I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.
No.
Well, what did she expect?
For it to be satisfying. For it to feel good - some part of her, dormant and wishful, begged to think that hearing him admit his pain would make hers fade slightly. At the very least, make it feel proportional.
But no, hearing the smooth silver of his voice does not make her want to do anything but die, and to know that the man she loved was the brother of a demon does not make her feel anything but a doubting of her own good judgement.
No.
Acton is watching them. Bexley knows that better than anything. His eyes up in the stars, his hand in the silent wind. In the way her blood roars in her ears. In the clouds starting to cover the moon. She thinks of their daughter and her Delphic third eye and wonders if she is watching, too, and whether all of this means anything at all to her, strange little girl that she is. It must. She remembers, suddenly, the story O once told her of meeting her father in the desert: that he was kind, and that in the moonlight, painted against the sand, he looked like a ghost -
No.
She wonders vaguely if Raum is lying. He’s supposed to be good at that. He’s lied to her before - to her, to Acton, to Seraphina - told her she would die, easy and painless, when instead she emerged from the rocks scarred and bloody and foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, uncontainable by her body or the normal limits of human emotion. But he could not have known, then. That she was God’s daughter. That she was strong, heavy-boned underneath the gold. That she would refuse death, even when handed to her on a silver platter, even when it called her name.
Now he knows better.
He moves toward her, and now she understands why they call him the Ghost. He should stand out in Solterra like a sore thumb, but the moonlight kisses him, covers him with a whole-mouth embrace, and he is suddenly as insubstantial as a cloud, a reflection, a moving sheet of water. His bones seem to disappear and reappear in different places; his shadows are unreasonably thin; even with her gaze following him, there are spots in which his body seems completely invisible. The only thing she can see consistently are his eyes, murderous blue.
She realizes they are the same color as hers.
She clenches her jaw until it aches.
He reaches toward her, and again she wonders how he can lie so well, how he can press a kiss to her cheek like he did not pray for the whole of her skull to be crushed under those falling rocks. She does not move, does not flinch, but her dark eyes follow him with a watchdog intensity, every movement realized and catalogued. He smells like death. His breath on her skin is bitter and hot.
And when he speaks, it is in the growl of a wolf, not the words of a civilized person. And yet she understands it. And that is what really scares her.
Incredulity rises in her chest like a tidal wave. Disbelief, disgust - she leans back to look at him more fully and her lip curls, like the unfurling petal of a rose. He is a monster. Even worse, a fool. It ended with you, he says, and she can tell he believes it, and the concept is so insane, so utterly ridiculous, that she wants to laugh. She wants to smile. But something stops her.
She thinks of Acton. She pictures him in her head, clear as day. And every inch is familiar: the thin scar on his shoulder, the true black of his hair, the bright, cruel amber of his eyes, and the low sweet smoke of his voice, and the oh-so-alive warmth of him and the sound of coins and cards and breathing.
And, like a ghost, he appears next to her.
But not a ghost. Bexley’s sorrow fills her with power. It makes his form seem solid, as if you could touch him, leaning close enough -
But she has done this innumerable times, recently, and she knows better. Raum does not.
She stares at him. The blue of her eyes says murder.
It says choke on this, and Acton dies a hundred times in the next thirty second. Crushed by a floating hoof, then with his throat slit from ear to ear, then with his bones cracking silently, all at random, then choking on air, then thrashing like he has just drunk poison, corporeal all the time, he dies again and again, throttled, bruised, broken, right in front of both of them, over and over, though no sound escapes him, and Bexley is dripping tears but her gaze burns and never moves from Raum’s, never, ever flinches.
Her lip trembles with the effort, and just as instantly as he appeared, Acton vanishes again.
You will only be a Ghost, she says, almost snarling, as long as people care to remember you. And you have just killed the last person who loved you enough to do so -
She tosses a burning spiral of light into the ground at their feet, scattering waves of hot sand into a wall between them, and before it can even reach the dunes on its way back down she is moving toward him, head ducked, shoulders hunched.
Rhoswen does not love you, she says, and her skin glows, Sabine does not love you, her eyes turn to molten gold, Reichenbach left you, she sizzles with heat, the air around them burns gold, sparks go whizzing around her fine-boned head, Acton is dead.
Bexley stops abruptly. She sheds the magic as easily as a gossamer scarf. There is only a foot or two between them, if that, and she turns from god to girl in half a second - no more glowing, no more powers. In that moment.
So I’m sorry, she finishes, and it is painfully genuine, That you are really on your own now. You could have stopped it.