Chapter 31
“Where are you taking me?” I ask as Talon pulls me out of the garden and onto the street in front of the house. My legs are jelly and pure bliss courses through my veins. The moment I step outside, though, and get a chance to look around, I sober up a notch.
“Holy shit,” I mutter as we stop and Nathaniel and Cassian catch up to us.
Beyond my grandmother’s house and the few adjacent ones, there is nothing. A clean, total absence, like the rest of the world hasn’t been written yet. It stretches in every direction under this perfect blue sky.
Talon waits for me to take it in before pulling me forward again.
“Where are we going?”
“There’s more to this place than just the house,” he says. “This is ours, Little Grim. All of it. Everything you see, including all that white nothing, is ours to build on. Whatever you want.”
“Wow…”
“But that’s not the end of it,” he says.
We reach the edge of the street where the pavement stops and the white begins.
Set into the ground here, as if they’ve always been there, are stairs made of black stone going down.
The light follows them a short way before it thickens and darkens, the way it does in a deep basement.
Cassian and Nathaniel join us at the top.
“The Grim Reapers who stayed,” Cassian says. “The ones who were murdered, who didn’t move on, who spent God knows how long waiting for their killers to die so they could have their moment. They don’t have to wait anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Things changed,” Nathaniel adds.
Talon takes the first step down.
“You remember what Death told you?” he says, turning to look at me. “Some time ago now. That it wasn’t Mark’s time when you wanted to kill him.”
How could I forget?
“I remember,” I say.
“Come down with us, Skye,” Nathaniel murmurs.
I follow Talon onto the stairs. The descent doesn’t quite follow logic.
At the top, where the white world ends and the black stone begins, the light is still summer-warm, still carrying the smell of the garden above.
But with each step down it shifts. Gold turns to amber to something low and sourceless.
“After Rhea killed the married couple in the hospital basement, Mark thought he would be next. We had other things to deal with. We didn’t see what was happening to him.”
“He had a heart attack,” Cassian says. “Out of fear.”
We reach the bottom. The light here is a deep violet. We step out into a large, dark room, the floor the same black stone as the stairs, worn smooth. In the center of it, in a chair that is neither throne nor interrogation seat but somehow suggests both, sits a man.
Mark.
His hands are in his lap. His face is turned down. He hasn’t noticed us yet.
I stop walking.
“Why is he here?” I ask.
For a moment I feel a flash of fear. Why would this man follow me into the afterlife, like some goddamn cockroach that can’t leave me alone? But then I find Nathaniel’s eyes.
“Don’t worry. This isn’t what you think,” he says.
“He’s here because of what we are,” Cassian explains. “The three of us will keep punishing murderers.”
I still don’t understand.
“Whenever a murderer dies from now on, they will appear in this room, bound and completely powerless. It will be up to us to decide on a just punishment.”
The word punishment echoes off the black stone walls and disappears into the dark above.
Mark still hasn’t looked up.
“He’s the first,” Talon says. “The very first to be judged under the new system. And because he is yours—“ he pauses, choosing the word carefully, ”—because of what he did to you specifically, the choice of punishment belongs to you.”
I look at him. “To me?”
“To you,” Nathaniel confirms. “Whatever you want, Skye. We have the means to make it happen.”
I turn back to Mark.
I have long given up on revenge.
Besides, I’m not sure what justice even is anymore.
That was always the problem with Mark. It was not that he couldn’t feel pain, but that his pain and my pain would never be the same thing.
I could hurt him every way available to me and he would experience it as injustice.
As something being done to him. He would turn it into a story where he was the wronged party, because that is what he has always done.
The way he understands the world leaves no room for the possibility that he could have been the one who caused damage first.
But perhaps this place is different. Perhaps here, true eye for an eye can exist.
“Anything?” I ask, looking at Nathaniel.
“Anything,” he confirms.
“Even supernatural stuff?”
“Yes.”
It comes to me not as a flash but as something that surfaces slowly. A very right answer from nowhere.
“I want him to be me,” I say.
The room is quiet.
“I want him to step into my life from the beginning and live it out.” I pause. “Every single day of it. Not knowing how it ends. And I want him to wake up from it at the exact moment he kills me.”
Nathaniel steps forward until he is standing beside me and slightly ahead.
“We can do that.”
It is fair because he never once considered what my life felt like from the inside.
He clipped everything in me that felt alive and called it love.
Then he brought dangerous men into my home for the sake of his own deals, and when one of them came for me, when I had to kill to survive, Mark looked at what I’d done and saw a problem to solve.
Not a wife who had been terrified. A loose end.
He put his hands around my throat and finished it himself.
So yes. Let him live it. Let him feel the smallness he built around me, day after day, year after year. Let him feel the moment that man came for me and understand what it took to survive it. And let him wake up at the exact moment he decides I am worth less than his own convenience.
Let him be me, just once.
Talon is already moving toward the chair.
Talon is already moving toward the chair. I watch him place one hand on Mark’s shoulder and the moment Mark’s eyes go distant.
I watch his face change.
It takes less time than I expected. It is both more and less satisfying than anything I imagined.
I turn away before it’s finished.
Nathaniel’s hand finds the back of my neck. He presses a kiss to my shoulder.
“Okay?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say, and I mean it.
I couldn’t feel better.
As for the four of us, I fully intend to make our eternity a happily ever after.
Death never tasted so sweet. The afterlife will be sweeter still.