“What do you mean?”
“After Balthazar hired you on. You requested this territory. Why in God’s name would you want to be in this place? Watching the people you knew die again and again.”
He smiled and looked out at a memory that I couldn’t see. A stream of sunlight spilled across the dusty space illuminating the pain beneath his smile. Pain that looked way too familiar for my liking.
“A girl, of course. Why the hell else would I stay here?”
“A girl? You put yourself through this kind of hell for a girl?” I asked, a little disbelief seeping out with my voice. Scout had never seemed like the romantic type.
He raised a brow. “Like you’re one to talk.”
“So what happened? Where is she now?”
He crossed the room and fiddled with something on his uncle’s workbench. If I knew Scout, he was just trying to hide his emotions from me. I let him.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Last time I checked in she was married, had two kids.” He glanced back at me and shrugged. “It has been twenty years, Finn.”
“Did she ever see you?”
“No. I didn’t want her to.” His voice turned gruff. “I stuck around for a few months after the funeral. To be honest I didn’t really know where else to go when I wasn’t rubbing elbows with the dead.” He chuckled, but it sounded bitter. “After I watched her cry herself to sleep every night for three months, listened to her talk to me in the dark while everyone else in the world was sleeping…I couldn’t take any more, so I left her alone.”
“She talked to you?”
He turned to face me. His eyes grim, years of pain finally being set free. “Of course she did. She could feel me. Even if they can’t see you, Finn…they know. They always know. Just like on some level, Emma knew way before you ever made a physical appearance.”
Scout took a step closer and knelt down in front of me.
“They can’t move on while we’re still around. You know that, right? Emma won’t ever move on as long as you’re there. Just like Sophie wouldn’t have if I hadn’t left when I did.” He finally plopped down onto the dusty concrete beneath us, looking whitewashed, exhausted. “Just because we’re stuck like this doesn’t mean they should be. They deserve more than that.”
“How did you let her go? How were you okay with her having a life with someone else?” I asked.
Scout rolled his eyes as he wrote a message to his uncle in the dust with his fingertip. I’m watching you. “You think I’m okay with it? No, man. I’m not okay with it. Watching her chase after kids that are half him, half her. Seeing her curl up next to him in bed at night, watching him touch her in all of the places that only I used to know.” He ground his teeth together and closed his eyes. “No…I’m not okay with it.”
He opened them again and sat back on his elbows, nodding to the message in the sand. “But I keep busy. And she loves him. Knowing that she was able to love somebody again, that she found some kind of happiness. Knowing I was strong enough to give that to her. It makes it easier.”
I stared at my empty hands. Hands that had held Emma a little more than forty-eight hours ago without feeling her. Hands that would never hold her again once this was finished. This had to work.
Because I was done torturing her. I was done torturing us both. Scout was right. She deserved more than me. More than I could give her.
The inside of my chest fractured, tore, and ached. Now that I’d come to terms with the decision, I felt hollow. For twenty-seven years, she had consumed every thought. My heart. My soul. She was my purpose. And now…who the hell was I supposed to be if I wasn’t this? Was there even anything left inside me if I wasn’t loving her? In that moment, it didn’t feel like it.
Scout cocked his head to the side, watching me. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“But you said—” He didn’t let me finish, making an irritated sound in the back of his throat. “Screw what I said. I am the most miserable creature in existence. Emma’s different and we both know it.”
She was. And staring into Scout’s empty eyes, I saw my future. He was strong, cut from steel…and facing an eternity of loneliness. Scout was giving me an out that I would’ve taken forty-eight hours ago, but I refused to do this to her anymore. I was going to take care of Maeve once and for all, and then I’d do what Easton and Anaya had always wanted me to do.
Walk away.
“I think,” I said slowly. “If you can find time to stop screwing around with the living, you can help me.”
He sat up, smiling, and rubbed his hands together. “You need my incredibly talented and genius-like mind, of course. Where do we start?”
I blinked. “That easy?”
“Well, I do sort of owe you. What are we doing?”
“We need to find a way to get rid of Maeve. And I mean for good.”
Emotions unfolded across his face. Shock dissolved into contemplation. “You mean—”
“Gone. Whatever that means. I couldn’t care less. But preferably Hell if we can get Easton on board. I don’t know, though. We’re not on the best terms right now.”
Scout stood up and started pacing, the wheels in his head that had already achieved the impossible beginning to spin. “Don’t worry about Easton.”
I nodded, glad I didn’t have to ask.
“It’s possible. I’ve thought about it before, but it would mean going to extremes, and unless you could get her right where you wanted her, it would never work,” he explained, setting me up for disappointment, if I had to guess. There was no way Maeve would ever trust either of us enough to get her to play along.
“How?”
Scout leaned against the door and looked me over, then shrugged as if it were obvious. “We have to kill her.”
I rolled my eyes. “She’s already dead, boy genius.”
“Not when she’s in a host body, she’s not.”
Disbelief rippled through me as each of his words sunk in. He was right. But that also meant-“But you’d have to kill the host for that to work, and even then, there’s no way to guarantee she wouldn’t get away.”
“Not if there were a soul there to guide the original one back into its body and another to take her to Hell,” he countered with a smile. “And I’m guessing with all of the nasty tricks Maeve’s been up to, Easton would be the one sent to collect. We’d just be speeding the process up a bit.”
He had no idea just how willing Easton would be to take Maeve out of this picture. Because if Maeve was no longer a threat, there would be no reason for me to be with Emma anymore. And as much as it hurt, I was finally ready to make that compromise.
Hope surged through me. God, this could happen. This could actually work. And he was right. With everything Maeve had done, she’d sealed her fate. There would be no white light waiting for her when she exited the body. No Inbetween, no Heaven. The only thing waiting for her was a one-way ticket to Hell and Easton’s smiling face to take her there. And when he came for someone, he never left empty-handed.
Scout interrupted my thoughts. “It would take two of us for sure.”
“Us?”
“I’m bored as hell. You don’t think I’d let you go it alone, do you? Besides, you need me.” He went to dig in the junk pile, retrieving the unknown car part, then put it back where it belonged under the hood.
“Finn.”
We both looked up at the sound of Easton’s voice. I gritted my teeth. “I haven’t been out long enough to screw up.”
Scout punched me in the arm. “Way to piss off the missing piece to our puzzle.”
Easton ignored Scout. “That’s not what this is about.”
I studied the panicked look in his violet eyes and shot up. “What’s happened?”