“What are you—“
She reaches out and presses two fingers against my sternum.
Cold slams through me, sudden and absolute, like ice poured into my veins in straight, clean lines. For a heartbeat, I feel everything. Hundreds, thousands of tiny points of light connected by lines of pressure, pulling and tugging. Souls in transit. Souls waiting. Souls screaming. Grim Reapers standing like pins on a burned-out map. The whole system hums like a machine balanced on the edge of failure.
Then the sensation narrows, forced like water through a funnel, down and down into a single point. A familiar, ugly, stubborn knot of darkness that feels like me and not me.
Pain.
Rhea’s voice slices through the rush. “Now this…” she says.
Something jerks inside my chest. I sag forward and catch myself on her.
“Ouch,” I mutter. “That fucking hurts.”
“Well, a little pain’s the price you pay.”
If only she knew the double meaning there.
“Try talking to him,” she says. “It should work.”
I wet my lips. “Pain,” I whisper.
The word lands differently now. It doesn’t vanish into cotton. It drops into something cold and dark and resonant, like a stone into deep water.
“I need you,” I say.
For a second, nothing happens.
Then the air in the van bends. Not visually, not exactly. It’s pressure, like the space in front of me exhales inward. The tiny hairs on my arms lift. Black feathers appear on the floor between my knees. One. Two. Three. They don’t fall from anywhere. They just exist, like smoke deciding to become matter.
Rhea exhales, almost relieved. “That’s it.”
The feathers ripple and pull together, as if someone is rewinding a slow explosion. They twist upward, rising into a shape that is avian first and then humanoid. A silhouette hunched and bristling, with wings that aren’t really wings at all, more like a cape made of night and spite.
Then he’s there.
Pain.
In his more human-ish form, he’s barefoot on the metal, dark jeans on his hips, shirt hanging open at the throat. Raven-black hair falls into his eyes, and those eyes are bottomless, furious, and hurt in the way only a soul can be.
He looks at Rhea first. “What the fuck?” he says.
Rhea snorts, then turns to me with a smile and a nod. “Good luck,” is all she says. Just as abruptly as she appeared, she dissolves into smoke and disappears. I almost feel a sting of sadness at her going.
Then it’s just me, the girls, and Pain, standing in the middle of the van like a fury in ripped black.
His gaze locks onto mine.
“Well,” he says. “You’ve really fucked things up this time, haven’t you?”
And gods, isn’t he just spot on?
“You know, I’m speechless right now,” Pain says, dropping into a squat. He’s been on his feet the entire time I’ve been catching him up on everything that happened since we last saw each other, but I guess I finally managed to stump him so hard his legs gave out. He rubs a hand over his face, looking at the floor for a second before he glances back up at me. “I really don’t know what to say.”
“How about,” I drawl, arching my brows, “you say you’ll merge with me, here and now, so I can become an all-powerful being again and all my problems go away?”
“Except the wraiths, you mean?”
