I was drowning, after all. Blood was pouring down my throat and into my lungs, filling them up, bit by bit. I immediately fell to my knees, sputtering. I wasn’t trying to breathe, to make it worse, but your instinct to live is a strong fucking thing. I kept on trying to get air, even though the whole point was not to live but to die.
I had to die. If I died, I was useless to him. He couldn’t take over me. He couldn’t harm Perry. He couldn’t bring her family here and try and open some fucking gates to hell. He couldn’t do anything if I was dead.
And so that was the plan. A split-second plan but it was the only one I had. I had wanted to die once when I was in college, right after I was institutionalized. I wanted to throw everything away.
I was glad I didn’t. No matter how hard it got, I was glad I kept going. I would have missed out on so much. It angered me, actually, that I thought I was doing the world a favor. Life, no matter how much it sucks – and believe me, being told you’re crazy because you see ghosts sucks, growing up with a crazy, abusive drunk mom and a deadbeat dad sucks – it’s still a gift. That’s some cheesy Hallmark shit there, but it’s the truth.
If I had ended it back then, I would have never met Perry. I would have never found my purpose in life. I would have never known pure joy and happiness. I would have never felt fulfilled. I would have never known what real love was. I would have never know the pleasure in having hope for the future. I would have never known any of that.
And so, killing myself in order to preserve some of that, it didn’t seem like that crazy of an idea. Of course, dying sucks. Dying when you have so much to keep living for has to be the worst joke God has ever played on people.
But sometimes, you have to do the shitty fucking things in life. Sometimes those things mean death. If this meant I could save Perry and everyone else, well, there wasn’t much to consider. I mean, we’re talking the gates of Hell here. We’re talking about the love of my life.
That didn’t mean, though, that when I fell to the ground and felt the blood pool around my head, that I didn’t feel sorrow. I felt absolute sorrow. Because I just wanted to back in time. I just wanted to be at Perry’s parents’ house in Portland, editing, happy as a pig in the shit because my woman just agreed to marry me. I wanted to go back to that and hang on to it and yell at myself for not breathing in every single second. I wanted keep living that joy over and over and over again.
That’s why I had asked her to marry me. I wanted joy, forever. I wanted her forever. I wanted all the wonderful things that life was giving me and I wanted them over and over and over again. I wanted to live.
I just wanted to live.
And now, well that just wasn’t in the cards. It wasn’t a choice I could have made.
For the first time in my life, I did what was best for everyone.
I stepped into the sword. I stepped into the abyss.
I would miss Perry more than anything.
But the fact that this way, she would go on living, that was worth it for me.
I died with tears in my eyes.
I died with love in my heart.
I died knowing that, after everything I had been through, life was still good.
Life was still good.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Perry
I don’t know how long I just stood there for, seconds, minutes. I yelled and yelled and yelled inside my head but I got no response – not from Maximus, not from Dex.
Finally, the bedside lamp flickered and I felt a giant whoosh go through me, like something was powering down and I was being emptied. Tears sprung to my eyes for no reason and it felt like my whole body was losing something. I fell to my knees for a moment, trying to breathe, to make sense of what was happening.
“Come with me.” I heard a whisper.
I looked up and saw Little Michael standing by the door. He waved his hand at me, frantically, trying to get me to follow him.
I managed to get to my feet, feeling off-balance and hollow. He grabbed my hand and led me out into the hallway. I heard growling, snapping sounds coming from behind me but he gave me a firm tug and hurried us along in the opposite direction.
“Don’t turn around,” he said. “Keep blocking yourself. He doesn’t know you’re here.”
I was stunned. How did this boy know what I was trying to do? More than that, it was actually working?
Before I could ask him, he brought me into a room at the end of the hall. It was dark in here save for a light in the bathroom. There was a shadow underneath the door – someone was in there. But the boy paid it no attention. He closed the door to the hallway and pointed at the king-sized bed in the middle of the room.
“Go hide under it,” he said.
“I have to find Dex,” I told him. “Your brother.”