The Beautiful Dead (28 page)

And then
before our eyes, to ash the Judge dissolves.

The sword
falls once more.

“ENEA!!”

Jasmine doesn’t
hesitate. It couldn’t have been better choreographed, her grace like a dance of
death, she moves to the abandoned sword through the ash of fallen soldiers and
the Judge herself, invites the hungry weapon into her slender hand.

“For my
daughter,” she breathes of focused anger.

And hurls the
steel.

Through the
air, a screaming song.

And into his
very eye.

Backwards he
flies like paper, the sword through his skull, he’s pinned into the wall like a
sad note to the corkboard. Silence swallows his body where once a fury of green
lived.

I have no time
to process the loss of the Judge, the agony of her death being the price for
the Warlock’s, no time at all, for the King already has fled through the gates,
making her escape into the woods.

No time at
all, even to acknowledge Jasmine, or the Humans fighting around us who can
still bleed, the Undead who battle on in despairing rage over the ashen piles
of their friends.

The stone I’d
given the Judge glints at me from the arm that had been severed … Green no
more.

With wild
conviction, I unsheathe the Judge’s sword from the Lock’s face with my only
remaining hand. Glistening in unseeable moonlight, it whispers a bleak and
steely salutation to me. I respond to its sweet song by exploding through the Trenton
gates.

The. Only.
One. Left. To. Blame. Is …

The King rushes
ahead … Malory … Her tall crown’s fallen to the dirt below, her infinity of
colorless hair like a cape waving in a windless wind. I chase her mighty shadow.
The empty air of a dead world rushing by in my furious clambering toward
victory.

“You cannot
run!” I belt out.

Lifeless trees
whipping past my ears, I leap over branches and stones in my pursuit.

The shadow of
Malory grows closer and closer. The end is near.

I scream: “You
will fail! I will catch up to you and you will die!”

The. Only. One
…

It was some
ugly fate that brought me to the cliff, and a beautiful one that brings me
back. The shadow called Malory stops at the very same edge I once stood before,
the world of mist waiting patiently below. I stop running and plant my feet,
sword up and ready. I don’t dare stand too close, not when I don’t yet know if
she’s armed, if any foul tricks remain up her infinite, skeletal sleeves.

Oh, but the
one wicked trick she indeed still has.

Her back to
me, she says, “I forgive you.”

“Save your
words, Malory. For all the lives you took, I shouldn’t allow you even the
decency of last words. You don’t deserve them.”

“I forgive you
for what you’re about to do.”

My hand
squeezes with its fatal commitment.

“And I forgive
you,” she presses on, her colorless hair thrashing about in the empty,
miserable breeze, “for the last words you said to me … for breaking all my
china … for flooding the house … for, at last, running away …”

I aim the
sword, pointing it at her back with its final intention.

“But I will
never forgive myself,” she chokes.

The Judge’s
prized steel grows heavier and heavier.

“The only one
left to blame … is me.”

My one arm may
tremble, but I am not afraid. I will not falter. I refortify my stance and prepare
to end the existence of the Deathless King. I will not question the demise I’ve
sentenced her to … I am not listening to her.

I’m not
listening.

They never
listen, they never listen to me.

“I did this,”
she says, her voice losing composure, her body quaking, “to myself.”

YOU DID THIS
TO YOURSELF.

I charge.

“Claire,” she
pleads.

They never
listen, they never listen, they never—

My sword
rushes into the back of the Deathless King, driving her over the cliff, but not
yet letting go. Seething steaming steel punctured through her skeletal body, my
blade is the only thing that keeps her from a long and terrible fall into the
mists. I literally hold her existence at the end of my weapon …

And just as
she’s slipping.

Just as she
starts to slip.

Just as the
blade is letting her go …

Wouldn’t you
know it, of all possible moments, this is when my Waking Dream at long last
chooses to find me.

C H A P T E R – N I N E T E E N

My name is
Claire Westbrook, and I hate everything.

Was Claire
Westbrook.

Hated
everything.

My mom is
Julianne and my dad is Samuel and I had no brothers and no sisters and I hated
everything.

And the
two-story mansion I lived in when I was little.

I hated the
neighborhood girls Carla, Jan, and Victoria because they always wanted to play
with my dolls.

My favorite
doll, I named her Princess, and Victoria pulled off her head when trying to pry
it from my hands.

I got a puppy
when I turned six and I hated the puppy because it wasn’t the snowy-haired one
I saw in the book. I refused to name it and it got hit by a car before my
seventh birthday and I didn’t cry.

I hated my
birthdays because mom and dad never listened to me, they never got me what I
wanted.

They never
listen, they never listen to me, ever.

Nameless puppy
was buried in the backyard by the petunias and I hated petunias.

Mom’s always on
the phone. I fell in the kitchen and cried and cried and mom’s still on the
phone.

I wasn’t
really hurt, but I cried anyway.

I saw my dad
once a week and I hated how he always told me, “Not now.”

When I broke
the porcelain lion, no one yelled at me.

We moved into
a three-story condo by the ocean and I hated the ocean. I screamed for three
days because I wanted to live in the city. “Not now,” he said.

I hated the
sound of pens scraping against paper because that’s the only sound my dad ever
made.

A teacher
called Ms. Rhodes that I spelled Roads didn’t pick me to play the part of the
princess in the fourth grade school production of
The Dragon and the Toad.

I told her in
front of the whole class that I thought she was stupid for picking Hannah over
me, Hannah with the braces and the pigtail. “Princesses don’t have braces,” I
explained because she was stupid and how else would she learn. How would any of
them learn. They’re all stupid.

The whole play
was written in rhymes and lyric and poetry anyway.

And I hated
poetry.

My first
friend was Bethany and I hated when she’d ask to ride home with me in the car
every day, and the only reason we became friends was because I finally got
tired of saying no.

A kid in my
class named Jared died from a snakebite.

My driver Eddy
who’s known me since I was five, he was so dumb, he said I should try having a
friend, that it couldn’t hurt.

He was so dumb
and wrong and I hated how Bethany smelled like baby powder.

I left the
bath running on purpose once and it flooded the house, a shampoo river with a
purple shower pouf running down the hall, a shampoo waterfall into the den, a
shampoo lake on my father’s nine-thousand dollar rug.

“Grounded!”
said dad, and never did.

When I turned
fourteen, Bethany was the only person I knew in high school, but I didn’t
invite her to my party because there were other girls like Erica and Myra and
Lindsey and they all thought I was cool.

They knew the
cool boys, and I felt like a queen.

They liked
coming over to my big house and they liked my pool and they liked my dad’s
beer. I had beer for the first time that New Years’ Eve when I kissed Connor.
It made Kayla mad because they were going out but I didn’t care. I wanted to
kiss him so I did.

I put on my
mom’s green, shiny emerald earrings.

Glinting in the
bathroom mirror, my ears like queens’, I smiled and kissed my reflection,
practicing my role and saying, “I’m yours, Connor,” over and over because I
heard it in a movie, kissing myself over and over.

I’m yours. I’m
yours. I’m yours.

“Because you
smell like a diaper,” I told Bethany one day when she tried to sit at my lunch
table. She was so dumb to even try, it was embarrassing.

Why did she do
that to me. Didn’t she understand.

All my friends
laughed and I felt so proud of myself.

I called her a
crybaby and I felt pleasure as I watched her posture break before me the way an
insect wrinkles in the sun, the way paper burns, the way tulips die.

I hated
Bethany and I spent two more years hating her. I loved my new friends, they
made me feel big.

I wore mom’s sparkling
emerald earrings to school.

At my
sixteenth birthday when Alicia and Elisa and Maggie and Marcy and Ellen and the
two cute boys from class Jesse and Cortland were hanging out on my back deck
drinking my dad’s beer, I learned to hate my parents all over again because
they bought me the wrong car.

I broke my
dad’s keyboard and threw half his reports in the upstairs aquarium. Little
fishes nibbled on them for hours, little pink and spotty fishes.

I cried and I
cried.

“The only one
left to blame is you,” my mom pulled the phone from her ear for one stupid
second to tell me. “You did this to yourself. Now go to your room.”

That was the
first time in my life she pulled the phone from her ear. I’d almost forgotten
what she sounded like.

No one listens
to me.

Dad said I
ruined a month of work and would have to be punished. But he never punished me,
forgot about it the next day. Something about an early flight.

I ran away
from home two months later but didn’t get very far. Cindy’s mom was so stupid
and wouldn’t lie to mine, so I was forced home in the limo.

Somewhere in
the backseat, I found a doll I’d once called Princess. The head wouldn’t twist
back on right, still staring at me all cockeyed, confused.

Half its left
arm was missing.

I ordered Eddy
to drive by the creamery and get me a sundae. I wanted a sundae with hot fudge
and a cherry.

I screamed when
dad told me we were moving again.

“Hope you like
the snow,” dad said stonily but it was in the middle of summer.

I was so angry,
I broke my mom’s expensive plates, the ones she kept up in the cabinet. Each
plate with their ornate symbols and paisleys, pulled apart like threads of a
sock, like beads of a necklace, sentences in other languages reduced to mere
syllables in the hallway.

I was so, so
angry, I took the family photo album and ripped it page from page, grandmothers
and great uncles and half-cousins and my little baby face twenty times, mom’s
face a hundred times, dad’s face. I pitched every eye and smile and sweet
memory into the fireplace.

My anger
wasn’t yet satisfied.

For my final
act, I took a shovel to mom’s garden. It took several kicks of my fur boots,
but I enjoyed the snap of roots beneath my feet. I enjoyed with dark delight
her beautiful garden decimated, her plumb tomatoes, her stalks and her greens.
I smiled over them triumphantly.

Mom’s on the
phone again.

“Grounded!” cried
my dad, and it’s a terrible feeling when all your happiness and power and
height rests completely on the stupid assumption that your friends would be
waiting there for you. My friends were never there, because they were never
friends.

“You did this
to yourself,” said my mother coolly as I shut the door on her face and her
phone.

I was halfway
through my senior year when we moved about two thousand miles away to a three-story
house in the north. It doesn’t matter what I do.

I called my
friends on the phone but they were all busy and two thousand miles away and I
didn’t have my big house with the beach and the beer anymore.

My mom fell
down the stairs one evening in August and I spent that night in the hospital and
I was so mad at her because I wanted to go to a party where Ricky and James and
the girls I knew in class would be.

I made new
friends and my mom’s fall got in the way.

“Darling,” she
whispered to me in the hospital room. There was no phone at her ear anymore.
“Claire, sweetie, can you get my glasses? They’re by the flowers.”

I dropped her
glasses and stepped on them.

I elbowed the
vase off the table, shattered on the tile. “Oops,” I said nastily on my way out
of the room, trampling over the flowers.

Tulips.

When my dad
told me she wouldn’t be able to walk again and that I couldn’t have a
nineteenth birthday party because of something to do with family and money, I
was so angry that I sat in my room and cried for two hours.

With every
heaving breath, every perfectly placed sob, I was sure he’d hear me and change
his mind, but no one heard me that day.

No one
listened.

A boy named Gill
asked me to prom and I said okay.

Still bound to
the wheelchair, mom wouldn’t let me wear the red dress I wanted with the slit
up the side.

“This is my
prom and I’m going to wear what I want.”

The short red
garment in her lap, she plunged a steak knife through it, tore a jagged hole in
its chest. “Wear it now,” she said, flinging it to the floor.

Many angry
words fired from my mouth, searing bullets of hate, something about her being a
legless freak, and for the first time in my life, dad grounded me for two weeks.
I wouldn’t be going to prom. He said tough luck for Gill, he’ll have to get
himself another date.

I had to talk
to him and he said, “Not now.”

He came home from
work on a Thursday with a gash down his arm, kept telling mom it was nothing. He
was always stubborn and hated going to the doctor.

“I’m not a
worn-out car that needs constant upkeep,” he scowled over a cup of oolong tea,
the wound in his arm growing uglier and uglier by the hour.

He slept in
his bed that night.

He slept in a
hospital bed the next.

The doctor
described it as an infection caused by the deep laceration dad got from a
rusted steel cabinet at the office. “But steel doesn’t rust,” said mom in her
chair.

Yes, it does,
and did.

It was the
morning of prom, Saturday, I sat in the chair across from my dad’s hospital bed
and explained to him how disgusting the cafeteria food was, and that I was
still going to prom whether he liked it or not.

“There’s more
than one kind of poison,” said dad, “other than arsenic and snakebites, or a
sharp bit of steel. There’s a poison of the soul, Claire.”

“You’re saying
my
soul
is poisoned?”

“No. The world
is.” He smiled at me, tried to reach for my hand. “Stay pure and true, Claire.
Don’t let it—”

The fire alarm
went off. It turned out to be a false alarm, but it interrupted his sentence,
and I’ll never know what he was going to say, and I never again asked.

That
afternoon, dad still in the hospital, I was sulking in the kitchen over a bowl
of something gross and I said I was going to my prom anyway. My mom rolling
into the room, she told me I was the only one to blame.

“Need to take responsibility
for your actions,” she said over the rim of her green, glinting glasses. “Nothing
decent comes from a person who doesn’t make right by her wrongs.”

“Then practice
what you preach and make right,” I snapped back, tears in my eyes, furious and
hateful.

“Come here and
let me hug you.”

I went
upstairs to my room and locked the door.

After an hour
and a half of suffocating myself in two quilted feather pillows to drown out my
sobs, I marched to my walk-in closet and found my red dress.

The hole was
mended. Mom must’ve mended it at some point, sitting in her stupid wheelchair.

I clutched the
dress, squeezing my eyes shut.

The next two hours
were spent in the bathroom with curling irons, pins, razors and lotion. My
hair, it was perfect like the magazine. My makeup, rich and burning eyes, high
cheekbones and my mom’s dazzling green emerald earrings that made me feel
invincible.

When the sun
was down, in my little red dress and fur coat, I climbed out the window and
stood on the edge of the roof, the cold winter wind biting my face.

From the
roof’s threshold, only mist below.

I carefully climbed
down and met my friends, just like I told them I would. Gill was there, and he
didn’t even say how pretty I looked in my dress, and I already loved how angry
my mom would be when she found out I’d gone. I couldn’t wait to see the furious
look on her face. And my dad, still in the hospital like a broken-down vehicle.

They’ll be so,
so angry.

When we danced
that night, my slender arms over his shoulders, I kept looking at the other
boys. I wondered if I’d look better dancing with Georgi, or Torin, or Darryn. Or
the guy all the girls talked about, Sascha.