Chapter Twelve

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.

Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

—Edgar Allan Poe

“Where is she?” Brent’s Southern drawl cut through Papa and Delia’s shouts. His voice drowned Dudley’s barking. But moreover, his words muffled the pounding of my heart. This was the final chance to defend my life or let it slip away. All those weeks and months I had told myself that if I had to be taken by him, I’d gladly accept it. Now all I wanted to do was run, forsaking our future together or the bond we had already made.

The urge to hide inside of the cabin was strong. There wasn’t a single thing to hide inside or under or below. There were no windows. The door was the one way in and out—a door that was the last barricade between life and death. This cabin felt more to me like a tomb or massive coffin than the bedchambers of a Master Scrivener.

When the door flung open to show me that Brent Hume was here to complete his task as my Grim Reaper, I froze. Wearing the clothes he had been given when he arrived at Wrightwick—a black North Face parka, jeans, and boots—he appeared more normal than ever. I longed to throw my arms around his neck and kissed him. But that impulse was quickly overridden when his brow furrowed, his eyes red as blood. He looked…confused.

Confused?Oh my Hades, this might work!

Two Olivia Dormiers dressed in Master Xiangu’s robes faced him.

Internally quivering, I resolved to say nothing. I did not blink or smile or do anything that would give me away as the true me. Xiangu did the same.

It was Brent who broke the silence. “Leave us,” he said to Neema who stood between us as our loyal sentinel.

“I only take orders from Master,” she said.

“Xiangu, tell your Eidolon to leave,” he said.

The Master Scrivener did not reply, and so I remained quiet. Brent’s instinct as an Eidolon was strong. He had tracked me halfway across the continent. For this reason, I wasn’t convinced he would fall for the ruse. Xiangu was good at impersonating others, but could she truly fool an Eidolon as savvy as Brent?

“Can we talk about this outside?” Xiangu said in my French-Canadian accent.

For a second, I thought that I had spoken, as the tone and inflection sounded so much like mine.

Brent’s red eyes bounced between Xiangu and me. Remembering her poise and elegance, remembering that she had decades of experience on me, I did my best to use her tricks. I kept my chin high, my shoulders squared. I didn’t look away when he stared me down.

“There is nothing to discuss. I have a duty to Styx,” he said, a robot set on kill-mode.

“You may have your duty to uphold, but you do not know who to approach, do you?” I said. As I let Brent scrutinize me from head to toe, I began to fear that convincing him that Xiangu was me would not end well for her. I couldn’t let her die on my behalf.

“You both wear the marking,” he confessed.

“We wear one piece of it,” I said, believing that perhaps this technicality, like the technicality he threw at Marin when I was to be executed, would be enough.

Brent took a step forward into the cabin. The floors creaked. The cabin felt instantly smaller with him inside of it. The shadow he cast made him appear bigger than he was. Had he shifted into his shadowy form, he would have taken over the entire space. For now, though, he stayed in human form.

“You need the other half of my soul to complete your job,” Xiangu said.

Brent stopped. Something about her words gave him pause. His red eyes fixed on me. And my lungs grew tighter. There was no room to push past him and make an escape.

“Why couldn’t you simply ignore the call?” Xiangu said, her eyes welling with grief.

This peeled Brent’s attention from me to her. I sighed furtively in relief.

“I don’t understand why you can’t ignore it,” she added.

It was clear from his face that Brent was struggling through several emotions. One that stood out among the others was guilt. Much like I had tried to save my friend Eve Cassidy, going as far as trying to dissuade her from getting a skull tattoo Deathmark and to intercept her Grim Reaper, Brent surely felt the same pangs of remorse. I knew how awful it was to carry the burden, and I knew that the grief didn’t lessen after the deed was done. But he had to fulfill his responsibility to Styx exactly as I had to. For me, that business had been tattooing Eve when she’d asked me to. For him, that business was ferrying my soul out of my body.

“I cannot tell you how I wish that my love for you was greater than my instinct,” he said to Xiangu, his red eyes welling with tears. I saw from my vantage the pain in his expression, the weight of this burden pulling him through his own personal hell. “I’ll walk the rest of eternity feeling like I cut out my own heart knowing I’ve killed the only woman I have ever loved. But I can’t stop it. The power is making me do it, Ollie. I’m just the vessel for the order of the universe. No matter how powerful I am, I am not powerful enough to overcome it. And had I uncovered any loophole…any option other than this, I would’ve, Ollie.”

When his attention slid to me, I blinked away my tears. He could not know who was who between us. I couldn’t let my emotions out me.

“The responsibility was mine,” I said, failing to mask the break in my voice. “I had to be the one to make this work. Not you.”

He took a step in my direction as he said, “Every second, I hoped you’d find a way.”

There was no sense in trying to pretend to be someone I wasn’t now. “Fate has been rather unfair to us, hasn’t she?”

Only a slight nod was his silent reply.

“I don’t understand why we were brought together to have it end this way,” said Xiangu.

“It’s not fair,” I added.

Brent took a step toward me and then one toward Xiangu. The ploy was working, but how exactly we’d move on from here was unclear. Would he eventually make a choice? Would he walk away in disgust? Was this the way out—confuse the Hades out of your Grim Reaper until he decides not to participate?

“You must choose between us,” Xiangu said.

Brent inspected Xiangu and me for a long moment. “I’m afraid I don’t…I don’t know who to choose.”

I had done a few things on my life that would have been called risky—jumped out of my third-floor apartment window as a teenager, narrowly avoided a car collision on my bicycle in Quebec, faced down Head Reaper Marin. I knew that in my final hour, a summary of how I’d kept one pace ahead of Death would fall before me. But standing here, watching my personal Grim Reaper conflicted about which of the Olivia Dormiers he had to ferry was not in my plan.

My palms were slick with sweat when Brent edged toward me. In selfishness, I wanted to scream and point at Xiangu, telling him to ferry her instead. I maintained my poise, though.

“Brent,” she said when he came too close to me. “I can’t…I can’t do this. I can’t let you take her when I’m the one who…”

Xiangu quieted when Brent’s hands clasped my shoulders.

My body stiffened. My muscles didn’t react when I sent panicked energy into them. My lungs shrank like deflated balloons, leaving me gasping for little beats of air.

I didn’t expect Xiangu to throw herself into the middle of this. She owed me nothing. So it was no surprise that she remained silent as Brent moved in for his kill. He had to have known who the real Olivia was. He was a hunter. The very best.

And he loved me. He knew me. I’d know him with my eyes closed.

What I did not expect was for Neema and Xiangu to unite in their own lethal defense. Matched, the pair were a blending of black mist and fire, their own form of hideous death. I now understood what Xiangu’s plan was from the beginning—when he went for one of us, she and Neema would unite and finish Brent.

Would they melt him? Would they do what Marin had done to Errol?

I couldn’t wait to find out.

No! Oh my God, no!

The only other option to outliving the Deathmark was to slay the one who had rights to it—Brent.

I slapped my hands against Brent’s hard chest to break him from his trance. “They’re gonna kill you.”

His eyes, red with an Eidolon’s determination, slid to the Matched demon next to us. Although Neema and Xiangu had what it took to melt him for good, he showed no sign of fear. There was a flicker of relief in his expression. “Let them kill me. It’ll save you in the end.”

“No!” I screamed. “No, I won’t let that happen.”

“It’s the only way you live, Ollie!”

As noble as that was, I couldn’t let it happen no matter how he welcomed it.

Their body of fire and black smoke prepared for a strike when I shoved Brent backward with all the force I could muster. This was enough to send him staggering back through the cabin door. Using what little of my heat that I had at my disposal to to keep him from draining me of my soul, I continued to push him farther and farther away from the hut as I tried to think of a plan that would save us both.

But as I shoved him out into the open where Nicodemus, Delia, and Papa stared on with slack jaws and confusion, the Matched pair pounced. She went for my beloved, latching onto him as a pitbull to its victim. Brent collapsed to the ground, thrashing under the might of Xiangu and Neema’s perfect union.

“They’re going to kill him!” I yelled to my friends. Delia and Nicodemus created their own Matched threat as Papa used his size to try to come between Brent and his enemies. But Delia wasn’t a Master. Their strength as a Matched Eidolon and Scrivener simply didn’t compare to Neema’s and Xiangu’s.

Delia and Nicodemus were hurled by Xiangu and Neema across the garden as quickly as they swooped in to assist.

There was no logic in waiting on assistance, anyway. This battle started because of me, and it would end my way. The only thing I never anticipated was coming so close to my personal Grim Reaper, the one Stygian I had been running from for weeks, that we would become one being. But it happened before either of us had a chance to consider the consequences.

Between a breath and heartbeat, Brent’s coldness poured over me. The familiarity of sliding into the eclipsed darkness overtook me. We combined, fire and ice, and despite my experience with other Eidolons until now, this particular moment was intoxicating. Pain and discomfort, the two staples of a Scrivener being Matched with an Eidolon, melted into warmth and security.

I hadn’t Matched enough to understand exactly how and why it worked—or why Brent didn’t just kill me immediately. Did this intimacy mask the call of my partially healed Deathmark? Or would I soon dissolve into him, losing the rest of my soul before Neema and Xiangu destroyed him?

United in our own icy inferno, we lunged at Xiangu and Neema, grabbed them by the arms, and shoved them to the ground. We pinned them to the grass as radiation from our perfectly balanced blending pulsed through our body and into theirs. They writhed beneath us. We held on as our energy intensified.

The look in their red eyes said that they would not let this battle end quickly. They would fight. One powerful swing of their arm forced us off balance. We landed on our side, unstable, and not in a position to retaliate. When I expected Neema and Xiangu to attack and begin the process of melting us into brown sludge, they grabbed onto our right forearm, precisely where the top of the unfinished Deathmark throbbed in brilliant reds and golds.

I felt Brent’s desire to fight. He was intent on doing what he was born to do—kill any Stygian who got in his way of his obligation. He was a warrior. I could not blame him for his instinct. But I would not let him break us from Xiangu and Neema’s clutches. Not now. Not as Xiangu banished another line of my Deathmark—the tops of the skull’s eyes.

Brent hadn’t experienced this sort of agony. Whatever it felt like to me, it must have been far worse to him by the struggle he put forth. My will to see this through was stronger this time. Xiangu wanted it done. I needed it done. And he would endure it.

As the misery increased, Brent grew increasingly violent. One of our hands pounded on the Matched demon’s shoulder as they worked vigilantly to peel away layer after layer of my Deathmark.

In a strike as quick as lightening, we sent the pair sailing away from us. The force was so great, the pair separated. Xiangu rolled across the grass, leaving Neema alone and vulnerable. Xiangu came to a stop at the garden’s edge.

I made the decision not to climb to my feet when Brent did. We did not need to be paired now that Xiangu and Neema were not. There was only one result I wanted from this melee and that was to have my Deathmark removed so that no one lost his or her life. Yet as much as I wanted to save everyone involved, there was little I could do when Brent stalked up to the critically weakened Master Scrivener, still in my likeness.

Xiangu’s arm revealed enough to show me that she wore more of the Deathmark than before. The skull’s eyes on my arm were gone. All that lingered on me was the forehead.

I looked from my tattoo to Xiangu. Brent lifted her from the ground. She was weak enough that he swept both arms around her, cradling her to his chest.

I ran to Xiangu’s side. Her disguise was slowly fading now. She was turning into the Master Scrivener with long black hair and beautiful, ageless features.

“No, Brent. Don’t!” I cried out, trying to pull Xiangu’s limp body from Brent’s grip.

But he didn’t listen. He put his lips to Xiangu’s exactly as he put his lips to mine when I’d stood in the face of my execution in Lethe. Only once had I dared to watch the video of my trial in Lethe. I had had enough trauma that I didn’t need to relive the horrors from that fateful day when he’d half-ferried me, so part of my soul was anchored in his body. Still, I tried to save her as I pulled futilely at her body.

“Don’t,” I whimpered. “It’s me. I’m here. You know me.”

“She wears the mark.”

I assume she would have made it vanish from her own body, if she’d had more time. But now, it shone dark and grim on her pale skin.

Brent pulled her life from her body in one intake of breath.

There were many ways for which an Eidolon to ferry a Stygian. A touch on the shoulder. A kiss. A devouring in the most violent way. Brent’s method was by far the kindest I could have imagined. Holding Xiangu like a groom holding his bride, his lips lingered for a moment.

Brent was kissing her good-bye, a tender, loving farewell.

Then Xiangu’s body vanished from my grip and Brent’s. A small pile of her ashes collected at our feet.

My heart paused in shock. What just happened? Why did Xiangu let this happen? Or had it all gone wrong—had she meant to save me and kill him instead? That had been her original intent in getting me to bring him to her. Did any of it matter? Master Xiangu had removed enough of my Deathmark to lure Brent away from me.

She’d died to do it, whether intentional or not.