Chapter 18
She’d fallen through a veil. It had felt like drifting through the finest spun cotton, each strand tender against her face.
She had pushed forward blindly at first and charged through dark landscapes and silhouetted crowds.
There was too much surrounding her. Thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of auras had spun past, battering her with the smell of roses, the acrid tang of vinegar, and the soft brush of down.
But there. A hint of spicy warmth. Pippa had pushed forward, clawing her way through a maelstrom of mist and thorns and stardust. The warm sense of his aura fluttered around her. It was faint, but enough for her to follow.
She’d called out his name, over and over again.
More than once, she thought one of the silhouetted figures gestured in the same direction of his aura.
Sometimes they pointed, yet sometimes they seemed to be shaking their heads or slashing diagonally with their arms as if discouraging her to go further.
It had just been her imagination, surely.
She’d come closer, and closer, and then finally she saw the outline of his shoulders and nose and she broke into a run, not stopping until she was holding him as tightly as she could.
It didn't feel quite right, since he was more pressure and aura than anything of substance.
There was a bit too much give when she squeezed.
He didn't complain, so she kept doing it.
“You’re here,” Maxim said into her hair, her neck, against her lips. “Fuck, you’re really here.”
Pippa couldn’t quite believe it herself. She’d opened her mouth to say just that when Maxim pulled away.
“We need to leave,” he said.
The urgent tone of his voice punctured the giddy relief at finding him, and it took several long seconds for what he’d said earlier to drift back to her.
“Because of my father?”
Maxim nodded quickly and glanced around.
“He was here. He’s here, he’s creepy as fuck, and he knew that you’d be coming for me.
” When he made eye contact, his expression held an earnest terror that made chills race over her skin.
“He just . . . looked at me and saw that you’d used the Reaper magic on me and—” Maxim swallowed.
His hold on her upper arms tightened. “Pippa, he saw it and he was thrilled.”
Because she’d used his magic.
She’d used his magic.
Oh stars, what had she done?
For the first time since she’d come to this place, she looked around at the crumbling buildings and dark apparitions floating in her periphery.
Everything appeared faded and dim. Sounds were muffled, as if she was hearing them with her head swaddled in a quilt.
There was no breeze, no movement of air, just an empty cold that pressed on her skin.
And Maxim. She couldn’t quite feel him. While she still sensed the overwhelming presence of his aura, there hadn’t been any warmth to his body.
She could see through him as well, structures squatting in the distance that shouldn’t be visible through his shirt and his jeans and his handsome, worried face.
Yet her own body was solid and tangible, so far removed from the landscape and people around her. She was breathing. Living.
Pippa knew exactly how it felt to not belong somewhere.
When her coworkers chatted about their weekends at the country house or their “ridiculous families” that included an uncle with a rock tumbling fascination or a grandparent who spent too much on bingo, Pippa had the sense she was trapped behind glass and only able to view it all at a distance.
It was wrong for her to be in this place. She was an intrusion, and she shouldn’t have come, but she did anyway. Life was sacred. Death was as well. Right on the heels of using that dark magic, she’d made a mockery of the natural order. Just like her father.
What had she done?
Her limbs turned leaden. Her legs buckled, and the ground rushed up to her. It should have been bruising and hard on her knees, but she only felt a gentle pressure as if she had been kneeling in mud.
“Pippa?” Maxim sounded worried. Muffled, but worried.
Sorrow, as thick and sludgy as tar, crawled through her stomach and adhered her knees to the ground.
A thought came to Pippa then: maybe it would be better to not go back. It was a trickle of a thought, barely bold enough to grab. But in this world, this landscape without weight or air or breath, that thought grew heavier.
Pippa looked at her hands, the empty sky, the shadows and the mist swirling between.
“I’m . . . I’m like him.” How could her breath hitch when there was no air to catch on?
“I used his magic to manipulate. I used it to kill. I—” A sob was building in her chest and it burned her throat as she tried to fight it.
“I’m here. I’m disrespecting life. Death. All of it.”
Maxim lay a hand on her back. There was no contact, just warmth. His aura strengthened around her and she closed her eyes at the rightness of it.
“Why did you come here?” he said. He was crouching at her side, one elbow resting on his knee.
Pippa blinked at him. “To— What do you mean? I came here to find you. To bring you back. It’s wrong though, I shouldn’t—”
Maxim grabbed her hands. She wished she could feel it.
“You didn’t come here to be like him, Pippa,” he said. “I’m going out on a limb, but when you said you used that magic to kill, I’m assuming you used it to kill the demons in the sewer that kidnapped us.”
“I— yeah.”
“Same demons who hired others to hunt you down? Who were a genuine danger to everyone in the city?”
She nodded.
Maxim stroked his thumbs over the curves of her wrists. “There’s something fundamentally different between wanting to cause pain for the sake of pain and what you’ve done.”
“What did I do?” She hated how small her voice sounded in this space.
The corners of Maxim’s mouth twitched. “You helped the city. You saved people. And you came here because you love someone so much that you’d ignore death to follow them. It’s both highly impressive and deeply, deeply flattering.”
Pippa’s laugh was watery. When he squeezed her hands, she squeezed back.
“And,” Maxim continued. “For what it’s worth, that person loves you just as much. But, you know, doesn’t have the power to transcend mortality for it.”
A giddiness surged up through her chest like champagne. “Hell of a time for a love admission,” she said.
Maxim shrugged. “If I can’t say it in an eerie land-of-the-dead hellscape, when could I?”
“Before you’d traveled to an eerie land-of-the-dead hellscape would have been nice.”
He huffed a laugh and smiled at where their hands were joined.
Pippa stared at the way their fingers, transparent and opaque, laced together. The visible contrast between them and the absence of warmth on his skin sent her joy skittering away like a kicked animal.
“I want to bring you back,” she murmured. “I don’t know if I should.” It hurt to think the words. It hurt even more to hear them out loud.
“I’d give you advice, but I don’t think I’d be able to be impartial.”
She caught the tail end of a wry smirk when she glanced up at him. “Maxim—”
He pursed his lips. “Ignore what you should do. What do you think is right? What do you feel is right?”
What would feel right would be a handbook, or a syllabus, or someone wizened and stern hovering over her shoulder to tell her what to do.
In their absence all she had was herself.
Pippa closed her eyes. Of course Maxim would want to come back with her.
She wanted that as well. Yet how could she fly in the face of death and manipulate a soul while still condemning her father for having done the same?
Even when she’d done this before as a child and brought the bird back to life, the consequences had been both horrifying and chastising enough to stick with her for so many years.
She usually shied away from that memory. The human scream, the wide-open beak, the small beady eyes rolling in terror.
Now, it gave her pause.
That soul hadn’t been willing to return. She’d sunk her fingers into the afterlife and tugged blindly, yanking a random soul into a bright and unexpected world without even thinking.
This was different. Maxim was aching to come with her and be deposited back into a body that was uninjured except for a few scrapes and bruises.
She would do it. They would do it. Determination set a new lightness in her. The air didn’t feel quite so cold; the sky didn’t seem quite so dark.
Pippa gripped his hands and stood, tugging him up as well. “Bringing you back would be against the laws of nature.”
His face fell and he nodded in understanding. “I underst—”
“Maxim,” she interrupted before he could go too far. She rested her hands on either side of his face, holding him still so she could summon every bit of sincerity to say, “Nature can suck it.”
A startled laugh burst from his chest, not as loud or resonant as it should have been. “I love you,” he said around a sigh.
Stars, that was lovely to hear. And the way he said it, too—easy and earnest, as if the words were already comfortable.
A sudden chill crept up the back of Pippa’s neck. About to ask Maxim if he felt it too, she froze. His posture was rigid, his expression twisted into a mask of fear.
In that moment, she became aware of a new aura infiltrating the space around her. This one crept through her senses as if she’d put an old penny and moldering leaves beneath her tongue. Copper with a hint of rot.
“Hello, Philippa.”
A man was standing away from them like someone who was too nervous to join a group of people mid-conversation.