Everlong: (Book One of the Everlong Trilogy) (2 page)

I was a bizarre mixture of the two - a freak - bleeding and weak, Death holding my life in the palm of her hands.

I didn't know how long I had left before She destroyed me, before I crumbled into oblivion - nothing more than dust on the breeze, destined to be absorbed back into the stars in which God had forged us - but I needed to find Evie before Death claimed me. I needed to see her one last time.

I knew she was alive. I could feel it, could feel her heart gently thrumming with mine.

But, despite my pleading and my aching need to see her, I didn't even make it off the tow path.

A grey cloud began to fall over my vision. I struggled to stay on my feet, clinging on to the trunk of a willow until my fingers bled, until my muscles roared with pain. I fought hard against Death's attack, and held onto life with everything I had, my mind oscillating between this world and the next, as I battled Her attempts to drag me back to the Other Side.

But finally, I lost the battle and Death's veil descended upon me.

I lost my grip on life.

Evie

An explosion went off in my head.

No, not an explosion, but a whole bloody war.

Bright daylight was imposing itself into my consciousness, its cold fingers trying hard to pry my eyes open, to make me face the world.

There was another explosion, but this time it wasn't in my head, but from somewhere out there, outside of me. In my mind, the bit that hovers between sleep and waking up, I pictured a war plane releasing a bomb before it moved off, circling in preparation for another strike. I knew it was going to come back, that it was just waiting for the right moment to attack again.

As I hurtled towards reality, other images surfaced from the darkest corners of my mind; of water, bitter and cold and black, trying to claw me down into its murky depths, the darkness punctuated by tiny shards of ice suspended around me like frozen angels.

Was I dead?

No.

The demonic beast - my torment - lived, and he was wriggling inside me, picking at my old wounds with his knife. A silent scream erupted from my lips, my body juddered as the realisation hit me; I couldn't even get my own death right.

I didn't deserve to live.

I didn't want to live. Not if I had to drag the beast around with me. I was so tired of carrying him around.

‘Evelyn! Evelyn!’

My eyes flew open and I bolted upright in bed.

‘Evelyn! Are you still in bed?’

It was Celia, my aunt, screaming like a banshee from downstairs; the war plane attacking me in my sleep.

Didn’t she have anything better to do other than coming here to make my life even more of a misery?

Why couldn’t she just leave me alone?

Alive. Having to deal with this shit.

My heart was rolling over in my chest and I couldn't breathe; I was suffocating.

Celia wasn't going to see me like this - over my dead body - I wouldn't let her have the satisfaction of knowing how low I'd fallen, of what I'd become, of what I'd very nearly done. And failed.

A failure. Yeah, that summed me up completely.

'Coming!' My voice was gravelly, my throat raw, like it was coated in tiny shards of glass.

I took a deep breath and hauled myself off the bed, catching sight of my reflection in the mirror on the wardrobe door. I stood still and took in the horror of what the mirror reflected back. Who was it that stared back at me? I didn't recognise her.

I felt sick.

'Evelyn!' shrieked Celia.

‘Shit! Crap! Shit!’ I cursed, coming back to reality. I run one hand through my hair trying to smooth the bird's nest that had taken up residence there, whilst the other frantically rubbed at the thick black mascara smudged over my face.

‘Evelyn! Are you coming, or what?’

‘Yeah, hang on,’ I shouted back, ‘I’m coming...Just give me a sec!’ I peeled off my dirty blue tee-shirt, which had stuck to me like a second skin, and grabbed a cleaner looking one off the floor. It smelt okay, better than I did, so I pulled it on and then snatched a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms from my chair. I turned quickly to leave but stumbled as dizziness screwed with my vision.

I leaned up the wardrobe door for support, hoping the storm would pass quickly. My head was pounding, like the whole of the road works on the motorway had been crammed into it and all the men in hi-vis jackets were now using their pneumatic drills on my brain.

Slowly, the dizzying swirls of psychedelic colour in my mind subsided, leaving behind a heavy curtain of fog, and the feeling of nausea sloshing around in my stomach. There was a rancid smell in the air, like something had died, been buried and then been dug up again. The bed was damp and smothered in dirt, like it had been the thing that had died.

Beside the bed lay a pile of stinking wet clothes; my clothes, the clothes I'd jumped in. A single black feather lay on top of the pile, its rachis bent awkwardly like a broken leg, the barbs clumped together with mud.

Broken, like me.

I dived out of the room, not knowing what I would say to Celia about my appearance, my only hope was to wing it and hope I sounded convincing. I ran down the stairs and into the living room to find Celia shovelling beer bottles and pizza boxes into a black bin liner.

Yep, I'd got a lot of explaining to do.

‘What the hell,' she screeched, 'has been going on here?’ She looked up at me, her nose all wrinkled up like a bulldog, ‘God you look like shit! And you don't smell much better either!’

Thanks, I said, but only in my head. I couldn't deal with the wrath of Celia, not today.

‘Doesn’t take a genius to work out what you were up to last night, does it?'

But I didn't have time to answer before she was ranting again.

'Trust you to get up to no good as soon as Cassie’s back is turned. As if she hasn’t got enough on her plate already, without this. Care to explain?’ she said, turning to look at me, one pencilled eyebrow cocked high, her arms folded across her chest.

I looked around at the rubbish. I didn't remember any of it. I didn't even know how I'd got home. I scrambled around for words, for something, anything to tell her. But words failed me. I stared at her eyebrows instead; the raised one was wonky and thicker that the other eye, like she'd been drawn by a child. Why do people do that? Pencil in their eyebrows?

‘Have a party did we? Of all the stupid things to do!’

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. A party? I bit the inside of my lip so hard that I could taste blood in my mouth.

'Sorry?' screeched Celia, dropping the bin liner and swooping over to me like a red bird of prey. She stopped a centimetre from my face, so close that I felt her toothpaste breath on my skin. ‘How much did you have to drink?’ she said, grabbing my chin and forcing it upwards.

‘Only a little bit-’

‘It looks like you had a lot more than just a little bit.’

If only you knew the truth. ‘Okay,’ I sighed, wrestling my chin from her hand, ‘I had quite a bit. It was New Year's Eve.’

Celia's green eyes narrowed. She let out a whistle of disapproval. ‘Go and make me a coffee, two sugars.’

I was frozen to the spot, mesmerised by her terrible eyebrows. Well, not her eyebrows exactly, but I knew if I stopped concentrating on them I might have to start thinking about what exactly had happened. Stuff that I couldn't remember. Or didn't want to remember. Either way, it wasn't looking good.

‘Coffee. Now, not tomorrow!’

‘Okay!’ I hissed back, forcing myself to move, feeling the nasty, stinking thoughts begin to circle in my mind, waiting to pick the bones of my anxieties clean. I dragged my sorry ass into the kitchen and switched the kettle on, grabbing a mug from the holder.

The last thing I could remember was jumping from the Old Bridge.

How did I get home?

Who was in my house last night?

Who put me to bed?

I picked up the sugar canister and noticed that my hand was trembling.

Sugar. How many did Celia take?

Who got me undressed?

No. I wasn't going to think about that.

My stomach rolled over. Did they only get me undressed?

I couldn't think properly, the curtain of fog that had fallen over my mind was now falling clumsily over over my whole body, covering everything, making things too hazy, too jumbled to see clearly.

The kettle bubbled rapidly, clicking off, dragging me back into the present. I picked the kettle up with a shaky hand and began to pour boiling water into the mug.

‘For God's sake!' screeched Celia, as she swept into the kitchen, 'I asked for coffee. Jesus Evelyn, you can't even get that right!'

I flinched and boiling water sloshed over the side of the mug, onto the worktop and my hand. I dropped the kettle on to the counter, shocked, not by the pain, but by the urge to cry. I thought my tears had dried up long ago. I bit them back. I would not cry in front of Celia. I'd promised myself I would not cry in front of anyone.

'Forget it,' she shrieked, 'Carl's just texted me. I've got to go. Do yourself a favour, sober up and then clean this place up. I'll be back in a couple of days and it better be clean by then, ok? I don't want Cassie coming back to this, she's been through enough crap without dealing with this.'

I nodded, my back still turned towards her. I clung to the worktop, my knuckles white as I held myself up, just waiting for that precious moment when I would be alone.

The throbbing in my hand bit deeper.

The front door slammed shut.

I raised my hand to my eyes, studying it like it was some alien specimen in a jar. My hand was on fire and yet, although I was in pain, it didn't feel like it belonged to me. I wasn't used to feeling, I wasn't used to pain.

It was an almost beautiful feeling.

A battle was raging inside me; a fight between wanting the pain and feeling alive or succumbing to the numbness, the lack of feeling, that usually lived inside me.

I plunged my hand under the cold water tap and the pain swirled down the plughole.

Numb was winning after all.

I went back to playing dead.

There was nothing inside me. Nothing at all. Just an empty hole.

Tears rolled down my cheeks. A torrent of liquid pain.

I was crying for the pain in my hand, the pain that refused to be felt in my head, that my heart was yearning to feel.

I fell head first into the great swirling abyss, and into the demonic beast's lair. He had me in his claws, forcing me down onto the cold stone tiles. I lay there sobbing, unable to feel the cold seeping into my skin.

I was stone.

Josh

The darkness was never ending, a heavy funeral shroud pulling me down into its depths of despair, but I wouldn't let it take my mind, I couldn't let it claim me.

I kept my mind alive with thoughts of Evie, re-imagining our first kiss. Our only kiss.

I didn't know how long I'd been falling through that unforgiving darkness, with those thoughts and images orbiting around my mind like the planets, when the first glimmers of another existence, another place, appeared in the depths of the chaos like a new born star. At first it was a flicker, like the flame of a church candle in the wilderness and then it burned so brightly that it blinded me.

A beautiful voice called to me through the darkness, but although I recognised it, it didn't bring me comfort at all.

For this was the voice of Death.

And Death has three faces; which one would She reveal to me this time?

Slowly the veil of darkness lifted. I was lying naked on a grey flagstone floor, my wings, now unfurled, twisted awkwardly behind me.

Crumbling limestone columns ran either side of me, struggling to bear the weight of the vaulted roof above. The stars of Heaven sparkled through the fragmented ceiling, illuminating the statues of hooded angels, shimmering like ghosts, at the base of each column, their hands clasped in silent prayer.

This was the entrance to Death's domain, The Portico of a Thousand Angels, which crossed the murky waters of the Styx. The foul stench of the river - rotting flesh and stagnant water - clawed its way into my nostrils, a painful reminder that I was now half human, and weak.

'Rise!' Death ordered. Her voice cut through me like Heaven's Will, the angelic dagger that I always kept by my side to sever the souls of the dead.

Unseen hands pulled me up, forcing me to stand. I felt Her eyes watching me, felt them burning my skin although I could not see Her.

'Josh Winters.'

'My Lady,' I replied, bowing low, as is custom when addressing those angels of the First Sphere.

‘You have been very, very busy.’

The gentleness of her tone hid the threat lurking behind Her words. The air was tight and heavy; a storm was building, a tornado twisting furiously on the horizon, and I knew it was going to tear straight through me.