The Irreversible Reckoning Read online

  ***

  I’m still here, baby. I’m right here. I got lost, but I’m close now. I can feel you, sweetheart. I can feel you near me.

  “James…”

  I said his name out loud, because I knew he needed to use it as a beckon. After I had succumbed to the gunshot wound in my chest, I had heard his and Violet’s voices through some haze that made them seem both endlessly far away and painfully close. I had been twirling through some cold, empty darkness, and yet I had been standing still. I could not see, but I could smell the ice in the air, and I could feel it tightly winding around me. And all the while, the only source of light (which I could not see, but which I could feel in my heart) was emanating from their voices. Like a child’s game of Hot and Cold, I moved closer, waiting until I could feel that light dissolving that chill of death with its warmth. The closer I had moved to their voices, the warmer the light felt.

  “James…”

  I said his name again, a little louder.

  I’m scared, baby.

  He would never say it out loud. He would never admit it to me. But there in that space between the living and the dead, in that awful limbo, our fears are amplified; they are the worst of the worst. They trump even our most basic human fear of death. We are unsure of where we will go, unsure if there is anywhere to go. Perhaps the experience is less harrowing for the faithful, who believe in a place apart from this place. But my instincts, which are so rarely wrong, tell me that all souls must pass through that space. Whether back to life or into death, we all must face the in-between, and in it, we must grapple with the worst fear of all: that there is nowhere but between.

  I can’t find my way. I can feel you, but I can’t find you.

  “James…”

  I was so weak, and yet, in my unconsciousness, I was throwing myself into that space, knowing it was dangerous, knowing every time I did it, my heart stopped beating, and my lungs expelled a breath. In real time, my jaunts into the darkness were only one second each time, but in that limbo, they were endless. I was swimming through the air, or maybe I was running, or maybe I was crawling, I could not tell, and all the while, I was whispering his name, only to hear it echo deafeningly through that space.

  “James… I’m here.”

  But something else was in the darkness with us, and I could not speak, or it would hear. It was some dark being, some entity of that blackness that held the balance. I was an intruder, throwing myself into that hollow before it was my time. I was breaking the rules, and through the darkness, that shadow was stalking me, and I would be lucky if all it did was throw me back into the realm of the living. James would be lucky if it released him. We would be lucky if it did not devour us and erase the lives that we had lived from our undead conscious.

  Every time I had remembered the moments I spent in that darkness, I was besieged by chills that ran up and down my spine and made my skin prickle almost painfully. It was the memory of that shadow in the dark that was taking hold of me in those moments, and, coupled with the terror I had felt at not knowing where to go, or where I would be sent, that fear was so resounding that I could become lost in the terrifying remembrance of it. Now that shadow was stalking me again, and I felt that fear amplified tenfold.

  But I would not leave without James.

  With a sharp gasp, I awoke. My body was shaking from the fear of that place and that shadow, and from the cold that I could still feel all the way down in my bones. The room I was in was freezing, and when my eyes opened, I saw that there was a single light-bulb burning directly above me, in the dead-center of my line of vision. How could a light-bulb be hanging that way if I was sitting up? And why did I feel like I was rocking?

  My body, which had gotten so used to acting on its own will, tried to throw itself up, because I realized that I was lying down. That chill intensified when my arms stayed attached by the wrists to the iron bedposts on either side of my head, and when my ankles, locked together and then fastened to the center of the bedrail at the end of the bed, did not budge at all despite how hard I was pulling backwards on the chains. I pulled my legs back and pulled my arms forward, flinging myself every which way, trying to break free, because I was panicking, wanting to scream, wanting to throw up, wanting to cry… Why had they chained me down like this? Tyre had said that he would not let anyone hurt me this way. But maybe he wanted Adam to do it “correctly” this time. Maybe he would threaten to kill us both if Adam did not follow his command, if he did not break me…

  I became aware of the smell of blood as I struggled, and when I looked, I saw that the cuffs around my wrist had broken the skin. Blood poured over the metal and dripped down onto the white bed-sheets, but it was not just my blood that I was smelling.

  I froze. It was as though some drug that caused immediate full-body paralysis had suddenly burrowed deeply into my motor cortex. There was another bed in the room with me, and another person. On that bed, covered in a white sheet, I saw the body of someone else, and my eyes fell on the hand that was hanging over the edge of the bed. I recognized the digital watch first, but I would have recognized his hand without it. I had held it so many times.

  “Oh, no…” I murmured, and my voice broke when I said his name. “Oh, no, James…”

  The door opened and closed quietly just as my breathing began to deepen, and I began to feel as though a wad of cotton was lodged in the back of my throat, blocking the passage of air as it tried to enter my lungs.

  “Alright. I know. I know, my darling girl.”

  Tyre. He kneeled in front of me, blocking the sight of James’s sheet-covered body from me, and I was almost grateful. Almost, until I realized just how responsible he was for every terrible thing that had happened to me. James was dead because he had lost control of his rabid, insane followers; I was chained to that bed because he had ordered his minions to put me there; I was forcefully married to Adam because he had decreed that it was necessary for our acclimation into his society.

  “Don’t touch me!” I bellowed, and I knew that I sounded utterly savage, almost animal, and I certainly looked it; when I lunged towards him, my fangs were bared, and when I got close enough to him, I snapped my jaws, trying to bite into his throat.

  “No.” He said softly, and with ease, he pushed my head back down onto the bed and held it there. His muscles were not even taut because he was using no force at all; still, I could not raise my head.

  “You killed him! You killed James! He is dead because of you! He is dead! I will kill you! Do you hear me?! I will rip your heart out for what you did to him! I will claw out your fucking heart, and your tongue, and I will—”

  With the hand he was not using to hold my head down, and still without using even a fraction of his strength, he covered my mouth. My screams, cries, and heavy breaths were totally silenced; I was sure that Tyre’s guards, who were standing in the room by the door, could not hear even the muffled sounds I was making, because he was covering my mouth so forcefully.

  “Shh… I do not like having to do this to you, my sweet child. I do not like having to treat you this way. But you must listen to me. If I must hold you down this way, and keep you quiet long enough to tell you all that must be told, then I will do it.”

  My eyes were burning, blazing red into his sedate gray ones. If I allowed myself to do so, I could believe that he only wanted to speak to me, that he cared for me, that he just wanted me to shun my old ways and accept his. But I knew better. I had known men like him before; Tyre was as cruel, crazed, and sadistic as my father and Michael had been, but he was far more skilled at hiding the depth of that cruelty, insanity, and sadism. He was able to mask it with false kindness. He was able to hide behind his supposed piousness. But he was just like them, and perhaps he was worse, just because he could hide his darkness so well.

  Either way, I could see, behind that sedation in his eyes, and that fake concern for me, and that soothing tone of his voice, and his words of regret and pity, that he was enjoying what
he was doing to me. Perhaps he was not becoming sexually aroused by it, but he was certainly enjoying it.

  “You would not want me to bind your mouth, would you?” He asked me gently, “Janna would not listen to me until I put enough straps over her to keep her totally still, and until I had bound her mouth with a cloth as thick as cowhide. Do you want that?”

  I did not respond; I just continued to glare back into his eyes.

  “Not answering me will be punished the same way, Brynna.”

  Again, my body acted by its own accord. I shook my head.

  “Good.” He said, and I wanted to smack the small smile off of his face so badly that my hands tingled as they would after I had delivered that glorious slap.

  “Alright. You saw that James is here in the room with you. Do you know why that is?” He asked, and he still hadn’t uncovered my mouth, so I just shook my head again. A part of me thought that he was going to heal him. I knew from the way he had healed my broken bones after Rich had beaten me that he was more than capable of healing injuries with little effort. Even though James’s injury was severe, I was sure that he could heal him. I would call out to James as Tyre mended his injuries, and he would find his way back to me.

  But Tyre’s intentions could never have been so pure.

  “I will tell you why he is here, but first, I must lament the poor decisions that you have made these past few days. First, you flouted our rites of marriage. I know that to you, what we required of Adam seems barbaric…”

  I could have laughed, because it was such an understatement, but I just let him talk.

  “…but it is not. I know that both here and on Earth, you read voraciously, and I know that in your literary travels, you must have happened upon the ancient cultures of Greece, and Rome, and Mesopotamia, and that you must have entered the medieval age. You know that it is a traditional rite of passage for a husband to bed his wife in an act of imaginary violence.”

  If he would have uncovered my mouth, I would have argued that what Adam was being required to do was not an act of imaginary violence, but he answered that objection without my speaking.

  “Now, most of the time, when a man and a woman are wed here, that act of violence is merely for show, for entertainment…”

  Oh, the many, many objections I could have made to that…

  “But in yours and Adam’s case, when I knew that you would never agree to lie with him, especially when I told you that it was your duty as his wife, I ordered him to use force, or the consequences for both of you would be severe. And instead of simply just letting him perform his duties to you, you engaged in intercourse with him in a depraved and deviant way.”

  Meaning I enjoyed it, I thought, and I could have laughed again.

  “Then, even though you were bound by our laws to Adam, you were still romantically attached to James. You were kissing him, holding him, telling him you loved him and would marry him the second you escaped from us. In that way, you flouted the spiritual, emotional, and legal bonds of your marriage once again. You ran from us. Together with your dear Penelope, you ran off in hopes of escaping, taking care to use your dark gift to confuse my men so that they could not find you, and then, you, Adam, James, and Penelope took off into the forest.”

  And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling morons… Under his hand, I laughed for a second, and he looked at me quizzically until he resolved in himself that I had merely coughed; there was no way that I would laugh at him. Even I could not be so disrespectful of his authority, or so fearless in the face of his contained rage.

  “But before that, Brynna…” His hand came away from my mouth, and his long fingers held my chin in a painful grip, “You brutally murdered your father. You bludgeoned him over two hundred times with a metal fire-rod, and then you ripped his throat out.”

  He did not pause, because he did not want me to speak.

  “Do you know what I do to murderers, Brynna? I murder them, because there is no chance that they can be redeemed. So, why have I not forced you to endure our Last Night procedure and then hung you from a post with a sign displaying your disgusting crime around your neck? Because I know, deep down, that my One God has plans for you. The same way I know that he has plans for your dear Rexprimus. I thought that he had plans for your James, but…” He reached back and pulled the sheet off of James, and after a second, one of his bodyguards placed a mirror behind James’s head.

  I saw the wound for the first time. I saw the terrible, gaping hole in the back of his head, his blood, now black, caked to his hair, his broken skull exposed... His eyes were still open, and rigor mortis had set in, so his handsome face was taut and gray and waxy, so unlike him. It could have been a doll there in front of me, but I knew that it was him. My sweet James… My love… My love… My love…

  From my throat, I was making awful wretching sounds, and if I had had anything in my stomach, I would have lost it there. Tyre had turned my head almost gently and was pulling a strap that he fastened over it to hold it in that direction. He pulled another strap and fastened it over my neck so tightly that if I tried to move at all, I would not be able to breathe. He was ensuring that I would be unable to look away from him.

  “I told my guards that if you close your eyes, they are to administer you with the Wake plant. It will keep your eyes watering but you will be unable to even blink.”

  I was biting my lip as my eyes stayed fixed on his. I could see where the bullet had come out of his cheek. I don’t know how I had not seen that hole before, but maybe the horror of looking into his lifeless eyes had been enough to distract me from seeing it; my mind could only take so much, after all. Still, I would become painfully familiar with every detail of how he looked now that he was gone, because I could not move, and I could not close my eyes, or they would ensure that my eyes would not close…

  “This is so cruel, Brynna. I hate that I have to do this to you. But I must teach you that there are consequences for breaking our laws. I must show you that if you continue down this path, it will cause you nothing but pain. Your dear James is gone, and I know how deeply you loved him.”

  I would not cry. I would not cry. I would not cry.

  “Now I want you to see the consequences of your disobedience, your stubbornness, and your sickness. I am sorry to report that this is only the beginning; your crimes are many, and you will be punished for each. If I have to take every person you have ever loved from you, I will. If it will make you see the true depth of your sins, then by the One God, even your dear Penny might pay a price.”

  “You will not touch Penny!” I screamed, “You will never hurt Penny!”

  “You have said the same about your dear James.” He told me, and there was not even the slightest hint of gloating in his voice. There was merely a tone of sadness that he felt because I could not see the error of my ways. “

  You said it many times,” He continued, “And look what has happened to him. I can take from you as I see fit, for the One God has deemed that you will help me win this war, and if I must break your very soul to make you go with me by having one of my men break Penny’s neck, then I will. Now, look upon what your disobedience has wrought for this man you loved.”