He snapped his fingers in front of her face, forcing her eyes to open. She glared at him, and he glared back at her before saying, “These aren’t emotions for you or I. We’re supposed to suffer. That’s our role in the world. If you’re revoking that, you might as well give your fellow death gods a knife and call them over for the feast.”
“They wouldn’t dare.”
Jackal gestured to her home, pointing his fingers in every direction then lifted his hands up in a shrug. “Doesn’t look like you’ve got that much to work with here. They could waltz in and kill you without even trying.”
“I’m stronger than I look.” She turned away from him, making her way to the single chair on the entire chicken farm.
He wasn’t wrong. They could come in and kill her, mainly because she hadn’t been collecting souls for a while now. She was losing her powers slowly but surely. In a way, it felt like the right thing to do.
She’d been alive for too long anyway. Longer than most humans, since most of them were dead. Selene wouldn’t mind paying for all the things she’d done to them.
They deserved a little retribution, even if it meant she didn’t get to see the end of Ronin’s story. At least she would know it was a good one because of what she’d done.
“Ah-ah, don’t you do that.” Jack stalked over to her. “I know that misty-eyed look. You are not allowed to think of him right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s the one that made you this sickeningly happy, and I can’t stand any more of the smell or I’m going to vomit.”
“You can’t vomit just because I’m happy.”
“Don’t try me, Doom-and-gloom. I’ll yuck all over your shoes, and then who’ll be the one who’s sorry. Hmm?” He lifted a brow. “That’s what I thought.”
Selene sighed and leaned her head into her hands, elbows propped on her knees. “Why are you here, Jack?”
“Can’t someone stop in and ask about their nearest and dearest friend?”
“You don’t have friends.”
“I like to think we’re at least a little close.” He held up his thumb and pointer finger, indicating such a small amount of space between them that they were likely touching. “Just a tiny bit.”
“Jack.”
“Why are you no fun? Fine. There were a few of the death gods talking in the bar about how your absence had been noted, and I wanted to come and see if Morpheus had finally done the job he’d always said he was going to do.”
She stared down at the ground through her fingers, then a question popped into her mind. It wasn’t a normal question, and likely no other goddess had ever thought of it. But it suddenly burned a hole through her mind until it tumbled out her lips. “Have you ever wondered why we have to be gods?”
“Because we were made to be so?”
“No, Jack, I mean like… Why can’t we give it up? I don’t like collecting souls any more than you like causing trouble. But here we are. Doing the same thing we’ve always done, over and over again. We’re stuck in an endless cycle of hating ourselves for what we do, but being unable to stop. Why is that?”
“We don’t want to die,” he replied. “It’s as simple as that. If we stop doing what we’re meant to do, then we wither away and don’t get another chance like humans. The end is the end for us.”
“What if we’re wrong about that?”
Hands reached for hers and pulled until she had to look up at him. Jack’s brows were drawn down, the fine crow’s feet around his eyes already wrinkled in worry. “What’s gotten into you, Gloom? You know the way of things. This is what we all agreed to when you stopped the end of the world. When we all finally banded together and agreed that the world had to spin in a certain way for it to work. This is how it’s always been.”
“What if we were wrong? About everything? I can’t stop thinking about what the humans do in their lives, and how unfair it is that we never get it. We can’t even love each other, because gods are devoted to their work, not each other.”
He chuckled. “The last time gods fell in love, the world ended.”
And of course he’d bring it up. Were the other gods unable to think of anything else? Yes, she’d loved him. Yes, they’d broken some kind of unspoken law by being with each other. But that wasn’t the end of the world.
At least, it shouldn’t have been.
Selene shook her head, then slapped her hands to her knees and stood. “I shouldn’t have thought you’d understand.”
“You were happy moments ago.” He trailed in her footsteps, so close she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. “So happy I was getting nauseous. You can’t tell me those were only thoughts about how you want to be human. Those thoughts taste like honey and bee stings, not happiness like a raw, salted apple.”
“What do you want me to say?” She whipped around. Anger suddenly surged through her, and she didn’t know why or understand where it came from. Just that it was wild, unbound, and so much angrier than she had any right to be.
“I want you to tell me the truth.”
“I miss him!” she shouted so loudly it made her ears ring. “I miss him so much, it hurts.”
“And that makes you happy?” His face twisted in confusion. “That doesn’t make sense, Gloom.”
“It doesn’t have to.” Selene wanted to tear out her hair, because no, it didn’t make sense. But that was the beauty of all the emotions she was feeling. After all this time, after losing him, she finally felt like a person again and that was a wondrous thing.
Jack unraveled before her. His eyes blurred, going unfocused as if he were staring into some future only he could see. His hands tensed, curling into fists then suddenly relaxed in a snap of energy that rocked him forward.
He swallowed hard, and then met her gaze with a troubled one she didn’t recognize. “What’s it like?”
“What?”
“Being in love. Caring about another person so much that you’d put the world after their well-being and not care if it ended up in rubble at your feet.”
Selene lifted her shoulders. “It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, but I wouldn’t trade a single second of it. It was like… in meeting him, life itself took flight in my chest and lifted me away from all this. Like I was somehow, suddenly, a person. Not just a goddess, not just someone to guide souls into the afterlife, not just someone here to take care of others. I was a person. I meant something more than this.”
“I can’t imagine what that’s like,” Jack replied. “All I remember in my life is causing chaos. I liked doing it for a time. You’re right about that. There’s a certain power to it that’s thrilling, addicting even. But then it just grows old. And I grew tired.”
“He quenched a thirst I didn’t know I had.” The words tumbled from her lips like she’d become a fountain of knowledge.
The sigh that rattled from Jackal’s chest was that of an ancient desert groaning at the mere thought of water. “I shouldn’t have come here. I should have remembered you do this.”
“What is it I do?” she asked, because she truly didn’t know. The gods had always been frightened of her, even before Ronin and now, maybe, they would let slip the secret that she’d desired to know her entire life.
Jack looked up at her, his eyes filled with a dark sadness that boiled in his soul. “You make us want things we can’t have,” he said. “And these are dangerous desires that can only end in madness.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe that. I have to believe that somehow, somewhere, we can find our own happiness in this world.”
A shiver trailed down his spine and his shoulders quaked as they always did when trouble brewed nearby. “You shouldn’t give life to words like that,” he reprimanded her with a sad smile. “Fate has a way of making you regret them.”
“What are you trying to say, Jack?” she asked.
He stepped away from her, shaking his head. His form wavered as it always did when Tricksters were a
bout to disappear.
“No,” she shouted, marching toward him. “You don’t get to disappear after saying that. What do you mean, Jack?”
Before she could reach him, he dissolved out of existence and left her alone in the middle of her chicken farm. An ominous feeling traced a finger across the nape of her neck. Cold air danced at her fingertips and she knew, somehow, knew that everything was about to fall down around her shoulders.
Static made the hairs on her arms lift. A spirit stood behind her, likely one of her own, and she didn’t want to turn around. Selene knew there could only be something awful about to happen.
Jack didn’t show up during the good times. As much as he wanted to see what happiness felt like, that wasn’t what he was trained to do.
He hadn’t come for a visit. He’d been an omen.
“Selene?” a wavering, familiar voice whispered. “I need you to turn around.”
“I can’t, Mutt.” Selene’s voice cracked on a thickness that made her throat so tight it was nearly impossible to speak. “Not when I already know what you’re going to say.”
“It’s not that bad, it’s just… it’s not good,” she replied. “Selene, you have to look at me. I can’t tell you this with your back turned.”
She was a goddess of death. She should be able to handle whatever news was about to be thrown at her. Spine straight, shoulders squared, she finally turned toward her friend and willed the tears back into her eyes where they would remain. She was strong.
She was exhausted.
Mutt stared back at her with watery eyes. Her form dimmed in the light of day, almost impossible to see, but it radiated sadness and a weariness Selene felt echoed in her own bones.
“What is it?” Selene asked. “Is it him?”
“No, not this time. It’s her.”
All the happy memories came flooding back. The way James’s wife had stared at him with a renewed promise of a future, and love, and hope. Her eyelashes had been so long, even Selene liked to watch them flutter with all the emotions that bubbled up inside her just because he walked into the room.
She’d done the right thing, insisting that James work on his relationship with his wife. They had loved each other. Not in a burning, destructive way like she and Ronin had loved. But in a steady coal that never seemed to extinguish its light.
“What happened?” she choked out.
“There was an accident. Someone had taken one of those rigged-up motorcycles. You know, the ones that shouldn’t even be running. They hit her when she was crossing the street.”
“Was Anna with her?” the thought made her heart ache.
“No. She was with James at another dance recital. His wife was going there to see… Well, it doesn’t matter now. She’s in the hospital and I thought you’d want to—”
“I will.” Selene interjected, already moving toward the door. She knew what Mutt wanted, and what the woman deserved.
God, she didn’t even know James’s wife’s name. She’d never asked, never thought to really. What kind of a person was she?
“Selene!” Mutt shouted. “You shouldn’t be going alone!”
But she was going to all the same. The woman who had made James’s life much better deserved more than just a hospital visit where haggard doctors and sleep-deprived nurses would help ease her way into the beyond.
Mutt appeared in front of her. “James isn’t there, Selene. You should keep her alive so he can say goodbye.”
“I’m going to do what’s best for her.”
“Her family should—”
Selene reached forward and grabbed the soul’s throat. She was the only death god who could physically touch them in the afterlife. Her hand closed around Mutt’s throat, and her soul cracked in fissures around the touch. “Don’t tell me how to do what I do. James will not be the first to lose a loved one without saying goodbye. If that’s what she wants, then that is what she will get.”
She released Mutt and strode through the soul, forcing it to turn back into mist.
The trek to the hospital seemed shorter than the other times she’d gone there. Or perhaps, she simply used the powers a death goddess had. In no time at all, Selene strode back up the crumbling stairwell, the one that didn’t have stairs at all anymore, and slipped back into the maternity ward where she could make her way up a level.
This was where they kept the dying. She could feel James’s wife. Her soul ached to leave the prison of pain and anguish, but it struggled to hold onto the physical form as well. It didn’t want to go.
No one ever did.
A doctor came out of the room, shaking his head. “There’s not much more I can do,” he whispered to the nurse waiting for him. “She’s not doing well.”
“Her family hasn’t been notified yet.”
“If she makes it in time to see them, it’ll be a miracle. We’ve made her comfortable. Now, all we can do is wait.”
How many times had she heard those words? They’d never hurt until now.
Selene pulled her hood over her head, waited until the doctor left, then opened the door to the room and slipped inside. It was eerily quiet other than the slightest beeping of a machine they’d managed to gather enough electricity to keep running. Another machine cast a blue hue throughout the room, washing it in a peaceful color that somehow still managed to seem sickly and ill.
On the bed in the center, James’s wife lay quietly.
There wasn’t much left of her really. They’d wrapped almost every bit of her body with white gauze. Blood stained a ring around her torso.
She looked so small lying on the bed like that. Selene always forgot how little they were, but her soul was so powerfully strong that it could have lit up the entire room if given the chance.
James’s wife shifted, looked at the door, and her eyes widened the moment they set on Selene’s form.
“You,” she whispered. “You’re real.”
The words echoed in Selene’s head, and she stepped closer to the edge of the bed. “I am. You know of me then?”
“I thought you were something James made up in his head.” Her voice was raspy and filled with pain. “But you aren’t at all. Come to gloat at my bedside that you’ll finally have him?”
“No.” Selene looked at the small clipboard next to the bed which listed all the drugs currently flowing through the woman’s veins, and her name. “Samantha. It’s a lovely name.”
“Why are you here then? If not to mock me.” Samantha’s voice trailed off as she stared into Selene’s eyes, and recognition dawned there. “You aren’t human. I always thought he was exaggerating, but you really aren’t human at all. What are you?”
There wasn’t any point in lying to a dying a woman. Selene sank onto the edge of the bed and placed her hand gently on Samantha’s knee. “I’m a goddess of death.”
“Here to kill me then?”
Yes and no. She didn’t want to kill the woman, but she also didn’t want any other death god to have her soul. Samantha deserved happiness in her afterlife, and Selene intended to make sure she got that. “In a way. I want you to be happy.”
“I was happy with him.” Samantha’s voice choked on a sob and she tilted her head so she couldn’t look at Selene. “Now, I suspect he will simply be happy with you.”
“I don’t think so. He was more than happy with you. He was blissful, and that was far more than I could ever give him.” She rubbed her hand on the knee beneath it, noting the strength still in her body. “If I could gift you one dying wish, what would it be?”
Samantha looked at her then, eyes glowing with a ferocity that betrayed her body’s weakness. “I want to see them one last time.”
Tears pricked Selene’s eyes, and she nodded. “Then I will help you to do that.”
“And I want to know who you are. Who you really are. You’ve haunted my steps since I met my husband, before he even knew you existed, you were there in his head. I want to know everything.”
“You might thi
nk less of him.”
“Impossible.”
Selene gave in. There wasn’t any harm in this woman knowing her entire story. She wouldn’t tell anyone. She’d already run out of time.
“Then as long as I tell this story, there will be breath in your lungs.”
She reached for Samantha’s hands, held them in hers, and told their story. Every bit of it, all the blood, the hatred, the anger. And all the love, the light, and the sad end that led them to this place and this time with Selene holding Samantha’s hands.
“And so,” she whispered, “we both loved him in a way. But you will always be the woman who made him smile.”
“Not my James,” Samantha replied, her voice catching on a sob. “He wouldn’t do those things. I can’t believe—”
Selene interrupted her, unable to allow a dying woman to think ill of her husband. “It wasn’t your James, but my Ronin. He did those terrible, awful things, because of me. I will always be the one who led him into darkness, and the one who left him there to rot. You will always be the one who gave him a child. Who taught him how to garden, and cook, and sing songs in the living room. And you will always be the one who danced with him under starlight and made him see how wonderful life could be. I have you to thank for that. You fixed all the things I broke.”
Samantha stared into her eyes and then slowly shook her head in denial. “You were given a monster to love,” she rasped. “I was merely given a man.”
Therein lay the problem. The bed of thorny roses that had torn at her skin since the beginning of this story. He was her monster. A man made of arcane magic, filled to the brim with black thoughts and dark things. But she had been an arrogant god who saw his power, madness, and hatred, and wanted to devour it whole.
Selene squeezed Samantha’s hands. “I’m going to show you something beautiful,” she whispered. “So you can understand.”
Through their connection, Selene reached through Samantha’s physical form and touched the blue light of her soul that so desperately wanted release. She didn’t pull it out of her body but instead, gathered it in her arms and filled it with all the memories she had glimpsed from her hiding place outside James’s home.
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