“When you remember me, he won’t matter, Evie,” Xavier’s face darkens in its earnestness.
The sky turns gray with overcast clouds that threaten the daylight, as if Heaven disapproves. Reed lets go of my hand and I feel the loss of it more deeply than just the cold air turning my fingers to ice.
Xavier leaves the deck like a charging bull and hurls himself at Reed. Tau is next to me in less than a second; his arms engulf me. He holds me back when I would jump into the fight to pull them apart. I struggle in Tau’s arms. “You have to stop this!”
“What worries you the most...that Reed will lose...or that that he’ll win?”
I still. Blood runs from Reed’s blade, spraying the white snow in violent patterns of red from a slash above Xavier’s left eye. They stalk one another like wild things. Xavier counters with a gory slice from Reed’s neck that mists the air with an iron scent. My eyes turn to Tau’s; for a moment I discern sadness in them. My heart squeezes with a terrible ache as I beg, “Stop them. Please. For that little girl you once loved!”
He hides all emotion behind a blank stare. “They won’t thank you for interfering.”
“Please,” I beg again, “do something!”
“No,” he frowns and shakes his head. “This has to happen—”
I whimper in agony. “You don’t know what we are to one another!”
Tau’s eyes stray to the fight again. “Are you referring to Reed...or Xavier? I may have a clearer view than you do of that. This is a blessing in disguise for you. Now you don’t have to choose.”
“This is a curse,” I retort to the sky, unable to pull free from Tau. “Let go of me so I can stop them!” Tau’s arms around me only tighten.
“No.”
In desperation I mutter a spell, “Hide the sun from my skin.” My flesh becomes cold to the touch. Bristling out, my skin elongates to a thousand sharp icicle points that cut into Tau’s arms. He flinches from the fleshy needles jabbing him while his own skin frosts over in a fine sheen of ice. It forces him to let go of me. My skin smoothes over and returns to normal.
The boatswain he had clutched in his grasp slips from his frozen fingers. Landing in the snow, the whistle gleams like a prism of refracted light. In a daze, I reach down and retrieve it. It warms in my hand. It has been waiting for me. Only me. Lifting it in my palm, its power surges into me like fuel to a fire.
Something grips me—some distant memory. Words fall from my lips unbidden, “In your hideaway, towers grow, so far away, in the dark of Sheol.” I place the whistle to my lips, my cheeks puff out as I blow; the sound of a thousand tormented voices howl in my head—they’re waiting for me to set them free.
Immediately, a rending tear forms in the air. It’s as if a sliver of the night sky has ruptured a hole in the fabric of our world. It stands open, a doorway in front of me to a wretched cityscape of dark, twisting towers. A vile, reeking stench bleeds into the air as fumes emit from the breech between worlds. Unbalanced and disoriented from the pain of howling voices, I stumble. An invisible force drags me toward the desolate gateway ahead.
The boatswain is stripped from my fingertips by Tau. He raises it to his lips. Darkness leaps up from the ground to pounce upon me when another few short wails from the whistle roll over me. I raise my hands to my ears; certain the shrill screams have made them bleed. I stagger as the offal reek of Hell flows back, ebbing and receding, a horrifying smudge of evil upon the landscape of home. The whistle shrieks again and I’m on my knees in the snow, retching and writhing in pain from the sound of it. The gateway to Sheol takes the shape of angel wings spread wide. Another long whistle blows and I’m swept away in the sound. I curl back into its resonance of the noise and spiral down. The sky goes black for me. My eyes roll upward. I fall towards the ground, but I never feel it.
“Simone...Si-moe-ohhnnn, wo gehst du hin?” Emil’s teasing voice calls to me in Deutsche, singing my name and asking me where I’m going. The playfulness of his words scares me more than anything has ever frightened me in my life. He only sings to those he plans to torture...or play with, which really amounts to the same thing.
Does he know? I ask myself. Fear makes my extremities heavy.