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When her skull cracked open on the pavement, she expected to die, for everything to go black and just stop . She’s well aware that she should be dead, she should’ve died when the angel tore the halo out through her chest.
She should be in pain. There is a gaping hole in her chest where the broken ends of her ribs reach for the sky from which she fell, embracing a god Beatrice once thought merciful.
Beatrice once thought herself merciful, now her physical form is as close as it will ever be to what she actually is, heartless— it had been torn out with the halo of the only person she’d ever loved.
Beatrice dreads that not all of this gore on the ground is the remains of people who thought themselves gods, but also that of the only god she would worship after everything.
She wonders if any of the blood and guts and muscle and sinew running in the rainy streets of London are from Ava, or if she’s already been washed down the gutter.
Beatrice’s eyes are on the heavens, the hole torn from one reality to the next shines a spotlight on the place where she lay dying. Gauzy beams of silver light cascading down to the material plane, turning the blood black and Beatrice’s pallid skin white like the plate she ate off, sitting across the table from Reya.
Her own body blocks out the heavenly light above her. Beatrice’s physical form is being held bridal style by someone in a thick, black rubber hazmat suit. Even through the pounding onslaught of rain, Beatrice can hear the hissing of the respirator, see the puff of steam that cascades past their shoulders as they carry her dead body away to be zipped up in one of the hundreds of body bags scattered across the street.