The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (35 page)

“Go, Roxanne. For once in your damn life, listen to me and go.”

“But what are
you
going to do?”

He let out a deep breath. “I’m going to stop it.”

“How?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s handled.” He started to shut the door, then hesitated. “Are you sure you can trust this guy?” he asked, looking at Santo.

“I’m sure,” Roxanne said vehemently.

April gave her a hard look. “It’s not going to be pretty,” she said. “When it starts.”

Roxanne stared back, confused. Of course it wouldn’t be pretty. The scavengers planned to kill. To steal the bodies of innocent people.

“I’m talking about the decay,” April clarified, nodding at Santo.

Beside her, Roxanne felt Santo tense. April shifted her attention to him and said, “You didn’t think you’d get to keep it forever, did you, reaper?”

Seeing Roxanne’s frown, Reece said, “The body. It rejects them.” With a look of sadness, he gently touched the rash on April’s arm.

Seeing Roxanne’s bewilderment, April said, “The Beyond and earth were never meant to meet in this way. The scavengers found a way in, but that doesn’t mean they’ve figured out how to sustain it. We deteriorate.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Like Reece said, our bodies reject the demon that’s inside them. We can’t maintain. We begin to erode. It’s why most of us look like ghosts. White skin. Even the eyes go white in the end. Eventually, all semblance of humanity is leached out of us. Isn’t that ironic?”

The girl looked very human in that moment, and Roxanne had a hard time reconciling how she could be one of
them.

It was Santo who gave the answer. “You took her
before she died,” he said in that husky voice that betrayed his emotions.

The sorrow in her eyes said it all, and Roxanne saw a message pass between April and Santo. An understanding that made her uneasy.

“You need to tell her,” April said, nodding at Roxanne. “Don’t make her guess.”

Reece gave Roxanne a tight hug before she could say anything else. “Get out of here.” He looked over her head at Santo. “You hear me? Get her out of here.”

With that, the two ducked back into the passageway, closing the door behind them, locking Roxanne and Santo out.

S
anto felt like he’d swallowed glass. He’d suspected that the rash was a symptom of deterioration occurring with the scavengers. When Gary had visited in the hours before dawn, Santo had thought his eyes resembled the hellhounds’.

But Santo hadn’t fully grasped what it meant. What it meant for
him.

“What was she talking about?” Roxanne demanded as soon as the door closed. “Does she think that’s going to happen to you?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Santo said, eyeing the delivery bay where they’d come out. A long ramp led up to a sliding door where merchandise could be unloaded. Tucked against the far wall stood five trash bins, lids open.

He took her hand and moved them away from the door, strolling casually. As if they weren’t afraid. As if they had no goal.

Roxanne tugged on his hand and stopped him. “I thought we were past secrets.”

He let out a deep breath and acknowledged her point. As much as he didn’t want to tell her what April meant, she had the right to know.

Walking again, anxious to get out of the open, Santo said, “She’s telling the truth. If it happens to them, it could happen to me.”

Roxanne said nothing, but he could feel her runaway thoughts. He could feel her worry as she tried to find a solution to a problem that wasn’t her own.

The police had the main accesses blocked off, but they hadn’t made it to all the store entrances yet. Roxanne and Santo circled around from the delivery bay until they found one that was unmanned.

“Did you know?” she asked in a hurt voice.

“No, but I should have suspected.”

“Why?”

“The hellhounds,” he said bluntly. “They haven’t been heard of in the Beyond for so long that we thought them a myth. But when I saw the scavengers in the hotel parking lot and the hellhounds appeared right after them, something clicked in my head. I realized the hellhounds hadn’t come through from the
Beyond—not like the scavengers. Not like me. They’d evolved. Or, I guess, the opposite.”

Roxanne stared at him, her brows puckering the flesh between them. She didn’t want to understand. But there weren’t a lot of ways she could misinterpret what he’d said.

“My guess is the rash is just the beginning,” Santo went on. “After that . . . like April said, it won’t be pretty.”

“And you didn’t think it was worth mentioning?”

“We covered a lot of territory in a short amount of time,
angelita
. It didn’t seem like something I should bring up when I wasn’t certain.”

“Have you seen signs yourself?”

He didn’t answer.

“Have you?”

Reluctantly, he shoved up his sleeve and showed her the small eruption at the crook of his arm.

“When?”

“This morning.”

He shook his sleeve down again and waited until she met his eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want it to be true either.”

“I won’t accept this. Do you hear me? I
won’t
. I’m in love with you, Santo. I’m not going to let go.”

He’d waited for those words for so long that he wanted to weep at their beauty. He vowed that he would
hear them again. That he would find the moment to give them back.

But this was not the time or place.

“I’m trying to hang on to that faith,
angelita.
You keep hold of yours.”

She looked so beautiful. So fierce. He remembered the despair that Santo had fought over his dead wife. If he had to give up Roxanne, his anguish would surpass anything Santo had endured. Becoming a mindless beast might be a blessing.

“I’m not giving up,” she said, kissing him. “Don’t you either.”

B
ack inside the mall, Roxanne and Santo made their way to the impromptu stage in front of the restaurant. The number of costumed performers had grown in the short time they’d been gone, and now it seemed they were everywhere.

Standing on the stage were a few other people wearing an officious air but no costumes. The noise level dropped from deafening to a loud rumble as one of them moved to the microphone and began to speak. Tall and pasty, he wore a black long-sleeved shirt and black pants. The collar was buttoned up to his chin, but Roxanne could see the fine shadow of a rash just below his ears and at his hairline. He wore dark sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but she didn’t have to see them. She knew who he was.

“That’s Gary, isn’t it,” she murmured.

Santo nodded grimly.

“Just a little while longer,” the man shouted into the microphone. “While we wait, your entertainment committee has some fun planned.”

From speakers located everywhere music blasted out and the crowd began to sing and dance along.

In her mind, Roxanne kept replaying her conversation with Reece. She leaned against Santo so he could hear her.

“What do you think Reece has planned?”

Santo shook his head. “I’ve given up on guessing what any of you will do.”

“There’s only one way he could stop it,” she told him. “He said he’s their key. Their
buddy pass.
The only way he quits being that is by not coming back. By dying for good.”

She could tell by Santo’s expression that he’d figured that out already.

“Roxanne,” he said gently. “Maybe it’s the way it should be.”

“No. I can’t believe that.”

“You won’t believe it.”

“That, too.”

“Behold,” the man onstage exclaimed over the din, making every syllable sound theatric.

He stepped back, and others dressed in skeleton costumes came to the front and stood in a line. A
movement at the edge of the stage distracted Roxanne, and she craned her neck to see six shadowy figures waiting behind the performers, like dancers preparing to do some elaborate number. Not so odd, except there was something about them that struck Roxanne wrong. At first she thought it was the street clothes they were wearing when everyone else had on costumes, but then . . . She frowned, inching over to get a better view. They had a strangely
ethereal
look to them. Like Manny had last night in the dream.

The performers began to move, waving their hands and motioning for the audience to join in. Each time one of them took a step, the spirits behind followed, as if bound. They made a gruesome,
ghostly
synchronized dance parody. Souls trapped here so their deaths wouldn’t be noted in the Beyond.

The injustice, the horror of it, made her sick.

Roxanne slowly looked from one of the jostling people around them to another. She saw more souls emerge in the audience, appearing like an illusion as her gaze touched on them. There was Jim Little and Sal Espinoza, from the bar. Even Manny’s spirit stood at the far edge of the gathering in his rolled up jeans and Iron Man shirt. He smiled at her.

Onstage, the skeletons performed, riling the spectators into a shrieking frenzy. Someone dimmed the lights, and the skull and bones costumes began to glow. The happy, playful antics they’d been performing slowed
with the music. It throbbed over the agitated bodies. That didn’t sound like Justin’s music any longer.

People blocked the walkways and spilled out of the stores, swaying to the deep beat. They stared at the performers with expressions of rapture, no longer talking or screaming as the music lulled them into silence.

Then the man with the microphone looked up, right into Roxanne’s eyes. He smiled.

She heard a loud shriek as the ravens flocked down from the ceiling. At the same time, locusts swarmed and buzzed at their feet. The screams bounced off the walls and came back tenfold as people began to flail wildly, fighting the talons above as they reeled away from the bugs clinging to their legs below.

The crowd lurched to the side and Santo’s grip on her hand broke. Before she could call his name, a big hand covered her mouth and someone jerked her off her feet.

The lights went out, plunging them into darkness as the screams rebounded with terror.

S
anto had never realized how completely a life could change in just a second. That’s all it had taken. He’d glanced away and then she was gone.

He spun, looking in every direction, but the lights had been doused, and only the doors offered a dubious, overcast glimmer. He shouted Roxanne’s name, but she could have been right beside him and not heard it over the panic. The ravens swooped, the locusts swarmed. People on the risers tried to get down, people on the floor tried to push through the circle of spectators surrounding them, and the outer ring fought back, trying to get closer because they had no idea what had happened. They thought Justin Whoever had shown up.

On the ceiling, the Black Tides of Abaddon washed ashore. A sharp report of gunfire cut through the
madness and chunks of plaster rained down on them all, inciting more wild-eyed terror. Santo pushed his way against the surge of people, heading for the stage. The scavenger no longer stood there, but others did, and someone had to know where they’d taken her.