“No, I think it’s obvious.”
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked, walking the perimeter of the room we were in. A cloud of white mist gathered around his ankles, following him like fog over the lake on a cool spring morning.
I swallowed the fear lodged in my throat and cast a wary glance over at Anaya. “You’re the boss.”
“Do you regret it?” he asked, never turning to face me. His gaze had settled somewhere on the horizon.
“Which part?”
Balthazar laughed. The sound echoed from walls that I couldn’t see or feel.
“All of it.” He slid me a careful glance. “Do you regret taking away Maeve’s chance at humanity?
Do you regret giving that chance to Emma?”
Those were questions I didn’t have to think about. Images of Emma limp and lifeless flashed across my mind. If Maeve was capable of such things, she didn’t deserve a chance at humanity because there was nothing human left inside her. Then again, if I’d never given Maeve a reason to hate me, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. I shook my head. “I…I don’t know.”
His white robe rustled with a breeze I couldn’t feel. Balthazar sighed. “I don’t regret any of it.”
Shock fizzled through me. Had I heard him right? I couldn’t have.
“The things she’s done are unforgivable. And God knows where Emma would be if you hadn’t dedicated yourself to her safety the past few years. She’s a good soul. That can’t be denied. She was not to blame for the transition that condemned her to the Shadow Land, as you well know.”
I did know. Unable to speak, I watched him pace, his eyes fixed on the horizon. The fact that he was seeing light in the darkest thing I’d ever done was enough to leave my head spinning. This didn’t happen. In a place this close to the Almighty, exceptions were never made.
I swallowed and gathered up the courage to stand beside him. A valley stretched out below us, gray with mist, every inch shimmering with a silver dust. The Inbetween. “What are you going to do to me?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment, but first, I have a confession to make.”
I raised a brow. “You do?”
He nodded. “I never should have made you a reaper. It was never your calling. And that day, when Allison’s name wasn’t drawn, I knew you’d push her through if I allowed you to get close enough. I let it happen.”
“What? W-why would you do that? Why let it happen just to punish me for it over and over?”
He sighed. “I needed her gone. I needed to rid you of the distraction so you could become what you were always meant to be.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And what, exactly, am I meant to be?”
He faced me, a look of pride pulling up the corners of his lips. “A guardian, of course. If your silly obsession with that girl has proven nothing else, it’s proven that you have the heart of a guardian. You were meant to protect. Not destroy.”
This had all been his plan. I didn’t know how to feel about any of this. “I…don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I have orders to offer you a position as a guardian, Finn.”
I couldn’t seem to form the appropriate reaction. I knew I should’ve dropped to my hands and knees to thank God for giving me an opportunity like this, but all I could see when I thought about that life was a world that didn’t include Emma.
“Do you dare deny me, when I’m offering you what your brother and sister over there only dream of?”
Easton spoke up from the edge of the room. “Take it, Finn. Don’t be stupid.”
“It’s not in your heart, is it?” Balthazar’s bright gaze swept over me thoughtfully. “No… there’s no room left in your heart for anything else, is there?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, wondering what kind of consequences awaited me after turning this down.
As far as I knew, no one had ever turned down an offer like this.
“You realize I can’t let you keep going on like this,” he said, sounding tired. “I can’t trust you to stay away from her. I can’t continue to allow you to break our laws for a mortal who means nothing in the grand scheme of things. So, what do we do?”
I watched a shadow twist on the horizon, feeling hopeless. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want, Finn?”
Without thinking, my lips desperately formed Emma’s name. “Emma. I want Emma. I want to be… alive.”
He took a deep breath, his eyes calculating as he circled me. “What would you give? An eternity of service perhaps?”
“What?”
“Would you take us up on our offer to make you a guardian?”
An eternity without Emma for a lifetime by her side? Thoughts overwhelmed me before I could fight them off, each one leaving me weaker than the last. Her laugh, rich and radiant like music in my ears, the feel of her skin moving beneath mine, the taste of her lips on my tongue.
“Yes.” I whispered before I lost control completely. I dropped to my knees, the pain of almost losing her still fresh in my chest. “I’d do anything.”
“Very well.” Something in his voice sounded so final it rattled me with a strange mixture of fear and hope. “There’s only one thing to be done, then.” He turned to face me, the light around him shimmering so brightly I had to shield my eyes with my hand. Fear rippled down my spine as a porthole appeared behind him.
“W-what’s happening?” I stuttered, unable to move. The light was swirling, pulling me in like a whirlpool. And Balthazar’s intense gaze drove me further against my will. The porthole flickered and moved until a thousand rainbow colors melded into a light so bright it burned.
“Balthazar?” I dug my heels into the ground, only to find there was no ground to save me. I was so close I could feel its heat on my face. Easton’s hand rested on my shoulder to guide me forward. He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“Don’t forget what you’ve agreed to, Finn,” Balthazar said as I stepped into the portal. “I’ll see you at the end of your mortal life to collect.”
Chapter 38
Emma I should be dead. It was I could think. It was all I could feel. I didn’t remember everything from the fire, but I remembered enough. The re-stitched side of my neck pulsed with pain and I reached up to brush my fingers over it. I’d almost lost everything because of Maeve. My mother. My best friend.
My life. There were too many things in this world I wanted to do now, and I wasn’t going to give any of it up without a fight.
I tried to recall the fire, two days and what felt like a hundred oxygen treatments ago, but smoke clouded my memories, making them fuzzy and weak. I did remember Finn. I would always remember Finn. Something ached in my chest at the thought that I might never see him again.
The steady beep of a monitor pulsed behind Cash’s head, and the smell of antiseptic and sickness hung in the air like a fine mist. When he made a groaning sound in the back of his throat, I raked my fingers through his hair and adjusted his blanket. His pierced eyebrow twitched.
“Stop messing with me. I’m fine,” he grumbled. His words had the sort of slip and swirl that only really good pain meds could provide. I leaned back and smiled when he opened his eyes. Muddy brown. The soft spaces underneath dark and bruised. Those telltale signs were all the proof I needed to know he hadn’t been sleeping. He turned over onto his side and stared past me. His gaze tracked something behind me I couldn’t see. “Are they letting me out yet?”
“Not yet,” I rasped, and covered my mouth to cough. “I think your dad’s trying to work something out, though. They said something about wanting to keep you one more night for observation.”
Cash’s eyes drifted over me like he was taking inventory. “You sound awful.” He sounded almost as bad as I did, but he sounded guilty, too. And he shouldn’t have. Not after what Finn and I did to him.