Chapter Twenty-Two

At one point, Magyar realized that she had never seen Laila's body. It had never bothered her before, not in the eleven years that Laila had been dead, but now she regretted not going to the funeral, even if had meant seeing her slit throat—such an ugly death for one of the few beautiful people Elizabeta had known.

But now, she thought it would have been better if she had seen, because this—this was worse.

Lukas Bondevik had his mother's face, and it was beautiful even if it was tinged with blue and pallid with death. Looking at him, it felt like seeing two deaths in one: Laila's and Lukas'. She thought that perhaps, if she had at least seen Laila in death, she would not be seeing double.

They had placed Lukas in the guest room—which was actually Nathan's room—and then everyone had crowded into the living room, as if there was not a dead body just a door away. Pizza was ordered, conversations were started, but everything was hushed, tense, accompanied by furtive glances to that single closed door.

It was suffocating.

"Gas," Elizabeta heard Lovino mutter into his brother's ear at one point. "The door was locked and they didn't want to blow things up, so they gassed him like fucking Nazis."

It felt surreal. But then it felt too real. It felt so real it felt like a dream.

The pizza was demolished, paper plates piled up in the trash, and Elizabeta thought that now. Now might be a good time to call Emil out. He had not left Lukas' side since he had seen him cradled in Mathias's arms, had stayed with him throughout the flight, but it was not healthy to stay in a closed room with a dead body for too long.

Elizabeta stood, began to make her way towards the door, but somebody beat her to it.

Mathias Køhler opened the door, and the entire apartment fell silent at that single action. Everyone was watching Mathias, whose borderline obsession with Lukas was notorious, but Elizabeta , who stood right behind him, saw that his shoulders were not tense with grief, nor were they slumped with defeat. He had an air of nothingness, but it did not feel like resignation. Elizabeta felt that strangely, it felt like resolve, but she must have been mistaken. Lukas Bondevik was dead, and no amount of resolve can bring back the dead.

The air inside the room seemed frozen, as if death marked an end to not just the body, but to all that the body touched, to the very space the body occupied. Emil knelt by the bed, his hands clasped before him as if in prayer, but his eyes were open, and he was just as frozen as the rest of the room.

Throughout their journey back to Boston, Emil had neither spoken nor wept, and it appeared that he had done neither in the time he was alone in the room either. No—Elizabeta amended—not alone. 'Alone' made it feel too real, made it feel like Lukas truly was gone.

"Get out," said Mathias, and Elizabeta startled. So did the rest of the apartment, save for the frozen room Elizabeta and Mathias stood at the doorway of.

Slowly, Emil looked up. He was wide-eyed yet expressionless, and he looked so lost.

"Get out," Mathias repeated, and Elizabeta's breath caught in her throat. How dare he—

"Everything will be alright," he added, and her rage sputtered.

Emil stood, took two steps towards the door, then stopped, just before Mathias. He looked so small beside the Viking, gazing up at him with an expression Elizabeta could not see from where she stood. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out at first. He took Mathias's hand, large and calloused against Emil's tiny, mismatched ones, opened his mouth again and said, in a voice that was a whisper and a reassurance, a plead and a prayer and a command, "No, Mathias."

He smiled, and something inside Elizabeta broke with that smile. "Not everything. But it will be alright."

And then he stepped past Mathias, past Elizabeta, out of the frozen room and didn't look back. His silhouette was small, yet unwavering, and he was a shadow of Laila, who had walked away from her past with the same unwavering determination as Emil walking away from the dead body of his brother.

Mathias did not look back either. He stepped into the frozen room, and closed the door behind him.

All was silent.

The clusters of guests in apartment number 502 exchanged furtive glances, but no one spoke, nor moved. Emil stood in the middle of it all, his back to Elizabeta, his back to that room.

No one seemed to breathe.

And then the silence was cracked—not broken, not shattered, but cracked, like an egg—by a single, soft sound.

It took Elizabeta a moment to realize that it was a sob.

And then Emil Steilsson fell to his knees, and wept.

The room was impossibly silent. Mathias knew that the doors and walls were not very thick, but it seemed as if sound was incapable of travelling through the air of this room. It made him afraid to speak, afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might shift a single particle in this pocket of utter tranquility.

But he forced himself to step forward, to kneel down beside the bed the way Emil had when Mathias opened the door, and carefully took Lukas' stiff, frozen hand.

There was something inexplicably beautiful about Lukas in death. In life he had been radiant. Not loud, not flashy, but bright, and had left an imprint so deep in his mind that nothing could make Mathias forget him. In death, he looked simply like the marble tomb of a saint. Perfectly pale, with an aureate halo.

Mathias reached up slowly and brushed his hand across Lukas' hair, fine-spun gold and softer than spider-silk. He traced those bloodless cheeks, those delicate lips tinged with blue.

He was so cold. Mathias could not stand the thought of Lukas being so cold. No, Lukas was never a warm or overly affectionate person, but he was like a glowing hearth in the middle of a snowstorm. He was home, and he was hope, and... he was dead.

It felt impossible, yet here it was. Once again, Mathias had killed the very person he wanted more than anything to save.

But Mathias was powerless no longer. He was not a flimsy worm struggling against the harsh current of death. At one point in his life, perhaps as he forgot his past, a revelation formed in his head.

It was a revelation that he forgot each time it appeared, but this time he clung to it, because this time, finally, it mattered.

"Lukas," Mathias said. Speaking felt like a violation, it felt wrong in this perfectly still room, but he clutched that cold hand harder and tried again anyway. "Lukas."

Something was leaving him. Something vital. His body whispered stop, his mind resisted. Somebody had once told him that he used his heart more than his head, but at this moment, it felt like his heart was motionless, and all that was left was his head, and all that was left in his head was a single thought:

Lukas' finger twitched, and then his hand clenched. His chest constricted suddenly as his heart began to beat, and his lungs constricted for air, his mouth opening automatically to meet his body's sudden, desperate demand. And there was a shuddering gasp, a cough as the miniature pathways through the body cleared and began to operate, and then Lukas' eyes opened.

But in real life, Lukas did not move. He remained as cold and dead as ever. The coldness seemed to be seeping into Mathias; it became harder to breathe. He clung onto Lukas' hand like it was his lifeline, even though he knew that this was what was killing him.

For a moment, he thought that he should just finish it, right away. But he paused. Just for one second. And he mustered up the last of his strength, leaned forward, and pressed his lips against Lukas' cold mouth.

"Lukas," he whispered, and closed his eyes.

Lukas' finger twitched.

All was silent.

This was a rather peculiar silence. This was a silence that was not an absence of sound, but simply an absence. Possibly it was inappropriate to call it a silence; it felt like emptiness, or perhaps nothingness, and it ached. This ache was new. In the past, nothingness was nothingness, and so it was void, too, of want. But now suddenly, it was as if an awareness had awaken, rendering the nothingness imperfectly empty— and thus, not much of a nothingness at all.

This was how it started: the void was nothing, but it wanted. Wantedto be everything.

And that, was the very first point.

Or perhaps it was a crack, or a ripple. Whatever it was, it was a sudden something in the nothingness.

This something seemed to hover momentarily and eternally, unmoving and silent yet terribly significant. But as this one second or this one millennium dragged on, it appeared that this something was not, in fact, unmoving. It was vibrating, trembling, a planet in the midst of a never-ending earthquake. And this tremor spluttered and grew and became something massive, something momentous, something that ruined the nothingness and turned it to silence.

And then—

BOOM.

Thunder. Or at least, it sounded like thunder. The mighty sound pierced through the silence, and when it clapped a second time, it shattered the silence completely.

Shattered nothing into everything.

BOOM.

And something was clawing, screaming, begging, weeping, and—

BOOM.

Craving. Craving in the sense that if it did not happen, he would die.

He?

And then the awareness that had first tainted the nothingness clicked into place with the everything that the nothingness had become, and then he realized that this was not thunder, this was heartbeat and his hands clenched and his lungs constricted and he realized that he needed air so his mouth opened and with a shuddering gasp that was like the fractured flash of a moon shattering against a sky full of stars—

Lukas woke.

Lukas Bondevik woke up, and he realized that he was alive.

He was dead.

And now he was alive.

He remembered sitting on the bed in that locked room, looking up in alarm as a hidden device in the corners suddenly whirred and began to spew out white mist. He remembered choking, suffocating, a terrible pain in his chest as he breathed in poison, not air, accompanied by the awful realization that he was going to die before he woke up.

As if it had all been a dream.

It was not a dream.

It took a long moment for him to adjust to being alive again. Slowly, his heartbeat faded into the constant, background noises of life, and his lungs learned to breathe without him having to tell it to draw in every breath, and his eyes adjusted and his spine and his brain connected and his senses opened.

He was cold.

He was lying on a bed, in a room, but it was not the room he had died in.

He was cold.

There was something in his hand.

He smelled dust and clean sheets, felt smooth softness below him.

It felt like a hand.

A cold hand.

He was cold.

And with significant effort, Lukas turned his head, feeling his bones shift and pop into place and he saw him.

Mathias.

He knelt by the bed in a curious position, one icy hand in Lukas', his head resting in the crook of his elbow of his other arm. His eyes were closed, but he did not look asleep.

He squeezed the hand. It was unresponsive.

Lukas managed to open his mouth, his lips cracking, his tongue no more than a slab of meat filling his mouth, but he heard his own voice struggle through the condemning silence of the room.

"Mathias?"

Mathias did not react. He must not have heard.

So Lukas tugged on his hand, trying again. "Mathias!"

It felt and sounded like a shout in his own ears. In reality, it was less than a whisper.

And so there was nothing.

Lukas shifted. He moved with difficulty, his joints stiff, his muscles slowly loosening up as his veins and arteries unclogged and blood flowed to the corners of his body. His spine was overloaded with commands from his brain, which felt on the verge of panic. He wasn't sure what he was trying to do. Sit up? Turn over onto his side?

His legs kicked feebly, the sheets rumpling beneath him. With a groan, he shifted his weight upwards, managing his lift his head and rest it against the headboard so that he had a fuller view of the room.

There was the bed. There was a narrow window on the wall across. A wardrobe right of the window and a desk left of it. A gray carpet covered the ground beside the bed, and atop the carpet knelt Mathias.

Lukas was alone.

It was a sudden and shocking realization, and while a small part of him shouted, False!, the rest of him knew that it was true.

"Mathias," he whispered, squeezing that cold hand. "Please."

He did not understand why he was begging. He did not know what he was begging for. He did not understand why there was wetness on his cheeks or salt on his tongue. All he knew was that he was terrified.

Terrified of being dead. Terrified of being alive. Terrified of being alone.

'Mathias,' he wanted to plead, 'don't leave me.'

'Don't leave me alone.'

But he just kicked at the sheets and managed to shift into a position resembling sitting, his hand extended awkwardly to cling onto Mathias's. This movement left him breathless, along with the silent sobs that constricted his throat, and finally he released Mathias's hand, letting it fall onto the messy sheets. His hand drifted tremblingly to the other boy's shoulder, nudging it hesitantly. When there was still no reaction, desperation flooded over Lukas, suffocated him, and the surge of responding adrenaline gave him just enough strength to push Mathias harder.

Hard enough?

Too hard.

So hard that Mathias toppled over, and shattered into a thousand pieces.

Lukas stared, aghast.

People did not break apart when they fall like they were made of brittle stone.

He grabbed the edge of the bed, pulling himself forward and reaching for Mathias—the pieces of Mathias.

Lukas leaned over, and threw up onto the carpet.

All his strength seemed to have been expelled from him along with the contents of his stomach, and he sagged at the edge of the bed, awkwardly bent, acid in his mouth and sourness rising around him as a putrid cloud. His arm dangled over the side, just close enough to touch what looked like a knee.

Mathias's knee.

Suppressing another urge to hurl, his fingertips brushed the cloth-covered part and watched with horror as it disintegrated into dust.

Nothing but dust and ashes.

He was alone.

And that was when Lukas opened his mouth—

And the world ended in the span of a single scream.

Except 'scream' did not feel like the right word; it was too piercing. But then 'shout' was too loud. And 'cry' was too weak.

It was a sound that shattered everything in a silent, barely-noticeable kind of way. It was the sound that embodied the feeling that something had changed but you didn't know what.

To the occupants of apartment room number 502, this sound that broke through the closed door of the frozen room marked the beginning of the end.

To the occupant of the guest room of the apartment room number 502, it marked the end.

And Elizabeta Héderváry heard this sound, this sound that wrenched at her heart and stole the breath from her lungs, and she threw the door open and found—

She didn't know what she found.

It looked like chaos, it felt like destruction, but it was quiet, and subtle, and completely and utterly wrong.

It looked like a dead boy reaching for what appeared to be the shattered remains of a stone statue, and everything he touched disintegrated into dust, as if death leaked from his fingertips.

And then it occurred to her that the dead boy was living, and breathing, living boy who had walked into this room an hour before was crumbling into white dust onto the gray carpet and she could smell the horror, palpable before her, the incredulity gathering behind her.

"Lukas?" Emil pushed past Elizabeta, staring at his brother with wide eyes. His shoulders were shaking with inexplicable emotion. "Lukas!"

But Lukas seemed to be in too much shock to hear. He seemed torn between wanting to touch the broken pieces strewn across the floor and not wanting to let them disintegrate.

He was sobbing, and Elizabeta became aware of the pungent scent of vomit. Whatever had happened in here, whatever had killed one boy and brought another back to life, it was not pretty.

And they were just boys. Almost men, but not quite. Mathias's mind had been too blank for him to have grown past the age of sixteen. Lukas had been forced to grow up so quickly that certain parts of him would never catch up, and might have stayed a child forever if he had not died.

And returned.

That was what pushed her into the room. Not the small crowd gathering at the doorway, the wonder and curiosity and shock, not the murmured mantra of his brother's name on Emil's lips, not even the realization that Mathias Køhler, the Viking, was dead, truly dead.

Because death takes something away from you every time you come in contact with it, and she was so afraid that all was left of Laila's firstborn, the toddler who had sat on the woman's hip, sucking his thumb and watching everything with bright, wondering eyes—of Lukas, was a hollow shell of shadows and dust.

She grabbed hold of his shoulders, pushing him back from the edge of the bed, gently yet firmly pressing down his hands that were still struggling and clawing feebly at the remains on the ground, ignoring the acrid odour of sickness and the musky undertone of death as she clutched him close, pressing his face against her shoulder, urging him to calm down in tremulous whispers.

This must be what a mother feels like, she thought, feeling the ring on her finger, the tightness in her chest, the reassuring gaze of Roderich on her back. This was what had made Laila turn her back on the organization she had grown up in, even if there was the risk of her getting killed.

Lukas struggled against her, trying to twist out of her grip, but he was too weak and too distraught. She didn't know how long she held him, but slowly, he stopped trying to push her away; slowly, his shaking subsided into a faint tremor; slowly, he began to breathe properly again.

Elizabeta let him go a little reluctantly. Heartless, murderous bitch she may be, she was fond of children—it was why she had worked as a teacher both in the Underworld and the real world.

The Lukas she released was like a little animal slowly waking up. His eyes were unfocused, his expression slack and a little confused. He leaned against the headboard of the bed, curling slightly into himself as if trying to retain some warmth.

She knew that he was still in shock, still grieving, just moved onto another stage, but a silent Lukas was more acceptable than a sobbing one, and so she backed off to let Emil crawl onto the bed, settling next to his brother.

Elizabeta ushered everyone else away from the entrance, leaving the door partway shut to give the brothers a vague sense of privacy while not cutting them off from the rest. They all settled back into their positions in the living room, some on the couches, some lingering near the kitchen, some pacing from one end to the other.

Elizabeta took a seat at the dining table. Roderich came up behind her, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. It shamed her slightly, to have him here with her, at this moment. Not because it made her feel weak, but because these deaths, these horrors and violence, they were a side of her life that she had never wanted him to see. But she knew that Roderich had always been aware of this darker side, and realistically speaking, if they were going to get married, she would not be able to hide it from him forever.

"Well," said Gilbert, with a heaving sigh, "that was that."

Antonio made a sound that might have been a chuckle but was too hushed and choked to be much more than a warped sigh, and that was that.

That was how everyone simply accepted the truth: that somehow, someone who was dead came back to life, and that somehow, Mathias Køhler was gone. And if anyone had any questions about this mysterious happening, the questions were never asked, and they never would be.

Hours later, the living room was a little emptier, but still quiet, still tense, still uneasy.

Lovino Vargas had lasted just under an hour, fingers tapping an irregular beat on the coffee table before he stood abruptly.

"You know what," he had said, hands on hips and face twisted into a noncommittal scowl, "Fuck this."

And then he had stormed out, trailed by a baffled Feliciano who genuinely thought his brother was angry, and not just trying to distract himself. Kiku and Ludwig exchanged glances when Feliciano left, and with a heavy sigh that was exasperated but did not cover his concern, Ludwig followed the Italian brothers out.

Francis vanished after a vague murmur about "getting some coffee". Alfred and Matthew gave the excuse of "things to deliver and planes to fly", the former in a tone of forced cheer before leaving, probably eager to get out of Boston altogether. Emma asked Lilli if she would like to visit a nearby flower shop, and Vash, still occasionally eyeing Elizabeta darkly and reluctant to leave his sister's side after years of separation, accompanied the two girls out.

Even after all that, the room felt too crowded. Suffocating. Roderich sat across from Elizabeta now, holding her calloused hands in his elegant ones, stroking her knuckles softly. She wanted to go home. Roderich probably did, too, after being kidnapped by the people who were now her allies, but she couldn't bring herself to leave. Something kept her here; she just did not know what it was yet.

When the bedroom door cracked open, more than one person was startled to his or her feet, Elizabeta being one of them. She stood as Lukas appeared at the doorway, his younger brother hovering anxiously at his elbow, and everyone watched him the way devout believers might watch a living saint: transfixed, breathless, anticipating, waiting for something—anything—to happen.

But when he spoke, all he said was her name.

"Miss Héderváry," he said.

Elizabeta blinked. She felt glances flicker her way. Her head cocked slightly to one side, sensing the arrival of something significant.

"I want to ask you a favour."

She smiled.

And that was how the Underworld began to fall.

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