It is mine. Forever.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask as Talon pulls me out of the garden and onto the street in front of the house. My legs are jelly and pure bliss courses through my veins. The moment I step outside, though, and get a chance to look around, I sober up a notch.
“Holy shit,” I mutter as we stop and Nathaniel and Cassian catch up to us.
Beyond my grandmother’s house and the few adjacent ones, there is nothing. A clean, total absence, like the rest of the world hasn’t been written yet. It stretches in every direction under this perfect blue sky.
Talon waits for me to take it in before pulling me forward again.
“Where are we going?”
“There’s more to this place than just the house,” he says. “This is ours, Little Grim. All of it. Everything you see, including all that white nothing, is ours to build on. Whatever you want.”
“Wow…”
“But that’s not the end of it,” he says.
We reach the edge of the street where the pavement stops and the white begins. Set into the ground here, as if they’ve always been there, are stairs made of black stone going down. The light follows them a short way before it thickens and darkens, the way it does in a deep basement. Cassian and Nathaniel join us at the top.
“The Grim Reapers who stayed,” Cassian says. “The ones who were murdered, who didn’t move on, who spent God knows how long waiting for their killers to die so they could have their moment. They don’t have to wait anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Things changed,” Nathaniel adds.
Talon takes the first step down.
“You remember what Death told you?” he says, turning to look at me. “Some time ago now. That it wasn’t Mark’s time when you wanted to kill him.”
How could I forget?
“I remember,” I say.
“Come down with us, Skye,” Nathaniel murmurs.
I follow Talon onto the stairs. The descent doesn’t quite follow logic. At the top, where the white world ends and the black stone begins, the light is still summer-warm, still carrying the smell of the garden above. But with each step down it shifts. Gold turns to amber to something low and sourceless.
“After Rhea killed the married couple in the hospital basement, Mark thought he would be next. We had other things to deal with. We didn’t see what was happening to him.”
“He had a heart attack,” Cassian says. “Out of fear.”
We reach the bottom. The light here is a deep violet. We step out into a large, dark room, the floor the same black stone as the stairs, worn smooth. In the center of it, in a chair that is neither throne nor interrogation seat but somehow suggests both, sits a man.
Mark.
His hands are in his lap. His face is turned down. He hasn’t noticed us yet.
I stop walking.
“Why is he here?” I ask.
For a moment I feel a flash of fear. Why would this man follow me into the afterlife, like some goddamn cockroach that can’t leave me alone? But then I find Nathaniel’s eyes.
“Don’t worry. This isn’t what you think,” he says.
“He’s here because of what we are,” Cassian explains. “The three of us will keep punishing murderers.”
I still don’t understand.
