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“Zazie—I understand you would do anything for your brother. But you don’t seem to grasp that we would do anything for you. Life is boring without you. Not worth living. I need you to stop.” His voice was desperate. “STOP.”
“I can’t stop!” I hissed. I couldn’t imagine Zach dying. I couldn’t even imagine him succumbing to cancer, let alone being murdered by the psychopath sitting himself on far too many branches of our family tree. That was too horrible.
Zach and my grandmother had raised me. Zach had always kept me safe and well. Kept me living in the world. He wasn’t just my brother; he was all my family wrapped in one. My closest friend.
And you know, there was Ryan.
“If I don’t make it, guys… It’s important that you look after Zach. As best that you can,” I told them firmly. “Promise me.”
“Zazie—don’t!” I heard Murtagh say over Caspian’s voice.
“I love you both. Do me a favor and live through this.” That was much, much harder to say than I’d like to admit. My skin was completely covered with goosebumps. “Okay?”
“Look, I’m not mincing words. You need to Stop. The. Car,” he growled.
“See you on the other side of this,” I sighed, and hung up the phone.
I had to then listen to ringing all the way there.
I wanted to cry, but I was too scared. I didn’t know that was possible. It seemed like those emotions would have gone well together. I was shaking, trying to contemplate what death was going to be like.
As soon as Zach got cancer, I thought I lot about what the world would be like without him. Honestly, my brain just imagined a similar world, just one that was grey-toned, serious, sad, and dark. Like a gritty war movie.
My own death I had never meditated on. Sure, about the time I was hanging in a mobster’s torture chamber, I had the thought of, ‘Well, this is it!’ but then I didn’t think about ‘it’.
I had a bad feeling my ‘it’ was going to look a lot more different than anyone else’s. There was magic in my blood that was going to fuel the magic in Seraphus, a creature so bad that he made even a hell-demon nervous, and I thought hell-demons were supposed to be tough. At least they were in horror movies…
I passed Newsome University. The pretentious university had only been on the charts during the last decade. Before then, it had been falling down. There was still some of that sort of castle-lost-in-the-woods vibe, but it was a pretty place. Quaint, even.
Or it would have been pretty if it wasn’t raining cats and dogs. As soon as I hit the town, a storm moved in. Now it was raining buckets in a torrential downpour.
Kids were running to class like their asses were on fire.
I’d never been huge on studying, never was a great student, but I definitely felt jealousy towards them. The only thing they had to worry about was getting wet and frizzy hair.
I had to worry about a lot more things. I was barely older than a college senior, but here I was. In a completely different existential experience than they were and probably about to die.
Hell, they were probably about to die, too, if my plan didn’t work.
I frowned. Well, at least I wasn’t jealous of them anymore. They were going to probably be going from a carefree existence right to the rabbit hole of a world ruled by my evil father. Lucky them.
I could feel the diamonds in my coat pocket. I could hear them say, “Don’t worry.”
“You think this is going to work, right?” I asked them.
“There’s a chance, yeah,” said Lully. It said it very sweetly, but it was hard to miss the hidden context of doubt. “Maybe fifty/fifty!” That came out as optimism, like I should be happy that statistic was so high.
No wonder they hadn’t given me the statistics earlier. The statistics sucked.
“You know the whole world revolves around you being right, right?” I asked frankly, feeling my annoyance prickle at the same rate as my nervousness.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Rocky. “The world will figure itself out. Always does,” it said very optimistically for a rock that had been trapped in a cave for as long as it had.
“Oh, God, I’m gonna die,” I breathed to myself, and then noticed something through the sheets of rain.
Line after line of hooded figures lined the street.
At first, I didn’t think they were real. Cardboard cutouts or something.
