“Good. You understand the stakes,” he says with a creepy grin.
“And Eric? When will you take him?”
Charon nods. “We’re leaving now.”
“Now?” Eric asks, but Charon only nods.
Eric pulls me into a tight hug and I gasp, realizing this is really it. Really the end.
I knew it was coming, but now that it is here, it feels all too soon.
“Tell them I love them,” I say, crying in his arms. “And tell them I’ll do my best to find my mother for them.”
“Thank you,” he says. “For this sacrifice.”
Then Charon grips Eric’s forearm but before he can push him into a small ferry, Eric reaches out for Hawthorne, then South, then Lennox. Pulling them into tight hugs.
The goodbye is brief. What is there to say? Good luck? Congrats? It all feels weak.
Charon pulls the ferry from the dock and it slices through the murky water. The sky is turning dark once more, it’s been nearly a day since we first glimpsed Eric.
“I’m dying anyway,” I say to no one in particular. “And you heard my mom. I have a job to do in the Underworld.” Tears are falling from my eyes, practically blinding me. “And you are all going to fade,” I say, choking on my words. “We’ll never see one another again, so at least we can die knowing Eric is getting another chance.” My shoulders shake, my heart broken. “And besides, we knew the end was coming anyway, right?” I gasp between sobs and before I collapse, I feel Hawthorne’s arms wrap around what is left of me.
“Shhh, Tenny, shhhh.” He kisses the side of my head and I sink against his chest.
“I love you,” I tell him. “So damn much. And now....”
“I know.” He looks down at me, taking my face in his hands. “One day can change everything, right?”
I nod. “I didn’t want it to change this much, though,” I say, feeling hysterical. “I’m not strong enough to lose you all.”
“You can’t lose us,” he says. “We are yours, and no matter where we are, we are together.”
I want to believe him, I want his words to steady me.
“Ten,” Lennox says. “We have one more hour together. Let’s not pass it crying.”
South points to a house in the distance, off the riverbank, and up a short path. “Let’s head up there,” he says. Then he reaches for my hand. “Tennyson, let’s enjoy what time we have left, okay?”
I nod, lacing my fingers with his. Wishing my body were whole, but it isn’t, and it doesn’t matter anyway. South and Lennox and Hawthorne love me as a person, not because of what I look like on the outside.
“Let’s go,” I say, my body awake with love and desire. “Let’s make the time we have left count.”
17
Lennox
Tennyson has always been so strong. When I met her, I was weak and broken, and she mended me with her wild laugh and her reckless spirit. Dragging me to parties, to haunted houses, to the Elysian Fields to poke around. We’d laugh, teenagers let loose in a world we weren’t made for. So free, despite the fact we were stuck in the in-between.
Ten made me believe that my life mattered, if only in the fact, that we had the privilege of belonging to one another. I had been in a hospital bed for more than half my life and I thought that was it. That death would claim all of me.
But it didn’t.
I died and found the love of my life in the purple-haired girl who pulled me from the riverbank and helped make me whole.
She has no idea how special she is. She brought us together, made us a family, and seeing her cry now, it fucking kills me.
Most people never get love like this; get to spend so much time with someone who completes them. But I do. Or, at least, I did.
She is so scared now, already forgetting her brave act of mercy is the very essence of her. We enter the house through the front entrance. It is empty, quiet. Just like many homes are, here in Styx. It’s like a haunted city on a hill, a wasteland of leftovers, but we’ve lived like scavengers for so long, we hardly notice it.
“It’s not too bad in here,” South says, striking a match and lighting a candelabra resting a table at the front entrance. “Empty at least.”
“Do you ever wonder why there are so many empty houses here?” I ask no one in particular.
“If it is the making of Greek gods, maybe they used to think this would be a special place,” South offers.
“That’s funny,” Ten says. “Imagine, coming to Styx for vacation.”
“Did you ever have a vacation you can remember?” I ask her as we walk through the grand house. The four of us eye a staircase and we begin to climb it. God, I hope there is a big bed wherever we are headed. How I long to hold Ten in my arms before she fades.