Chapter 186 — Death Does Not Let Go III
Her hands stayed pressed to his chest, red to the wrist, and she did not breathe.
Across the hall, Alice raised the short sword over Finn’s throat.
Marcus was too far, down a hand, swaying. Saoirse was on her elbows, ten feet short, dragging herself through blood that kept lying about whose it was. The circlet on Maeve’s brow pulsed once more, broken and thin. The silk on the walls swelled and settled. The statues bowed.
The room belonged to Alice, and everyone in it knew.
The blade started down.
♢♢♢♢
Cold touched James’s cheek.
Water.
He was lying on his back, and there was water moving against the side of his face, shallow and slow, and he was not drowning in it. Under him was a surface that made no sense to his hands when he pressed against it. Solid like stone. Giving like water. Both at once, depending on whether he was paying attention.
Above him was black. He waited for his eyes to adjust. They had nothing to adjust to. No stars. No ceiling. No pale blue edge of a System window floating in the corner of his vision, and that absence, after twenty floors, felt like a missing tooth.
There was no pain.
That was wrong. The last thing he owned was pain, an enormous amount of it, centered in his chest, and now it was gone, and things that large do not just go.
He sat up and grabbed his chest.
The armor was gone. His shirt was whole. There was no wound. There was no blood. His hands searched anyway, pressing along his sternum, over and over, looking for the hole he knew was there.
Then he went still, hands flat on his own chest, waiting to feel the next heartbeat.
He waited.
He waited longer.
Nothing moved in there. His chest sat under his palms like a locked house.
That scared him more than the dark did.
He got his feet under him and stood, and the water was wrong too. Looking ahead, it was ankle-deep. He looked down at his boots and it was at his knees. He took a step and it was ankle-deep again, without ever having gotten shallower. The water was not measuring itself against him. It was measuring itself against something else and letting him stand in the difference.
"Hello?"
The word left him and kept going. Too far. Sound was supposed to die in open air, and his voice traveled out across the black water like the dark had picked it up and passed it along, hand to hand.
Then it came back.
Hello.
His own word, his own shape of it, but flat, wrong, like something out there had studied how the word was built and rebuilt it without his voice inside.
"HELLO!"
Hello.
James turned in a full circle, boots dragging through water that couldn’t decide its own depth. There were no walls. There were no doors. There was no light except the fact that he could somehow see himself and the black surface around him, which meant light was coming from somewhere that refused to be found.
"Where—" He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Think. He was in the throne room. Alice broke the scythe. Alice was—
The scythe went through him. He remembered the scythe going through him.
His hands came off his eyes.
"No. No, no, get me back. GET ME BACK—"
Footsteps.
They came from behind him, slow and even, each one landing clean and dry against the surface. Every step James had taken in this place splashed and dragged. These didn’t.
The skin on the back of his neck tightened. He turned.
The figure came out of the dark the way a shape comes forward through deep water, there long before it was visible. Taller than Marcus, taller than any man James had stood next to, wrapped in black robes that moved like slow smoke and passed through the surface of the water without taking any of it away.
Six wings sat folded at its back. Black, and wrong at the edges. Some feathers whole and heavy, others crumbling as James watched, shedding ash that never landed anywhere.
Behind its head, where a halo should have floated above, hung a ring instead. Dark. Broken. A crack ran through it, and out of the crack leaked light like silver seen through miles of cold water.
The face stayed mostly in shadow. James caught a pale mouth. A straight nose. And eyes, or the place eyes should be, holding two points of light like stars at the bottom of the sea.
Its hands were empty. James noticed that, and noticed that he’d noticed, because some part of him had expected those hands to be holding a scythe.
He stepped back. The water climbed to his knees and pretended it had always been there.
Fear came first, simple and animal. But underneath the fear, spreading up through him from the water, was a calm he did not want and could not refuse. Heavy. Old. It felt less like comfort and more like standing beside a grave that had never once lied to anyone.
"Who are you?" James’s voice cracked on it. He hated that it cracked. "Where is this? What is this place?"
The figure kept walking. Stopped. Looked at him for a long moment.
"So you are the one carrying my fragment."
The voice did not echo. Everything else here echoed. This didn’t. The dark had enough respect not to touch it.
"What? Carrying — what fragment, who are—"
"You have used my power this long," the figure said, "and still do not know whose shadow follows your hand."
James stopped.
The scythe. Every skill panel he’d never questioned. The way the dead answered him and no one else. Alice, screaming a name as her wing broke, hatred in her voice that was decades older than James. The name she’d spat like it was the reason for everything she was.
His mouth was already moving before his mind signed off on it.
"Azrael."
The figure closed the last of the distance, and James had to tip his head back to hold the star-point eyes.
"No questions. Not here. Not yet."
"Then just—" James looked out at the black water, the nothing in every direction. "Where am I? At least tell me that."
"Between the death that took you," Azrael said, "and the death that has not finished deciding."
The fight came back to James all at once, not as memory but as weight. Alice’s blade going in. Finn’s face. Marcus on the steps. Maeve’s light. All of them still in that room. Still in that room with her, and he was standing in a puddle at the bottom of nowhere.