the wrong way, ambling toward the corner where once Kaela stood. His foot stamps into her blue hair.

“No, no, my love,” says Shee, rushing over to take him by the shoulders. “This way.”

“This way,” Grim agrees glumly, moving where she guides him until his foot kicks into the pile that once was Collin. A stray fleck of metal that might have been part of Collin’s spine or perhaps his kneecap goes flying, slapping against the wall of the cave and landing somewhere unseen. “This?”

“That,” murmurs Shee quite sadly. “Oh, Grimmy, Grimmy, Grimmy. Please fix it.”

Grim, devoid of all happiness and wearing nothing but a shredded pair of denim jeans, crouches next to the pile. He reaches out blindly, fumbling for what’s there. I watch with mounting emotion—both angry and hurt and despairing—as his hands discover Collin’s shirt, then his belt, then picks up a fistful of dust.

Grim sighs, shaking his head slowly. “It is broken.”

“NO!” Shee clenches her fist, gnaws her teeth and yelps something unintelligible before howling: “Please, Grim! Pleeeeease!”

“It’s broken beyond repair,” he says, almost a whisper. His voice is stolen from him. His joy. His life. His every and anything. What has happened to Grimsky?

Empress Shee seems to crouch next to him, some of her insect legs bending, others stretching flat as she lowers herself to wrap an arm around Grim. “I liked that one. He made me … curious.” She kisses the side of Grim’s face twice, once on his cheek, once on the fabric where his eye should be. “Why does it always happen when I’m mad?”