“He’s angry,” says Raymie, hugging the stitched rabbit. “Or maybe sad.”
I nod. Her eyes are wide, but her expression is perfectly blank. I wrap my arms around my knees. When she drops the rabbit and keeps looking at me, I get up and I follow Truman out.
We stand side by side on the tiny cement balcony. I know that something is wrong between us and I don’t know what it is. The memory of last night is still fresh. I think of Myra, Deirdre, all the girls who slip into the beds of strangers, take whatever they want. Last night, I was that girl. I did it too, but not because I wanted pain—it was because I just wanted
him
. The current between us feels like something real.
Truman’s quiet. He stands with his elbows on the railing, smoking. From below us, there’s the hum of Las Vegas Boulevard, the faint chatter of pedestrians, a siren screaming a long way off.
I touch my hair nervously, without meaning to. The cut ends prickle against my fingers and I make myself drop my hand. “Is there such a thing as love?”
The question is thin, almost disembodied. It comes out in a cracked, tiny voice that doesn’t sound like mine, but I need to ask it. I need to know what this is.
He turns to look at me, and it’s all I can do to keep from flinching. I can finally see into his eyes and I want to look someplace else.
“Love,” he says. His voice is hoarse and as soon as he says it, he can’t look anywhere but away from me. And when his hands won’t stay still, he puts them palm down on the railing of the balcony. “I almost died, because I didn’t care anymore.”
He stops, shaking his head, and he still isn’t looking at me. I watch him anyway, because I need to know the answer.
“I almost died because I
wanted
to. It was so easy, Daphne. It was all I
ever
wanted. And it didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel like anything. And that—” His voice breaks, but his eyes are dry and far away. “That was amazing.”
The air is cool, but nothing like Chicago. We’re standing on a tiny balcony, high above the street, surrounded by neon lights and desert, and a boy who has spent his whole life dying is trying to explain to me about desire.
“When I woke up, you were just sitting there watching me. I’d never hurt so much in my life. I’d never wanted to die more than I did right then, but I could feel your hands on my face. I was crying because I wasn’t dead, and you were just touching my face, like everything was normal and okay. I’ve woken up every morning for a year and a half feeling like I have broken glass inside me.” He shrugs abruptly, shaking his head. “When I’m with you, it goes away.”
I blink and when I do, I see the pain tree. I see how I kissed him and tasted sorrow. I took it, and all I know is that when I did, his smile became so much brighter. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it’s the truth.” His face never changes, but his hands are trembling, trembling on the railing. “You asked about love. I don’t know about love, Daphne. I just know I don’t want anything but you. I don’t want to be anywhere but with you.”
Down in the dark street, the traffic is gridlocked, sitting bumper to bumper—a river of red taillights. My heart, the thing that until recently I wasn’t sure existed, is beating faster than it ever has before. I turn to him and before I can say any of the ways I feel when I’m with him, he reaches for me.
When he lifts my chin, it’s like all the movies, and it’s not like the movies at all, because it’s actually happening. His mouth on mine is warm and soft. His back is warm under my hands and I don’t dig for misery or pry farther into him than I should. I only catch a glimmer of it and that’s enough. It’s incidental, just one small part of him, and all the other parts matter more.
He puts his mouth next to my ear and whispers, “I just want that, the way I feel when you kiss me. Just having it makes all the bad things better.”
All my life, my sisters have bewildered and terrified me, and still, I’d be like them in a second just to have Truman. I would give up my angelic heritage, my translucent fingernails, my white teeth, and not think twice.
Suddenly, I understand what Petra has always been trying to tell me. The whole time she was mumbling her litany of stories, she was always only telling me one thing. Love is when you care more about something else than you do about yourself.
DARK DREADFUL
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A
t dawn, we leave the room and go downstairs to find Moloch. I don’t really expect him to be able to help us, but I don’t know what else to do. I’m wearing Truman’s sweater because he lets me and because I like that it smells like him.
I know it won’t do much good against monsters or archangels, but I bring the razor anyway.
We’re on the main level, winding through the crowd, when something flashes into view, yellow-eyed and half-transparent in the surface of a plateglass window. All I can say for sure is that it’s not my mother. I approach the glass for a closer look, but there’s nothing and I walk faster.
Truman gives me a puzzled look, but doesn’t ask what I’m looking for and I don’t say anything.
Then I see it again. Not all of it, just a flicker in the floor-to-ceiling windows, a swipe of gray sliding between all the people, and my heart starts to beat much too fast.
The casino is built in a series of indecipherable split levels. If you want to go up, you usually have to go down first. We’re in the long corridor that leads toward the mezzanine and I squeeze along the wall, shoving my way past people, holding Raymie tighter than usual and keeping her face turned against my shoulder.
We’re almost to the escalators when Lilith appears in the glass face of a slot machine, staring out from where my reflection should be. Her eyes are wide and full of an icy terror.
“Run,” she whispers in a voice that makes the fear prickle down my neck. “
Run
!”
And this time, I don’t wait. I bolt down the escalator, forcing my way past the throng of people, squeezing along the rail.
I can hear Truman pounding after me.
On the casino floor, I bounce off the elbow of a cocktail waitress and keep going, unbalanced with Raymie in my arms, always on the verge of falling forward. The smell of cigarettes doesn’t cover the raw stink of meat. And then I hear the breathing. It echoes around us, hoarse, elated—the sound of every tiger stalking every prey animal in the world. Her footsteps are thunderous and seem to come from everywhere.
“Run, run!” Lilith is screaming it, echoing at me from the tokens spilling out of slot machines, howling from the trays of empty cocktail glasses.
I’ve run in Pandemonium, but never like this. Never for my life, with the breath jolting in and out of my lungs. Raymie is heavy and unwieldy, making it harder to maneuver, but I jostle her up in my arms and keep going, pounding between banks of slot machines, racing for the stairwell. I see it, the weird five-way intersection, the sign that points to the stairwell. If we can reach the stairs, maybe we can elude her, make it to the hotel room and lock the door, push the little velvet couch against it—or break for the garden, take the jump-door back to Chicago or home, someplace safe.
Truman is close behind, shoving past slot machines and blackjack tables, trying to keep up. People turn to stare at us, but no one stands or calls out. No one tries to stop us.
I make a quick right turn, find myself in a narrow hallway. The carpet is red, the walls are covered in mirrors, and the L-shaped hall leads nowhere. For one instant, I see him—Azrael, with glittering eyes and a fierce, expectant smile. Then he turns the corner and disappears. The hallway gapes empty in front of me. Red, like death is red.
Then Dark Dreadful bursts in to visibility between the casino and the dead end and we’re trapped in the hall with the monster and the mirrors.
She looms colossal and gray, with jagged teeth and dirty-yellow eyes, nothing like the pristine giantess of the murals. All around us, the mirrors show her in limitless reflection, repeating to infinity, huge and gaunt and hungry.
The mirrors are everywhere, reflecting us from a hundred places. I can see every Dreadful except the real one. Raymie’s breath is light and fast against my ear, and she’s making tiny animal noises, scared mice noises, clutching at my hair. Truman steps closer to me, but even as he does, I know he can’t protect me from this.
Dreadful’s mouth is wet with hunger and she licks her lips. Her eyes are ravenous, like she can hardly stand the waiting.
She’s blocking our escape, filling the hall with her massive bulk. Her dress is ragged and covered in bones, no way to tell which ones are Myra’s, which are Deirdre’s. The sight is chilling and if I don’t move now, my bones will hang next to theirs.
I clutch Raymie to my chest, shielding her head with my hand and backing away, backing helplessly into the dead end. Dreadful raises her hand and for one excruciating moment, I think she’s going to kill me here and now. Then she catches me by the hair, yanking so hard I rise off the floor, twirl in space as she lifts and slams me against the wall. There’s a brittle crunch as the mirror cracks behind me. Raymie leaves my arms like a yellow balloon, sailing away in slow motion, her arms and legs waving, but not as frantically as I’d have thought, not as desperately.
Truman dives for her, catching her by the back of her sleeper before she can hit the floor. He holds her to his chest, staring around wildly at the riot of reflections, all of them gaunt and huge and needle-toothed. I understand that he can’t see the real Dark Dreadful at all. I can only see her now that her hand is at my throat.
She has me pinned against the wall, my wrists above me, no way to reach the razor. The texture of the glass is rough, spiderwebbed against my arms. My chest, my throat, are exposed, ready for her curved knife, her teeth, and I have nothing but the cracked glass behind me. I want to smash it, knock the pieces loose, but Dreadful has hold of my wrists and when I kick, the heels of my boots drum helplessly on the wall above the carpet.
She grins down at me and I smell brimstone. She’s laughing, and still I can barely hear her through the sound of my own blood. The metal-toothed girls are coursing in my veins and they want to come out. They want to destroy everything, and Dreadful is gnashing her teeth, laughing and snarling. Before now, I never thought that I was not immortal.
Then, there’s a faint noise coming from someplace nearby, a rustle in the mirror behind me. My mother’s voice is small and panicked, speaking to me, directly into my ear. “Daphne,
do
something. You have to do something to save yourself.”
A strange, unfathomable calm falls over me. This is the moment of desperation. The moment when I live or die. I look up at Dark Dreadful and sink my teeth into my bottom lip as hard as I can.
There’s the sweet, steely flavor of my blood pouring into my mouth and I spit, spraying it across her face. For an instant, she only stares down at me, blood running into her eyes.
But the white girls are here now. They’re in the hallway, unfolding around us, springing up at our feet. Blood drips sluggishly from my chin and Dreadful’s forehead as the girls bloom like lilies on the carpet. One of them goes clawing her way up Dreadful’s back, leaving ragged slashes. The others close in behind her, hissing and baring their teeth.
Dreadful loosens her grip on my hair and I fall.
The girls are blossoming on the ground, clamoring around Dreadful, scratching at her and baring their teeth. She snares one by the throat and begins to drink its blood in long swallows. The girl goes limp in her grasp, growing paler and paler until I see her bones, shadows beneath her skin. In my head, the only thought is
run, run, run,
like a little song I made up and can’t stop singing. It thuds in my skull and it doesn’t leave room for anything else. For one disorienting moment, I look up and Azrael is standing over me. He smiles and I feel cold. He turns, reflected a thousand times in the mirrored hall, and is gone.
Dreadful doesn’t pay him any attention. She only gnaws on the body of the girl and then lets her fall. Arms and legs jut at odd angles, a pile of mismatched bones. The girl crumples to nothing and Dreadful moves onto the next one.
All around me, the girls are pacing restlessly, making a barricade between me and Dreadful. Their legs are thin and willowy like stalks, and Truman is fighting his way through them, reaching for me. I scramble on hands and knees through layers of ash, flinging myself at him, reaching out for him and for Raymie, the warm, actual shape of her.
“Come on,” he says in a hoarse whisper. “The mirror—quick, head for the mirror.”
I kneel in the dust, clutching Raymie to my chest. I’m trying to get my bearings, trying to stand, but my whole body is shaking. “Mirror?”
He gestures to the largest, the one with the jagged star where my head hit the glass. “Azrael just walked through, but not like a shadow. He went through a door—a real one.” Truman glances over his shoulder to where Dreadful is slashing wildly at the snarling girls. “She’s not going to let you back out, we have to go this way.”
He grabs me by the elbow and yanks me up, steering me toward the end of the hall, toward the broken mirror and the place where Azrael vanished.
I’m trembling uncontrollably, and the dizziness makes it hard to focus. The reflection in the broken mirror looks like my mother. I stumble toward it, reaching for her. It’s easier with something between us. Our hands meet against glass, palm to palm, and it’s a second before I realize that I’m just seeing myself. Behind the web of cracks, I look white-faced and stunned, reflected in pieces.
I lean into the mirror, and press my forehead to the glass. “Let me in,” I whisper.
When I speak it, the glass cracks jaggedly down the middle, then seems to ripple and dissolve, revealing a pair of huge double doors with a pair of brass rings for handles. I grab one of the rings with both hands and the door inches open when I pull, scraping along the floor. We slip through the narrow opening, and step into the dark.