Read Online Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) by Daryl Banner - Free Book Online

it.
    Finally, there is a network of streets in the center of the Necropolis which holds a large array of four-story apartment buildings where most of the Undead live. The Housing Manager tells me it’s called the Neighborhood, clearly someone’s bad joke. The buildings have covered walkway accesses connecting one another on multiple floors, and each holds an average of twenty to thirty apartments per floor. Building 2A, apartment 412—that is, the twelfth apartment on the fourth floor—has been assigned to me.
    When the Housing Manager shows me inside, I find a clean, empty room painted grey, flat and featureless carpet, also grey, and two windows at the far end. A beige couch sits on one end of the room opposite a kitchenette and dining area. A door near the stove leads into a bedroom where two more windows let in more sunlight I cannot see. A bathroom that I will never use is attached to the bedroom, stocked with a toothbrush, hairspray, and nail clippers. I stifle a laugh, putting a hand to my mouth, and when the Housing Manager asks me what’s funny, I tell him, “Nothing. Nothing’s funny at all about this.” I start to laugh again, so I bite a fist to suppress the untimely urge.
    When the Housing Manager leaves, the laughter dies. I peer out a window, feeling strangely tired, and watch as a couple of lovebirds stroll down the street arm in arm.
    “John,” I murmur, remembering.
    Haven’t been in my apartment more than a minute, I’m already out the door. I hurry down the steps, break into the street, then weave through a dizzying set of streets before arriving at a familiar courtyard. When I cross it, I realize with a sick stab to the gut that it’s the same stretch of cement where I once encountered the metal-legged Warlock dwarf. I’d had a band of Humans with me at the time and we were just footsteps away from a way out, but the Warlock stopped us, and too soon a companion of his joined: Grimsky himself. I realize I’m standing in the same place I was when Grim pulled out a sword and betrayed his own kind, stabbing the Warlock instead of me. He’d paid a price to save me that day. He’d paid many prices, Grimsky had …
    The surge of emotions burns in my chest. Grimsky was also the one who set the tree-structure on fire from which John fell to his doom. Grimsky, the man who found me, who betrayed me, then betrayed his own kind, then took away the Human man I’d loved. How could I ever know where Grimsky’s true loyalty lies? He’s betrayed so many people and principles and beliefs, I wonder if there’s a real person in him at all.
    But just before he abandoned me that day long ago in Garden, just before he left me to helplessly embrace my dying John, I saw the flash of awareness in his horrible green eye. Was it his Waking Dream that I witnessed? Did he, in that moment of surprise, experience his long-awaited and assumed-never-to-occur Waking Dream? He’d kept saying that the Deathless sacrificed their Waking Dreams, but I was never convinced …
    I think Grimsky learned who the true Grimsky was that day. There’s no other way to explain his behavior.
    When I find the hospital, I’m certain a hundred hours have passed. The Necropolis is not an easy place to navigate; I learned that when I was once its prisoner. Pushing through the glass doors, I arrive at the counter to find a button-nose lady with curly blue hair staring at me expectantly. “I’m looking for John,” I tell her, uncertain. “He’s, um … He’s supposed to be receiving Upkeep. He was a recent Raise.”
    “Yes, he’s been released,” responds the lady.
    I gape at her. “Released? To whom? He’s a new Raise, he can’t just be released!!” I’m screaming at the lady, her eyes wide with surprise and stammering for a response.
    “Winter?”
    I turn to the new voice. A sweet-faced woman dressed in a blue uniform with a giant scorpion-shaped broach at her neck stands there, a clipboard hanging from her hand. She looks