Chapter Seven #2
“Is it? I thought Guardians were supposed to be of service to the mortals.”
Blue eyes hold mine. “What greater service is there than making sure they stay alive?”
“All of them? Forever?”
He shifts in his seat. “Guardians don’t know which ones will make a difference.” He pauses, weighing his words carefully. He rubs the heel of his hand over his chest, and my eyes go back to those jagged scars. “Best to play it safe,” he says, mostly to himself.
I try to imagine that. The intricate web of humanity and fate and everything that hangs in the balance. Remove one thread, and the whole thing unravels. What a weight that must be on his shoulders. To always be watching and waiting for the first domino to fall.
Luckily, we both seem to want the same thing. Even if he can’t see that just yet.
“Well,” I say calmly. “If you want to save this soul, you’ll help me cross things off my list.” I won’t be shut out of my own redemption arc.
I need to be the one to save this soul. I need to know that I’m capable of something that isn’t death.
“Every time an item is achieved to my satisfaction, I will share a detail of my vision.”
“No,” he says immediately.
“Fine.” I shrug. “Then we’ll part ways. We’ll see who gets there first.”
On the other side of the table, Gabriel fumes. He doesn’t want to help me, but he doesn’t want to lose a life even more. I’m forcing his hand, and he hates it.
“Let me see the list,” he finally says.
“I want your agreement first.”
“No.” He drops his milkshake on the table and crooks two fingers in a short, impatient gesture. “Let me see it.”
I hesitate, then slowly reach into the front pocket of my bag for the folded-up piece of paper that’s been there since the day I died.
I hold it in my fist, dragging my thumb over the well-worn edges.
No one has ever seen this list but me. I’ve scrawled out every silly wish.
Every misplaced hope. Every inconsequential thing I never got the chance to do.
“Darcy,” he snaps, impatient.
I hold on to it. “I don’t want you to make fun of me when you read it.”
A divot forms between his brows. “I won’t.”
“Pinky promise.”
He huffs and rolls his eyes. “I’m not going to—” I thrust my pinky in his face. He stares at it in derision. Then with all the enthusiasm of a man being led to the guillotine, he lifts his hand and curls his pinky around mine.
“Thank you.” Satisfied, I extend my paper across the table, then immediately busy myself with shredding my straw wrapper into a thousand tiny pieces. I can’t stand to watch him read it. It feels like he’s shoving a crowbar between my ribs and cracking me open.
Paper rustles, his chair creaks, and the silence is so thick I want to scream.
Finally, he snorts. “Bumper cars?”
I reach across the table and immediately snatch the list back. “You said you wouldn’t make fun of me.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t expecting to see bumper cars.” He smiles a little bit, bewildered, and it makes his face look impossibly younger. Softer. Like last night, when I was someone else and so was he. “Why the hell do you have bumper cars on your bucket list?”
“It’s not a bucket list if you’ve already kicked the bucket,” I grumble, carefully folding the paper back up and sliding it into my bag. Tater Tot nudges me with his wet nose in solidarity, and I give him a gentle pat.
“So, what? I take you to bumper cars, and you give me hints as to who is in danger? That’s your plan?”
More or less. I would have settled for him staying out of my way while I attempt to save a life, but that clearly isn’t going to happen. Gabriel seems like the type of man who likes to work for a solution. If this makes him trust me a bit more, so be it.
“It’s a win-win,” I say.
Gabriel is deep in thought over my proposition, squinting at me like he wants to split my skull open and pluck out all my secrets. “Is that why you kissed me in the alleyway? To cross an item off your little list?”
“You kissed me,” I point out, flustered. I was hoping the both of us could just pretend that never happened. “And that’s not on my list. Kissing, I mean.”
“Seems like an oversight,” he says, latching on to my discomfort like a greedy parasite. “To have something like bumper cars but no kisses.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t know if a mediocre kiss next to a trash can would have ranked.”
The smile vanishes from his face, and his hand flexes on his cup, crushing the flimsy cardboard. Strawberry milkshake starts to ooze out of his straw. “That kiss rocked your world.”
“Five out of ten,” I tell him, lying through my teeth. That kiss is the most I’ve felt in four decades.
“Is that why you were making all those little sounds?”
“Didn’t want you to feel bad about that erection you kept digging into my thigh.”
His eyes flash. “You’re a shit liar, Darcy.”
This entire conversation has been a variation of a lie, so. No. I think I’m pretty good at it, actually.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” I tell him.
He huffs a humorless laugh and turns to look down the street. The wind dances through his curls, and the sun highlights all the sharp angles of his face. He really is unbearably handsome.
“How old are you?” he asks, his eyes faraway.
“I’m twenty-seven.”
He shakes his head. “No. How long have you existed?” He gestures toward me with his milkshake. “When did you die?”
I swallow around the ash that fills my mouth. It’s still difficult for me to think of that day. “I died in 1918.”
Gabriel exhales a harsh sound. It sounds like an expletive, in a language I don’t understand. “Are you serious?”
“What?”
He collapses back in his chair, the metal protesting against his weight. “There’s no way you’re this naive.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve only done this for a handful of decades, and you think you know how to outsmart the system?
” He points at me with his man-gled milkshake.
“The department has existed for millennia, Darcy. There is no changing the script. You don’t get a do-over.
When they find out you’re deceiving them, they will find you, and they will punish you. ”
“You’re only saying that because you haven’t tried.”
His face hardens.
“Ask me how old I am,” he says quietly.
There’s a demand in his voice. Raw power that scrapes its way out of his throat and makes my bones vibrate.
I keep my mouth shut. Maybe it’s some vague sense of self-preservation making a rare appearance. At long last.
“Ask me,” he says again.
Beneath the table, Tater Tot eases his head onto his paws, watchful and still. The air around us sparks with Gabriel’s magic, a powerful force that rises like the tide. It feels inevitable. All-consuming.
“How old are you?” I manage, my voice no louder than a whisper.
Behind him, the shadow of great, powerful wings rises against the brick wall. They don’t explode from his back the way they did in the alleyway, but I feel the sense of them. The knowledge that they could, with a simple roll of his shoulders.
“I was there when they built the temples,” he says, his voice low and rumbling.
“When they brought their marble to the summit and carved their intentions into stone. I was there when men fell to their knees and begged the gods for salvation. But not even the gods could protect them from what was to come.”
His face is intense, his features severe like they’ve been carved from the very marble he speaks.
“The Mayans?” I breathe.
His face pinches. “What? No.”
“Mesopotamia?”
“No,” he says again. “I was—”
“Egypt, then.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s exhausted by me. I pick up my drink and take another sip. The shadows behind him fade.
“You said temples,” I point out. “I’m simply naming civilizations with temples.”
“Yeah, well, you’re naming the wrong ones.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “I was there when they—”
“Why are you talking like that? Why can’t you just say when you died like a normal person?”
Gabriel looks offended now. “Because I’m not a person, Darcy.
That’s exactly my point.”
“We were people once.”
“I know that. I’m trying to explain—”
“Tell the truth. You watched Gladiator once and now you think you need to talk like that.”
His mouth opens, then closes. “That movie is incredibly inaccurate, by the way. There was never any—”
I snicker. “I knew it.”