Her half-lidded eyes lift to mine, and I see something in them I never wanted to see.
Acceptance.
She exhales, soft, barely there.
No more fight left in her.
“Stop,” she breathes. “You can't.”
“Please,” I whisper. The word barely reaches her.
Her form is disintegrating now—head to toe, black clothing, raven and all—turning into nothing, slipping out of existence.
“No!” I tighten my grip, but my fingers sink through hers like air. She’s slipping through my hands. Gone, gone, gone. “You're not done yet! You—”
But she gives me the faintest shake of her head.
“I think… I think it's okay. I forgot… what it feels like already.” A single tear slips down her cheek. “To let go.”
The world slows.
The scythe clatters to the ground once again. This time she won’t pick it up anymore.
And then—just like that—she’s gone.
Just…gone.
I stare at the empty space she left behind, my own breath caught somewhere deep in my chest. It’s wrong. It’s so fucking wrong.
And in her place…
The thing that was once Laura Collins lingers.
“What the fuck is this thing?!” Cassian’s voice slices through the ringing in my ears like an axe through rotten wood—jagged, messy, and slightly panicked.
“A wraith!” Nathaniel shouts back. “I read about them once. A being that’s neither dead nor alive. Vengeful bastards.”
The thing cocks its head, its mouth stretching way too wide.
A wraith? No. No, that can’t be right. I would have heard about something like this. I would have known.
“How do we get rid of it?” My voice wavers, and I realize it’s still staring at me. Fixated. Like I’m an all-you-can-eat buffet and it hasn’t eaten in centuries.
I swallow hard. It has to die. It has to. The energy rolling off it is pure rot, the kind of wrong that makes your teeth itch. This thing should not exist. Not near me. Not near them. Not anywhere.
“That’s the thing,” Nathaniel says. “I have no fucking clue!”
I suppose I have to fight.
There's no other around it.
No way in hell did I think I'd be out here post-mortem, throwing hands with some undead abomination. I thought death would be, I don’t know, better than that? But no, turns out if you interact with the world even a little bit, it interacts right back. And sometimes it does so with claws and slashers for teeth.
Fine.
I guess I’m about to rearrange a fucking wraith’s atoms.
“Wow. You're a real ugly thing,” I inform her, inhaling deeply. Probably a bad idea, considering she’s a walking corpse wrapped in supernatural rage, but I’m already dead too, so what’s a little ectoplasmic lung damage at this point? Courtesy? Manners? Please.
