Page 169 of Dead Beat

“Stop,” Alex begged. “Stop it.”

“I will never stop. I will devote eternity to your misery.”

Not Dawes. Of course not. One more illusion. One more distortion. One more game, and this time she was going to lose. I don’t care, she thought. This means Dawes is safe and I can die.

“I want to feel your heart in my hands when it stops beating.”

Golgarot was still talking. He was enjoying every moment of this victory. She opened her eyes and looked at him, still disguised as Dawes. That was foolish of him. Because the sight of her brought Alex only peace. Dawes would find a way to turn the tide, to bring Darlington out of hell once more. They would find a fourth to walk the Gauntlet again. Maybe Mercy would agree to help.

She took a final look at Dawes’s red hair in its messy bun. Death was here at last and she was beautiful. Alex reached across the spokes of the Wheel, trying to find the Bridegroom.

North, she pleaded. Don’t let hell take me.

She felt herself rising up from the arena, away from the stadium, the crowd. She saw her limp body, the illusion of Dawes bent over her, Darlington in his demon form, and then the field was gone. The campus glittered beneath her, and the city beyond: New Haven. New Heaven. Just as cursed as she was to try and to fail, to hope and to suffer for it.

The Bridegroom was beside her. She remembered when she’d seen him fighting the gluma. That had been the beginning of the debt between them. His face was sad and solemn, but it was always sad and solemn.

“It’s time,” he said. “This is the only chance we’ll have.”

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No more than this.”

Alex realized this was how she would appear as a Gray, in her jeans and T-shirt, a gash across her sternum, blood on her lips and chin. It was like taking a bad school picture. This is how I’m going to look in the yearbook?

Far below, she saw Harkness, lit up like a watchtower. She heard the chiming of the bells. Soon the clock would strike midnight. The end of it all.

Dark shapes drifted up from the tower roof, their flight silent. The owls. Had they been waiting for the moment of her death? To make sure her father’s mistake was erased?

“This is the last moment, Galaxy Stern. Take my hand and follow.”

Alex saw his ghostly fingers, his dark sleeve. She grasped his hand, and for the first time, North was solid, physical, more than a phantom. She saw the path to the Veil open before her—the end of everything and she would never have to hurt again.

Here was the Wheel alight before her, the spokes infinite, touching every soul in New Haven, alive or dead. Alex could feel all of them.

“There is love,” whispered the Bridegroom.

He was right. Alex could feel it, a pulse that burned across the Wheel.

But beneath it, something else—relentless, familiar, an endless font of resentment.

In the dead because they had not lived longer. In the living because life was so very hard.

A man flexing in front of the mirror, cursing his lost youth. A woman speaking into a camera, wondering why no one paid attention. A father bent over an engine in his garage, asking, Would it be so goddamn hard to get a thank-you? A mother bouncing an infant on her lap, sure she’ll never have a chance to finish her novel. All the petty grievances and jealousies and frustration eddying around the nexuses, society members wondering, Why not better? Why not more?

Dawes grieving Tripp.

Turner waiting for divine intervention.

Mercy chasing after Nell and in both their heads the drumbeat that demanded, Why me? Why her? Why me?

On and on they went, grudging and grasping, their anger throbbing like a bruise, a chorus that drowned out any hope of peace, a refrain Alex knew so well because she felt it too, felt it even now in these last moments, because the world had no place for her, because every way she knew how to survive had been the wrong one. If she came out swinging, she was unstable. If she worked up the courage to bare her neck, she was playing victim. Troublemaker. Delinquent. Liar. Fraud. The only good and graceful option they had left her was to lie down and die and pretend it was heroic. Wouldn’t that be easier on everyone? On her mother and her father and all the people who loved her but who knew, somewhere in their generous hearts, that she was a magnet for mess, that inevitably she would cost them more than they could pay?

But everybody loved a dead girl, someone to mourn, to dress up in flowers, to remember as sweeter and more gentle than she had ever been, to make into a cautionary tale. When she was dust, they could cry over her coffin and congratulate themselves for trying to be kind to someone so difficult.

And that was why she could not fucking do it. She had never had it easy, so they didn’t get to have it easy either.

“You are dying,” warned the Bridegroom. “There are no more tricks to play. Hell will claim you and I will be powerless to help.”