Death

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  For Rafferty

  you let me cry in your kitchen

  corrected my chaise longues

  and Beargue—always Beargue

  For the Girl Gang

  y’all know who you are

  and you know why

  Why should I fear death?

  If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not.

  Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?

  —Epicurus

  I bring the karma

  you better run, run, yeah

  that bitch don’t play

  —Alma

  PROLOGUE

  these layers of me

  many and varied

  rising with the new dawn

  kissed by the sun

  parched by life’s cruelties

  until you call

  feeding me love

  dressed in touch that calms

  water that cools

  affection that wraps me

  in your everything

  you cry out in shock

  despair teases the dark recesses

  that make up your whole

  as you feel the warmth of my flesh

  listen to the catch of my breath

  lick the salt of my sweat

  you fear my death, lover

  I see it in your eyes

  as they take in my every detail

  loving

  warm

  terrified

  of the day I slip this skin

  and walk this land no more

  but know this

  as you know

  my every curve and hollow

  no grave can shackle me

  no earth can keep my body

  from seeking yours

  I shall claw my way upward

  and roam the streets for your scent

  your sound

  your soul

  ravenous

  enraged

  no repast shall satisfy my ache for you

  no wine taste sweeter than your lips

  we are entwined

  belonging to each other

  forever

  do not fear death, my lover

  she has nothing on us

  for we have each other

  CHAPTER ONE: DUTCH

  There is nothing like a mother’s love.

  Unless that mother is named Shema Mathew.

  Leader of the Junta.

  Member of The Gate.

  If your mother is named Shema Mathew, you are fucked.

  CHAPTER TWO: DUTCH

  I lay on that table like a pig headed to slaughter: powerless, panicked, aware. My eyes darted around the dark room, back and forth, back and forth, as dancing firelight tossed sinister shadows on the walls and ceiling. A voice inside my head, the rational one that always seemed to remain calm no matter how fucked up shit became—and shit was fucked up with a capital F right now—told me to breathe easy, slow, in and out, in and out, to still the pain. But the other voice, the one that lived in my skin and blood, my gore and guts, that voice could muster only short, panicked breaths, the kind that led to hyperventilation and uncontrolled panic attacks and all kinds of other shit that didn’t help my current situation.

  My fingertips pressed into the unforgiving wood of the table, but my hands were tied down and the exposed bone of my wrists also wasn’t helping much. The leather of the shackles felt damp and heavy against my burning skin.

  Then there was that goddamned smell.

  Metal.

  Every. fucking. where.

  Thick, so I could taste it even. Choke on it almost. That smell was my blood splattered everywhere my eye settled. There was no place in the room without some of me splashed all over some of it. Hence the smell. And the taste.

  I wanted to vomit, but that would involve moving my throat, constricting it and the muscles in my stomach, and both those areas of my body were shredded and raw and left open on that table, thanks to Khan and his knives.

  Vomiting was not an option.

  “Dutch.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Tight. As if doing so helped me forget I was carved up and bloodied, sections of my body opened and exposed, all of it hurting like nothing I’d before experienced—and I’d spent a lifetime experiencing brutal bloody shit.

  This was different, though. This was magic of the blackest kind coursing through me while killing me, while not. This was Khan at his most vile and pernicious. This was hell. So unimaginable that I’d long ago escaped the confines of my mind and blurred the line between fact and fiction, all in an effort to protect myself from sensation too intense to define with common words and phrases. Rational thought seemed so far out of reach, an impossibility for the impossible existence of someone I could no longer recall.

  Myself.

  Who was I?

  Had I rendered Dutch Mathew no longer of this world? God, I fucking hoped so.

  I turned my head to the side, the motion pained and slow, and tried to open my eyes again, tried to fixate on sounds that once upon a time I recognized and understood but now simply felt in my blood.

  “Dutch.”

  Faint shapes in the darkness, amorphous and misshapen, moved about the room, making sounds that somewhere in my being I knew were conversation even as I could comprehend little else. The who-what-where-why of the shapes mattered little to my nearly dead brain, mostly because somewhere deep inside my pulverized soul, I knew.

  I knew the answers.

  I knew they were here to deliver me, sinew and muscle and barely beating heart, to Death so she could have one last look, one last laugh at my expense. So she could remind me Juma belonged to her and her alone and that I was a piece of shit, unworthy of two seconds of Juma’s time or attention and most definitely unworthy of her love. Then Death would smile and laugh and probably run her finger, that goddamned finger that could cut through anything, along my lips before pressing her own to mine and ending it, once and for all.

  I knew this—and Jesus fuck, I was ready.

  I wanted to shout as much to her goddamned mumbling minions, I wanted to break free of my constraints, sit up, and tell them all to fuck off and die. That I wasn’t scared of anyone: Death, Khan, Veda, the Black Copse. None of them mattered, because only she made a difference, only she existed for me, only she could make me think twice about anything in this lifetime or any of the others I might suffer.

  Juma.

  Juma.

  Juma.

  Memories of her washed over me—her honey and lemons and grass and light—as my fucked-up, barely working brain tried to lift my carved-up, half-skinned body off that table, only to be gently pressed back into the wood.

  By the shapes.

  The forms.

  Those amorphous beings flitting about the room had come to focus on me because it was time. She was coming, that blackhearted bitch.

  Death.

  God, I fucking hated her because, yes, I was ready to die, I almost welcomed it, but still. The thought of never seeing Juma again, never feeling her breath ag
ainst my chest as she slept or her laughter as I tickled her feet or those goddamned filthy jokes she whispered in my ear as her hand worked my dick and everything exploded.

  Yeah.

  All of that.

  And more.

  So I gave it one last shot and fought against those fucking leather straps I knew I could not escape, because they were steeped in all kinds of black magic, but I fought anyway because, fuck, I had to.

  “Dutch, goddammit”—a hiss of breath as harsh hands pushed me back into the table and held me down—“lie the fuck down before I kill you myself.”

  “Rani, please.” Another voice, one so familiar and yet not at all, filled my ears as hands and fingers danced against all the places on my body stripped clean of skin. I screamed out in pain and terror although no sound escaped my lips. “He cannot help himself. He is suffering.”

  “This asshole might be your son, Shema, but do not for one second think I care about him.” Sound and words came together in a clear, concise, sensible way for the first time since I had slipped my skin and my spirit soared skyward, as if my brain knew it was time to work again.

  “Did such disdain develop before or after you slept with him all those years ago? Repeatedly.”

  Rani’s mouth clamped shut and a hush fell over the room as fingers kept working magic into the bloodied and brutalized parts of my body, kneading tissue and muscle until somehow, someway, shit made sense. Everything fused. Body and mind. Like—bam!

  “What the fuck?” I spoke aloud, my voice cracked and hoarse but working all the same. “Do not touch me. Either of you.”

  CHAPTER THREE: JUMA

  Once upon a time, a girl and a boy raced in a yellow taxi through the streets of New York City, up the curves of Broadway, hugging the outer lane of traffic, whizzing through perfectly timed green lights to find themselves deposited before a tall prewar building full of solitude-seeking celebrities and sunglasses-wearing billionaires. They stepped into the elevator, and when the doors opened, they knew they’d landed in the sky. The room was white and beautiful and they looked around in hushed silence, slow smiles curving their lips as Frida Kahlo watched it all.

  I needed that white room, the solace before the storm. Avery’s penthouse apartment of vast and airy openness high above the madness of the New York City streets, the last place I’d laughed and lived and loved. The last place I recalled him laughing and living and loving. The last place we were together. And happy.

  Dutch.

  I screamed his name, bellowed it for the gods and monsters of this world and all the others to hear and know and remember. And yet, not a sound escaped my lips. Nothing. Not even the slightest vibration of air moved past my lips in a sigh. On the cusp of beginning life number seven, and I could do nothing more than lie there on that cold harsh slab of marble, alone in that windowless room of madness.

  Because that’s what this was, right?

  Madness?

  It had to be.

  At least according to Jack Nicholson and the quiet, brooding American Indian and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Ken Kesey, this was madness. Nothing but quiet and white and hard slabs of marble upon which I lay perfectly still, and I wondered what Mr. Kesey would say about murderous fathers and twisted sisters and an army of mute killers, what would he think of nine lives and Death and watching your lover succumb? Was that enough to warrant a gentle but firm pillow to the face until every last bit of air stored in the lungs and blood expired and all that was left were the body and bones?

  Or would Ken tell me to get over myself, drop some LSD, and get back at it?

  I turned my head to the right, the movement slow and deliberate and full of bone-crushing anguish, and noted the white of the walls and the muted nickel of the doorknob and the button of the lock and the worn wood of the solitary chair, and as my eyes moved around the space, thoughts and feelings and words and sounds bounced around my skull, demanding attention and action—as if to say, Let’s do this, gorgeous—and without warning my mind’s eye conjured him.

  Dutch.

  All brown skin and full lips and tatted arms. A cigarette dangled from his gorgeous mouth as he smiled, and it was a real smile, the kind that reached his eyes and let me know he was happy and light, and for a brief moment in his existence, the darkness was not swallowing him whole, chewing him up, and spitting him out wherever it pleased. For a brief moment, he knew joy.

  I sat up and dangled my legs over the edge of the marble slab—point flex point flex—as my blood pushed to the outermost parts of my body and my skin heated and bit by bit, I felt more alive and aware. I pushed myself off the marble and inched my body down the table to finally stand, learning the cold floor with each of my toes my heels the balls of my feet, until I was certain and steady and able to bear my weight.

  A thought fluttered across my brain cells—brief but demanding some sort of testament—that I never stood this soon upon return, because I never woke alone, because I always woke in his arms, he always kissed me back to this life.

  Dutch.

  I stilled and closed my eyes and let him sweep through me, fill me with his everything. I felt love and tenderness and devotion, I heard his bark of a laugh, I tasted his bourbon-sweet tongue, I smelled the musk of his sweat. My dark love, my twisted heart, my death and salvation.

  My soul shook as I tried to gather myself while enveloped by him. The cool of the room cocooned me, and still I remained rooted to the spot, deep in rumination and remembrance. And when it seemed I might cross back to the nonliving, that perhaps I’d never really revived, my blood and breath so inert, my heart shrouded in dark and despair, I gasped.

  “Ahhh.”

  The sound bounced along the walls, danced on the floors, kissed the ceiling as it reached my ears and my eyes flew open and all of me became 1,000 percent present in the here and now, the death and destruction, the loss and pain, the quiet and solitude. I moved across the room toward a lone chair pushed under a desk as if waiting for someone to sit down and write a letter. The bones in my feet cracked in revolt as I walked the slow gait of the elderly or injured, my body relearning its motor functions faster than ever. The desk, a mere ten feet from where I began, was a walk from hell, and when I reached its wooden respite, I grasped the edges with both hands and leaned into it with a grateful sigh.

  I breathed in and out in and out, deep and full, my lungs wanting more more more but my mind focused on the one thing in the room that caught my eye as I lay on that marble slab, distraught and defeated: Dutch.

  In a picture on the desk.

  As if someone knew I would need him when I awoke. As if someone knew I would need a reason to rise.

  It was one of the photos I’d taken with my phone all those months ago after the night he came to me all bloodied and battered, when he’d leaned against my kitchen table that morning and smoked and smiled and charmed and all of it was beautiful. I touched the edge of the print, traced my finger along the white of the frame, and smiled.

  Then, in a flash of movement, I pulled the frame apart, flipped the clips, and removed the back. I worked my fingers under the photo, between the image and the glass, until he was in my hands, all his darkness and deadliness mine and mine alone. Just as we were supposed to be: Dutch and Juma, dark and light, forever and ever. I brought the picture to my lips, pressed them to his, then slipped the photo into my back pocket—this was how I would remember Dutch, alive and full of love, touched by the morning sun, a whisper of smoke from his cigarette, his smirk a dirty dare made up of mischief and fun.

  That piss-poor excuse of a father, Khan, and the even more psychotic sister, Veda, had darkened and dimmed so much of his life. I would not allow them to do the same to his memory. Fuck them. I knew they’d killed him, I’d seen the murderous rage in Khan’s eyes as he came up behind Dutch and caught him unawares, and I’d seen the resignation on Dutch’s face when he realized the folly of his ways, that he should have finished off his father when he’d had the chance, that he
should never have paid a second of attention to Veda and her twisted theatrics, that he should never have looked my way.

  But he was Dutch, and if there was one thing I knew about him, it was that he loved me, so it made perfect sense he’d stopped and watched as both our lives ended. Similar to the sense it made now, for me to gather my strongest selves, those beings of fire and death and destruction, and push him into the furthest reaches of my consciousness—all his warmth and tenderness and love, his wicked mouth and perfect hands, every atom of Dutch needed to fade into the black of my memory banks so I could move forward.

  Just as we’d planned.

  Just as I’d promised him I would do.

  No matter what.

  A sob wracked my chest and escaped my parted lips, the sound feral and unrestrained, strains of love and despair and longing wrapped around each other and released into the white of the room, and if I’d heard that sound from another, I would recognize the unfathomable pain, for it lived inside my darkest places, my deepest cracks, and there it would remain buried forever. I held on to the desk until my fingers went numb and turned white and throbbed with pain, as if everything I felt for Dutch had transferred into the tips of my being for safekeeping.

  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.

  One.

  Two.

  Three . . .

  . . . Nine hundred sixty-seven.

  On I counted, determined to move forward but incapable of doing so in any concrete way that mattered. Yes, I revived and pulled all the parts of me back together and crossed the room on feet still raw and broken, but an hour later I had done little more than that.

  “Juma?”

  I pressed my fingers to my eyes as if doing so would make the familiar voice so soft and sweet disappear and I would be in the room alone again.

  And with that simple gesture—fingertips to lids—so full of frustration and longing and all things brown and beautiful, he returned, despite the fact I’d spent so much time counting him into the furthest reaches of my soul, despite the fact I said I would not be stilled by his memory, he returned.