Chapter 23
A
Levi gasped awake on the bed at the same time Asher did, both of them resetting at the exact same moment. Levi’s head turned to confirm it: Asher was there, flat on his back, eyes wide, his hand at his own throat.
You came back with me.
I don’t care.
He sat up and Asher’s hand shot out to his wrist. “Don’t.”
“Help me leave the game,” Levi demanded.
Asher’s eyes widened. “There is no game.”
Something in Levi broke. Everything he loved about Asher — the careful hands when he was trying to be careful, the unadulterated delight that lived on his face when Levi willingly showed him affection, the feeling Levi got when Asher was near and made him feel, for better or worse, truly seen—burned to ash.
The frustration that had been running him since Asher killed the NPCs on the Daedalus had never quite vanished, and suddenly it felt like the only thing that was holding him together.
He spit in Asher’s face.
The surprise opened a half-second and Levi took it — his teeth sank into Asher’s wrist, the skin splitting under the bite, and blood rushed into his mouth that tasted like Asher and iron. Asher let out a strange sound, startled and hurt, and Levi was already moving.
Off the bed. Over the carpet. The large window was right there.
“LEVI —”
Asher’s hand caught the back of his shirt and Levi did not stop. The fabric tore at the collar, came away in Asher’s fist, and Levi kept going, because the window was going to break or he was going to break, and he already decided which.
He hit it with his shoulder.
The glass went.
One knee buckled as he tumbled over the sill, his palms slipping in glass and wet grass as he landed. He felt cold air press inside the gash on his face, blood spilling down his neck, and his shoulder was screaming. It didn’t matter.
He got to his feet and ran deeper into the fog.
Behind him, he heard the sound of the glass breaking further, and Asher’s voice coming from the fog behind him. “LEVI — STOP —”
“NO!”
It was a no to the room, no to the knife, no to Asher’s hands, no to everything that didn’t involve leaving the game.
The shadows reached for him as he ran, small cold hands brushing his face, legs, and arms, but he didn’t stop. Asher’s voice was somewhere behind him, close and then far as the fog stripped the distance from sound until direction was a lie. It didn’t matter. Levi kept running.
I love you and I’m sorry and I can’t stop.
The tears were coming now and he did not know when they’d started. The blood from his face was mixing with them on his jaw, his knee was folding on every third step and he kept going, because stopping was the thing Asher wanted and he was not going to give Asher that.
The fog in front of him thickened and swirled, taking shape.
The massive creature turned towards him, its cloak and hair parting the fog, and this time it did not hold a staff.
It held a scythe. It cocked its head, grasped the scythe with both hands, bending at the knees with a sound like trees being felled, and slammed the bottom of the scythe into the ground so hard Levi stumbled from the reverberations in the grass.
Levi did not change his course. He kept going.
His hands came up instinctively at first, but he forced them to drop and threw himself against the tip of the blade.
He grabbed the handle and leaned forward as the blade punched into his chest and things inside him cracked.
He kept going as pain exploded from his spine, the tip of the scythe breaking through the skin of his back from inside his body.
Levi couldn’t feel his legs, but they kept moving until his chest met the Shepherd’s hands on the shaft.
For a half-second he was face-to-face with it and it looked into him with its empty eye sockets, gave a single nod, then let go.
Its shape left the fog and the scythe was in Levi’s hands alone, buried in the earth, his legs holding him up because his legs hadn’t figured out that they were done yet.
The grey was getting greyer.
He died standing.