Chapter 26
“Open your eyes,” Talon tells me.
I do as he says and find myself standing at the hospital exit, right in front of the automatic doors. The glass gives me a faint reflection of my gown and the tiny stars scattered across the fabric, but I barely take it in. None of that matters. What matters is what waits beyond the doors.
Outside in the night, a path of candles stretches out before me. Hundreds of them glow low and gold against the darkness, their flames trembling in the breeze. The line of light curves gently away from the hospital entrance and trails toward the forest.
“Talon,” I whisper. “What the hell did the three of you do?”
The sight overwhelms me, and for a moment I am almost afraid to step outside. I cannot imagine what waits for me at the end of that glowing trail.
“A little something,” he replies, cocky as ever.
The tone of his voice tells me it is anything but little.
Whatever he and the others prepared, he is proud of it, and it shows in the way he stands beside me.
I was gone for nearly the entire day, wandering alone at the forest’s edge and waiting for the Grims. No wonder they had to bring Hailey and Lila into their scheme just to keep me from noticing what they were doing.
“Shall we?” he asks as he looks down at me.
His milky eye and the unreal color of his hair make him look like something conjured for Halloween, a creature that slipped through the cracks for one night only. Except it isn’t Halloween, and he isn’t a demon, and I have no right to feel the chills skating over my skin.
Whatever this is, it’s meant for me.
I nod and let Talon guide me through the doors and out into the cold night.
The temperature doesn’t bother me. It glides over my skin in a way that feels almost familiar, and I fall into it without thinking.
Talon’s hand is the opposite, burning hotter with every step, just like on the bus when I touched him in my vision.
He felt impossibly warm then, or maybe I was impossibly cold, finally brushing against the edge of my power.
The same sensation coils through me now.
We walk until we have rounded half the building, then move deeper into the shadows, toward the spot where I waited for Rhea and her girls. That is where I see Cassian and Nathaniel. They stand beside something on the ground, both in suits, watching us approach.
They look just as unreal as Talon.
For a moment, I have to keep my eyes on the grass.
If I look at them too long, I feel as if I might slip out of myself entirely.
The danger in their eyes seems heightened tonight.
The quality that usually makes Nathaniel look brooding and artistic now sharpens into something otherworldly, as if a lethal creature is wearing a human face.
Cassian’s broad shoulders and solid frame, mixed with the quiet confidence they all share, turns him into someone who should belong in a film rather than in front of me.
I can hardly process it.
Ever since I met them, I have had the quiet thought that we would never have crossed paths if I had stayed alive, that we belonged to different worlds and would never have existed in the same orbit. Now that thought returns with more weight, expanding until it fills every corner of my mind.
How did we end up here, the four of us standing in the same darkness?
How did I get so lucky?
“Skye,” Cassian murmurs, and I lift my head before I even realize I am moving.
He steps aside just enough for me to see what the three of them have been standing over. At first it looks like a strange shape made from stone and earth, uneven and rough, as if someone built it with nothing but their hands from the ground up.
It takes a second for my mind to catch up.
It’s a grave.
My grave.
The rocks rise in a careful slope, their edges fitted together, and the top is smoothed with a flat piece of dark slate propped upright like a headstone. There is an inscription carved into it.
HERE LIES SKYE DILANO
A BEAUTIFUL SOUL
NEVER FORGOTTEN
My breath folds in on itself. Something inside my chest pulls inward and expands at the same time, too many feelings striking all at once.
Cassian watches every flicker of emotion crossing my face as he steps closer.
Talon moves in behind me, his heat settling along my spine where his hand rests. Nathaniel smiles softly.
“Is this… for me?” I manage, and my voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“You never got a funeral,” Nathaniel says.
It is such a simple sentence. So small, almost gentle, and it hits harder than anything else.
I died a long time ago. I came back wrong, then came back again, and somewhere in the middle of all that I discovered a whole new side of mortality.
A whole new kind of living. The four of us have been learning it together, piece by piece, like we are building something out of the wreckage.
And yet, in the space of a heartbeat, I realize I always wanted this.
To be remembered, and to be cared for.
“You deserved one,” Cassian adds. “A real one. Not whatever lie your ex-husband would have spun.”
The mention of my husband should sting. It doesn’t anymore. I mean, who would have cared about that asshole in the presence of these three?
“We wanted you to have a place,” Nathaniel says. “Something that marks that you existed, and that you loved.”
Loved.
I did love.
I do love.
Talon leans down, his breath brushing my ear. “Go see it.”
He nudges me forward gently. When I reach the stones, I slide my hand over the slate. The surface is cold, but it warms under my touch. Or maybe I warm under it.
It’s nothing extra. Just stone and earth and a single plate set into the ground. And yet it might as well be everything.
“There will come a day when we leave this place,” Cassian says. “I don’t know how or when, and I don’t know what will become of us when we do. But we want to vow to you, Skye. We will never leave your side.”
I turn toward them.
“Never,” Nathaniel echoes. “Even if the whole world goes to shit, we’ll be right with you when the sky falls.”
“I hope you know that even if Death tries to tear us away from you, we won’t let him,” Talon adds. “We’ll find you, even at the furthest edges of the afterlife, if that’s where he takes you.”
My heart flutters.
“Come here, Skye,” Cassian says, extending an arm.
I take it, and from the corner of my eye I catch Talon turning away as he heads toward the hospital. He disappears for only a moment before returning with his portable analog music player. He sets it in the grass and starts a slow, sultry melody with no words at all.
“Thought we could use this,” he says, flashing a grin.
Cassian lifts my hand to his chest and presses it right over his heartbeat, steady and warm beneath my palm.
“Dance with me,” he murmurs.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more surprised.
“Dance with you?” I echo, blinking up at him. “You want to dance?”
He draws me in anyway, his hand settling at my waist like it belongs there. “I do dance on special occasions.”
A laugh slips out of me before I can stop it. “Wow, soldier boy. If you say so.”
He guides me like my body is already his, like it is only a matter of time before he unwraps it and takes it however he sees fit. He sways us smoothly, turning each step into an excuse to drag me closer until every movement rubs my body against his.
Nothing about it is accidental. He knows exactly what he is doing, and he wants me to know it too. My heart flutters with every step.
“You look absolutely beautiful,” he murmurs against my ear. “Completely delightful.”
My thighs press together instantly.
“Stop this,” I say, but there is no bite to it. “I don’t know what to do when you act like this.”
He leans down, brushing his lips along my jaw.
“Say thank you,” he murmurs.
His breath is hot, and the hand at my waist is even hotter.
When I whisper, “Thank you,” he hums with satisfaction and draws me closer until my nipples brush the hard wall of his chest. Then he guides me into a slow, lazy turn, letting my back glide against his front.
His hands slide to my hips, steadying me there, while his breath drags over my neck like he has all the time in the world.
“You feel that?” he murmurs, and I do. His cock is thick, already hard against me. “That’s what you do to me just by breathing.”
My knees threaten to buckle, and I can’t tell if it’s from the pressure of him or the way his voice wraps around the words like he’s tasting them.
Then Nathaniel steps into my line of sight and reaches for my hand.
“My turn,” he says softly, and just like that, he takes me from Cassian.
Cassian lets me go with obvious reluctance, his fingertips dragging off my hips in a scrape that pulls a shiver straight through me. Nathaniel draws me close and doesn’t wait for anything.
He kisses me immediately, claiming my mouth and making my pulse stutter. The cool metal of his piercing brushes me in that familiar way I’ve already memorized, and I fucking crave it so hard it makes me lightheaded. When he finally pulls back, the world tilts, dizzy in the best way.
“Aren’t you a bit too impatient?” I tease him.
“I can’t help it,” he replies. “You have that effect on me.”
He moves us in a slow circle, his thigh slipping between my legs. Every shift drags my pussy over the firm muscle there, and I catch on a sharp breath, trying to keep my voice steady through it.
“I meant to tell you something,” I gasp. “I love the type of bad that you are.”
It lands oddly, a little out of place. I’d had an entire speech ready. Something smoother, something that would lay him out in the exact light he deserves in my head. But the second I open my mouth, it all collapses, and this is what’s left in its place.
Still, it stops him for a beat.
“Oh, really?”
“Yes.”
He smiles. “Well then, that’s all that really matters to me.”
And that’s it.