Chapter 3 Nathaniel’s Past #2
The other one stays half a step behind. He’s difficult to read at first glance.
Broad-shouldered, precise in the way he moves, dark hair cut close to his head.
One of his eyes is blind, and he wears it openly.
Everything about him reads as disciplined, which I usually appreciate in people.
And yet something about him unsettles me in a way I can’t immediately name.
He registers as a threat.
They take the only two open seats. The ginger drops into his with a graceless collapse, knees spread wide, exhaling like he’s been dragged here on a leash. The other sits with his back straight, elbows in, hands loose but ready on his thighs.
They don’t carry the same grieving weight the others do.
It interests me and unsettles me in equal measure.
“Welcome,” the counselor says. “Thank you all for joining us today. Before we begin, let’s go around and introduce ourselves. Just our names for now. No pressure.”
One by one, people offer their names.
“Margaret.”
“Tom.”
“Lily.”
“Daniel.”
When it reaches the ginger, he lifts his chin reluctantly. “Talon,” he says.
The dark-haired one gives a short nod. “Cassian.”
“Nathaniel,” I say.
The introductions continue around the circle, but I catch the brief glance Cassian exchanges with Talon, like he’s sending him some hidden message.
Are they family? Did they both lose someone they cared about? Why are they here together?
They don’t seem related, and there’s no sense of equality between them. Talon, the ginger, is irritated by Cassian. Cassian seems to want something from him, like he always has something to say and keeps swallowing it.
My mind jumps immediately to Leonard. Are they detectives, hunting for cracks in people they suspect of something? But even if they are, my crime was perfect. It left no trail back to me. They cannot be here because of me.
“This group is a safe place to express whatever you’re carrying,” the counselor says. “You don’t have to speak today, but you’re welcome to at any point.”
She turns to a woman beside her and opens the first share of the session. The group listens with sympathetic hums and quiet murmurs. Talon bounces his knee, glancing at the floor, at the windows, at the counselor. Not like a cop. But maybe that’s all a performance.
Cassian watches the room in slow, sweeping scans, and since I’m watching him so closely, it isn’t long before he watches me too.
He meets my gaze about four times in the next twenty minutes.
Each time I look away first, casually, the way you’d glance at anyone in a room.
But each time I do, I’m aware that he’s clocking me more and more.
That only fuels my interest.
Eventually the counselor claps her hands softly. “Let’s stretch our legs. Ten-minute break.”
Chairs scrape. People stand. Some cluster near the credenza for tea or coffee, others step outside for air.
Talon is the first through the door. He shoves his hands into his pockets and mutters something too low for most people to catch, but the shape of the words is frustration. Cassian follows, and they move down the short hallway toward the alcove near the restrooms.
I stand as well, though not to join anyone. I adjust my coat, step out of the room, and lean against the hallway corner where I can hear them without looking like I’m listening.
Talon exhales sharply.
“Man, what the fuck do you still want from me?” he says. “I’m just trying to grieve my shit and move on. Kill it with the cult talk.”
Oh? Not cops, then.
“It’s not cult talk,” Cassian says calmly. “It’s the truth. You asked how I know there’s more than what’s in that room. I’m telling you.”
Talon scoffs. “No, you’re feeding me weird metaphysical bullshit that sounds like something you’d hallucinate on mushrooms. The dead aren’t watching us. The dead aren’t whatever the fuck you think they are.”
“I didn’t believe it either.”
“Yeah? And then what?” Talon snaps. “You decided to become some fucking afterlife prophet? Cassian, I’m not doing this with you. Not here. I just want to sit in a stupid circle and grieve my people. Get off my ass.”
Cassian doesn’t let go.
“Grim Reapers exist,” he says. “I know, because I’ve seen one. There’s a whole system out there. A flawed system. It needs to be fixed, and it’s up to people like you and me to fix it.”
“Fix it?” Talon mutters, voice lower. “Man, I lost my grandmother. Then a girlfriend. Then another. You get that? I’ve been bleeding grief for years. Even if I believed you…” A pause. “I’m not the right guy to talk to. I haven’t fixed a damn thing in my life. I’m… fucked up, man.”
Neither of them moves.
“None of that matters,” Cassian says.
Talon lets out a short breath. “The hell does that mean?”
“It means everyone in that damn room is fucked up. Me included. If you’re not damaged, you just plant your ass down and live your life, letting all the wrong shit in the world keep happening, because it never touched you.
If the pain never hit you, it turns into background noise. You and me, we’re not like that.”
Talon doesn’t answer.
“I watched my sister get murdered,” Cassian continues quietly. “A Reaper stood behind her. Cold. Detached. It collected her. I see them now. They do it all the time. Taking souls, collecting lives. Someone needs to do something about it. If I can see them, I can stop them.”
Talon lets out a weak, humorless laugh. “You want to do… God’s work? Death’s work? I don’t even know what to call this shit, man.”
“Call it whatever you want,” Cassian replies. “I want to help the people nobody ever helps.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’re just crazy?” Talon asks. “That all of this is just in your head?”
“Maybe,” Cassian replies. “I’ve thought about it. But what if it isn’t?”
My body stiffens.
There’s one notion every scientist, regardless of their field, has to accept: there is a great deal we don’t yet know.
I suppose working with lives, trying to keep people from dying, death has haunted me more than it haunts most. I watched people die throughout my career. I got used to it early.
There is no denying that a human being is more than a constant exchange of electrons traversing between tissues. There’s something else to it. A factor X we haven’t understood yet.
Many call that factor a soul.
What if this man, Cassian, can truly see them? What if he can see what happens to a soul after the body gives up?
“The people you grieve…” Cassian starts. “They didn’t die peacefully, did they?”
“Don’t.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect,” Cassian says. “Quite the opposite. I want to help them.”
It sounds as if Talon steps back and drags his hands down his face.
There’s a long beat of silence.
The short break has ended, and the counselor is clapping her hands softly, urging everyone back inside, but none of the three of us move.
“Fuck…” Talon stops, swallows, tries again. “Man, I’ve got nothing left to lose. If this is some sick fucking joke…”
“It’s not.”
“Yeah, but you should know—I’ve killed people. I will kill you if you’re lying to me. With my bare fucking hands. Don’t test me on that.”
There’s a scoff, and then Cassian’s voice drops to a whisper.
“I kill people all the time.”
And everything in me freezes to the bone. All the unease I felt about the two of them suddenly clicks into place and I understand what it was that I sensed from them.
A sense of foreboding. On some instinctual level, I have recognized that these two men and I are the same.
Murderers.
I should leave them behind and rejoin the group. If I care about what I have built, my career, the legacy I have started to create, I should just push off the wall and go sit down in the circle.
But I stay. Because this man’s words—Cassian’s words—linger in my mind.
What if?
I’ve never believed in fate. Or divine balance.
Or cosmic fairness. The world I understand is governed by biology and physics and chemical inevitability.
The heart stops because potassium rises and membranes fail.
The lungs stop because muscles can no longer contract.
Death is measurable, predictable, a collapse of form and function.
But what if that collapse is not the end of the function?
What if the system extends beyond the body?
What if failure continues somewhere else?
And if it does… who regulates it?
Doctors? No.
Scientists? No.
God?
If Cassian is right, then the question becomes painfully simple:
Who decides what happens to the dead?
And who holds them accountable?
Just like Cassian said, two weeks ago I wouldn’t have cared to know the answer as much as I do today. Two weeks ago, my mother was still here, and the answer didn’t indicate what had happened to her.
“Okay… we’re on the same page, then,” Talon mutters. “So let’s say this is real. What do I do? How do I… I don’t know… how do I see them too? Those Grim Reapers?”
Another pause. And I feel myself getting drawn to the answer like a moth to a flame.
“You have to die,” Cassian replies. He lets that sit for a moment before he continues. “And then you have to be brought back.”
“That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” Talon says. But there’s no bite in his voice anymore. If anything, it’s the first time he sounds remotely convinced. Like he indeed has nothing left to lose. Like part of him was already waiting for someone to suggest death.
“Dying is the easy part,” Cassian says.
“I bet,” Talon replies. “How the hell do you plan to bring me back, then?”
Cassian doesn’t answer immediately.
And in that split second, something shifts inside me.
I make a choice. One without a return.
Or maybe I made it already when I decided to kill Leonard Garza. Maybe it happened then.
Either way, my shoes make a soft sound against the old church floor. I step out from my corner and come to face them. Both men turn. Cassian is completely unsurprised.
I meet their eyes—green, and then mismatched—and say, very plainly:
“What kind of death are we talking about?”