Chapter Thirty #2
Please, I whispered to a woman with the kind eyes who took my hands and made all the pain go away. Please.
All I ever wanted was for my suffering to end. To have another chance. But when I died and became this, I thought I was being punished. An afterlife of delivering death. Collecting souls and depositing them somewhere else.
I’ve been fighting against it, not wanting to become the villain of the story.
But death doesn’t have to be the end. It doesn’t even have to be the middle.
For Frank, it’s a beach with craggy rocks and inquisitive, bossy seagulls.
Wet sand beneath his feet. A little girl digging for shells and a woman with hair like strawberries laughing over the surf.
For me, it’s a man with ocean eyes. Tattoos on his skin and his mouth shaped around my name.
I wouldn’t have found him if I wasn’t this.
“Ah.” Across from me, Gideon’s gaze is fixed right on me. His mouth splits into a wild grin. “You understand now, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “I do.”
I lived a lonely life. If I had moved on in death, I would have lived a lonely afterlife, too.
Instead, I became a Reaper and experienced hundreds of tiny miracles.
All sorts of people, from all sorts of places.
Fragments that when you stitch them together become something else entirely.
Something whole. Something beautiful. I’ve seen things I could have only imagined from my life before.
And I—I was waiting, I think. To come here. To this place. To him.
I tip my face back so I can look at Gabriel, stone-faced and silent. So, so strong. I stare up at him, and I see it. Clear as day.
His eyes find mine.
“Darcy,” he whispers, and I smile.
I asked the tree for something different, and I got it.
That old, curved door in the center of my chest blows open, star-flecked magic pouring out.
I’ve always thought it was dark as ash, but it’s not.
It’s a million shades of purple and blue, swirling together.
The night is never truly dark, is it? It’s littered with stars.
Comets. Entire universes spinning wild and unchecked.
I flex my fingers, feeling the power there. It isn’t darkness at all. It’s hope. It’s rest.
It’s love.
“I’ll take you,” I tell Frank. Gabriel’s fingers flex at my hip. I trail my touch along his forearm, and he rattles out a breath. “I’ll be with you at the end.”
It’s the least I can do.
Gideon claps his hands together. The leaves tremble on the trees. “Good. Great. Finally. I’ll escort you both to Maverick.” He raises a pointed eyebrow. “We wouldn’t want any more incidents along the way.”
I’m not exactly in a position to disagree after spending the last month evading every single protocol the department has. I dip my chin in agreement just as Gabriel’s inked fingers curl around my wrist. He turns me so I face him, and my magic whips into a frenzy.
Gold flashes in his eyes. “I’m so fucking mad at you.”
I smile, even as tears flood my eyes. “Figured you might be.”
He shakes his head, then glances over my shoulder at Frank. Frank, who is waiting so patiently with his wife’s favorite flowers clutched in his weathered hands.
“You’ll be with him?” he asks.
I nod. “I’m going to take him to his girls.”
“All right,” Gabriel agrees, his voice so achingly soft that my tears spill over.
He sees them shining on my cheeks and his brows pull together.
“Shh, no. Don’t do that, sweetheart.” He tries to catch them with his fingers, then gives up and cups my face with his hands instead, thumbs rubbing across my cheeks. “Everything is going to be okay.”
“I really thought I’d have to fight with you more about this,” I sob out.
Gabriel smiles. A tremulous, tender thing. “Yeah, well. I think I’m tired of arguing with you.”
“Knew I’d—” I hiccup. “Knew I’d wear you down eventually.”
Gabriel guides my chin up with his thumb. “Yeah,” he whispers. “You did.”
And then he kisses me. With his thumb on my chin and his other hand in my hair in a graveyard with my magic spinning wild between us. He kisses me like it’s the very first time and I kiss him like it’s the last, clinging to him with both of my hands fisted in his shirt.
“This isn’t the end,” he whispers against the curve of my cheek, nose nudging mine. “You come back to me, Darcy.”
My magic pulls from the shadows of the tombstones, the stars in the sky, the deep reservoir of power that lies within Gabriel. Now that I’ve let go of the shackles I’ve kept chained around it, it rumbles and rolls. Building, building, building. “I don’t know if I can.”
“You come back to me,” he says again. “I don’t care how many centuries it takes. You come back, Darcy.”
I can’t bear to tell him a lie, so I kiss him instead.
I kiss him, and I give him all the things I wish I were brave enough to voice aloud.
My gratitude, my frustration, my adoration, and my—my love.
Because that’s what this brilliant, terrible thing is that glows in the middle of my chest. I love him and I think—I think I was always supposed to.
I wrench myself away, turning my back to him before I can see the look on his face.
Tater Tot barks behind me, and I shake my head, biting the inside of my cheek to keep a sob from falling out.
“No,” I tell him. “Stay here.”
He whines, but he does as I say. The best dog, until the very end.
My eyes fill with fresh tears as I grab my abandoned scythe. I reach for Frank with my other hand, then tap the base of my curved blade twice against the muddied earth.
“Take care of each other,” I tell them.
The cemetery falls away around us.
I don’t look back.