Page 18 of Where Light Cannot Follow

I let my gaze drop to the slime-slick stones at Dante's feet. Mr. Dante's, perhaps I should say. So accustomed to authority, he believes it will serve him here. Believing that if he maintains his arrogance and cutting glares, he'll march through each room, locate the exit, and simply walk out. That he needs no guide.

He doesn't know that the genesis is only the beginning.

Some creature not of the earthly plane—one I've never bothered naming—slithers over stone, belly writhing as it pulls itself into the ink-dark water. The swamp ripples, then settles.

I shift to return down the path. I cannot bear watching another soul fall. Cannot endure failing again.

Perhaps after all these years, something is finally breaking within me.

I knew from the beginning I shouldn't have entered this man's mindscape. Shouldn't have allowed the bond to form. Soon his terror will echo through my consciousness like a crescendo building toward catastrophe. For another moment, I hear a woman's wails, high and desperate. I shake my head sharply, forcing myself back to the present.

I cannot keep doing this to myself. I shift to leave, but Dante speaks, though he's not looking at me. His hand rests on the door's knob, attention fixed there. But he doesn't turn it.

"Are they all moments from my past?"

There's something nearly frightened beneath the echoing authority of his voice. Small and whispering.

"Not all," I answer. “They will possess a mixture of your genesis moments and your temptations."

He shudders. The coat follows the motion, trembling down his frame.

When he looks back, the arrogance has swept away for just a breath. It's not Mr. Dante, the wealthy executive, standing before me, but a child with dark eyes on the verge of tears, asking when his father might return, stomach growling with hunger.

"You'll be with me, though?" The question carries uncertainty he'd never permit in daylight.

"If I'm not connected to your mind, I would make a poor guide."

He blinks, then looks back the way we came, toward the door housing his shabby home, the pitiful, broken Christmas tree, and stained walls. The place where he trembled before his mother.

"I'd rather not share all my worst memories." He frowns. "Some things are private."

Not here, I want to say again, but I see there's no point. However, there's just enough tenderness blooming through him now, just enough vulnerability, a small sprout of verdant hope in a city of cold, brutal silver, that I sigh and move in his direction.

"If I remain disconnected from your mind, I shall witness my own temptations and genesis moments. Not yours. It will prove difficult for me and render me less able to help you."

“But you've made it through before?" The intensity radiating from him feels like a freshly sharpened blade.

"Many times. However, it's been years upon years since I've traversed my own temptations in this realm."

It's something I swore never to endure again. Yet, as he has since the moment I first glimpsed him, this tall specter of a man pulls at me with gravitational force I cannot name.

I already fear what I may agree to at his suggestion. Perhaps I'm not yet immune to temptation, to being swallowed by the swamp.

But that insecurity flickers across his features again, brief as a candle flame in the wind, but unmistakable.

"I'll remain with you, if you wish it," I say softly.

At my words, he turns fully to the door and opens it.

9

DANTE

The door clicks open, and steam billows from utter darkness. I steady myself, then step inside, waiting to see if Virgil follows.

When he materializes alongside me, I suppress a sigh of relief. I've spent too many years monitoring body language not to recognize when someone nears the breaking point of a deal. The telltale loss of eye contact, the way the body angles away from commitment.

How precariously close he'd come to abandoning me in this realm.