The balance.
What balance?
I was killed in cold blood. Buried in the dirt like I was nothing. No justice. No reckoning. Just silence. A forgotten life, erased without consequence.
My fingers twitch, clenching into fists before I force them open again.
“That was different,” I snap.
“Was it?” Nathaniel tilts his head. “Or do you only believe in the rules when they work in your favor?”
I want to hit him.
I want to scream, to shake them, to make them understand that this isn’t about me. That there will be consequences, and I have no idea what they’ll be.
But I don’t get the chance.
Because the moment I open my mouth, something shifts. The anger inside me bubbles up so much that it shakes me from within. One second, I’m in the car, my fists clenched, my anger swallowing the air between us.
The next—I’m nowhere.
The world drops away like it was never real to begin with.
There’s no car, no men, no weight of my scythe at my back. Just darkness. Void.
It takes me a moment to realize what’s happening—or that I’ve been here before.
This isn’t the empty, endless in-between of the afterlife. This isn’t the quiet stillness of my grave, where my body still rots beneath my willow tree.
This is the space between reality’s seams.
Here, I have no body. No form. Just thought, just presence, just—ugh.
It used to happen when I was new to being a Grim Reaper. Whenever I got overwhelmed—whenever my stupid soul confused “being back in the human realm” with “being alive”—I’d slip. Just… blink right into the void.
It hasn't happened in years.
But now, after everything—after tonight, after them, after that girl seeing me—I feel unmoored. That's probably why I blinked in here.
Ugh.
If I could shake my head, I would. If I could scream, I would.
Instead, I focus.
I breathe—no, not breathe. Exist. I push through the swirling nothingness, through the weightlessness of the void, andthink.
In the past twenty-four hours, I have:
Met serial killers.
Been seen by said serial killers.
Been trapped in place by them like a goddamn insect.
Watched them steal a soul that was mine to reap.
Witnessed them get rid of a body like it was just another Tuesday.
