16	together again

Jollie watches the operation, sitting in the same wheelchair.

Darian lowers the lights, except for the lamp he uses. Puts Mark on a table opposite Andy’s and gives him a shot for the pain. Then sews his wound shut. Works silently, like a smiling sentinel. Never takes one eye off his work, just like before. Single-minded. Professional. Terrifying. The operation doesn’t take long. Not much blood. The room still smells like burned flesh. The phantom MP3 player drones an awful tinny instrumental version of “Corner of the Sky” from Pippin. Darian’s instruments clink and tink, like fancy cutlery at a fine restaurant. He tells Mark it will be fine—everything will be just fine.

Mark stares off into space.

Jollie watches it all with something like horror—but she can’t really name the feeling. She wants to scream and yet she can’t scream.

And then.

• • •

“Darian, tell me something,” Jollie says. “Do you always plan these little chess games of yours? Or do you just improv them?”

“Chess games?”

“You’re a manipulator.”

“No more than you, Jollie.”

“I will never do what you have done.”

“You say that now. But there will come a time when you’ll do what you must. Look how you’ve gone beyond your limits tonight. You almost killed poor November Twelve, just because of your anger with him. It had nothing to do with manipulation.”

“Stop calling him that.”

“What? November Twelve? That’s the name I gave him. His secret name. We’ll use it among ourselves, to remind us of this night, Jollie. To remind ourselves never to let our emotions rule among family, ever again.”

“You’re not my family. You’ll never be my family.”

“So I’m just a man you’re playing chess with?”

“Yes.”

“And who exactly won tonight?”

“Take a look over your shoulder and find out, Darian.”

Darian smiles.

She means Andy, of course.

He turns his head from his work to look.

• • •

“FUCK YOOOOUUUU!!!”

Andy’s voice comes like an explosion in the silence, like gunfire breaking the calm. It shatters the moment into fragments, and Darian sees the scalpel like a butcher knife in Andy’s one good hand, then feels the awful, cruel steel driving hard into flesh and then bone—right at the base of his skull. There is a big meaty impact that cancels out everything else—a sound like a side of beef twisting and snapping in half. Darian is instantly paralyzed when the blade severs his upper spinal cortex. Darian swallows his gum again and chokes on it, just as blood blasts up his throat in a tortured deep-spasm cough, and it all jams inside there, cutting off his air as he struggles for just one instant. He thinks about Rashid—the beautiful beast who mutilated his face. He thinks about Marnie—his brother who might have been a king. He thinks about Jollie—the smart girl he underestimated one too many times. It almost disgusts him. It almost shames him. Then his entire body locks up and freezes, sending the final shock wave blasting upward at a million miles an hour. It reaches his brain and pings him there in a mule kick from hell, throttling everything he ever had into a roiling meaningless soup that bursts through his sinuses and oozes through his eyes.

As the Boy Prince of the Kingdom hacks Darian Stanwell to death, right in front of Jollie and Mark, with his one good hand.

Darian finally goes down smiling.

Knowing.

That this was the only way it could possibly end.

Checkmate, he thinks, just before he dies.

• • •

Andy stands over the body as the last bit of life runs from it.

Stumbles there in his hospital rags, his face charred and his hand mutilated, his mind half-there over the rush of the drugs. He has only the most instinctive memories of being chopped up on the table, being held down by those awful cocktails pumped into him. He only vaguely recalls ripping the IVs out of his arm and sliding quietly off the table. Hearing that awful version of “Corner of the Sky” and almost recognizing it, somewhere deep in his warped memory and sluiced consciousness. Watching Jollie distract Darian with her voice as he came over. Darian’s back to him, like a big red bull’s-eye, just waiting to be scored. Picking up the scalpel from the floor where Darian set it. Doing something bad with it. The scalpel, still in his hand. Still covered in the madman’s blood. It’s a terrible rush of unreality, flowing through him like weird cheap wine. He hardly feels human in this moment.

But he is free. They are free.

“Jollie,” Andy says.

“Jollie,” Mark says.

And the three of them—the House of JAM—are together again.