Chapter 38
The clipboard was fading.
Should it be doing that?
Dustin was pretty sure it shouldn't be doing that.
“What's happening to it?” he asked.
“It's losing its shape,” Greg said. “It's connected to the system. And I'm not part of the system anymore, so...”
“So it's dying.”
Greg blinked at that, like he couldn't see the connection Dustin was making. “It's not alive.”
Dustin stared at the clipboard. He'd never been fond of that thing, but he'd watched Greg clutch it like a lifeline in serious conversations, he'd watched him sleep with it on the nightstand where other people kept their phones.
It was Greg's most annoying habit and his most defining feature and now it was dissolving in his lap in a grocery store parking lot.
Dustin's chest felt too tight for breath.
“Could you take me somewhere?” Greg asked. “Just somewhere quiet. Somewhere nice.”
“Why?”
“I've thought of something.” Greg's voice was calm in a way which should have been reassuring but wasn't. “The demon's contract specified a reaper's soul. Those were the terms. A reaper's soul, freely given.”
“I was there.”
“If I'm not a reaper anymore, the contract can't hold. There's no reaper's soul to collect. The terms become void.”
Dustin processed this. “So you need to stop being a reaper.”
“I need to finish stopping.” Greg lifted the clipboard slightly. “This is the last piece. My tether to the system. As long as I'm holding it, I'm still connected. Still technically what I was.”
“And if you destroy it?”
“Then I'm not. And the demon gets nothing. At least I hope that's how it works.” Greg tried a smile. “I may not know much about human life, but I understand formalities.”
Dustin's chest tightened further at the sight of Greg's smile. How could he be smiling at a moment like this?
How could he be talking about formalities as if his soul wasn't on the line?
“Please?” Greg asked. He looked down at his clipboard. “I don't think I should be doing this in this parking lot.”
“No,” Dustin said slowly. “Probably not.”
He took a deep breath and he started the truck.
Dustin drove without deciding where he was going.
That wasn't true. Some part of him had decided before he'd pulled out of the lot. His hands knew where they were going even if his brain hadn't caught up, because they turned left on Third and passed the coffee shop that closed at four and the only bar in town, and then they passed the high school.
They passed the chain link fence around the track field and Dustin stopped pretending he was driving aimlessly.
He pulled off the road onto the dirt shoulder and killed the engine.
The hill rose in front of them, golden-brown in the afternoon light. It wasn't much; a scrubby slope that climbed maybe two hundred feet to a flat outcrop where the rock broke through the grass. From the top you could see the whole valley. The mountains in the distance and Ridgway below.
He hadn't been up there in years.
“Oh,” Greg said, looking through the windshield.
Dustin didn't answer. He got out.
They walked up together in silence. The grass was dry and crunched underfoot. Dustin's shoulder ached with every step—worse since the grocery store—but he ignored it.
They reached the top.
The valley opened below them. Greg stood at the edge of the outcrop and looked at the view—the houses and roads, the river snaking through the fields and the mountains cutting into the sky.
It was a nice view, but Dustin didn't have eyes for it.
Dustin's eyes were glued to the clipboard in Greg's hands.
It looked less solid than it had in the truck.
He swallowed and stood next to Greg. “Tyler and I used to come up here after school. We'd sit here and plan all the things we were going to do.”
He could see them. Two kids with scraped knees and too much energy, sitting on those rocks, looking at the mountains and talking about jumping off them. Tyler's laugh. The way he'd spread his arms and say someday, man.
“This is where everything started,” Dustin said. “Tyler looked at the cliffs across the valley and asked what if?” He rubbed his thumb across his knuckles. “I said let's find out.” He inhaled the crisp air. “I guess my brother and I are the definition of fuck around and find out.”
Greg stood so close to him that their arms touched. “What did you find out?”
Dustin shook his head. “Maybe more than I ever wanted to know. Or maybe just all the shit everyone else seems to know instinctively.”
“I think I understand that.” Greg smiled again.
Silence stretched between them. A light breeze stirred Dustin's hair. The afternoon was still and bright and the valley below them was going about its business.
“Do you have a lighter?” Greg asked.
Dustin's stomach clenched.
Right, they'd come here to destroy Greg's clipboard. “You want to light it on fire?”
“Yes,” Greg said solemnly. “That goes against several regulations, but…
I suppose they don't matter anymore.” He said this with such a sense of quiet wonder that Dustin almost wanted to tease him about it, like, look at you talking about burning clipboards on a mountain cliff like some sort of rule-breaking hippie.
But the words got stuck in his throat.
His reaper had come such a long way.
Was this where it ended?
“What's going to happen to you?” Dustin asked.
Greg looked at him. The sun was in his glasses and and there was still a streak of marinara on his collar.
“It's like I told you. Reapers don't get an afterlife,” he said. “When we're done, we disperse. The tiny bit of soul material that gave me shape will return to the source, and maybe, one day, it'll be part of something bigger.” He looked out over the valley. “I think nothing ever truly ends.”
Except our time together, Dustin thought.
“I don't want you to go,” he said, the words slipping past his lips before he could stop them. Maybe the most honest thing he'd ever said.
Greg's smile turned wobbly. “I can't stay. I wish I could, I do. But if you let me do this, I can at least go back to the source rather than be snatched by a demon.” He wiped at his eyes. “If I go back, I can be part of something beautiful someday.”
“You already are.” Dustin's voice broke and he couldn't say anything more.
This wasn't fair.
How was Dustin supposed to stand here and watch Greg destroy his clipboard—destroy himself?
Greg was going to die.
And he'd known it—he'd known it when he'd kissed Dustin in the parking lot, and he'd known it when he'd asked to be taken somewhere nice and now he was standing on Tyler's hill in the afternoon sun asking for a lighter so he could die clean.
Greg reached over and took Dustin's hand. His grip was warm and solid and real.
“I need the lighter,” Greg said.
Dustin didn't move.
“Please.”
Dustin reached into his jacket pocket. His hand found the lighter — a cheap Bic, orange, nothing special.
He held it in his fist.
“Thank you,” Greg said. “For the diner. And the motel. And the ice cream.” He looked at the lighter. “And for wiping ketchup off my face. I think that might have been when it started.”
“Greg—”
“I'm ready.”
“I'm not.”
Greg's hand tightened on his. “I know. I'm sorry.”
Dustin opened his hand. Greg took the lighter.
His clipboard was barely there now. More suggestion than object. The sun shone through it.
Greg flicked the lighter. The flame was small and ordinary, flickering slightly. Greg held it to the corner of the clipboard.
The clipboard caught.
It didn't burn like metal and paper. It burned bright and sudden, a white-blue flame that climbed the surface faster than should be possible.
Greg held on.
His fingers were in the flames and his jaw was clenched, but he didn't let go. Dustin watched his knuckles go white and then red. The skin blistered. “Greg, your hand!”
“Let me finish,” Greg said through his teeth. “I need to hold it.”
The pages curled into nothing. The forms turned to ash and scattered in the wind, and then the frame itself collapsed inward until there was nothing left in Greg's hands but ash and air.
Greg opened his fingers.
The ash blew off his palms. He stared at his empty, burned hands.
“Done,” he said.
And then his edges blurred.
It was fast. One moment Greg was solid — and the next his outline was dissolving into the afternoon light like chalk in water.
“No—” Dustin reached for him. His hands found Greg's shoulders but the fabric of his shirt felt thin, insubstantial. “No, no, Greg, stay with me, stay with me—”
The command had worked in the motel room.
It wasn't working now.
Greg was looking at him. His eyes were the last thing to blur — brown and warm — and his mouth moved and Dustin couldn't hear what he said.
“GREG!”