Chapter 29
For a moment, time seems to slow down.
We stand together, my men and I, shoulder to shoulder, facing dozens of wraiths that hover in the air like vast shadow-things sent to wipe us from the earth.
Blood covers us, still dripping from the bodies of the murdered couple.
Lila lies crumpled in the corner and Mark sits in silence, oblivious to the monstrosities only we can see.
This was meant to be my fight.
From the very beginning, Death reached for me. He placed me here, exactly like this. Not Cassian. Not Talon. Not Nathaniel. Not any other Grim or person.
Me.
And now he’s waiting for me to do his bidding.
Flashes of a life I almost had blink through my mind.
It would have been beautiful. To leave all of this behind and go somewhere safe and different, somewhere none of it could follow us.
Nathaniel might have opened a practice. Cassian might have taught self-defence.
Talon might have spent his days elbow-deep in engines, happy with the honest simplicity of fixing things.
And I could have finally stopped tracking the passage of time and just let it move.
The way I never have. Not once in my life.
But some of us only get moments. I am grateful for all that were given to me, and selfishly, all I still ask for is just one more.
Just one moment to say goodbye.
“Nathaniel, grab me!”
My hands find Talon and Cassian. I trust Nathaniel to be the fastest of us when it matters. He has always had the shortest distance between thought and action, and he doesn’t fail me now. His hand closes around me before any of the wraiths can reach us.
I squeeze my eyes shut and think of somewhere far away. Somewhere without the weight of everything we’ve been through.
When I open my eyes, we’re standing on a hillside. The sky is flat and pale. Fog sits low across the slope below us, thick enough that I can’t see where the hill ends.
The guys are catching their breath, one by one.
Cassian is the first to spin around, check that I’m safe, and take in where we are.
“Where are we?” he asks.
I almost smile. He still has hope. He wants an answer so he can start preparing for the next fight, as if there’s a way to get ahead of this one.
There isn’t.
Five minutes, maybe ten, before the wraiths find us here.
“I don’t know,” I say.
My voice comes out too calm, and I watch all three of them go still at the sound of it.
“Skye.” Talon says it carefully. “We’re going to figure this out.”
I shake my head.
“I know this looks hopeless.” Nathaniel steps closer. “But it isn’t. There are things we haven’t tried. Objects, spells — there has to be something—“
“We don’t have the time,” I say, as gently as I can.
It’s cold here. The grass under our feet is short and coarse and wet, gone almost brown in patches. The whole world is shades of grey.
But they are not grey. Not even a little.
All three of them, so vivid against it, and each one a stronger presence than the last, as if they’d made some private bet to outshine each other and kept it going ever since.
Cassian crosses to me. His hands come up to my shoulders. Then, as if he’s afraid that will be too much, he tries to take my face in them instead. He can’t seem to decide, and in the end he settles for a single finger under my chin, tipping my face up until I’m looking at him.
I let him do all of it.
“Skye,” he breathes. “Come on.”
“I need to fight them,” I say. “It has to be me.”
His jaw tightens. His finger is still under my chin and he doesn’t move it.
“No,” he says. Just that.
“Cassian—“
“No.” He says it again, quieter this time, which is worse.
I reach up and take his hand from my chin. I don’t let go of it.
“I want to tell you something. That’s why I brought us here,” I say slowly. “I know we didn’t start well. You three were a complete nightmare, honestly.” I smile, turning to Talon and Nathaniel. None of them smiles back. “But being with you was the happiest I’ve ever been. In my entire existence.”
“Stop.” Talon’s voice comes out rough. “Why are you talking like this?”
“You know why.” I guide Cassian’s hand gently down. “Once I do this, I die.”
“Then don’t do it!”
“I want to say goodbye.”
Cassian makes a sound I’ve never heard from him. Like something in him just gave way.
“How about you let me die in your place?” he says. “Tell me how and I’ll do it instead. Just tell me how.”
Behind him, Nathaniel takes a half-step forward. Talon puts a hand on his arm. Nathaniel looks like staying still might break something in him. But he stays.
I’ve never been loved like this. I didn’t know such love existed before them.
“You became everything,” I say. “I don’t care if it’s the wrong time to say it. All three of you became the whole thing for me.” My voice doesn’t shake. I don’t let it. “I hope we find each other again. In a better world than this one.”
Somewhere behind me, a roar splits the air. It rolls across the hillside and keeps going, swallowed by the fog below, and I feel it in my teeth.
My time is up.
“I love you,” I breathe, and I drop Cassian’s hand and take a step back. Just one. “You’ve got this. The three of you. You will be fine.”
Cassian’s face does something terrible. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out.
“Skye—“ Talon starts.
“You will,” I say. “I know you will.”
“Skye!” Nathaniel lunges forward. Talon’s not there to stop him this time, and he throws his whole body toward me as if moving fast enough could change what’s already been decided.
He would.
I know it in the same way I know my own name.
He’d follow me into the ether. He’d walk into nothing without a second thought.
All of them would.
And I would do the same for them. I am doing the same for them.
That’s the whole point.
So I don’t allow myself any hesitation. I don’t let myself look at their faces again. I blink away before any of them can reach me.
I close my eyes, throw myself into the void, and come out on the other side.
The first thing I see is my grave.
The name Skye Dilano stares back at me from cold stone, and for a moment I just stand there, reading it. My own name, waiting for me.
I should find it frightening, I suppose, but I don’t. There’s something almost peaceful about this. There will be no more running, no more calculating the odds on borrowed time.
I simply reached the end of a very long road, and I’m about to find a place to finally lie down.
So that’s what I do.
I sit on the stone first, then let myself lean back until I’m flat against it.
The cold seeps through my clothes immediately, spreading up my spine.
The sky above is the same pale nothing as it was on the hillside.
I stare up at it and breathe, and try not to think about Nathaniel’s face as I disappeared.
The wraiths will change direction and leave them there. They will be safe. And knowing them, wherever that hillside was, they’ll find their way back home. Or perhaps they’ll make a new one. Who knows.
Minutes pass before I hear the roar again. This time, I welcome it.
I turn my head toward the sound and see the first wraith at the edge of the woods. Then another. Then I stop counting. In an instant they are everywhere.
I wait, defenceless, until they are all within arm’s reach of me, close enough that I can almost feel their fangs against my skin. Only then do I reach down into myself, past the layers I keep so carefully managed, to all the pain I’ve always carried, and bring it out.
I touch it.
I think of Mark. Of every version of myself he made smaller.
I think of Cassian saying no in that quiet voice of his.
I think of Nathaniel’s face.
I think of Talon’s hand on Nathaniel’s arm, holding him back, and how much that cost him.
I think of how glad I am that I got to know what real love feels like.
All of it mixed together, the pain, the hate, the love, I feel all of it. And then, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world, I let it go.
The light bursts out of me so fast and so total that one moment it isn’t there, and the next it is everywhere. White and absolute, without edge or source. It fills the grey world from ground to sky and takes me with it.
As it does to me, so it does to the wraiths. One by one and then all at once, we are unmade by my power.
I watch it happen from somewhere already growing very far away.
The last thing I feel is the cold of the stone.
The last thing I think is that it was all worth it.
Every bit of it. The whole long, difficult, beautiful, terrible road.
Worth it.
And then I let myself become nothing, once and for all.