Page 52 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

“I was planning on dirtying you up again.”

Just then, her stomach did something it had not done in centuries—it growled with hunger, making him drop his head back and laugh.

“Food it is,” he said, grabbing his shirt and throwing it over her head, guiding her arms through the short sleeves before sitting her up in his lap and wrapping her legs around his waist. With her clinging to him like that, he started making her food.

Then he’d made love to her again right there in his kitchen, then as he’d brought her under the hot shower, and again in his bed until their limbs were tangled together to the point neither knew where the other started and where they ended.

“If I gave you a dream, any dream, what would you want to dream about?” he murmured, eyes fluttering from sleep. “I will give it to you.”

“Too late,” she whispered. “I got my dream.”

They’d fought sleep hard, the both of them.

But exhaust and grief had meddled in a strange concoction and drowsed them.

Time had done the most unforgivable thing.

It had passed.

As she stared down at his sleeping form sprawled on the bed, she started counting down the seconds that would soon strike to dawn, trying not to let the last memory of him blur behind tears.

“I will remember,” she whispered to herself as she choked on chopped sobs. “How can I forget? I can’t forget. Nothing could make me forget you.”

Seconds before her own clock would finally strike a second death, she reached a hand to his face, forcing herself to remember every detail on his skin, the exact way he felt at her touch, the colour of his hair that she hoped to forever see in the sun.

She pressed her lips to his brow as gently as she could without waking him up in the new cold world of hers. “You are so beautiful. You are so beautiful to me.”

Holding her timekeeper tightly to her chest, she wished one last time that it would stop working. And when more seconds were wasted away on wishes that couldn’t be fulfilled, she gathered every little bit of strength she had to stand and leave and not scream: Let me be just a ghost only to haunt you for I can no longer love you.

Her heart could never be hollow or narrow enough not to fit him. It was a but a wretched thing, blackened by misery and bruised by hopelessness, but she would behold him like a beacon.

Azriel was waiting for her right against the gates to his world, his head lowered in a defeat that Death never accepted—there was no hopelessness in death so why were his endless, dark eyes drowning in it? “I am sorry,” he whispered, low and dark and mournful.

It was then Silene let it all out. Everything she had held in.

She crumbled in the only arms she could ever allow herself to crumble, she’d crumbled in his arms one too many times, and he’d welcomed it every single time.

“I don’t want to forget him.”

He would not look at her, his hopeless gaze latching on her palms pressed against each other at her chest, her only shield against the pounding of her heart begging to be set free. “You both made unbreakable bargains, Silene. There are worse things than forgetting,” he said. “Remembering is one of them.”

“What will I remember?”

“Of him? Nothing. You will never remember him for long even if you meet again. You will start anew in my service. For five hundred more years.”

Time passed, it was what it did best, but she didn’t want it to make her forget. “And then?”

“Only the fates know.” A flicker of something less than hope and more than despair flickered in his eyes. “Maybe they will be kind.”

Despite all the strength she used to will her tears back, she broke again. “They never are.”

Epilogue

Gabriel had been bestowed with a curse. The curse of memories. Memories he shared with no one now. Memories he’d once shared with someone he loved. Someone he’d always love. Someone who’d never even remember ever loving him back again.

He’d watched his dead lover for hundreds of years now as he’d always done. Sometimes from afar, at other times when he’d mustered the courage to bear the brunt force of longing, he could do it from up close.

This spring morning, she had watched him back. They’d sat merely a few feet apart on opposite benches on the small park she often visited every spring in Asador as they had once done long ago together, in a faraway memory she could not remember and one he would never forget. When his gaze had finally become unbearably noticeable, she’d lowered the book she’d been reading and simply stared at him. Seconds had turned into minutes. Minutes into hours. He could see the tumultuous storms brewing in her gaze, the many questions she had but unable to recall the answers she’d once had for all of them.