Page 40 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

She reached a hand to her throat when those eyes dropped on the scar there, the scar she always hid.

“I should have obeyed the fates, I should have stayed away,” he said, pressing a hand to his head and grasping at his hair. “At least I couldn’t hurt you then.”

A stab pierced at her insides at his words. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t mind. That her body could do nothing besides bruise and bleed. In fact, her body did it best. She bruised and bled like no other. So much so that her father had turned her into a spectacle for it. But why was he not laughing like her father and the monsters made of men had? Why was he staring at her as he was? Why had he never laughed?

“How am I even losing you,” he said, his mouth stretching into a trembling grin despite the tears in his eyes—tears that softened the very ground she stood on. Silene’s world had never been shaken the way it did just then. “You were never even mine.”

His.

Silene had never thought…she’d never thought she’d wanted to belong to someone. Someone who made her feel so light, so warm, who made her smile, who’d comforted her, who circled around her like the sun itself. Someone who had given sense to wind and rain, to rocks and clouds. Someone who made the entire world disappear for her.

One moment, she was there, at where she had always been—two feet apart from him. And the next, her arms were reaching over his shoulders, closing over his neck as she got on her toes and pressed her mouth to his.

Pain struck her across her chest first, grasping her heart in a firm, tight grip until she could barely breathe. But she’d been barely breathing for hundreds of years now so she paid no mind to it. How could she when his hands cupped her face and pulled her limp, pain ridden body to his firm one.

But her embrace was the place hopes went to die.

He was wrenched away from her too suddenly. So suddenly that she swayed on her feet and almost took a tumble. Gabriel stood where he’d always stood, two feet away from her, but this time watching at her with a pair of wide and terrified blue eyes, breathing hard and fast.

Silene looked down at her hands, her arms, her chest, at the skin around them that had turned almost entirely grey, violet veins spreading all under her skin with blood that stung like poison. Everything came crashing in all at once. Realisation and pain alike. And she fell to the ground, her limbs struggling to hold her up. She didn’t resist the call of weakness that lured her body to lay down on the cold, wet earth fresh from evening’s dew.

And as her sight blurred, giving into the darkness, she saw him again, leaning over her, holding a shaky hand over her face. Silene had never witnessed such a storm, such angry skies and seas as the one in his eyes as he looked at her and shouted, screamed things she could not hear while her consciousness slowly dipped into darkness.

The next time she opened her eyes they were looking up at the wrong brother as he carried her in his arms. “Where is he?” she asked, her own voice like blades against her throat.

Death did not look at her as he continued on his path to Asphodel, on the hill towards her home. “Gabriel will not come near you again.”

“But I want him to. I was the one who got close.”

He stopped, still not looking down at her though she was sure the scowl he directed at nowhere was meant for her instead. When he finally looked at her, there was nothing but pity in his gaze. And she’d never seen Death pity anything. “Do you know what that would mean, Silene?”

“I find very little meaning in things these days,” she said, pushing at his chest and testing her feet. “I want to see him.”

“I will not allow that,” he said with a finality she’d not heard from him before.

“Az,” she started, prepared to beg him, too.

“It is final,” he said, vanishing.

Nine o' Clock

Unlike the many past nights of light and steady rest, something had overtaken Silene’s body, placing her into another world and letting her mind wander there. She’d been thrust back in her dark world of nightmares all of the sudden after she’d taste peace.

When she woke, the darkness had wrapped around her like a capsule, the candlelight she always kept on had died. She patted the bed next to her, whimpering and crying as she hoped and prayed to everything and everyone that it had been just a dream and that she was not back in her old body, laying beside someone who’d slowly been driving her to choose death.

As she frantically searched into the darkness of the room for monsters that would jump her without warning like they always did, pinning her down and violently taking what she did not give permission to be taken, her lips quietly shaped into the letters of his name, time after time like an incantation.

Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel.

“Please,” she finally whispered at the end of her silent chant.

And the darkness answered. It answered for the first time ever. “I’m here”

Silene sucked in a sharp breath, staring right ahead at the direction of that familiar voice despite not being able to see a thing. But she knew he could see her.

“What was it, my beautiful demise?” he asked.

Her voice was too small, too wounded by memories as she muttered, “Just a bad dream.”