Chapter 31
Greg came back through the front door, phasing through the wood without even knocking.
“Hey,” Dustin said.
“Hi,” Greg said.
He looked nervous.
Not his usual kind of nervous, either. Dustin had seen him flustered, panicked, embarrassed, overwhelmed, and once, memorably, so overstimulated by a kiss that he’d forgotten how to be solid.
This was worse.
“What did you find?” Dustin asked.
“I found many things.” Greg’s knuckles were white around his clipboard. “The filing system was a disaster. There’s a reaper named Norbert who has a lot to answer for.”
“I don’t care about the filing system.”
“It seems like nobody does,” Greg said, sounding genuinely wounded.
“Greg.”
His gaze flicked toward the kitchen. Cathy was still awake. Cooking, from the smell of it, because that was what she did when the world stopped making sense.
“Not here,” Greg said.
Dustin’s stomach dropped.
Whatever Greg had found, he wasn’t going to say it in front of Cathy.
“Let’s go for a drive,” Dustin said.
Greg blinked. “Now?”
“Now.”
“It’s very late.”
“I know what time it is.” Dustin grabbed his keys. “Come on.”
Greg followed him outside, because of course he did. He’d protest and stammer and list seventeen reasons why something was inadvisable, and then he’d follow anyway.
Dustin pulled out of the driveway. The neighborhood was dark and quiet, porch lights glowing against the night. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.
For a while, he drove without thinking. Down Maple, left on Third, past the town’s only grocery store. Roads he’d driven hundreds of times with the windows down and the music too loud, back before everything.
Greg sat stiffly in the passenger seat, the clipboard in his lap.
“So,” Dustin said. “The filing system was a disaster.”
“It was genuinely awful.” Greg sounded relieved to have something safe to say. “There’s a reaper in Spectral Disputes who’s been borrowing filing cabinets from the records department, and now nothing is where it should be. I wish I’d had time to reorganize.”
“I’m glad you came back instead.”
Greg went quiet again.
They passed the high school. The chain-link fence around the track field was the same one Dustin had climbed a hundred times as a kid. Beyond it, in the dark, was the hill where he and Tyler had once made all their grand plans.
He didn’t look at it.
“Greg,” Dustin said. “Tell me.”
Greg’s jaw tightened.
Dustin pulled the truck over.
The engine idled between them. Greg stared through the windshield, his eyes too bright behind his glasses.
“The cases I found were all similar,” he said at last. “Someone makes a deal with a demon to protect someone they love. The system detects the interference, identifies the person who made the deal, and then sends a reaper to collect them.”
No.
That couldn’t be true.
“The system calls it obstruction clearance,” Greg continued.
His voice shook with barely contained anger now.
“You need authorization for it. I didn’t even know that.
I kept looking for a different ending. One case where they broke the contract, or negotiated, or found another way.
” He pressed his palms against his eyes. “I didn’t find one.”
Dustin couldn’t breathe.
All he could think of was his mother, drinking coffee like she hadn’t just confessed to selling her soul in a cemetery.
Saying she’d do it again.
“No,” Dustin said.
Greg lowered his hands.
“No,” Dustin repeated. He didn’t know where he was getting the certainty from, but he needed it. “I’m not letting your system kill my mom.”
“I don’t accept it either.” Greg’s voice broke on the words. “But I don’t know what to do.”
“Then we figure it out.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” Dustin tightened his hands around the steering wheel. “But we’ll think of something. If you still want to help.”
Something in Greg’s face shifted and settled into determination.
“I do.”
Simple words.
Too simple, maybe, for what they meant.
This reaper was willing to betray his entire existence for Dustin’s sake.
Dustin cleared his throat and looked away before that thought could do anything embarrassing to his chest.
“We should head back.”
Greg nodded. “Yes. Okay.”
The drive back was silent.
When Dustin parked in front of the house, Cathy was visible through the front window, moving around the kitchen.
“Greg,” Dustin said, unbuckling his seat belt.
“Yes?”
“How long do we have?”
Greg was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know. But Oversight is involved now, so… not long.”
Dustin stepped out of the truck.
“Then we move fast.”
Cathy had made chili.
The smell hit Dustin the moment he opened the front door—rich, warm, and aggressively spiced. The kind of food Cathy made when she needed her hands to be doing something. When the world got too big, Cathy got territorial about the kitchen.
“Wash your hands,” Cathy said, not looking up from the stove.
Dustin washed his hands.
Greg stood in the kitchen doorway, rooted to the spot.
“You too,” Cathy told him.
Greg looked down at his hands. “I don’t—”
“Gregory.”
A pause.
Then Greg went to the sink and washed his hands.
Dustin sat at the table and tried not to think about the fact that he had no plan.
Or the fact that he might not have enough time to enact one even if he did.
Cathy set bowls on the table, shredded cheese on the side, crackers in the middle. “Sit,” she told Greg.
Greg sat.
He looked at the bowl with open curiosity.
“Have you eaten?” Cathy asked.
“Not recently.”
“Good.”
Dustin ate. The chili was warm and spicy and familiar enough to hurt.
Greg took one small, cautious spoonful.
His face transformed in wonder.
Then his brows drew together.
He took another spoonful. Then, very quickly, another.
“What is this?”
His ears had gone pink.
Dustin realized, with a terrible rush of delight, that Greg had probably never eaten spicy food in his life.
“Are you okay?” Dustin asked.
“Something is happening to my throat.”
“That’s the spice.”
Greg sniffed. “Is it?” He reached for his water.
“If you drink water, it gets worse.”
Greg froze. “Oh.” He looked helpless. “What helps?”
“Milk or bread.” Dustin paused. “Ice cream, after.”
Greg stared at the bowl, betrayed. “Doesn’t the food hurt you too?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I grew up on her cooking. You build up a tolerance.”
“A tolerance.” Greg gestured at his own face, which had progressed from pink to a general state of emergency. “So this is something you went through as a child, and you simply decided to continue doing it anyway.”
“Pretty much.”
“And your mother continued feeding it to you.”
“She makes it spicier at Christmas.”
Silence.
Greg looked at Cathy.
Cathy, who had been eating with total serenity, looked back.
“Honestly, I went easy on the spice tonight,” she said.
“Oh,” Greg said faintly.
He lifted the spoon again.
“You don’t have to keep eating,” Dustin said.
“No, that would be impolite.”
Stubbornly, Greg continued.
A minute passed.
Then a tear ran down his cheek.
Greg touched it, startled. “My face is crying,” he said, deeply offended. “I’m not even sad.”
Cathy set her spoon down and pressed her lips together.
Greg ate another bite, swallowing with visible effort.
“Why,” he said, with a depth of feeling Dustin hadn’t known him capable of, “when you could be having a burger?”
Dustin put his face in his hands.
He laughed.
It came out hard and wrong and unstoppable, shaking loose from somewhere deep in his chest. Across the table, Greg made an indignant noise that only made it worse, and then Cathy broke too, one hand pressed over her mouth, shoulders trembling.
That finished Dustin completely.
He laughed until his ribs hurt. Until his eyes ran, though not from spice. Until he had to grip the edge of the table because he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop.
“I’m glad,” Greg said, from somewhere above him, with immense dignity, “that my suffering is so entertaining.”
Dustin lost it again.
“Gregory,” Cathy managed, voice unsteady, “it really is a mild batch.”
“Ma’am,” Greg said, “I have attended a great many deaths, and I have never suffered the way I am suffering right now.”
Cathy laughed harder.
Quiet and helpless, the way Dustin remembered from before. From when his family had still been complete, when the world had been smaller and easier and they hadn’t yet learned all the ways it could break.
His laughter softened.
He watched his mother at the kitchen table, wiping her eyes.
Watched Greg, destroyed by chili and still determined to finish the bowl because that was simply the kind of person he was.
For one impossible moment, with death circling the house and no plan in sight, they were laughing.
Dustin exhaled and rose from the table.
“I’ll get you the ice cream,” he said.