He walked over to the wall behind Dawn and ran his fingers along a gruesome display of opened ribcages. “Two birds,” he said. He pulled a rib bone out of the wall. “One bone.”
Suddenly the room reverberated with a low rumble. Bones began to come loose from the walls, falling onto the ground and splintering in half. Dust began to rise, obscuring my view, and the clatter of breaking bones filled the space.
And Dawn, Dawn stood in the middle of it. For one beautiful but terrifying moment she looked up, snapping out of her daze. She saw me. She tried to run but only got a step forward before the bones above her head broke loose and tumbled onto her, bringing her to the ground.
I screamed, trying to get up and run, but Max had me by the throat and was pulling me back, pulling me away from Dawn.
“Let go!” I screamed, trying to fight him off, kicking him in the knees, elbowing him in the stomach, but he was strong here and now. He was so much stronger, and I was wasting my breath and my time.
The last thing I saw before the cavern collapsed entirely was Jacob, looking at me through the dust.
“I won’t fail this time. I’ll take her of her,” he said, raising his hand in sad salutation. “You take care of yourself. I loved ya, boy.”
Then he looked up and the ceiling of skeletons collapsed on him.
I could barely move, think, breathe, but Max could. He hauled me up the ladder just as the walls of the passageway started to give in, too. His feet slipped on the rungs a few times, but somehow we made it out into the church. He pulled me out onto the ground, and my lungs filled themselves with the fresh night air.
Max dragged me out of the church and the ruined graveyard to a grassy patch by the street. We watched in horror as the ground around the church began to jostle and shake and the remainder of the building finally fell, the ground swallowing it whole. The whole area above the crypt sunk in as well, the tombstones sinking further into the earth.
Dawn. Dawn was in there. She was being buried alive.
I got to my feet, not noticing, the sharp pains in my heart, the panic and the terror that had its cold fucking grip on my throat. Max pulled me back. He kept me in place. Soon ambulances had arrived, and rescue workers and throngs of people had gathered around the area, watching the scene, shaking their heads. None of them noticed us off to the side. They probably thought it was some kind of sinkhole.
“They have to know what happened,” I choked out to Max. “We have to tell them she’s down there. That Jacob’s there. They might be still alive.” But I could see in his expression that there was no point. They weren’t alive.
I still waited, though. I wouldn’t give up hope. I wouldn’t just forget that the two most important people in my life were ripped away from me by Lucifer himself. So I waited and I waited, all through the night, until one rescue accidently fell down through the earth and landed in the cavern, on top of a pile of bones. He saw a female hand sticking out of it.
Dawn was brought out of the rubble at dawn, just as the sun was breaking pink over the river. Her body was lifeless. Her soul somewhere else. Even in death, she was beautiful.
I’d never wanted anything more than to see her take a breath, to see her eyes open, to see her come to life. But no matter how hard I stared at her, even when they took Jacob’s body out of the ground, it never happened.
They were both gone.
Forever.
So much death in my life over the years, and I still couldn’t handle how finite it was.
The concept of forever. The concept of never.
Max put his hand on my shoulder. It took all my self-control to not lose it on him, to not scream at him for screwing up and putting her life in danger. I wished he fucking left me in that crypt to be buried with her.
“If I know Jacob,” he said gravely as we watched them put the bodies in the back of the emergency vehicle, “he’ll try and make her suffer less.”
“I wished he’d taken me.” I swallowed painfully. “I would have given them my soul for hers.”
“We all knew that,” Max answered. “But that shouldn’t have been your choice to make.”
And so it was. Real, terribly real and not real all at the same time. I knew I was numb, in shock, as much as I could be. I knew that the reality would soon sink in. The truth. That they were dead. And when it did, it would take over my life. It would reduce me to grieving until the end of time.
I closed my eyes to the scene. I turned around. Max and I went back to the hotel.
I left my heart somewhere in that crypt.
Chapter Sixteen
Dawn
When I was thirteen years old and really getting into barrel racing, I had a pretty bad accident. I fell off Moonglow just as we were making our final turn during a training session. She lost her footing and pitched to the side. I went flying into the barrel, my shoulder cracking against it, Moonglow falling onto my leg. I felt no pain at the impact, but I wasn’t unconscious. I just went to another place. A place of white light and weightlessness and euphoric thoughts. A place where nothing bad could happen, even though it seemed the worse already had. I always looked back on that moment and thought I had a near-death experience, that I went to some sort of heaven or afterworld and that I was sent back because my time wasn’t up yet. Apparently it was just my brain, trying to save itself from damage, trying to repair itself and protect me. That place did not exist.
I knew that now, because where I was was not like that place. There was no weightlessness, no white light, no feelings of love. Where I was had grey skies and grey earth and a world devoid of color. It was a place where giant bats with veiny, transparent wings flew overhead, where the ground at your feet had teeth and roaming eyes, where your body felt like it was weighted with a ball and chain.
This was the Thin Veil. I had guessed that much.
And I was dead. I figured that out, too, when the bones came crashing down on me, taking the image of Sage away from my eyes and filling them with dust and bone and blackness.