Chapter 19
“My turn,” I say, already looking around for something I can use to damage my eye just enough. I don’t have any ocular damage, and ideally I’d reproduce the exact same conditions Talon had. I never got a good look at Cassian’s eye before his clinical death, but Talon’s data fills that gap.
Cassian’s head snaps toward me. Talon, still half out of it and staring at the empty corner, blinks like he’s not sure he heard me right.
“Now?” Cassian says. “Already?”
“No point in waiting.”
I pull open the metal drawer under the anesthesia cart. Handheld ophthalmoscope. Useless. Next drawer down gives me a stainless-steel eye shield, a jar of sterile saline, two plastic irrigation syringes, and a box of blunt cannulas.
“Who’s going to do it to you?” Cassian asks.
“You.”
I find a vial of hyperosmolar mannitol. Standard use is reducing intracranial pressure by drawing fluid out of tissues. In ophthalmology, get the dosing wrong and you get transient retinal vascular collapse. We call it acute anterior segment ischemia.
I hold up the vial between two fingers.
Perfect.
“Wait.” Cassian grabs my wrist. “Wait a damn minute.”
“Relax.” I look at him. “You handled Talon’s resuscitation just fine. You’ll handle mine.”
“I was following your lead. That’s not the same as making the calls.”
“You memorized everything I did. All you have to do is run it back.”
“And if something goes wrong?”
I pause.
“What did Talon say?” I shrug. “Not like I have anything to lose.”
I hold his gaze. At the end of the day it comes down to what a man believes is right and whether he’s got the nerve to act on it. Any task, high stakes or otherwise, runs on three things. Drive, knowledge, confidence. Lose one and the whole thing falls apart.
“You’re not the type to scare easy, Cassian,” I say, lowering the vial. “I respect that. You know why I need to do this now, so you’re going to help me. Grab a piece of paper. I’ll walk you through it one more time.”
Cassian stares at me, jaw tight. Then he steps back, swears, tips his head toward the ceiling. When he looks at me again the panic is gone. Same steady presence I saw moments ago.
“What’s that supposed to do?” He nods at the vial.
“Destabilize the internal ocular pressure. Disrupt the microcirculation. That creates reversible vascular fragility, makes me more susceptible to ischemic injury. If I hit the same window Talon did, the odds of triggering the same perceptual phenomenon go up.”
“How are you taking it?”
“Like this.”
I draw a carefully calculated dose of mannitol into a large syringe, sit down on the rolling stool beside the tray, and tilt my head back.
Talon tries to push himself up, winces, drops back. “What the fuck, man…?”
“Respectfully, shut up,” I mutter. “I need to focus.”
A sharp breath through teeth somewhere behind me, but nobody says another word. I straighten up and bring the needle to my eye. The stool keeps shifting under me, wheels too loose, but Cassian steps up behind me and locks it still with his boot.
I breathe in slow and slide the needle in just beside the orbital cavity, where the osmotic gradient will hit the vascular bed.
Cold. Then a spreading burn as the solution floods the tissue. Pressure behind my eye spikes hard and fast. Deep, nauseating throb pushing straight into the back of my skull. My vision blurs at the edges. Light fractures into a halo, then breaks apart into jagged prismatic lines.
“Okay,” I exhale. “Done. Now listen carefully…”
“Wait a damn minute.” Cassian steps back, tears through the shelves for a piece of paper and a pen, and uses a clear spot on the tray to write it all down.
I walk him through everything. Precise timings.
What to do if something goes wrong. I prioritize the sight.
Survival comes second. I know that even if I survive without it, I can always try again, but it matters that I do this now.
Same space Talon gained it. Same method. Same equipment.
All to maximize the chances.
I set up the table for myself, strip off my coat, roll my sleeves, disinfect my arm. Then I climb onto the procedural bed and lower myself back against the cold surface.
Cassian straps the oxygen mask loosely over my face.
“Ready?” he asks.
“As much as anyone can be,” I say. “Go ahead.”
He reaches for the sedative. As his finger moves to press the plunger, I exhale once, bracing for the closest thing to truth I will ever touch.
“See you on the other side.”
Darkness slams through me.
A part of me finds peace in this brief silence.
I am and I am not. Both feel less meaningful than ever.
So much of my life has been built around the idea of doing what’s right.
Culture and upbringing shaped expectations of me that I never agreed to.
Be a good son. A good man. A good doctor.
A good person. Each one runs on different criteria, and what counts as good shifts depending on who’s looking.
The son, the mother, the outsider, the patient, the passerby, the nurse, the colleague. On and on.
I wonder what I actually am.
Good, or bad, or something in between that doesn’t fit in a box.
Either way, I’m still here.
A sound begins to take shape at the edge of the nothing and the pressure behind my right eye is gone. The ache that bloomed there is no longer part of me. Pain in general feels unhooked.
A silhouette resolves in the brightness. A figure, tall and narrow, wrapped in something dark that swallows the glow. A line that might be a shoulder. Another that might be a tilted head. And in its hand, cutting across the light like a hooked crescent, something long and curved.
Takes my mind a moment to label it.
Is that a… scythe?
The light spilling off the blade isn’t like any illumination I know.
A Grim Reaper.
Cassian was right. The entity he swore was real is standing right in front of me. Or above me. It’s here to collect my soul. But if that’s the case, does that mean I’m dead? And if I’m dead, do I get to see my mother?
My mother. The thought of her hits something buried so deep I almost can’t reach it.
I didn’t think past the discovery. I never considered what happens after I confirm Grim Reapers are real. I just threw myself into the search, into the mechanics of getting there.
I’ve always been bad at processing emotion, I suppose.
Always treated it as an obstacle. And the goals I set in its place were grand.
I always dreamt big. And early on, as soon as I started reaching for those things, I realized that feelings, unpredictable and powerful as they are, rarely help you get where you’re going.
Their nature is to turn you inward. Make you reflect.
Meanwhile, goals demand the opposite. They punish a mind that shifts with every breeze.
They reward the ones who step outside themselves and look at the task clean.
None of that seems to matter now.
Where did my mother go when she died?
Is she somewhere behind this thing?
Did something like it come for her while her blood dried on that apartment floor and the cops botched the scene outside the door?
Where did Leonard go? The man who killed her. The man I killed.
Did he get one of these too? A guide. A system. A process.
Or did he just drop?
The questions keep coming.
Then—
Noise.
Pain slams back into my chest like a car wreck. My ribs feel crushed from the outside and detonating from the inside at the same time. Air rips into my lungs like ice water poured into hot glass and I gasp.
The world snaps into place around me.
Ceiling. Lights. Cold table under my back. The sting in my arm where the needle hit the vein. The sharp, blinding ache behind my right eye.
I choke on a breath and open my eyes.
The left eye sees the room in harsh, sterile focus. The right sees nothing coherent. Smeared light and shadow, a haze of brightness blooming at the edges.
I blink and the bloom resolves. First into shape, then into intent.
There, in the far corner of the procedural room, stands the same figure Talon described. Its scythe glows with that same strange, erasing light.
I breathe in.
Breathe out.
My perception is binocular, stronger on the side where I induced vulnerability. The ischemia did exactly what I predicted. The retina took the damage and in doing so became a better receiver. Somehow.
“I see it,” I croak.
Cassian’s face swims into view above me, lines of tension carved into his brow. “Yeah?”
He follows my gaze to the corner. “It looks like a person.”
“It does,” he replies.
On the table beside me, Talon shifts and turns his head with effort, one eye cloudy, the other sharp. “Thank fuck you’re alright, man,” he whispers. “That thing’s been staring at you the whole time. I tried talking to it but it doesn’t want to talk.”
“They never do,” Cassian says.
I push past the pain in my chest and the throbbing behind my eye and let the most important conclusion lock into place once more.
Grim Reapers exist.
I let my head fall back against the table and stare at the ceiling, feeling my worldview rearrange itself piece by piece.
“This changes everything,” I mutter.
I close my left eye for a moment and test the right.
The vision through it is damaged but functional, distorted contrast, slight central blur, shapes ringed with halos.
The Reaper, however, remains in perfect, razor-edged focus.
I open my left eye again and the image softens slightly, like adding a layer of mist in front of a floodlight.
Interesting.
I turn to Talon. “Any headache?”
“Yeah,” he croaks. “Somewhere between a hangover and getting hit by a car. You?”
“Same. But if it were painless I’d be more worried about the extent of the damage.”
He stares at me, then laughs weakly. “You’re fucked up, Doc.”
“Maybe. But so are you.”
The Reaper doesn’t move, doesn’t flicker, doesn’t react, doesn’t even appear to breathe. It’s simply present, like a piece of equipment that was turned on so long ago nobody remembers when it was installed.
I study it openly now, clinical curiosity overriding whatever instinct might tell me to look away. “Does it ever approach?”
Cassian shakes his head. “Not unless someone dies. Then it comes to the bed, or the floor, or wherever they are. Reaches through them, takes something, and then it’s gone.”
“Like a phlebotomist for souls,” I murmur.
Talon grimaces. “Jesus. Are you okay? Slow down man.”
I ignore him.
“Have either of you seen more than one at a time?”
“No,” Cassian says. “They seem to be bound by territory. That’s probably why this one came for both of you.”
“Fascinating,” I whisper.
It’s looking in our direction, yes, but not at us. Not at Talon, not at Cassian. Through us and past us, as if we’re furniture between it and something far more important.
I wonder why it’s still here.
I push myself upright and the table creaks beneath me. The movement sends a pulse of pain through my chest and a spike of molten light behind my right eye. I ride it out, keeping my breathing even.
“Can it hear us?” I ask, more to Cassian than the entity itself. Then, because I need to know, I address it directly. “Why are you still here?”
No reaction. No startle, no human gesture of acknowledgement. Its posture is identical to the moment I first saw it, patient and fixed, as if the entire world has been reduced to a single invisible countdown only it can see.
I step off the table with my muscles protesting as gravity reasserts itself. My legs feel unsteady but they hold, and I take a few slow steps toward the corner, toward the thing that refuses to be anything more than a function.
“How the hell do you have the strength to get up?” I hear Talon ask behind me.
I don’t answer him. My attention is locked on the figure in the corner and I close the distance until I’m near enough to study it properly.
“Can you see me?” I ask it. “Do you know who I am?”
Nothing.
I stop an arm’s length away. Up close, the light from the scythe is even stranger.
It doesn’t so much shine as cancel out the darkness around it, erasing shadow without fully illuminating anything, while its clothes absorb the surrounding light instead of reflecting it.
The face underneath belongs to a middle-aged woman with soft features and pale blonde hair, but there’s nothing alive behind the eyes.
“Why are you still here?” I ask quietly. “No one is dying in this room.”
For the first time, something changes.
The Reaper’s attention shifts and it turns its head toward the adjacent wall. One step toward the plaster, then another, and then it simply passes through. Coat, scythe, hood, light. All of it slides into the wall as if the barrier doesn’t exist.
My heart rate spikes despite my best efforts.
“Oh,” I say, already moving. “I wonder where it’s going.”
I cross the room in three strides and press my palm flat against the smooth plaster where it disappeared. Behind me, I hear Cassian push off the wall.
“They only move when someone’s about to die,” he says calmly. “At least that’s my theory.”
For a moment none of us move.
Then it clicks.
“Come on,” I say, already heading for the door. “We follow it.”
Cassian unlocks the door without argument. Talon tries to sit up.
“You stay,” Cassian tells him.
“Like hell I will,” Talon mutters.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed, nearly topples, and catches himself on the rail. He looks like he could vomit or pass out at any second, but the stubborn set of his mouth says there is no version of this where he lies there while death wanders through the building.
We step into the hallway.
At the far end, just past the bend where the research wing curves toward the older part of the clinic, a faint glow pulses once against the corner like moonlight catching metal in an otherwise dark room.
“There,” I say.
We move. Cassian takes the front this time and I follow at his back with one hand closed loosely around Talon’s elbow to keep him from drifting into the wall. He’s trembling under my grip but keeps pace.
As we round the corner the Reaper comes back into view, standing further down the hall now, half-faded against the doorway of another room. The placard on the door reads Experimental Suite 4.
“Huh,” I mutter.
“Let me guess,” Talon says weakly. “This is where your fun colleagues hang out?”
“Let’s find out. This wing listed four experimental suites and this one wasn’t in the official directory.”
Cassian makes a quiet, derisive sound.
“Let’s go.”
We follow the Grim Reaper inside.