Chapter Thirty-Three
Darcy
“Hello and welcome to the Department of Hauntings and Spirits.” My jaw pops with a yawn. “How can I help you today?”
“Wow.” A familiar head of blond hair pops up on the other side of the glass. “I didn’t think you could become more boring, and yet here you are. Inspiring.”
Aelia gives me a toothy grin and slides her number under the small crack at the bottom of the window. I stare at her, stuck somewhere between disbelief and searing, startling affection.
It’s been twenty-eight days of agony in this tiny cubicle. Gideon says punishment wasn’t his intention, but it definitely feels like it. Working the customer service desk of the afterlife has been a lesson in slow-burn agony.
“Is this a figment of my imagination?” I ask. “Or are you real?”
“Real as a nightmare, baby.” She blows a bubble with her gum, then snaps it back into her mouth. She slides another small piece of paper in the tray with her ticket. “You’ve officially been summoned to the Head Reaper’s office.” Her eyes sparkle. “Your final judgment awaits.”
I don’t touch either paper. “Is it bad?”
Aelia lifts an eyebrow. “You mean worse than this place? I don’t see how that’s possible, considering it smells like someone microwaved fish.”
“Someone did microwave fish,” I reply. “Seth has microwaved fish in the break room every day for two weeks.”
I’m convinced Seth was placed here specifically because of his affinity for microwaved fish.
“Okay, well. What Gideon has for you can’t possibly be worse than that.” She nods toward the small waist-high door at the back of my cubicle. “Come on. I’m supposed to escort you over there.”
I stand and pull off my headset, tossing it on my desk with a clatter. Seth stares balefully at me from the other side of the partition wall.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I have to go.”
He sighs. “The good ones always do.”
I’m not so sure I can be categorized as a good one considering I’m a Reaper serving her mandatory sentence for defying the order and optics of the department on her way to meet her final judgment, but I’ll take the shred of kindness for what it is.
That’s what the past couple of weeks in customer service has turned me into. A shell of a being, scraping the very bottom of the barrel for any inkling of generosity.
I meet Aelia on the other side of the wall, and we hurry into the hallway.
“How bad has it been?” she asks. “Are you okay? Let me look at you.”
She pulls me to a stop, fussing. She smoothes the material of my sweater and presses up on her toes to pinch at my cheeks. A soft brush of tenderness curls around the cavern of my rib cage. She’s worse than a mother hen, and I love every second of it.
“I’m fine,” I promise her, grabbing her hands and urging them down. I hold on to them. “As well as can be expected, I suppose.” Besides this tender, hollow wound that seems to sear me from the inside out. “Have you heard—” I pause and inhale deeply through my nose. “Is Gabriel—”
Aelia squeezes my hands tight. “I don’t know,” she says gently. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”
I nod and try to reassure myself that it doesn’t mean anything. The Office of the Guardians is notoriously siloed from the rest of us, just as the Office of the Grim Reapers is. Just because Aelia hasn’t heard anything doesn’t mean that the worst has happened.
It doesn’t mean he’s been stripped of his wings. It doesn’t mean he’s somewhere suffering because of the decisions I’ve made.
“Come on,” she says, tugging at my hands. “I’m supposed to take you to Gideon.”
“Okay.”
It’s enough, I reassure myself as we wind our way down the department hallways.
It’s enough to keep my memories, to know that we had time together, limited as it was.
It’s enough to know that in the end, I did the right thing.
I saved the soul I was sent for and offered closure for another.
I experienced life again. Pumpkins and sticky bar tops and the bite of cold on an overcast October morning.
A red lighthouse, rising from the bay like a sentinel.
Twisted bedsheets and soft kisses. Husky laughter and the thump of a dog’s tail against the floor.
All of the mundane, ordinary, perfect things I had been missing. I had them again. They were mine.
I got to choose my own path, and I fell in love.
Whatever happens now, that’s enough.
Aelia stops in front of an unmarked door in an otherwise unremarkable hallway. We could be anywhere in the department for all I know. Forty thousand leagues under the sea.
“Through this door, okay?” She frowns at me again, her blue eyes searching my face. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Yes,” I tell her. “Of course.”
It’s a pleasant little bit of delusion we’re both indulging in, but I can’t stand for Aelia to be another person I have to say goodbye to.
She offers me a haughty nod, then spins on one light-up mermaid shoe and strides back down the hallway.
I watch her until she turns the corner, then heave a sigh.
“Please,” a voice drifts through the door. “Continue loitering outside the threshold. I have nothing else pressing to attend to.”
I roll my eyes to the ceiling. Leave it to Gideon to be impatient about delivering eternal damnation.
His pale blond head is bowed over a stack of paperwork when I poke my head through the door, his sunglasses sliding down the slope of his straight nose. He nudges them back up with his knuckles, then resumes his furious scribbling.
“Bloody paperwork for a month straight,” he grumbles. “And still not an inch closer to deliverance.”
I glance around the office. Every flat surface is occupied by a precariously leaning stack of files. The floor, too. Stacks and stacks of seemingly endless paperwork.
“Is this why you were avoiding the department?”
Gideon signs his name across the bottom of his document with a flourish and then slaps it on top of the closest pile. He glances up at me with a sour expression.
“Has the paperwork always been this … extensive?” he asks.
“Since I’ve been here? Yes.” I glance at one of the papers closest to me. It’s a Notification of Personnel Action from … 1776. “I imagine it builds up when you’ve been avoiding it for several thousand years.”
“There’s no need to be smug.” He tosses his pen to the side with a clatter and then leans back in his chair, stretching his neck to the side. It’s an oddly human gesture for a being that is essentially the embodiment of death. “From this point forward, all paperwork is banished.”
I snort. “Maverick might take issue with that.”
“I’m sure he will.” He stares at his desk with such a naked look of anguish that I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep myself from laughing. The fearsome Reaper, felled by intake forms.
“You asked to see me?”
“Ah, yes.” Gideon rifles through the nightmare that is his desktop, reaching for a drawer and pulling it open only to close it again. “Where is the— Ah. Good. Here we go.”
He stands from his chair and rounds the desk, leaning against the front of it. In his hands, he holds a small wooden box, no bigger than a snow globe. He extends it to me.
I stare at it. “What is it?”
He flicks the box open with his thumb. Inside, nestled prettily on a pillow of black silk, is a bright red berry.
A bright red berry from the yew tree in the assignment room.
My stomach drops.
“Your probation has been completed. Congratulations.” His smile is a mocking curve. “You’ve been reinstated as a Reaper.”
I take an instinctual step backward. I had prepared myself for every possibility … except this one.
“But—” My voice cracks. Magic licks up my spine. My hands are shaking, and I can’t quite catch the breath I don’t need. Gideon has somehow managed to find the only punishment that’s worse than the customer service desk. “But I broke all the rules. I disobeyed orders. I—”
“Showed compassion and understanding and a genuine love for the mortals.” He wiggles the box around, sending the delicate red berry rolling.
“You delivered a soul—albeit the wrong soul—but a soul that was well overdue for what was owed to him. You managed all of this with the grace and aplomb of a drunk, sniveling beast, but you managed it all the same. And this is your reward.”
“My reward?”
This isn’t a reward. This is a joke. A mockery. The one thing I’ve wanted more than anything else is to be free of this job, and yet here I am. Ordered back into the field.
“Yes. You are being rewarded for your choices.” His smile eases into something more genuine. “It would seem I needed a reminder as to what it is we do here.”
I am hopelessly lost, torn between grief, panic, and fury. I don’t want to go back. I don’t. “What is it we do here?”
Gideon rubs his thumb below his bottom lip. “We grant mercy.” He drops his hand. “We show love.”
I stare at him. “What?”
He snaps the box closed with a huff and places it carefully beside him, watching it to make sure it doesn’t tumble, then turning the full force of his attention on me. His gaze is hard and unrelenting, even through the opaque lenses of his glasses.
“Is that not what we do?” he asks softly. He slumps farther against his desk, legs crossed at the ankle.
Exhausted, I realize. He’s exhausted.
“Is ferrying souls from one realm to the next not an act of compassion? Of love? The mortal world is a cruel, cumbersome thing. What we do, it’s … we take them away from it all. We deliver them somewhere else. Somewhere better.”
I think of Frank, returned to his younger self, standing on a beach with a bouquet of peonies in his hand.
And then I think of Gabriel, his sword at his side and his eyes right on me.
Gabriel’s face softens. “In a week or so, there will be reports of a Reaper who has gone rogue. Department heads will be summoned, the appropriate fuss will be kicked up, and a search will commence.” He plucks the wooden box off the desk and snaps the lid open once again.
“But in the end, it will be discovered that it was all for naught. For the Reaper was just completing her assignment as intended.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This will be your final assignment, Darcy. At its conclusion, you will move on to what comes next.” His head kicks to the side. “Somewhere better.”
But I’ve already been somewhere better, and it’s a hole-in-the-wall bar with a crooked roof and mismatched paint. It’s a stool that leans slightly to the left and stale peanuts in a bowl.
Gideon offers me a small, tired smile. “Eat the berry, Darcy. Trust me.”
I hesitate.
He lifts the box another half inch with a short huff through his nose. “Today, sometime, would be great.”
I pluck the small, innocuous berry from its plush silk bed and hold it in the palm of my hand.
“Ah, before you taste that. One last bit of business.” He turns half-way and digs through the mountain of files and folders for something, muttering under his breath. He emerges with a delicate music box held carefully in his pale hands. A bird in a cage.
He holds it out to me. “When you get to where you’re going, deliver this to the antiques shop.”
I hold the berry in one hand and reach for the music box with another. It’s surprisingly heavy. Wellmade. “Why?” I ask.
“I believe the mortals call it groveling.” He nods at me. “Come on, now. Take your medicine.”
I stare at the small red berry in my hand. A couple of months ago, I did this exact thing and wished for something new.
I decide to trust that sliver of hope again. I toss the berry into my mouth, and I bite down on the tart fruit.
The vision swims to the surface slowly, rippling outward with color and sensation. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to focus, holding on tight to the clues that drift lazily through the murky deep magic.
My eyes snap open. A laugh that sounds like a sob cracks free.
Gideon smiles. Barely a quirk of his lips. “Off you go.”