His eyes met mine, silver gaze stony. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
He let out a long sigh. “Maybe remember that the next time the Fae offer promises.” He turned his chair and tapped the keyboard of his computer, waking the screen to spreadsheets. “Now get out of my office.”
54
JUDE
Nat leftto do whatever Reapers do when they aren’t babysitting lost souls, and I paced. For hours. Or was it minutes? Without a clock, without the sun, time was a suffocating, silent medium I was dissolving in.
The books he’d given me lay open on the table like a taunt.Fundamental Thread Tension and Longevitywas a desert of theory written by scholars who’d clearly never seen the Veil, only its shadow. I would have described the Weave as fabric, its threads knotted and pierced and woven with intention. They described it as abstract force. It was like reading a manual on swimming written by someone who’d never touched water.
Principles of Anchored Manifestationwas worse. A self-help book for the recently deceased. I’d been staring at the same paragraph on “soul-density harmonics” for what felt like a lifetime, absorbing nothing but a profound, cosmic frustration. There were entire chapters on shifting your appearance, ghostly cosplay. I’d always fancied being taller, darker, more defined. But I had Angel for that now. He seemed to like me as I was. Or… as I had been.
I’d have been more settled with a stack of old school romances, even closed door, than I was with theory of beingdead. For a while, I could still turn the pages. It took a vicious, grinding focus that blurred as the time progressed, but I could do it. I read until the words bled into nonsense, until my concentration snapped.
Then, without warning, my hand passed straight through the page as if it were mist.
I tried again. Nothing. The book was now a hologram, a museum piece behind glass. Or probably it was me that had gone completely spectral and Nat’s cozy little studio was the reality that I could no longer touch.
I leaned back, the energy required to hold form, to interact, was gone. I was thinning. Becoming vapor. A spectator in my own afterlife.
Panic cut through the frustration. This wasn’t moving on. This was the great, silent fade. Not into some new chapter, but into nothing. No Angel. No Ivan. No furious, loving heartbeat to anchor me. Just… absence. That had never crossed my mind before. Eternal loneliness. The ultimate hell.
I didn’t want to transcend. I didn’t want to pass through some mystical door. I wanted to claw my way back through the Veil, to the smoking wreckage I’d left behind. I wanted Ivan’s worried grip and Angel’s solid, furious warmth. I wanted my life.
But here, in this silent, sterile room, I couldn’t even turn a page.
The room was too quiet. Too still. The single window reflected the pulsing heart of the realm across the Veil, and for the first time, I wondered which one. Did they all look like that? Or was this simply where they all collided, like some kind of cosmic center?
The windows of his tiny studio looked out onto nothing I recognized. Night sky. Too high up to see a street, or a location, or even a skyline. Not in the living world at all? A place between, or simplyIwas between the places?
I had a few seconds of debating, needing some sort of emotional anchor, and since I’d already searched every book in the tiny apartment for a single distracting fiction and found none, I decided out was the only way to go.
I headed for the door and reached for the handle. My hand closed around it, or tried to. My fingers passed through the brass, cold and insubstantial.
Right. Out of juice.
I stood there for a moment, staring at my translucent hand. Doors didn’t work for me anymore, not like this. Not when I was thin and faded. Was this weakness temporary? Or maybe I’d overused what little remained of me for all eternity and this was how ghosts really existed? The thought gave rise to panic. Having never really feared death or the possibility of an afterlife, being stuck in this sort-of-between-existence really scared me. What if I could never talk to Angel again? Or look in on Ivan? Or do anything but float place to place like some sort of depressed Casper?
Focus, Jude,I scolded myself. Maybe I just needed to recharge. I stared at the door, then looked back to the chair, would the strength come back?
But the idea of just sitting there, doing nothing, gave rise to anxiety. If my hand passed through books, my whole self, ghost or whatever, should be able to go through a wood door, right?
Steeling myself, I took a step forward, through the wood and the frame, and emerged into the hall on the other side.
The transition was cold, a brief, unsettling sense of coming apart and reassembling somewhere else. I hated it. It felt less like moving and more like forgetting where I was for a second.
But I was through.
I stepped into the hall, lights dim, walls lined with dark wood, giving it the feel of an old English loft straight out of a BBCsponsored film. The air was cooler here, smelling of paper dust, ash, and time.
Doors stretched along the corridor, closed, no numbers or names. Were they entrances to other realms or afterlife options? Did that mean I could go through them and try out other realms? The idea of getting sucked into some nightmare of religious utopia made me shiver. Nope to the nope.
I headed in the opposite direction, down the carpeted hall, footsteps making no sound. At the end of the hall a set of double doors stood slightly ajar, stairs beyond leading down into darkness.
Stairs into obscurity that screamed abandon all hope, check. If there had been a sign that read “Enter at Your Own Peril,” it would’ve been overkill. I half-expected a jump scare. Instead, I got… a library. Great. Even dead, I couldn’t escape the feeling I was behind on my reading. Not that I could read any of it now.
