I scrambled farther away from Emma and her warmth, shaking. “I…I…I didn’t mean to.”
“Do you think Balthazar is going to buy that?” Easton snapped. “Because I sure as hell don’t. Do you have any idea what this means for you?”
I staggered to my feet, refusing to break eye contact with Emma. Of course I knew. I just didn’t care.
The school doors flung open. Students and faculty spilled out into the courtyard, their shouts echoing off the concrete building. Emma held my gaze for one last heart-stopping moment, then turned her attention to a teacher calling her name. Before she could look back, I let the air take hold of my skin until I faded into nothing.
“Emma!” A teacher with short gray curls stepped over a twisted hunk of metal that used to be the bobcat’s snout. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her knee and pushed herself up. “I wouldn’t be if it—” She looked back to where I’d been standing and her brows pulled together.
“You wouldn’t be if what?” The teacher pushed up her glasses and looked right through where I was standing, invisible.
“Nothing.” Emma touched her head, her face suddenly far too pale. “I think I hit my head or something.”
The crowd swallowed her, taking her away from me. In the distance a fire engine’s siren started to wail. Easton scowled and opened his mouth to rip me apart, but the words stayed stuck there. He grabbed his scythe. “He knows,” he finally choked out.
I could already feel Balthazar’s pull like fire eating its way through me cell by cell, overriding the call of the dead I’d ignored to save Emma.
Two strikes against me in a matter of a minute. I was so screwed.
Easton gave in to the call, and without a word disappeared.
I held on a little longer and drifted toward the crowd. A fireman carrying a medic bag led Emma to a bench in the courtyard and checked her vital signs, while she warily looked into the crowd. She plucked a few blades of grass out of her hair and brushed her blue sweater off, her hands shaking.
I’d touched her.
She’d seen me. Talked to me.
But she hadn’t remembered. I should have been thankful for that. If she ever remembered who I really was, what I’d done to her, to us… She’d hate me.
I braced my hands on my knees, unable to look away from her. My world was spinning. And it wasn’t the hell I knew I was about to pay with Balthazar. It wasn’t even the energy I’d spent touching her. It was knowing that everything had just changed. It was knowing there was no way I could go an eternity without that again. Balthazar’s call turned to spikes in my skull, blocking my thoughts.
I would have given anything to have one more moment with her. To let her know I was there. That I’d always be there. But instead, I gave in to the wind. As usual, I belonged to death.
Chapter 4
Finn The Inbetween. I couldn’t make myself take another step closer. I’d spent too much time avoiding this place. Avoiding the memory of Allison and how badly I’d wanted her. Avoiding how that wanting had blinded me to the consequences of our relationship and doomed us both. Choosing to drop the souls off at the gates was easier than facing the memories that hid behind every shadow inside. Balthazar made sure I had plenty of reminders without this. But of course, that was my punishment. Every reap was connected to something I’d done, and I hated it. God only knew how much longer he was going to keep this up. After today…I had a feeling it wasn’t ever going to end.
A gatekeeper in a gray hooded cloak raised a brow at me. “Are you coming in or not?”
I nodded and stepped through the gates, looking out over the frozen horizon. Neither day nor night, light nor dark. Just a blanket of charcoal mist that I couldn’t feel on my face, and a bouquet of stars butting against the glass floor beneath my feet. The swaying mass of silver wheat that always sat off in the distance tapered off into the rolling hills, where it was swallowed by shadows. There wasn’t a single weeping willow, skyscraper, shipwreck, or double-decker bus, but their opaque shadows haunted the colorless terrain like ghosts of a land long forgotten.
Somewhere in the distance, the rush of waves washed over a shore that I’d never been able to find.
Back when she’d only been Allison to me, Emma and I looked for hours once. Even after I’d been called away to a reap, Allison scoured the endless miles of nothing searching for the ghost of an ocean that didn’t exist. I’d found her later lying on the glass floor staring up at a long, twisted shadow that rippled with far-away screams.
“I can’t remember what this is,” she whispered, sounding so small and lost. “I should know what it is, right?”
“It’s a roller coaster,” I told her, “or the shadow of one, anyway.”
She just nodded, the quiet madness swirling in the depths of her ocean-blue eyes. “And I’m…”
I knelt down beside her and brushed the white-blond hair away from her neck. “You’re Allison.” I said. “You’re my Allison.”
I blinked away the memory when the throng of reapers gathering became too loud to ignore. A nervous energy bounced through the crowd like sparks—to be expected when the reapers from Heaven, the Inbetween, and Hell congregated in one place. I could feel those sparks in my chest, driving fear into my jittery limbs. We didn’t get called in for a meeting like this too often, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out this one was for me.
I stayed on the outskirts of the crowd, avoiding the stares and whispers that spread like a virus as I moved toward the gathering square. I wasn’t just a reaper to them. To them I was the outcast who had broken an age-old rule and fallen in love with a charge, defied Balthazar in an unforgivable way, and gotten away with it. To them I’d spit in the face of God.
And now I’d done it again. They just didn’t know it yet.
I searched for a safe, familiar face. Easton or Anaya, preferably, but at that point, I would have settled for Scout, a reaper who’d been recruited twenty years ago or so. Which meant he was still new.
And stupid. His assigned territory bled into ours, so we crossed paths from time to time. He was the closest thing I had to a friend outside of Easton and Anaya, and while Scout might have been a lot of things, judgmental wasn’t one of them.
Unable to locate the three of them, I was forced to face the reality of my situation. Balthazar was standing on the steps to the Great Hall, the only real building in the Inbetween, though none of us ever went in it. Shiny marble steps led up to the reflective structure, its walls like mirrors, so that it practically disappeared into the nothingness around it. Reapers milled around the dry stone fountain in the center of the meeting square, casting questioning glances my way. Balthazar pressed his lips together and narrowed his gaze on me.
That look said I was screwed.
“Ten minutes, people!” Balthazar’s voice crashed through the crowd like a wave, echoing in myriad languages so there’d be no misunderstanding his message. “Get seated or I lose my patience. I don’t think any of you want to find out what that’s like.”
Reapers scattered in a panic to find a place to sit. I shoved my hands in my pockets and hightailed it over to where I spotted Easton sitting down.
“Hey,” I said, taking the seat beside him. He folded his arms across his chest and stared at the gold lectern at the top of the steps that awaited Balthazar’s arrival. “You still pissed at me?”
“He warned you, Finn. He told you what would happen if you interfered in her life again.”
“I told you, I didn’t mean to,” I whispered. “It…it just happened.”