Chapter 17 #2
She pauses, eyes unfocused like she’s watching it happen again.
“Inside was a cavity between the panels. And the ring,” she continues.
“I was tied up, so it felt like a Hail Mary. I hooked the edge of the zip tie against that burr and I dragged it back and forth, back and forth, over and over. That’s how I got this. ”
She lifts her hand and points to the scar on her wrist.
“Holy shit,” I mutter.
“There was another gap at the back of the cavity,” she says. “A passage for wiring that ran down toward the rear door frame. I couldn’t open the doors from inside, but the latch still had a cable. I reached through, found it, pulled, and the door popped open.”
Her eyes lift to mine, and for the first time there’s something in them that isn’t detached. She looks kind of like me. The thought lands wrong, but it’s there anyway. Like we’re cut from the same awful cloth, both hauling demons we never asked for.
My eyes burn. I blink fast. “So what happened then? How the hell did you end up back here?”
“Yeah,” she mutters. “That’s the lame part. My brain just kind of wanted to delete this place, I guess. I fell out of the van while they were still driving and ended up on the outskirts of a small town.”
My wrists itch where the zip ties bit earlier, and I fight the urge to scratch them raw.
“I thought if I could just get far enough from the road, I could pass out without being visible,” she says. “I thought I could sleep for ten minutes and then stand up. I thought a lot of stupid shit.”
I don’t correct her. I don’t call it stupid. Because I’ve been there, when thinking becomes survival, and survival becomes lying to yourself just to keep moving. It’s a thing.
“What happened?” I whisper.
“Someone found me a couple days later, thinking I was dead.”
“Who?”
“A local woman.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Anyway, I ended up in a hospital with a brain injury and memory loss.” She claps her thighs, sharp like she’s trying to shake it off.
“So here’s the butt of the joke. When I met Talon and tried to move on with my life, I started remembering bits and pieces.
You wanna know when it finally all came together? ”
“When you died?” I guess. It’s wild, but death seems to scrub some things clean.
“Yup.”
I blink, trying to make that land. Beyond fucked up doesn’t even cover it. What kind of bad luck does someone have to have to get grabbed by monsters and then forget the important shit?
“How the hell did they find you again?” I mutter.
“Oh, they were looking,” she says. “This son of a bitch is really fucking relentless. That’s why he has to die.
There’s no other way. I know it. Even if he’s somehow caught and sentenced to prison, he’ll find a way to do this again.
I don’t fucking know how. He’ll act like an angel behind bars so they release him early, and then he’ll kill again. He’s sick.”
Unfortunately, I’d already landed on the same conclusion.
There’s something about him that feels like a missing wire, a dead space where a human connection should be.
Like he isn’t a person at all, just a machine built to churn out violent thoughts on repeat.
When I first met Cassian, Talon, and Nathaniel, their actions terrified me.
Now I know the difference between doing something bad while still having a moral code, and being rotten all the way through.
When I see Nathaniel again, I’m going to make him shout it from the rooftops until he believes it. He is not a bad man. I don’t fucking care anymore about his sins. Not in my eyes.
I push myself up and walk over to the hatch. Just like she suspected, the ringer is gone.
“Mhm, great…” I turn back around. “At this rate, the guys are going to have to find him when I’m already dead. It’s a surprise he hasn’t killed me yet.”
“That’s not his style,” Rhea says.
“Well, my style is to use my divine Grim Reaper powers and save myself, but guess what? They are not working.”
Rhea shifts her jaw to the side. For a second, she almost looks amused by me. She doesn’t answer, and the silence stretches until it starts to feel deliberate.
“Ah, alright,” she says at last. “At first I wanted to revel in your helplessness a little, but it’s not fun anymore. I talked to your men. I told them where you are. Now it’s only a matter of time before they find you.”
I go still.
“You… really did that?”
I can’t believe it. The words land like a trap, like the kind of kindness that turns its teeth the moment you lean in.
“Of course I did,” she says, as if I’m the one being dramatic. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not your enemy? I’m just jealous of you. That’s all.”
My mind blanks. I don’t know what hits harder, the confirmation that my men are actually coming, that this van and the two girls trapped in it might not be the end… or the fact that Rhea just said she’s jealous of me like it’s nothing.
I latch onto the jealousy. I can marvel at my men later, privately, when I can breathe again.
“You’re jealous?” I echo.
“Yeah. I thought that went without saying.”
I shake my head and let out a short, disbelieving chuckle. “Oh, no. It does not go without saying.”
“Well,” she says, thoughtful now, “you’re alive, for starters. That’s a pretty good reason. And second, you’re loved. You’re wanted. You’ve faced most of your demons from the past. You faced your murderer. That’s a few more.”
She pauses, watching me from across the van. The faint silver light spilling from her scythe’s edge catches the hollows of her face and makes her look sharper, older, like something carved out of moonlight and spite.
“I didn’t think you had feelings,” I mutter before I can stop myself. “Good ones, at least. Not toward me.”
“Bitch, jealousy is not a good feeling,” she says, but she still chuckles. “Besides, how dare you? You, of all people, say that?”
Okay, fair enough. I’m emotional as hell myself. Death doesn’t erase shit. Still, this is a surprise.
“Just so you know,” I say, “being alive again isn’t all it seems like. It sucks a lot.”
“I know,” she replies. “But you got a second chance.” Her voice goes quieter, like she’s admitting something she hates.
“I’d like that too. Sometimes I catch myself dreaming about it.
All the things I would do…” She exhales and looks away.
“But after I died and remembered everything about my life, I realized how easy it is to waste what you’re given. ”
I stare at her, and I get the awful feeling I already know where this is headed. “Talon?” I murmur.
“Yeah,” she says.
“I hope you know I don’t want to hear how you’re still in love with the guy I love,” I say quickly. That would be the worst. It’s bad enough that I keep seeing pieces of myself in her and feeling sorry for her. I don’t want to think she deserves my man, too. I have to draw the line somewhere.
“Love?” she echoes. “I don’t love him, Skye.”
“You don’t?” I repeat.
“I still think fondly of him,” she says. “I’ll always have that. But love?” She shakes her head. “No. He was not meant for me. I didn’t even show him a fraction of the real me. I couldn’t have. I didn’t know who I was.”
That lands like a punch.
“Rhea…”
She cuts me off with a crooked smile. “Don’t pity me. He loves you, the real you, and you love him. I’m cool with that.”
I don’t know what to say. Heat creeps up my throat, sharp and humiliating. I’m flattered, maybe. Horribly, selfishly flattered. Relieved, too, and that might be the worst part.
“I really thought you hated me,” I admit at last. “I would hate me if I were you.”
“I’m going green with envy when I look at you,” she says. “But I don’t hate you. I kind of root for you, actually.”
“Wow.”
The silence that follows turns heavy, the kind that presses into your lungs. I rub the back of my neck, trying to anchor myself in something real, in the pain still humming under my skin. Then, slowly, I lift my eyes to her again.
“If you root for me,” I whisper, “can you lend me some of your powers again? Just a little. Enough to get us out of here. Enough to save the girls.”
Her expression collapses.
“I’d love to,” she says softly. “Believe me, I would. But I can’t. Death cut you off completely.”
“Maybe we can bypass it somehow.”
“We can’t.” She shakes her head once. “You’re as divided as dividing goes.
There’s you, the mortal you, and then there’s your raven.
Everything that ever made you supernatural is with him.
It’s like there are two of you. Honestly, it’s a miracle I could even touch you.
You shouldn’t still be in the in-between. ”
It takes a second for the meaning to sink in.
“Is that why I can’t even talk to him?” I ask. “To Pain, my raven. Is it because he can’t hear me?”
“Yeah,” she says. “You don’t have the power to reach him. You can’t send the message.”
I press my palms to the cold floor and breathe out through my teeth.
Goddamn it.
So that’s what Death meant when he said I need to merge with Pain to get my powers back. I literally have to bridge the gap between us.
Easier said than done.
Another wave of silence rolls in, thick and sour.
I try not to dwell on how much everything sucks right now, but the surroundings make it impossible.
The air is freezing, the floor leaches heat from my hands, and Lila and Hailey lie close enough that it feels like they’re already gone.
I’m sitting here talking to a dead girl who would rather be me, like that’s a normal thing to do.
And my men are gone.
I think that’s the worst part of all.
To my next surprise, because there have been a lot of them lately, Rhea doesn’t really leave.
She stays with me, just sitting in the silence like she belongs here.
I appreciate it so much that I don’t even ask her about her Grim Reaper duties.
She made it clear last time that she’s constantly busy, and if her absence for the past couple of days is any indicator, she actually was.
Now I just take what I can get, even if it’s quiet. Her presence makes me feel less alone.
About an hour later, or what I think is an hour, she shifts. She sits up straighter and stares at me, eyes suddenly wider, like something has finally clicked into place.
“What?” I ask.
“Wait. I didn’t think about something,” she says, and then she’s moving, standing and coming to sit right beside me. The air drops a few more degrees with her proximity, cold curling under my skin. When she takes my hands, I don’t pull away.
“What?” I echo.
“Your raven can’t hear you,” she says.
“Yeah. You already told me that.”
“But he can hear me.”
I blink, not sure I heard her right.
“I’m going to send him a message,” she says.
My throat tightens. “You can really reach him?”
She snorts like I’m insulting her. “Hold still.”
“What are you—“
She reaches out and presses two fingers against my sternum.
Cold slams through me, sudden and absolute, like ice poured into my veins in straight, clean lines.
For a heartbeat, I feel everything. Hundreds, thousands of tiny points of light connected by lines of pressure, pulling and tugging.
Souls in transit. Souls waiting. Souls screaming.
Grim Reapers standing like pins on a burned-out map.
The whole system hums like a machine balanced on the edge of failure.
Then the sensation narrows, forced like water through a funnel, down and down into a single point. A familiar, ugly, stubborn knot of darkness that feels like me and not me.
Pain.
Rhea’s voice slices through the rush. “Now this…” she says.
Something jerks inside my chest. I sag forward and catch myself on her.
“Ouch,” I mutter. “That fucking hurts.”
“Well, a little pain’s the price you pay.”
If only she knew the double meaning there.
“Try talking to him,” she says. “It should work.”
I wet my lips. “Pain,” I whisper.
The word lands differently now. It doesn’t vanish into cotton. It drops into something cold and dark and resonant, like a stone into deep water.
“I need you,” I say.
For a second, nothing happens.
Then the air in the van bends. Not visually, not exactly.
It’s pressure, like the space in front of me exhales inward.
The tiny hairs on my arms lift. Black feathers appear on the floor between my knees.
One. Two. Three. They don’t fall from anywhere.
They just exist, like smoke deciding to become matter.
Rhea exhales, almost relieved. “That’s it.”
The feathers ripple and pull together, as if someone is rewinding a slow explosion. They twist upward, rising into a shape that is avian first and then humanoid. A silhouette hunched and bristling, with wings that aren’t really wings at all, more like a cape made of night and spite.
Then he’s there.
Pain.
In his more human-ish form, he’s barefoot on the metal, dark jeans on his hips, shirt hanging open at the throat. Raven-black hair falls into his eyes, and those eyes are bottomless, furious, and hurt in the way only a soul can be.
He looks at Rhea first. “What the fuck?” he says.
Rhea snorts, then turns to me with a smile and a nod. “Good luck,” is all she says. Just as abruptly as she appeared, she dissolves into smoke and disappears. I almost feel a sting of sadness at her going.
Then it’s just me, the girls, and Pain, standing in the middle of the van like a fury in ripped black.
His gaze locks onto mine.
“Well,” he says. “You’ve really fucked things up this time, haven’t you?”
And gods, isn’t he just spot on?