Chapter 30
“What a story that was…” A voice echoes all around me. “I believe I shall applaud you.”
It takes me a moment to understand where I am and what is happening.
Only after a while do I recognise who’s talking to me.
Death.
Here he is again.
Why? I don’t know. I don’t even want to know at this point. My wilful death was supposed to be the end. That’s it.
Can’t I even have that?
“Please don’t,” I say, and if I could, I would sigh. Preferably throw something at him. Do anything that would give him the hint that I don’t want him here.
“I know you don’t want me here,” he replies. He sounds almost surprised by it, which is rich, considering.
“I just died.”
“Yes.” A beat. “You did that very thoroughly, I thought. I’ve seen a great many deaths. That one had real commitment.”
I don’t answer. There’s a quality to this place—the void—that makes silence feel more right than anywhere else. I want to sink into it. I want to stay there for a very long time and not talk to anyone, which I think is a reasonable thing to want, given my situation.
“You can rest soon,” Death says. “I only want a moment.”
“You always only want a moment.”
“And yet here we are again.” The void shifts slightly around the sound of him. Not warmer, exactly, but less like a verdict. He’s not his punishing self today. Something about that makes me more wary, not less. “You knew this conversation was coming, Skye Dilano.”
“I was hoping you’d make an exception.”
“For you specifically?”
“I did just end several dozen wraiths and myself in one go. That feels like it warrants some professional courtesy.”
A pause, longer than the others.
“Professional courtesy,” he repeats. “What a creature you are.”
“Were,” I say.
“Mm.”
The silence stretches. I have never liked Death.
But I have come to understand him, which is a different thing entirely, and he seems to know that too.
Before, he took things from me. Lectured me.
Sent me back bruised and diminished and without recourse.
Today he is quieter than that. More careful.
I wonder if that’s what mutual understanding entails in his own fashion.
“So,” he says eventually.
“No.”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“It couldn’t be good.”
“…I was going to ask how you were feeling. As a courtesy.”
“I’m dead. I feel dead.” I pause. “If you have something to say, say it and then let me rest.”
“You’re very impatient for someone with nowhere to be.”
“I have everywhere to be. That’s the whole point. Whatever comes after this, I’ve earned it and I want it.”
He doesn’t answer immediately. When he does, his voice carries that particular quality it has when he’s about to say something I won’t be able to unhear.
“Do you have any regrets?”
“How do you think?”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Skye.”
Just my name. The way he says it lands like a hand on the shoulder.
Fine. If he wants to know that badly.
I think about Mark. I think about every version of justice I reached for and missed. I think about the moment Death himself told me his time hadn’t come, that someone else would take his soul, that I was forbidden, and how I carried that alongside everything else for the entire length of a war.
There’s a lot to regret here, isn’t it?
What a shitty question to ask, by the way.
“In the end, I did nothing about Mark,” I say.
My voice comes out flat and tired and certain.
“Whatever happened after, I still believe he didn’t get what he deserved.
Maybe I wouldn’t want to kill him now. But it still seems unfair.
” A beat. “And I won’t get my happy ending, which sucks balls.
Those are my regrets. Are you satisfied? ”
Death is quiet for a moment.
“No,” he says. “Not quite.”
“Then what—“
“You have served your purpose,” he says. “More than that. You exceeded it. I told you once that you would earn your rest. I am a being of my word, Skye Dilano, whatever else you think of me.”
I go still. Or whatever passes for still here.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to.” The void begins to shift around me, not collapsing inward this time but loosening, like a knot being undone. “Consider it a reward. Or balance, if you will. Whatever makes death easier to accept.”
“What is it?”
But he doesn’t answer.
“You’ll know,” he says, “when you get there.”
The void lets me go.
And I arrive somewhere that smells like summer.
The warmth hits me before anything else. Real warmth, so I know it can’t be anything false. Then the light, which is too gold and too generous to be anything but memory. Then the smell.
It’s all beautiful and welcoming and kind.
More than that, it’s a place I know.
My grandmother’s house.
I stand at the gate and can’t move for a moment.
The colors are wrong. Or rather, they’re right, more right than anything I’ve seen in longer than I can measure.
The blue of the sky is the blue I remember from when I was very small.
So vivid and pastel and almost cartoonish.
The garden is overgrown in exactly the way it always was, before Mark and Jessica took over.
And in the back, where it always stood, the weeping willow.
Its branches hang all the way down to the grass, swaying gently, trailing over the ground.
I open the gate and walk toward it slowly.
If this is Death’s idea of a peaceful rest, then you know what? I’ll take it.
I sit down beneath the willow and let the branches close around me. Then I close my eyes and breathe in.
My grandmother used to sit exactly here. I remember the shape of her in this spot. She would close her eyes too, and I never understood it then, but I definitely understand now.
She was just being grateful for a moment of stillness.
Bullshit gets to people so damn easily. It’s nice to take a moment and think it away.
I let myself do that, too.
I don’t know how long I sit like that but—
Someone sits down beside me.
My heart stops, then starts again, very, very fast. Something in my body knows before the rest of me does. Some animal part that has spent a long time learning a specific gravity, the way the air changes when certain people enter it.
I open my eyes.
Cassian is the first thing I see.
Then Nathaniel, cross-legged on my other side, watching me with that careful stillness of his.
Then Talon, standing just beyond the willow’s curtain of branches,
Oh my god.
I stare at them.
They look… wrong, is my first thought, and then immediately: no. Not wrong. Different. More. Like someone took everything they already were and turned up the volume.
They are wearing their combat gear.
In this golden, impossible garden, with the willow trailing around us and the flowers doing whatever flowers do in a place like this, they are standing there in full gear, worn and familiar, exactly as they were on that hillside.
“Hi,” Cassian says.
The word comes out of him like he’s been saving it for minutes.
“You’re not real,” I say.
“Skye—“
“Death sent you. He felt guilty about the whole Mark thing and sent me a very convincing vision, and I appreciate it, I do, but—“
Nathaniel reaches over and takes my hand.
I stop talking.
His hand is warm. So damn warm.
“We’re real,” he says quietly.
I look at him. Then at Cassian. Then past them both at Talon, who has come through the willow branches and is standing close enough that I could reach out and touch him.
“That’s not possible,” I say. “I watched you… I left you on that hillside. You were—“
“Alive,” Talon says. “Yes, we were alive. But only partially.”
I don’t understand.
Could this really be real? No. They were supposed to stay on earth and live their lives and be happy. How could this happen? How could they be dead? Was it the wraiths? Death?
How did they die?
“After you disappeared,” Cassian says before I can spiral any further, “the wraiths changed direction. They left us. But then Death appeared in their stead.”
“He appeared,” I echo.
I swear, if that fucker hurt them, I’m going to throw this entire paradise back in his metaphysical face. And then some.
“Physically. Or whatever passes for physical with him.” Nathaniel’s mouth curves slightly. “He said we had a choice.”
“He said,” Talon continues, “that the sight had been costing us something we didn’t know about. That we’d been half dead for a long time.”
I look between them. “Half dead.”
“The sight lets you see what the living aren’t meant to see,” Cassian says. “Apparently that has a price. It pulls you toward the other side, slowly, over years. We just didn’t know it was happening. It’s also why we could touch you so early on.”
I’m speechless. Somewhere above, a bird crosses the sky.
“So Death offered you…” I try.
“The rest of the way,” Nathaniel says simply. “To cross over. To be here.” He squeezes my hand once. “With you.”
I should say something sensible. I should ask questions. I should verify and interrogate and hold this at arm’s length until it makes logical sense.
Instead I just sit there, feeling his hand in mine.
“Was it… painless?” I ask finally.
“Pretty much.”
Wow. Okay. That’s… great.
“And you wanted it?”
“Of course.” Talon scoffs. “Is that even a question?”
I mean, I don’t know. They’ve told me they loved me, many times, but to actually die for me…?
“What about your work?” I ask, perhaps stupidly. “The creed. The souls that need help.”
“Well…” Cassian starts. He glances at the other two, something passing between them. “What you did, it wasn’t just ending the wraiths.”
“You collapsed the afterlife,” Talon says. “Or rather, restructured it. What you did was significant enough that the whole system had to account for it.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
The three of them exchange a look.
“We’ll explain,” Cassian says. “Later.”
The way he says it settles low in my stomach.
I swallow. “Later?”
Talon huffs a quiet laugh behind me, and when I turn, he’s closer, close enough that I can see the shift in his pupils and the way his mouth parts.
“Yeah,” he says. “Because right now?” His gaze drags down my body. “I think you should give us a welcome kiss, don’t you think?”
My breath catches.
I definitely do want to give them a welcome kiss.
Nathaniel’s fingers tighten around mine.
Cassian leans in on my other side.
“We said we would follow you into death,” he murmurs. “And that’s exactly what we did.”
My body reacts before my brain catches up. Heat blooms low and sharp and immediate. It coils tight, like I’m not dead at all.
Talon steps fully under the willow, branches brushing his shoulders as he closes the distance. He crouches in front of me.
“We will be together forever now, Little Grim. This whole place? It’s ours for eternity.”
I hear it, but I don’t. It sounds too beautiful to be true.
Cassian’s hand slides to my jaw, fingers curling as he tilts my face toward him.
“Feel real to you?” he asks.
I shake my head before I can stop myself.
“No matter. You’ll feel it soon enough.”
And then he kisses me. His tongue pushes in, demanding, and I open for him with a broken sound I don’t recognize as my own.
Nathaniel doesn’t let go of my hand. Instead, he shifts closer, his other hand sliding up my arm until his fingers curl at the back of my neck.
“You did amazing back there,” he murmurs against my skin. “We’re so proud of you.”
Talon watches us for half a second longer before he moves in too. His hand grips my thigh, dragging me forward just enough to unbalance me between them.
Cassian breaks the kiss only to drag his mouth down my jaw.
“Good thing you’ll never have to do anything like that again,” he mutters against my skin.
Nathaniel’s lips find the other side of my neck. His tongue traces a slow line upward, and I shiver violently between them.
Cassian’s hand slides down my body, over my ribs, my waist, lower—
straight between my thighs.
I gasp, my back arching instantly as his fingers press against me.
“Wet,” he says, almost surprised. Then darker: “Already fucking wet.”
Heat floods my face, but there’s no space for embarrassment. Not with Nathaniel’s mouth on my throat, not with Talon’s hand sliding higher up my thigh, not with Cassian’s fingers pressing harder, rubbing slow deliberate circles through the thin fabric between us.
“Tell me this isn’t real,” Talon murmurs, leaning in, his lips brushing mine but not quite kissing. “Go on.”
I can’t.
Cassian’s fingers slip inside.
I break.
A sharp, helpless sound tears out of me as his fingers push into me, slick and easy, like he belongs there.
“All this for eternity,” he breathes. “You will never run away from us again.”
Nathaniel’s hand tightens in my hair, tilting my head back as he watches Cassian’s hand disappear between my legs.
“Hear that?” he asks quietly.
Talon finally kisses me, and it’s nothing like Cassian. It’s teasing at first, slow, dragging, his tongue tracing my lower lip before pushing in, deep and messy and greedy.
Cassian curls his fingers.
My whole body jerks.
“Fuck—“ I choke into Talon’s mouth.
“That’s it,” Cassian growls, pumping his fingers deeper, harder. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”
Nathaniel pulls back just enough to look at me.
“Can you take more?” he asks softly.
I don’t even understand the question before Talon’s hand slides between us, pushing Cassian’s wrist just enough to make space—
and then Talon’s fingers join his.
Two hands. It should hurt, but it doesn’t. Maybe pain isn’t possible here, or maybe pleasure simply wins. Either way, I love it.
I cry out, my head falling back against Nathaniel’s shoulder as they fuck me with their fingers, slow at first, then faster. They’re pushing, stretching, and making me feel every inch of them.
“Look at you,” Talon breathes against my mouth. “Taking us so fucking well.”
Cassian’s teeth scrape my throat. “You missed this?”
“Yes,” I gasp, the answer torn out of me before I can think. “Yes—fuck—“
If I could form coherent words, I’d tell them how scared I was I’d never feel them like this again. How lonely it felt to lie on my grave and accept I’d never see them again. How much I want to cry right now. How selfishly happy I am that they’re dead with me.
How much I love them.
Nathaniel exhales.
“We missed this too,” he says.
And then his hand slides down too.
Three.
I lose it.
My body goes tight, shaking, my breath shattering into fragments as they fill me, touch me, take me apart right there under the willow tree, golden light flickering through the branches.
My hands clutch at them blindly, my whole body burning, unraveling, caught between them with nowhere to go and no desire to escape.
And somewhere in the heat and the pressure and the way they’re touching me like they never mean to let go—
I understand.
This is real.
For the first time, nothing threatens to break this apart.
It is mine. Forever.