Don't Fear the Reaper, page 17
His mouth tightened in resolve, and he reached out a shaky hand to grip the knob tightly and turn it.
At first, the door wouldn’t budge.
“Well, that was disappointing.”
Vincent threw his weight into a shoulder, ramming the door as hard as he could. It barely opened a couple of inches this time. A massive gust of arctic air rushed out, and the sound of crackling ice following it.
I could hardly believe my eyes.
The door was frozen shut. And the water… it came from melting ice.
“What the actual fuck is going on here?” I screeched, stumbling back to brace my shoulders against the far wall of the hallway. “Is there a damn flock of ghosts in there or what? Why is everything frozen?”
He continued to slam into the door and eventually pried it open enough to slip through the crack. Ice crunched beneath his heavy boots in the entryway.
“What the hell am I doing here?” I questioned my sanity loudly, mustering my bravery to follow Vincent into the freaky winter room. “I’m not the one on some goddamn magic quest! This is what I get for talking to strangers.”
Muttering some creative curses under my breath, I peeled myself from the damp wall and crept closer to the cracked door. If anything, it felt like the temperature dropped with every step I took. Something didn’t want me here, it seemed.
That sounded so stupid in my head.
It was just a room.
A creepy room.
In a creepy building.
With a fucking beam of light shooting into the sky.
Yeah, no worries.
Vincent wasn’t screaming in agony, so I assumed he was either suffering in silence or still alive. Worst case scenario, I can use him as a meat shield and squeeze my ass out this door like a rat.
Game plan set, I pressed my back to the door frame and scraped my way into the room, trying not to slip and bust my ass on the slick linoleum of the entryway flooring. The chill cut its way straight through my skin to the bone, sending a hard shiver throughout my body. My teeth chattered noisily as I turned slowly, taking in what seemed to be a small living room. Everything was crusted over with a thick layer of ice, but I could barely make out the posters on the wall. The posters on the wall displayed groups of men with large pieces of some kind of armor covered in cloth and helmets, and one in the front held an oddly-shaped brown egg.
People were weird in the old days.
There were shoes—men’s if I had to guess by the large sizes and styles—piled to the left of the door. It seemed kind of morbid to see them sitting there, like the people who once lived here would just come back and slide a pair on. Pillows still sat undisturbed on a low couch. A table and chairs sat over in the corner next to a small kitchen. There were even pots sitting on the stove and in the sink.
How had this place gone over a hundred years without being ransacked?
It was like stepping through time, back to before everything went straight to hell. Or really, when hell came straight to us.
“Vince?” My voice shook and broke, just like my courage. This place gave me serious bad vibes.
There were two doors on the other side of the living room, and the one on the right looked forced open enough to squeeze through. Billowing mist leaked from the crack and chilled the rest of the room.
“Aw, fuck it.” I picked my lady balls up off the floor and strode across the room, pushing my way into the room and nearly plowing over Vincent in the process. He had been standing just inside the door. “Hey, a little room please?”
But there was no room. There was a fucking room-sized hunk of ice taking up nearly all the space. I had to blink a few times just to make sure my eyes were working, and I wasn’t having some kind of hallucination.
Beyond the wall of ice, covered with outward-facing icicles that seemed unusually sharp, were two people. What the actual supernatural fuck is this?
I wanted to lean in for a closer look, but it was physically impossible with the icicle-covered wall between us. It was almost like a shield, trying its best to keep anything away from what it guarded inside. Our backs were almost to the opposite wall with how much space we had, so it was already a bit of a challenge to avoid the more ambitious tips that stretched out.
“How long do you think they’ve been in there?”
I looked over, though I wasn’t really sure why I bothered since I wasn’t going to get an answer from Vincent. He was just as quiet, but tears trickled down his cheeks as he stared at the blurred bodies preserved in the room. I mean, it was sad to see them trapped in there, yeah, but crying?
My hand reached out in an attempt to comfort him. “Hey… it’s OK. They’re not hurting anymore, I don’t think.” Just looking at the spear of ice going through the guy’s head made me wince.
What the hell do you tell someone who’s crying about some frozen people? I was already emotionally stunted as it was. I didn’t have the capacity to deal with this! He’d been a zombie since almost the start of our travels together. It wasn’t like I knew enough about him to help…
Still, something about the pain showing on his face made my chest hurt. Tears prickled my own eyes in frustration. What could I do?
As I watched, the tortured expression on his face morphed into something else entirely. Rage, heartbreak, determination… so many emotions jumbled together on those masculine features. I pressed myself even tighter against the wall in preparation for whatever batshit reaction he was fixing to blow. His arm—the one still holding the dagger attached to his chest—lifted high over his head, the blade pointing at the ice wall.
Was he going to…
Ignoring the icicles completely, he slammed the blade into the thick ice, stabbing himself straight through the arm in the process. I watched, mortified, as he pulled the bloody arm off the smooth spears and stabbed again. And again. And again.
At this rate, he was gonna lose his damn arm!
Shredded skin and muscle already hung loose from the arm that continued to stab, even as I threw myself onto him. I wasn’t exactly a waif, but it was like I wasn’t even there as he kept swinging his arm with the dagger.
“Vincent, stop it!” My throat clogged with tears watching him tear himself apart. “What the fuck are you doing? They’re dead! Dead! Just leave them alone!”
His teeth ground together so loudly even I could hear the crunch, making me clench my jaw in response. With one final stab and a silent huff, the dagger embedded itself to the hilt in the ice. Cracks and gouges surrounded the area he had been attacking, splattered with the blood flung from the swings. Impossibly, it seemed like the ice was sucking the blood into cracks around the blade, as if it were… alive. A pulsing light began to spread from where the knife had been embedded into the ice, the wall shuddering with every wave as the cracks grew wider and deeper.
The wall shuddered and crackled, vibrating with some unseen force building up behind it, and the last thought I could muster before watching the shard explode toward us was that I regretted not telling Vincent he was a great guy. That I was grateful I ran into him. That despite all the crazy shit that had gone down, being with him made me feel the most alive since my parents died.
I also regretted the terrified, girly scream that ripped from my lips as I waited to get skewered against this wall. Never in my life would I have imagined this was how I’d go out, pinned to the wall like a goddamn bug by some weird-ass icicles in this weird-ass room. Reflex had my arms covering my head and dropping to the floor to ball up against the wall. Maybe this is a new defense maneuver for avoiding flying icicles.
This must be the end.
Chapter 21
Noira
My eyes snapped open, senses reeling as an overwhelming pain split my chest wide open and arched my spine off the mattress, slamming back down onto it as if I had been electrocuted. A moan-gasp pulled in air to lungs that were still for far too long, sounding like a dead person coming back to life. In many ways, that’s exactly what it was. The irony of the embodiment of Death coming to life was not lost on me as I continued to cough and wheeze. Then, a body slouched over onto me, and everything came into sharp focus.
Hearts pounding.
Cries.
Blood.
My aura spread out in an uncontrollable rush, an automatic defense to whatever was within reach. It slammed into an ice wall I had unknowingly created. Something must have prompted it… but what?
Two frantic heartbeats drew my attention—and that of my tempestuous power—to the other side of the cracking shell. Another terrible throb stabbed through the center of my chest, sending another shockwave roiling out from that spot and slamming into the ice again. The wall shattered violently, shooting out like shrapnel. A piercing scream ripped through the air.
It was a struggle to even lift my arm to wrangle control of this rogue power. I gritted my teeth and flung a burst of energy to catch the shards before they harpooned into the wall, and whoever was screaming on the other side of the room. The effort to slow their tremendous speed felt like trying to stop a train barreling down the tracks, and a sweat broke out across my forehead with the strain. The effort of sitting up was herculean as I struggled beneath the dead weight slumped over me and swung my bare feet to the ground.
A cry of relief whimpered from someone’s mouth as the shards crashed to the floor, unable to hold the shards aloft any longer. Lying dormant for so long, and now forced to take this mortal form, my power was severely drained.
Now, for the unsavory necessities.
With one hand I reached out and gripped a fistful of shirt from the corpse slumped over my lap where it had fallen, the other hand reaching to clutch his jaw and lift the head up. He still looked just as perfect as the day we met at the warehouse, kept untouched by the chilling preservation my defensive magic kept us in. Well, beside the spear of ice shot through his forehead that was apparently the killing blow. Even then those cloudy green eyes seemed to gaze with adoration that touched something in my inhuman heart.
Victor.
I mourned the loss of his peace after death. In my hibernation I had no contact with Veralt or others of my House, but judging from the shattered soul standing by the bedroom door, I made a few deductions of my own. Veralt was somehow able to cobble this poor boy back together and reincarnate him to find me again. I could only imagine the dire state of the world with Azazel unleashed on it, to bring him to this desperate solution.
Surely, this kind of black magic would traumatize my spectators, but I really had no choice if I wanted to regain my power again.
The ragged tips of red threads that regrew from my back drifted around into view, their color a pale, sickly color of their former glory. My eyes slid shut in focus to brace myself for what I had to do. With another ragged gasp, I let the human façade fall and my own monstrous form broke loose. In a way it was a relief, like cutting loose a tight binding and letting the skin beneath breathe.
A seam split apart that bisected the middle of my chest, separating to reveal a maw lined with rows upon rows of jagged teeth running vertically on either side. It was hardly a stretch pulling the hole open wide enough on either side to absorb the preserved remains of Victor and his fragmented soul that clung to them like spiderwebs. Pale red threads crept from the maw and wrapped themselves around his body to pull deep within, where my well of power sat pitifully empty. Not exactly my finest or most eloquent merge, but my resources were limited, as was my time. I needed another host, and I needed more power to be able to form that bond.
And the other half of said host was standing in the room, holding the other half of my scythe in his bloody hand. Cheeky. How he managed to summon that on his own was a mystery I had to store away and ponder on later.
The body that was Victor absorbed quickly into my core, my chest snapping shut with an ominous crack. While the power boost was immediate and relieving, it was barely enough to keep this body stable. I didn’t belong here, in the world of the living, especially for this long. My head hung down between my shoulders heavily and my hands gripped the disintegrating bed sheets that crumbled into dust beneath my fingers. Fear, pure and bitter, poured from one of the humans huddled on the floor by the door.
“Silence, girl.”
The screams cut short, but her face shifted to indignant rage at the impatient tone. This one, she had some fire.
Through it all, the man holding my blade said and did nothing. But his eyes, they held something so familiar it acted like a balm to my weary soul. I tried to push myself up to standing and stumbled slightly. He was at my side the next moment, reaching his free hand around my shoulders to hold me up on legs shaking from disuse.
“Hello, Victor.”
The girl piped up, slowly rising from her crouch but sliding her back against the wall for support. Her voice was hysteric, eyes widened in a disbelieving stare. “That’s Vincent, Venus flytrap lady! And who the fuck are you? And what the fuck is going on?”
Obviously, what she witnessed was traumatic to say the least. I admired her courage to question me after seeing what she did. I chuckled darkly, slouched as I was leaning heavily on Victor— or, Vincent, as she said. “I like you, child. You’re a spirited one. What is your name?”
“Why the hell would I tell you, ya damn monster! And I’m not a child! I’m a grown-ass woman who’s fixing to go apeshit if you come any closer!”
“I am obviously too weak right now to be of harm to you. Why would you be threatened?”
She scoffed. “Uh, I don’t know! Maybe because I saw you eat a person through your chest! Vince, stab her or something!”
This whole conversation was deteriorating into madness. I didn’t have the time or energy for this squabbling.
“Apologies. But you’re about to see some more disturbing things.”
“What the fu—“
With my free hand, I plunged it into my chest to grip the shaft of my weapon kept there. I had retrieved the rest of it from the scraps of Victor’s soul left behind in his old body, condensed to a much shorter version. At this point it would be more of a sickle than a scythe. Not exactly ideal.
Vincent extended his hand, tangled with red threads that held the blade in his grip and connected back to his own core. It seemed he knew what to do as he pressed the two pieces together. The threads unraveled with a pulsing golden glow and slithered across the shaft, winding tighter and tighter until they solidified to bind the two pieces into one sturdy weapon.
A stumpy weapon, but it would have to do for now.
“Well…” I sighed heavily, once again completely drained. “Pardon the intrusion, Vincent.”
The threads from my back quickly wound around my arm holding the sickle, and I slammed the fist that held it back into Vincent’s chest to bind us together once again. They latched on to the remaining pieces fragmented in his core and pulled them all together as I pushed through his body to the other side. With my other hand I reached around his back to pull the blade through, now completely coated in a red lacquer-looking sheen that hardened to an unbreakable material. This was what I had been missing in the last battle. The reinforcement of an indomitable spirit. Something that, sadly, Victor had lacked in his previous life.
I should have known better than to push him in that way. There were few choices at the time, but I shouldn’t have overestimated my own power in that fight with Azazel’s true form. I was cocky, and Victor paid the price for it. That will not happen again.
Vincent was shaking and convulsing, his shoulders curling in as he hunched over and held his chest in a strangling grasp. His breathing was choppy and riddled with coughs as he choked on the pain of the reformed host bond. Beads of sweat trickled down his temples and trickled down his spine where they were wicked away by the thin cotton of his white shirt. As he struggled with the new burden, the red glow inched its way down from the center of his chest to the damaged arm he held against his chest. It pulsed in time with his heart, and with every beat began to stitch the torn skin and muscle back together. I placed a gentle hand along his damp back and rubbed soothing circles as a mother would their child, murmuring soft nonsensical noises in an attempt to comfort him through this. Even as he healed, it pained him. I wished I could take this from him.
This would not be an easy transition for him to bear, but it was something he needed to do on his own before his mind fractured completely. This half-life he lived was about to expire.
The girl pressed against the wall took a bold step forward in her own attempt to help her companion. “Vince? Hey, bitch, get your fucking hands off of him! What the hell did you do? What did you pull out of his chest? Is he dying?”
Her hands were shaking, but they balled into fists as if she had half a mind to punch me. The look on her face was pure murder. Maybe she even had feelings for this man. I sympathized with her, struggling to find a way to tell her this Vincent she knew wasn’t even a whole person. He was just the jumbled pieces of someone I had failed in a previous life that had been cobbled together and crammed into this human body.
The man she knew was already dead. He had barely been holding it together, keeping this body alive in this comatose state when they found me.
He fell to his knees still clutching his chest, breaths sawing in and out noisily as he used one hand to brace against the floor and prevent himself from falling on his face. The girl rushed to his side then, ignoring me completely as she gripped his shoulders to pull him against her and away from my touch. He slouched in her lap, shuddering heavily like he was going through withdrawals.
“Vince?” Her voice was thready and desperate. “Hey, hold it together! How can I help? Tell me what to do! Say something, God damn you!”
“Child…”
“I said I’m not a fucking child! Get the fuck away from us!”
I held both my hands up at her belligerent tone, the sickle connecting me to Vincent still gripped in my right hand. She was beyond consoling. Tears streaked her filthy face and she ran a black sleeve across her nose in an attempt to wipe away some of the wetness.
