TROUBLE , kaz brekker

vii. i have better things to do than sit around and watch you die.

CHAPTER SEVEN

DEATH SMELT LIKE GUNPOWDER and sandalwood. Now, Echo hadn't been expecting much but she had always idealised the prospect that whatever came beyond the veil of the living would have some kind of floral undertone. Maybe lavender?

She also imagined death would be pleasant, if not a little boring. And as this was neither, Echo came to the uplifting conclusion that she was not dead. Whilst her rudimentary logic gave some rudimentary comfort, it didn't explain what was actually happening as she slowly rocked side to side in a pitch-black world. Echo attempted to open her eyes, to try and figure out exactly where she'd ended up post-jumping-out-a-window but it felt like someone had stapled her eyes shut and then sat on them for good measure.

"Is she dead?" A voice sounded - muffled by the restraining factor of having one functioning ear to hear out of.

"Little ray of sunshine today, aren't you?" But then there was a heavy, uncertain pause. "No, she's definitely breathing."

Then she was moving. Moving? Maybe she'd been kidnapped. Now, there was a silver lining. She could finally settle Kaz and Jesper's long-standing bet on how long it would take anyone stupid enough to kidnap Echo Caddel to send her back. Jesper said an hour. Kaz said thirty minutes if she was gagged. Twenty, if she could talk.

Of course, this was to say nothing about the insurmountable pain in her right arm that seemed to pulsate outward across her entire body in raging, white hot waves. It was better to be kidnapped with four functioning limbs but, Echo digressed, kidnapped was better than dead.

Stop it, she thought angrily, panicking will get you nowhere. First, Echo would conquer the mammoth task of opening her damn eyes, then maybe she could think about anything else.

The hands beneath her shifted their weight. It was a tiny motion, almost hesitant, but it still sent shards of sharp pain emanating from the wound in her upper arm, sudden enough to choke an audible gasp from her lips, painful enough to fling her heavy eyes wide open.

A familiar face stared down. "Evening, Red."

"Jesper." Echo breathed out a sigh of relief. His face had never been a more welcomed sight - worried as it looked in the soft candlelight.

They were...somewhere. Black Veil, her mind chastised. The haunted plague cemetery. Full of the finest marble pillars and gravestones for her to recline on to her heart's content. As Jesper placed her upright against the wall of the vault they now called Home, the ground below her hands was hard, rough, the kind of jagged stone that left indents in her palms. The unmistakable sea-salt scent of Ketterdam lingered in the air. The familiarity of it all was reassuring. The morbidity of it was not.

The Sharpshooter crouched at her side, inspecting the ragged up, down motions of her chest and the heavy bloodstain on the sleeve of her shirt. He tried to smile but it looked more like a grimace, which did very little for Echo's already-diminishing morale.

"Welcome back to the land of the living. We thought we'd lost you for a minute there." Jesper glanced behind him, where a disheveled demolitions expert was inspecting a frayed hole in his sweater. "Wylan was just about to donate your body to science."

Wylan looked up and frowned. "That is a lie."

"I thought you were Rollins' men," The panic gave way to relief, and then to pain. The adrenaline that had powered her through Van Poel's window had worked it's way out of her system and now all Echo was left with was an uncharacteristic gratefulness for her life and a characteristic agony. Echo could barely choke out the words as she buried her head in her hands, "you have no idea-"