Page 64 of Deathless
I dropped the cigarette and crushed it under my boot. Patroklos lay where he'd fallen. The Pantheon would find him eventually. Let them.
We had a plane to catch.
The engines died, andthe silence tried to fucking suffocate me.
I sat there with my grip still on the yoke and Patroklos on his knees behind my eyes. Three shots. I could still count them on my trigger finger if I let myself, which I wasn't going to do, so I ran through the shutdown instead. Fuel mixture, throttle, magnetos. The work kept my hands busy while my brain stayed back in Amritsar.
Through the windscreen, I could make out the empty airstrip in the pre-dawn gray. Dirt and scrub stretched in every direction. A single jeep sat at the far end, the one Luka had left for us.
My family had made it across safely. Luka's last message said the boats landed three hours ago.
I climbed out, and the heat slammed into me. Jasper peeled off toward the jeep without a word while Rhadamanthys limped across the tarmac with Nevada under his arm. Mr. Nobody disappeared toward the tree line like smoke. Vihaan was alreadyon his phone, probably yelling at someone about servers or some shit I had no room for.
I grabbed my pack and headed for the jeep.
The drive took twenty minutes through back roads that didn't exist on any map. The resistance had carved their base out of an old limestone quarry, stone corridors with basic fixtures, voices echoing in Spanish and Romani. People called out greetings as I passed, and I nodded, kept moving until I hit the communal showers.
I stripped, turned the water on, and stepped under.
Brown water ran off me at first, then pink, then clear.
I grabbed the soap and scrubbed under my nails where Patroklos's blood had gotten in deep. The water turned pink again and swirled down the drain. Soap and water, and the blood was gone, washed away like it had never been there.
Except Patroklos stayed on his knees in my mind. The sickle hit the dirt. His body jerked three times, once for each shot.
I scrubbed harder, working the soap over my forearms, my chest, anywhere the blood might've touched. The bar slipped, and I caught it, kept going. My skin started to burn, but I didn't stop. The blood was gone, but I could still sense it on me, a stain that had soaked through to the bone.
I dug my nails into my bicep and scraped, trying to get down to something clean underneath.
The other kills had been fast. A gun in my face and my finger on the trigger before I could think about it, and then it was over. Those kills had no faces. They lasted an hour, maybe two, and then they were just facts.
This one stayed.
I'd put three shells into a man already on his knees. I'd looked him in the eyes and pulled the trigger three times, execution-style, and now I couldn't scrub the image out any more than I could scrub out the blood.
The bathroom door opened.
Footsteps crossed the tile, and someone stepped into my shower stall. Water hit a second body in the spray. I barely tracked it, too busy scrubbing, too focused on trying to get the blood off even though I knew it was already gone.
It took me a full minute to figure out it was Jasper.
He stood in the spray, fully dressed, water soaking through his shirt and jeans. He looked at me with my raw knuckles pressed against my ribs and every muscle pulled wire-tight.
The sob came out of nowhere and ripped straight from my lungs. I dropped hard, knees cracking against tile, and I couldn't hold myself up anymore. The water kept running, and I shook and couldn't stop, couldn't hold my shit together.
Jasper dropped beside me. Water pooled around us both and he said nothing. He pulled me against his chest and held on while I fell apart.
I grabbed his soaked shirt and pressed my face into his shoulder, let it come. The fear, the rage, the weight of what I'd done. It poured out of me, and Jasper held on tighter. He brought his hand up to the back of my neck and wrapped his other arm around my shoulders. He was solid. He was real. He was here.
"Breathe," he said quietly.
I tried but couldn't get air, tried again and managed something ragged that hurt going in.
"Patroklos deserved it," he said. "What he did to Eight. To those people. You made the right call."
I pulled back enough to look at him. Water dripped from his hair and his clothes clung to his body, soaked through from getting in the shower with me.
"I can't get it off," I said. "The blood."
