1
Hayden
The thing aboutdeath is that it doesn’t give a damn.
Not about your unfinished business, your best intentions, or the laundry you swore you’d fold last Thursday and didn’t. Death arrives unsentimental and on time, like it always has.
Which is why I respect it. Death, at least, keeps its calendar.
The sign above the door readsHarlow and Sons Funeral Home, the lettering engraved into weathered oak. Classic and reliable, like the kind of place people trust to handle their loss with care.
It’s a convenient fiction, really. The name. People trust a “family business” more than they’d trust a solo owner with no apparent ties to the living. I’ve kept it for the irony. Not a single son in sight. Just me, my impeccable filing system, and a very successful centuries-long act of pretending not to be Hades.
The only company I keep are the shadows that trail me. Mostly invisible to mortals, but tangible enough to raise goosebumps when I pass.
So, when I step into my office this morning and find a sunflower arrangement mocking me from my prep table, my first impulse is to banish it from existence. Fire feels…poetic.
They look like they belong in a summer commercial. Bright petals dancing in a sunflower field, practically begging for someone to frolic through them, hand in hand with a romantic interest who will probably ghost them on Tinder within a day.
This is a funeral home, not a Hallmark movie set.
I drop my bag onto the worn leather chair by the door and give the flowers a death glare. Their sickening optimism feels like a personal affront. This is where people come to mourn. Where we honor the dead with the dignity they deserve. Once, that used to mean something, as the person who had to remember what everyone else wanted to forget.
I can practically hear my former self sneering in the background.This is what you’ve become, Hayden?
The thought makes my jaw tighten.
“Irene!” I call out.
Irene Beaumont appears in the doorway, coffee in hand, looking like she could run a Fortune 500 company. Instead, she’s chosen to manage my day-to-day with ruthless efficiency. I’m not sure if she’s seen me at my worst, but she’s definitely seen me at myleastcharming. She doesn’t seem to mind.
Her dark eyes gleam with amusement. “Morning to you, too.”
I gesture dramatically toward the flowers like they’ve committed a felony. “Care to explain?”
Her lips twitch. “They arrived for the Masterson funeral. I assumed you approved them.”
“Do I look like someone who’d sign off on this”—I gesture again at the bouquet, searching for the right word—“this…monstrosity?”
Irene takes another sip of her coffee, completely unshaken. “Maybe the florist thought your life needed some brightening.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I assure you, my life is sufficiently illuminated.”
“Then take it up with the man himself. I’m sure he’ll appreciate your feedback.” Irene places a neat invoice on my desk. “His shop is just down the street. Levi Wilder. Always smiling, exceptionally cheerful…” She pauses, smiling knowingly. “You’ll get along famously.”
There’s something close to comfort in our rhythm, in her unflappable calm. Forty years and she’s never once asked why I don’t age, why the shadows trailing sometimes flicker too long. Irene is the only mortal I’ve ever met who seems to understand that some truths don’t need to be spoken aloud. She doesn’t knowwhatI am, not really. But she somehow gets me anyway and that unspoken comprehension has kept us both content to leave certain doors closed.
She disappears into her office, leaving me alone with my resentment…mild, manageable, familiar. Irene, despite all her exemplary qualities, is unfortunately never wrong. Which is precisely why I find myself moments later stepping onto the frozen sidewalk, invoice in one hand and the offending sunflowers clasped begrudgingly in the other.
As I head to the florist’s, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a frosted shop window. Sharp-angled face, dark hair, exactly the type of profile one might expect carved into marble or immortalized in bronze. Both of which, to be fair, have happened. But those days of eternal grandeur are memories now, left behind when I traded the underworld for…the Garden State.
The gods got temples and hymns. I get invoices and headstones. It’s a downgrade I still haven’t learned to make peace with. No one here knows what I am…or who I was. And I’d like to keep it that way.
My reflection shifts, shadows trailing just behind me. Faint echoes of a purpose I can’t quite shake. Ever present, loyal in the way only ghosts and mistakes tend to be.
I try to ignore the bitter twist in my chest. There’s no point dwelling. The Immortal Retirement Act was a mistake born of good intentions and misplaced trust. One I can’t undo.
Though I’ve tried…
