Page 81 of All Her Ghosts
Is this what you want?
I force my flickering mouth to smile. I steal a second just to stareat him, the corded muscles of his forearm bearing up a burning sword, sunlight glowing on his sweet, stupid face.
“I would have liked another date with you,” I whisper.
Bas snorts, black eyes bright, now fully ringed with gold.
“Yeah,” he whispers back. “Me too.”
Grabbing him by the collar, Mom wrenches him around to face the door.
“Stop it! Concentrate! We’re not dying. Cain’s an ass, but he’s competent. They can’t have that many teams left. What he doesn’t take down, we’ll clear, buy ourselves breathing room to figure out the rest.”
I shake my head, rolling onto my back within the circle, my head aligned with the symbol of an oval sliced through the center.
“I’ve already figured it out. Or, well,youfigured it out. You’re the one who gave me the answer, you and Cain. We need to reverse the ritual.” I flop a gummy hand on my chest, soul plucking at my skin. “You came here with a bomb for a reason, Mom. We just need to aim it in the opposite direction.”
“Absolutely not!” she snarls, frantic. “That would kill you. Worse than kill you—it would siphon the soul out of your body, harvest all your electricity, and—andprojectit, amplified, at such a force and volume that it would…” She trails off, horrified understanding dawning.
Slowly, the gun droops in her hand. My mother turns to face me,seesme in my entirety for the first time in our seventeen-year history.
“It would destroy everything above it resonating at opposite polarity. It would destroy the ward-wall, reset the flow of the ley lines themselves,” she breathes. “It would destroy everything I’ve ever worked to build.”
“Mom,” I say. “Please.”
She hesitates.
The doors bow in, pounded by a battering ram laced with glowing crystal. They can’t shove the table we propped up away from the door—not far enough to force the filing cabinets out of place—but they bend the doors themselves, warping a gap.
I have a second to scream his name—“Bas!”—but the warning comes too late. A barrel jams through the broken latch. The gun fires.
A terrible red asphodel blooms across his chest.
The sword in his hand burns out. His knees crash to the ground. And I know he’s dying before the light evaporates, before the gold seeps from his eyes, his blood swelling into the runes beneath my too-small body, staining my sweater, my hands, and yet, stupidly, all I can think is—
“You promised,” I whisper. “You said you’d live for me.”
The shooter screams. Cain roars obscenities. Bas huffs something like a laugh—or maybe a collapsing lung. His fingers creep across the stone floor, calluses ghosting my hand. His lips move, soundless, spitting blood, and it sounds like my lost name.
It sounds like “I love you.”
It sounds like something worse, something deeper, older than the world.
It sounds like a promise, and I mean to keep it.
“There’s a med kit in the cabinet, second drawer!” my mother screams, kicking the left-hand filing cabinet. She shoves her rifle to the crack in the door, squeezing tight-burst suppression fire down the hall. “Quick, there should be coagulant, gauze. I know it looks bad, but we can stop the bleeding.”
My cheek in the dirt, our bodies sprawled in yin and yang, I watch Bas’s cooling face until the steam stops seeping from his skin, the gold gutters in his eyes. My rib cage yawns, ravenous and aching. Tears pour down my face.
I feel only rain, the waters of an ancient river lapping at my ankles, a calloused hand outstretched across black water filled with stars.
“It’s okay,” I murmur, barely louder than the sound of someone’s body dropping in the hall. “It’s almost over. He doesn’t need a body now. That one took him as far as we needed.”
Grinning, magnificent andmassive, Bas climbs out of his skin. No longer a boy without a heartbeat, he swells into his true form, a god, not a ghost. I don’t think Mom can see him, but even she feels him. She reels backward under the pressure of his light and heat and the summer-sweet promise of growing things. His hair burns a halo around his head. Fire licks his arms. Sunlight boils from his smile, from his golden glittering eyes. He kicks his way out of swiftly cooling flesh, shucking off his cocoon at last, and he is life itself. I taste wheat in the breeze of his sword blazing back into his hand. Seeds sprout in his cheeky wink. He stoops, so big he fills the room, and his calloused fingers scorch my cheek, reminding me what it means to be alive—
to be dead—
to press my lips against his in the blue-raspberry rain, in the asphodel, in Helheim—
