Page 11 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

“There is nothing I need to know.”

“Do you hate me?” The question had slipped faster than he’d intended to ask it. He didn’t mean it to seem like an accusation.

Silene’s perpetual frown melted away and she turned to look at him again, with something else in her eyes, something like acquiescence, as if she had made peace with the fact that it was neither this or that. “I don’t hate you, Gabriel. I just don’t like you.”

“Why not hate me if I have been so cruel to you?”

“I think I wasn’t made capable of hate. All of it might have been easier if I had just found a way to hate. If I had clung to it, I might have found some meaning in living.”

“And love? Did you not love?”

“I did. To the point of suffocation. I should have loved a little less, maybe I could have been able to hate more.”

“Your death. Was it painful?”

She swallowed and his eyes dropped to her throat that was always covered by a thin scarf of sorts to hide the very scar he might as well have carved by his own hand. “People like me never die violently.”

“People like you?” he asked, wanting to know more of the life he’d not been able to witness, of the life she’s always pushed him away from seeing and cursed him to never see. It was like she had not wanted any witnesses to her death. Or maybe…she just had not wanted any visitors at her grave, because the woman he’s seen from afar had been neither here nor there, only resembling somewhat of a lovely phantom, a mirage of pain draped in such gentle beauty. She was still as such, as the day he’d found and then lost her.

“People who have only ever known violence,” she said, standing and handing him back his jacket. “I am leaving.”

Looking up at her, he said, “You’ve given my brother your five hundred years. Before you go, give me one more day.”

Silene’s lips parted, and she stared at him with so much confusion for a while before asking, “Why? At the very least tell me why?”

“I’d like to know more about why you don’t like me.”

“Won’t take me a whole other day to list them.”

“I’m certain you can come up with enough to fill up a whole day.”

“Such a senseless thing to do.”

“Says the Reaper who knits and wears things no one can see, cooks what she cannot eat, decorates a house she invites no one into, and plants flowers no one can smell.”

Her lips parted and she sat up straight. “How would you know all that?”

“I have senseless hobbies.”

“Like watching me?” she asked, blinking fast, her cheeks taking the slightest rosy tint. But strangely, she did not react as surprised as he’d thought.

“That wouldn’t be one of them. There is some sense to that.”

Her eyes paced between his. “What sense could there even be to watching me?”

He wanted to remember her. Everything about her. He wanted everything about her engraved on his skin, for the ink to take root on his bones, for them to feed into his marrow.

Her entire life was gone somehow except the end. There wasn’t a single trace of her anywhere. If not for her hate, he would have never found her, he wouldn’t have borne witness of her end, of what drove her to her end.

No one could do that. No one could wish so hard to not exist that their entire existence would erase. But she did, and Gabriel was afraid she would do it again and vanish from his sight once more. Soon, she would leave his sight, and he wanted to use every clue he had to find her no matter where she would hide from him.

She threw his jacket in his lap. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Why are you always so unsettled by my attention, Silene?”

“You’re an unsettling creature.”

He threw his head back and laughed, but that seemed to unsettle her, too, because she looked away, breathing in as if there was no air at all.