Page 64 of All Her Ghosts

And some distant part of me, some little regret still mired in my meat, screams at me to stop. Some lingering human remnant, teenaged and small and scared, begs me to show mercy. The same girl who cringed in high school hallways, six schools in three years. The same girl who spent her time lingering on weird fringes of the internet, reading about reincarnation and spells for invisibility—craving, so badly, simply tocease.

The same girl theyhunted downhowls at me to stop, to think.

I’m too big, my weight on the world too massive; if I touch a ghost in violence, I willend it.

But the windows are all spiderwebbed in my mother’s RV and blood drips down its frame.

I bring my palms together.

All the little lights snuff out.

CHAPTER 19

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“The Carnival Is Over” by Dead Can Dance

Horrified by the sudden silence, I cut the projector. I snap back into a body already vomiting, face down and heaving in the wheel well. A sick and gutting guilt rots me alive and for a second, my aching head spinning, I can’t figure out why. The car? It’s totaled. A couple half-digested pancakes won’t hurt it any extra and the insurance company won’t know this was an act of God to deny the claim—

Act of God.

I heave up bile, choking, my chest seized so tight I can’t breathe. A thick, bitter dust fills my mouth when I try, coating my teeth, my acid-burned throat. The walls clamp down on me, airbags crushing from every direction. The gearshift threatens to bore through my rib cage. I scrabble at the door, but I can’t make my fingers close, clawing uselessly, staring at my hands with a cold and visceral dread.

Light flares through the dust. Metal screams. The entire door peels away like a tin can opening, flung away, over Bas’s shoulder. He reaches for me and time doubles in my battered brain. Wild-eyed, I stare acrossthe passenger seat—across a widening abyss, the sky crashing down and every soul screaming—and grapple forward.

“Hold on, I’ve got you,” he urges, fending off my hands, “I’vegot you. Give me a second, Jenny, for crap’s sake.”

Fumbling under my belly, he unclicks my seat belt. One hand punching down the airbag, he scoops me out and into him with the other. My head tucked tight into his shoulder, we spill in a tangled heap to the ground. His palms climb my shoulders, cup my cheeks, dragging me forward until my forehead presses tight to his, fever-hot but fading into something almost normal. Almost human.

“Breathe, Jenny,” he insists, each word a wildfire against my mouth. “You have to breathe.”

I can’t.

“I killed them, didn’t I?” I hiccup. “I killed them.”

He snorts, trying to laugh for my sake, trying to turn this into a joke. But his throat gives him away, closing on the words, “Pretty sure that was me.”

My hands clutch uselessly at the fabric of his hoodie, burnt away to the elbow and still smoking. The heat of him, the steam, thesmell—

I clench my fists. I can stillfeel them, every little light winking out.

Irreplaceable.

Irrevocable.

One moment of carelessness—no, one moment of caring too much, a mortal grief that weaponized divine and fathomless rage. Now those souls are gone. Forever.

Did Bas see? Does he know? I can’t bear to look him in the eyes but force myself.

“Bas, Iextinguishedthem,” I whisper, confession splintering against my teeth.

I didn’t witness their memory or welcome them home. I held their lives in my hand and destroyed them. They will never exist again. They will never reincarnate. They’re gone, forever, for the sin of being human, for choosing the wrong side, for making amistake.

DidImake a mistake? Did I have another choice? Was my death, Bas’s, Cain’s worth the cost of what I did?

I stare at my hands—at Bas’s eyes, gold melting back to black—and I expect to see hatred, disgust. Expect to see twelve little cigarette holes singed into my bones, evidence of my hateful blasphemy. But only my own unmarred skin stares back at me, my sweet dead boy determined to live for me.

“Well, excuse the hell out of you for not being super chill about a bunch of dudes trying to kill you!”