Chapter 19
Greg stood outside Dustin's motel room for eleven minutes before he knocked.
It wasn't that he was anxious or anything.
He just needed to go in with a plan.
That was all.
He needed to be prepared before he faced Dustin again.
After everything Morrith had told him… After his last encounter with Dustin… their ice cream parlor 'date.'
Come find me after, Dustin had said.
The memory sent a shiver down Greg's spine. He couldn't help it.
But that wasn't why he was here. He needed to remember that. He was here because this was his assignment and he needed to investigate Dustin's history.
There was no reason for his heart to be doing strange acrobatic maneuvers in his chest.
At the very least he wasn't vibrating.
Greg took a deep breath, raised his hand, and knocked.
The door swung open almost immediately, as if Dustin had been waiting.
He was wearing a faded t-shirt and sweatpants, his hair ruffled and slightly damp. He'd put his piercings back in because of course he had, and yet… He looked soft in a way Greg hadn't seen before, and Greg's stomach did a painful little flip that he aggressively ignored.
“There you are.” Dustin smiled at him and stepped aside to let Greg in.
Greg looked around the motel room, though there was nothing special about it. Nothing aside from Dustin's gear spread across the desk: harnesses, carabiners, something that looked like a fabric wing folded into a surprisingly small package.
Dustin followed his gaze. “Are you thinking about messing with my stuff again?”
“No,” Greg said, his voice coming out strange. “I wouldn't do that again.”
“You'd better not. That would make this thing between us very awkward.”
This thing between us.
Greg didn't know how to process those words, so he stood awkwardly in the middle of the room and said nothing.
He'd come here for a reason, hadn't he? What was the reason again?
Dustin reminded him.
“So,” he said, dropping onto the edge of the bed, legs spread, leaning back on his hands. “How much trouble are you in?”
Greg licked his lips. “A moderate amount.”
“On a scale of one to ten?”
“Seven. Possibly eight.”
“Damn.” Dustin didn't sound particularly sorry. “What'd they say?”
They told me to dig into your past. They told me to find the flaw. They told me you should already be dead and something is preventing it and I need to figure out what.
“They want me to understand why you won't die,” Greg said carefully. “So I can restore the natural order.”
Something flickered across Dustin's face. “And how do you plan to do that?”
“I need to ask you some questions. About your history.” Greg pulled out his clipboard and tried to look official. “I need to know about anything unusual that might have happened.”
Dustin's eyebrows rose. “Are you seriously going to interrogate me right now?”
“It's not an interrogation. It's an investigation.”
“With a clipboard.”
“The clipboard is company issue standard equipment.”
“You want to sit down for this investigation?” Dustin patted the bed beside him. “Plenty of room.”
“I'll stand.”
“Suit yourself.” Dustin's grin sharpened. “What do you want to know?”
Greg looked down at his clipboard. He'd prepared questions during his eleven minutes of standing in the parking lot.
“When did you start jumping?”
Dustin's expression flickered—something vulnerable passing through before he could hide it. Greg remembered the last time he'd asked about this topic. Dustin had moved on to distract him with the fries.
Greg couldn't let himself get distracted this time.
“Why does it matter?” Dustin asked.
“I'm trying to establish a timeline of significant events.”
“God, you really are going full detective, aren't you?” Dustin ran a hand through his damp hair. The motion lifted his shirt, exposing a strip of stomach. Greg looked at his clipboard very intensely.
“It's relevant to the investigation.”
“Fine.” Dustin blew out a breath. “I was sixteen. Tyler and I found this cliff behind our high school. We convinced ourselves we wanted to jump it. We spent weeks planning how we'd do it.”
“Without training?”
“Without anything. We were sixteen and stupid and convinced we were immortal.” Dustin's mouth twisted.
“We had it all figured out. We were going to be legends. Well, until Mom overheard us planning.” Dustin laughed.
“The look on her face.” He shook his head.
“She sat us down and I thought, this is it.
She's going to lock us in our rooms and throw away the keys.”
“She didn't?”
“Nope. She enrolled us in skydiving lessons.”
Greg blinked. “She... what?”
“She made sure we were as educated as we could be. Ground school, tandem jumps, solo certification. Everything.” Dustin shrugged, but his eyes were distant. “She said she knew she couldn't stop us. So she'd make sure we didn't kill ourselves doing it wrong.”
That was... not what Greg had expected. He wrote nothing on his clipboard. His pen hovered uselessly over the paper.
“That's an unusual parenting approach,” he managed.
“That's Mom.” Dustin's voice was strange—fond and frustrated at the same time. “At some point she gave up trying to stop us from doing dangerous shit and just made sure we knew what we were doing.”
“So that's how you got so good,” Greg heard himself say.
“Yeah.” Dustin's expression softened. “We got really good. But skydiving wasn't enough.” He paused. “I want to show you something.”
Before Greg could say anything, Dustin was pulling his shirt over his head and tossing it aside like it was nothing, showing off a truly unreasonable amount of bare skin.
Bare skin and tattoos.
That was distracting.
That was very distracting.
Focus, Greg told himself. You're here to investigate.
But Greg's eyes weren't cooperating with the investigation. They were too busy cataloging the planes of Dustin's chest. The definition of his shoulders. The scattered ink across his skin—so much ink, chaotic and beautiful, different styles and sizes, collected like souvenirs.
There was a swallow on his shoulder, wind and cloud lines wrapping around one forearm, a snake on his upper arm, a dagger with a rose…
“Greg.”
Greg's eyes snapped up. Dustin was watching him with undisguised amusement.
He pointed to a small tattoo that sat on his ribs, over his heart. “These are the coordinates of our first BASE jump.”
“Oh.” That was meaningful, wasn't it?
Greg wondered if the other tattoos had meaning too.
There were so many of them.
“What about that one?” Greg asked, pointing at a set of intersecting triangles.
Dustin glanced down at his forearm. “I got this in Peru.
There's this shaman outside Cusco who does traditional geometric patterns.
Each shape represents a different element of the soul's journey. The upward triangles are aspiration, the downward ones are grounding, and where they intersect...” He looked up at Greg. “That's where transformation happens.”
Greg blinked. “That's... wow. That seems deep.”
“It's complete bullshit.” Dustin grinned. “I got it at a flash sale in Denver because I had a two-hour wait for my car to get inspected and the shop was next door.”
“Oh.” Greg's brows furrowed. “Why did you lie about it?”
Dustin shrugged. “Last week I told someone it was a map to my ex's grave. One time I convinced a guy it was a gang tattoo and watched him get very nervous very fast.”
“But why?”
“Because it's funny.”
Greg shook his head. “You like to distract people.”
Dustin's expression flickered. “Yeah, maybe,” he admitted after a beat. “Probably.” He grabbed his shirt from the bed but didn't put it back on, just held it loosely in one hand. “Anything else you need to examine?”
“You can put your shirt back on.”
“You sure? I've got more tattoos. Some of them are in more interesting places.”
“You're trying to distract me again.”
“And you don't want to be distracted?”
“I want to do my job,” Greg made himself say. Because Dustin was already dead. A pending file. An attachment that shouldn't be formed.
Because Dustin was smiling and Greg wanted to take a picture and freeze the moment in time, and that was not how a reaper should behave.
“Have it your way.” Dustin pulled his shirt back on. Something in Greg's chest loosened and tightened at the same time.
Then Dustin's phone buzzed.
He grabbed for it, still smiling, and his eyebrows rose as he read the screen.
“Huh,” he said.
“What?”
“Email from Apex Energy.” Dustin was scrolling, a strange satisfaction spreading across his face. “They accepted. I didn't think they would, the little cowards.”
“Accepted what?”
“I told them I'd do Devil's Needle if they let me out of the duck merchandise clause.” He looked up, his grin sharp and reckless and alive. “They said yes.”
Greg frowned. “What is Devil's Needle?”
“It's a wing-suit flight through a canyon formation in Utah. It's a pretty tight maneuver.” Dustin's eyes were bright. “It's only been completed successfully twice.”
Greg's stomach dropped. “And unsuccessfully?”
“Just as many times.” Dustin shrugged. “Both guys clipped the wall.”
“They died?”
“They very much died.”
Greg didn't think, he just spoke. “You can't do that.”
Dustin looked amused. “Pretty sure I can. I just agreed to it.”
“It's a fifty percent fatality rate!”
“Look at you, doing math.”
“This isn't funny.” Greg's voice came out sharper than he intended. “You're telling me you just committed to something that has killed half of everyone who attempted it, and you're treating it like—like—”
“Like it doesn't matter?” Dustin rose from the bed, and suddenly they were very close. “Because it doesn't. Not to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don't die, sunshine.” Dustin spread his arms. “You've seen it. The duck, the parachute, the eight-hundred-foot fall. Something keeps me alive whether I want it to or not.”
“That might not last forever,” Greg said quietly.
“Then I guess I'd better do the fun stuff while I can.”
The words cut Greg between the ribs.
“When's the jump?” he asked.
Dustin glanced at his phone. “In three weeks. They want to film it for their fall campaign.”
Three weeks.
Twenty-one days.
Greg didn't know why he was counting. It shouldn't matter.
By every metric that mattered, Dustin was on borrowed time—a soul that should have crossed over already, lingering only because of some unnatural interference.
Finding that interference and eliminating it was Greg's job. It was what he was made for.
Attachments don't end well. For anyone.
“Hey.” Dustin's voice was softer now. “You okay? You look like you're buffering.”
“I'm fine.”
“You're very obviously not fine.”
“I'm—” Greg stopped. He didn't know how to finish that sentence.
Dustin stepped closer. “What did they actually say to you at reaper HQ? You've been weird since you got back.”
“I got some standard supervisory feedback.”
“You're still a terrible liar.”
“I'm not lying.”
“Your left eye is twitching.”
Greg's hand flew to his face involuntarily. Dustin laughed—a real laugh this time, warm and surprised.
“You're ridiculous,” Dustin said, and there was something almost fond in his voice.
“I prefer 'thorough.'“
“I'm sure you do.”
They were standing so very close. Greg should step back, but he didn't want to. He couldn't make himself stop looking at Dustin. There was a tiny scar above his eyebrow that he'd never noticed before.
Step back. Be professional.
“You're staring at me.” Dustin stepped closer.
Greg stepped back. “I'm not staring.”
“You can if you want to.”
Another step forward. Another step back. Greg's shoulders hit the wall.
Dustin planted a hand on the wall beside Greg's head, leaning in. His eyes were dark and intent, fixed on Greg's face. “You can even touch if you want to.”
Greg's breath caught.
He's already dead. He's just a file. You cannot want this.
“That would be inappropriate,” Greg whispered.
“Would it?”
“I'm your assigned reaper.”
“You're also the guy who ate ice cream with me this afternoon and got chocolate all over his face.” Dustin's other hand came up, fingers brushing Greg's jaw. The touch was light, but it made Greg's skin prickle everywhere.
“I'm not—I don't—”
“Greg.” Dustin's thumb traced along his cheekbone. “You keep looking at my mouth.”
Greg was. He couldn't stop. Dustin's lips were right there, slightly parted, the silver ring catching the light.
You were made to be a reaper.
“I should go,” Greg said, but he was pinned against the wall and Dustin was so close and his body had apparently forgotten how to move.
“Probably,” Dustin agreed.
And then he leaned in and kissed him.
Dustin's mouth was warm, his lips slightly chapped. There was the faint press of his lip ring, cool metal against Greg's bottom lip. His hand slid from Greg's jaw to the back of his neck, fingers threading into his hair, and Greg's entire nervous system short-circuited.
He should pull away. He should stop this. He should—
Dustin's lips parted against his, coaxing Greg's mouth open, and then his tongue slid inside, hot and slick and—
Cool metal dragged across the roof of Greg's mouth and every coherent thought Greg had ever possessed dissolved into static.
He fell backward.
Through the wall.
He landed hard on cold asphalt, gasping, staring up at a moonless night sky. The motel's exterior wall loomed above him. He'd phased clean through it.
Dustin had kissed him and he'd experienced complete structural failure.
In other words, he'd been so overwhelmed he'd forgotten how to be solid.
From inside the room, muffled by the wall, he heard Dustin say: “What the fuck?”