“Tell me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Skye.”
Just my name. The way he says it lands like a hand on the shoulder.
Fine. If he wants to knowthatbadly.
I think about Mark. I think about every version of justice I reached for and missed. I think about the moment Death himself told me his time hadn’t come, that someone else would take his soul, that I was forbidden, and how I carried that alongside everything else for the entire length of a war.
There’s a lot to regret here, isn’t it?
What a shitty question to ask, by the way.
“In the end, I did nothing about Mark,” I say. My voice comes out flat and tired and certain. “Whatever happened after, I still believe he didn’t get what he deserved. Maybe I wouldn’t want to kill him now. But it still seems unfair.” A beat. “And I won’t get my happy ending, which sucks balls. Those are my regrets. Are you satisfied?”
Death is quiet for a moment.
“No,” he says. “Not quite.”
“Then what—“
“You have served your purpose,” he says. “More than that. You exceeded it. I told you once that you would earn your rest. I am a being of my word, Skye Dilano, whatever else you think of me.”
I go still. Or whatever passes for still here.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to.” The void begins to shift around me, not collapsing inward this time but loosening, like a knot being undone. “Consider it a reward. Or balance, if you will. Whatever makes death easier to accept.”
“What is it?”
But he doesn’t answer.
“You’ll know,” he says, “when you get there.”
The void lets me go.
And I arrive somewhere that smells like summer.
The warmth hits me before anything else. Real warmth, so I know it can’t be anything false. Then the light, which is too gold and too generous to be anything but memory. Then the smell.
It’s all beautiful and welcoming and kind.
More than that, it’s a place I know.
My grandmother’s house.
I stand at the gate and can’t move for a moment. The colors are wrong. Or rather, they’re right, more right than anything I’ve seen in longer than I can measure. The blue of the sky is the blue I remember from when I was very small. So vivid and pastel and almost cartoonish. The garden is overgrown in exactly the way it always was, before Mark and Jessica took over.
And in the back, where it always stood, the weeping willow.
Its branches hang all the way down to the grass, swaying gently, trailing over the ground.
I open the gate and walk toward it slowly.
If this is Death’s idea of a peaceful rest, then you know what? I’ll take it.
