Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye.
The burning light began to dim, the lightning fading.
Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.
In the clouds, the face of the monster or god or whatever it was, also began to fade.
Deray stood there, wide-legged, blood glistening on his clothes, mingling with rain water. His chest heaved as if he had finished a great labor. The lightning, though gone everywhere else now, still burned in his eyes.
He raised his hand to touch his throat; he touched his chest with the other. The flesh was completely healed. The knife cut was gone. The bite was gone. He threw back his head and laughed. Exultant, triumphant.
Invincible.
Not merely a necromancer, but something else. Immortal. The unconquerable conqueror.
Grey turned and looked down at the crowd around the barricade. No one was fighting. They were all looking up at him. Jenny was not there. She was not standing where she had stood.
Looks Away was there, but he was alone.
Then…
No.
Not alone.
Looks Away, bloodied and exhausted, stood over a figure who lay in the mud. A slim figure with blond hair.
Lying there.
Broken.
“No…,” he said, but that single word had to tear its way through the wreckage in his chest.
No.
He wanted to scream it. But could not. It didn’t matter, though, and he knew it. Jenny was gone. What remained was broken, ruined, half buried in mud.
Gone.
And that made him remember something else. Something Jenny had said to him not an hour ago as they prepared for this battle.
“Don’t worry,” she had said so softly that only he could hear her. “Death isn’t the end.”
Even as he remembered those words he actually heard them.
He turned his head and she was there.
Annabelle.
Standing there, her face bright as a candle. Her hair rippled in the breeze, but even though the wind was blowing her hair moved in a different direction. As if she stood in another place and was touched by some other, gentler breeze. It was so strange. Grey wondered if this was because he was dying.
“Death isn’t the end,” she said.
And as she said it he heard both voices.
Hers.
Jenny’s.
Speaking as one.
“I’m… sorry,” he said to both of them. “I’m so sorry.”
Annabelle smiled, but he could see Jenny there, too. Like two images painted on glass, overlaid and then brought to life by magic. A shadow fell across her face and Grey turned, wheezing, gasping, coughing wetly, to see Aleksander Deray standing there, his clothes torn but his body whole. His power restored, immense, terrible.
“Now you understand,” said the necromancer as he stepped close to Grey. As he spoke his breath blew against Grey like the draft from an open furnace. “Now you see why not even death itself can bar me from taking this world for my own. Now you understand why I can never be stopped. Now you grasp the full scope of your own failure.”
“Yeah,” said Grey. “I know.”
Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye.
The words echoed in his dying brain.
Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.
Grey forced himself to stand straight. Despite the grinding pain in his chest, despite the liquid heat in his stomach, he stood tall one last time. He managed to smile. With split lips and broken teeth, Grey Torrance smiled at the man who had killed him.
“See you in hell, you son of a bitch.”
He winked at Deray.
Then he wrapped his arms around the man and with the very last of his strength he threw himself over the rail, dragging Deray with him.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
They seemed to fall for a long time.
Deray screamed in terror. Real terror.
Below them the people of Paradise Falls screamed.
As Deray screamed red fire erupted from his mouth and nose. It enveloped Grey, it wrapped searing tendrils around them both as they dropped from the frigate down, down, down.
Grey had one last glimpse of the pale face of Annabelle looking over the rail at him as he fell. Annabelle looking at him with Jenny’s eyes.
I’m so sorry, he thought.
And then the ground was there.
Even with all that rain and mud it was so hard.
So hard.
It crushed them both. Pulped them both.
But it did not kill them. The night and the storm and all of its dark magic were not done with them yet. With either of them. Grey heard them hit the ground. Heard the sound of bones snapped, of meat bursting. He felt the heat of blood. His and Deray’s, mingling together. He felt the stab like a knife as one of Deray’s splintered ribs speared him in the chest.
The world closed its eyes and there was a time of darkness.
Then there was a time of floating. Of nothingness. Grey thought he felt himself still falling and he wondered how far he would have to plummet until he landed in the fiery depths of the Pit.
Would Deray be there with him? Would both of them serve out their sentences in Hell, chained together for all eternity? Was the universe that cruel? That perverse?
His eyelids fluttered open.
It was dark and the winds blew and the rain fell.
Grey saw a face come into focus as someone bent over him. He saw worry, and then saw that worry turn to horror as full understanding struck him. Looks Away closed his own eyes for a moment.
“By the Queen’s garters, old boy,” he murmured. “You’ve gone and done it now.”
Grey tried to speak. Wanted to. Needed to. But there was so little of him left.
“Did… I…?” he croaked. Hot blood choked him and he had to turn his head to spit his mouth clear. There was something wrong with his neck. The bones felt wrong. So wrong. “Did I… kill… him…?”
Looks Away looked off to Grey’s left. His expression was confused.
“This son of a whore is as hard to kill as you are, dear fellow,” he said. He sneered at Deray, who lay beyond Grey’s sight. Looks Away drew his knife and rain pinged off the bright blade. “I think I’ll have to finish this myself — if anything at this point will end him. Let me do that for you, my friend. Let me make sure he goes first and—.”
“No,” said a voice.
And then another figure stepped into view beyond Looks Away. A tall man with iron gray hair, wearing a black vest and white shirt open to the mid-chest. A man who had a deep and dreadful scar over his heart.
A scar.
Not a chunk of ghost rock.
Not a bullet hole.
A ragged pink scar.
“No,” repeated Lucky Bob Pearl, “he’s mine.” He held pistols in each hand.
Looks Away recoiled from the Harrowed, bringing his knife up, ready to fight. Lucky Bob shook his head.
“Don’t,” he said as he touched the scar. “We’re not enemies anymore, Looksie. We used to be friends. Maybe we can be that again if the world doesn’t end.”
“Bob…?” said Looks Away, stunned. “How?”
Lucky Bob knelt and placed his hand over Grey’s heart. “He did it. He destroyed the ghost rock and freed me from the necromancer.”
“But you’re… you’re…”
“Dead?” finished Lucky Bob, smiling a rueful smile. “Maybe. I don’t feel dead. Hell, son, I’ve never felt more alive in my whole dang life.”