Chapter 8
Sephtis
“What the fuck are you doing, Sephtis?” Wren’s voice came to me from a distance—I was trapped underwater, crushed by the weight of the ocean pressing me into the sand and stone.
Cole was still in my arms. I didn’t have to be a Reaper to understand this was more than him drowning, more than a wreck.
He was cut open, and my hands pressing against his chest were doing nothing to keep the blood from spilling out of him in rivulets of red that were pooling on the dirty ground.
Worse, the creature in front of me snarled, and I didn’t even have the strength to stand and fight it. I could have pulled a blade, I could have done something…
But that would mean letting Cole go, and I knew the instant I took my hand from his chest, the life would completely slip from him.
He was dying.
He was dying, and I didn’t want to be in this place to see it. I couldn’t.
I couldn’t lose him. The frantic feel of the Ardor racing through my veins was agony, a thousand cuts ripping me open from the inside out. It tore me to tiny shreds, and I didn’t even have the blood to follow Cole to the grave.
“Please…” I whispered, carefully lowering him to the ground and putting my body between him and the Enmity behind us. “Please, just… wait.”
I couldn’t do anything right now—not until I was sure the creature was dead. I wasn’t sure I could do anything at all… but I had to try.
Behind me, I heard Wren let out a low grunt as he drew an arrow—my eyes were more focused on the man beside him.
It took me a second to recognize him as the one who I’d seen the cupid holding in the alley, the one who’d almost taken Wren straight to the grave with him.
I’d seen death hovering over them both that night, wrapped and twined around them and telling me if one went, the other would follow.
But if one was strong enough… things were different when a human was tied to a supernatural being.
The thought sparked in my chest, even as my eyes roamed over the body of the new man. He stood tall and proud, and his fingers were tipped with dark claws that he used to dig into the chest of the Enmity so he could twist it around to face away from him.
It was a newly changed creature, barely capable of forming coherent thought, let alone fighting Wren and his soulmate.
The thread shining between them burned so brightly it was nearly blinding, and Wren didn’t hesitate to draw his bow and shoot an arrow straight into the creature’s chest.
When it roared, the man holding it slid his fingers up, grasping the beast by the lower jaw, using his other hand to clutch the top of its head.
With a loud, sickening crack, he ripped half the Enmity’s head off and unceremoniously dropped it to the ground. It hadn’t even landed before he turned toward me, his stance still defensive.
“Who the fuck is that, Wren?”
“Don’t worry about it, Theo. He’s a friend.”
Theo.
I’d never heard Wren say his name before. Under any other circumstance, I would have asked him exactly how things had happened… because I was certain that the man standing beside Wren, the man reaching out to take his hand, was an Enmity.
I didn’t have the leisure for questions, though. On the ground beside me, Cole was dying.
It wasn’t something I could fix with a small burst of Vitality this time, though I was full of it from the soul I’d taken just before I’d found him on the bridge.
I could barely feel him there, other than the way his soul called to me.
Now, in these moments when he didn’t have the strength for defense… it was reaching out to me.
But I wanted it to stay.
I turned to Wren, my eyes flickering to the red thread trailing between him and his Enmity. A man who’d been dying.
Someone who shouldn’t be here at all.
His soulmate.
“Wren…” I couldn’t believe I was asking him this again. “Pull an arrow.”
Wren moved without question, and it was the man beside him that caught his arm. “What are you doing?”
Wren’s eyes drifted to Theo’s chest. I knew what he was thinking about, even if the man beside him didn’t.
“Returning a favor,” he said softly, but he didn’t shake Theo’s hand away when he reached behind his shoulder to pull an arrow.
It was the same crimson color I’d seen in the hospital, the same bright light that I’d wanted so desperately for Caiden, even though it had never been him I was there for. I wondered if it was the same one he’d pulled then, if it had been waiting for me to ask this whole time.
“Are you sure about this, Sephtis?” His eyes dropped to my chest. “We’ve already proven once that a cupid’s arrow isn’t really meant for a Reaper.”
I didn’t hesitate. “I’m sure. It’s the only way I can think to keep him.” I’d have to worry about asking Cole’s forgiveness after.
“Reaper?” Theo echoed the word, but Wren didn’t ask me again. A low gasp tore from me when he let the arrow fly—it pierced my chest in the same place the other had, but this one passed through me.
Straight into the dying man on the ground.
I turned, glancing between us… but the red thread was black.
Nothing.
And Cole wasn’t breathing.
“No.” The word felt like agony ripping from me. I could feel the connection—could feel where his heart was supposed to be beating—but I couldn’t feel him.
“The thread…” Theo’s voice was a soft whisper.
“Sephtis, I’m sorry. It’s…” Wren trailed off when my body fell forward.
There was weight tugging me down from the center of my chest, from the thread that connected me to the dead body beneath me.
For a moment I saw his soul rise up. For just a second, his eyes were clear when they looked at me…
curious. Surprised, like he was seeing me for the first time.
“Sephtis?”
I hadn’t even called his soul, but it was coming to me.
I didn’t want it. I didn’t want him dead.
Another sensation streaked through my chest, white hot and impossible, because I knew what it was.
“Vitality.” I gasped the word as Wren’s hand lit on my shoulder… and the soul hovering in front of me lingered, looking me over, then spilled back into Cole’s body. The little taste I’d given him before was enough to have me tortured slowly for the rest of eternity… but this…
The very essence of life that I’d collected earlier poured from somewhere in the center of my body, straight into Cole’s heart, flooding down the thread between us.
I felt it when it started to beat again.
It tore a shuddering gasp from my chest, because that heartbeat was an echo in my head so loud it was deafening.
But that meant it had worked. Cole was alive, even though he shouldn’t have been. Vitality didn’t have the power to heal like this, or to bring people back from the dead.
But…
With the connection forged between our souls, he had a direct line of it pumping into his body. I hadn’t known if it would be enough… but that red line between us blossomed back to crimson, perfect and almost blinding. A near sob caught in the back of my throat at the sight.
He wasn’t dead.
I hadn’t had to take both him and his brother. He was still here. My hand came out, fingertips shaking, and I smoothed them along his chest. There should have been wounds there, but the skin beneath was a little too smooth—like scars.
“What did you just do, Sephtis?” Wren’s voice was hushed behind me, and I slid my palm through the blood on Cole’s chest so I could feel the rise and fall of his breathing, the steady beat of his heart.
Proof that he was living, so I could finally tear my gaze away from him to look at the men beside me.
“I don’t know.” It was the only truth I could admit, but it was honest. I had no idea what I’d done.
I’d just hoped it would work. Seeing the connection between Wren and his Enmity, knowing that the red thread of Fate between them had been the only thing that had really kept Theo alive when I’d carefully constructed a seal made of little threads of Vitality…
I’d hoped.
But I’d never thought that thread would be a siphon.
“I have a feeling that whatever it was, you weren’t supposed to do…” Theo gestured carefully between my chest and Cole on the ground, then wiggled his fingers like he wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to say. “That.”
“I wasn’t supposed to save you either,” I deadpanned, and his eyes went wide. “I guess I’m just a rebel.”
Wren’s lips parted in shock. We’d interacted since he’d shot me with the Ardor, so he knew I’d developed something of a sarcastic personality…
but the relief I felt was making it even worse.
I didn’t know what I would have done if this hadn’t worked…
if Cole’s soul had stayed there, staring at me and waiting for me to ferry him to the afterlife.
I could have waited, I suppose. He would have been reborn again eventually, though it would have been a lifetime of agony, of not knowing.
It would have been impossible to ask Death about that soul specifically.
Would I have recognized him, faceless and floating in the Lake while waiting for his turn to be reborn?
It didn’t matter. I didn’t have to think about that, because I could feel his heartbeat echoing in my chest. Cole was here, and I’d broken every rule that existed to make sure I could keep him.
“I know you told me you had help when you first shot me, but you didn’t tell me it was from an asshole. Don’t you have any nice friends, Wren?” And then, with a smirk, he added, “Other than me.”
Wren leaned in, pressing his fingers to the center of Theo’s chest. “You aren’t nice either.
” His expression when he said it was so soft, so full of love.
It was an emotion I’d never seen play across his face before, though I’d noticed the beginnings of it when I’d found him in the alley holding Theo that night he’d called in his favor.
When he turned to me, that look faded into something closer to concern. “Are you in trouble here, Sephtis?”
I could have lied to him, but what was the point? “There’s every chance I’ll learn soon enough if a Reaper can be unmade.”
Wren glanced between my chest and Cole’s, and his next question came even softer. “It’s worth it, though, isn’t it?”
And as much as I wanted to say no, breaking the rules wasn’t worth it, putting myself in a position I was fairly certain no other Reaper had been in wasn’t worth it…
I could still feel Cole’s heart beating, strong and alive beneath my palm, echoing a new rhythm in my chest, and I knew the answer.
“Yes… yes, it was.”