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He doesn’t want you to know. The words are curdled milk down my throat, the reminder he’s still keeping secrets from me wholly unpleasant.
“He can’t rip out your throat,” I point out in an attempt to make light of the situation. “He can’t even kick you out into the Beyond.”
Mei’s face falls. “I kinda wish he could.”
My eyes widen. “What do you mean? You can leave at any point.”
She turns away from me, but it does little to hide her nervous jitters.
“Hey, you can talk to me.”
She sighs. “I haven’t told Tei this. I don’t want him to judge me.”
I mimic zipping and locking my lips before tossing the key over my shoulder. That gets a small smile out of Mei.
“For a while, when I first died, I could see the door. It was open, and bright, and warm. But I wasn’t ready. So I ignored it. And I ignored it some more. Then one day I decided I should at least check it out, but…” Mei takes a deep breath. “It was closed. It’s been closed since.”
I fail at hiding my surprise as my lips pop open with a sound. “You’re stuck, too?”
Mei nods.
“Do you even want to leave?”
She waves her hand in the air. “Not necessarily right now. I want to make sure you’re okay, and I feel a little guilty leaving Tei behind after the years we’ve spent together, but… yeah. When the time comes, yes. I’d like to move on.”
I do wonder what will make the time come, if it’s truly about Tei’s curse, or if there’s something else she isn’t saying. “Maybe you have to decide the time is right before it opens again.”
Mei shakes her head forcefully, shaking her shoulders with it. “But it was open before, and I had no intention of crossing it.”
I pucker my lips. She’s not wrong, but I refuse to believe the situation is as hopeless as Mei makes it out to be. “If I could find a potential solution to the problem, would you be willing to try it?”
She perks up. “You’d help me?”
“Of course I would,” I say with a scoff. “You’re my friend. I’m not going to let you deal with this alone.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d say the sheen covering her eyes looks like tears — except it’s just the touch of death. But there’s no mistaking the way her expression fills with longing. “I kind of renounced myself to the fact that I’d be alone for the rest of my days.” She rolls her lips over her teeth before continuing. “I mean, Tei is company, and we’ve developed an… interesting dynamic, but our start wasn’t exactly the best.”
“Then why didn’t you leave right away? What weren’t you ready for?” I try to keep the question in, but it bubbles on my lips before I can stop it.
“I bargained for a way to be with my beloved, and for a while I thought maybe…” she shakes her head with a heavy exhale. “I thought death could be it.”
I tuck one leg under me and hug the other one to my chest. “Then why didn’t you stay by her side?”
“Because she couldn’t see me,” Mei admits in a whimper. It’s a sound so sorrowful it punches me in the gut. “And I couldn’t deal with watching her grief without being able to do anything about it.”
She curls into her shoulders, tucking a strand of kelp-like hair behind her ear. “Does that make me a coward?”
“I think it makes you human,” I say without thinking, remembering the early days of losing my mom, of desperately trying to contact her, of breaking again each time I came up empty-handed. I wouldn’t have wanted her to witness my grief. “And I think your lover would understand.”
She presses a hand to her chest. “Thank you. And thank you for agreeing to help me.”
“Anything for a friend. But first, I really think we need to find my family grimoire.”
Mei nods so forcefully I fear her head will snap. “Yes, of course.” She reaches for me before retreating her hand, as if she’d temporarily forgotten her touch can scald me. “We’ll find it. I know we will.”
I force a smile on my lips. If only I could muster the same confidence. The chances we’d find a grimoire even my cousin who’s looked for it all her life can’t are slim.
Mei studies me, tipping her head side to side. “What’s wrong?”
