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“So where doesthisfit in? Because it doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t balancing anything. Life is temporary and the afterlife still allows for movement, for change. This is forever—it doesn’t fit.”
“I didn’t make this all,” Hunter answered. “No one asked me how to set it up. My best guess is that purgatory happened when people couldn’t move forward, when that fight inside them was strong enough that they couldn’t break free. Universe needed somewhere to put them, and that somewhere ended up here. The universe isn’t doing this—the spirits trapped themselves here.”
The answer was highly unsatisfactory. It didn’t explain why the reapers were here, or how it all fit together. It felt like a huge ‘screw you’ from the universe to create a place like this where people couldneverescape.
I wanted to walk over, to grab one of the trapped souls, to see if I could do something. Could I wake them as I had with the men? Could I free them from this place? Grab a hold of their soul as I’d seen reapers do and just haul them out of purgatory? Hunter had said it wasn’t possible, though.
So the loops sat like some sick monument to them and their pain.
I leaned forward, breathing slowly, trying to tell myself it was okay.
It wasn’t, but what else was I supposed to do? It felt like the damn plants in hell again. The situation sucked, but I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t fix it. I had to focus on what I could do.
So I shoved myself to my feet as the mist closed all the way in on us, forcing myself to move forward, toward Lilith, no matter how hard it was.
How long we had walked, I had no idea. I wasn’t sure it really mattered. If hell was strange, it was nothing compared to purgatory. Everything around us screamed that we weren’t meant to be here, that this place obeyed none of the rules I had come to understand.
Still, we were so close. The hair on my arms stood, a never-ceasing charge that ran along the mist and told me she was close.
Shedidn’tbelong. It was clear as anything. She altered the entire realm by her presence, like a poison leeching away what it was supposed to be.
The path went up, as if we were climbing a hill, but because I couldn’t see far in front of me, I couldn’t tell visually. The soft sand beneath me, however, shifted to a firm surface.
I paused, dragging my foot over to find stone. That was a good sign, right? Any change had to be something good at this point.
A sound from ahead of us made my steps slow, something low that I felt more than heard. It reminded me of bass turned low on a car, when the deep sounds vibrated through me. I couldn’t identify it, but Iknewit was her. It was like a sound that grated, something that I damn well knew shouldn’t be there, as if it were on a frequency that wasn’t right.
“She’s up here,” I said, whispering it even though the mist had seemed to create a sound barrier.
“Yeah,” Grant answered. “I feel something, too.”
If it was strong enough for him to catch, it meant we were close. I was sensitive enough to feel it from far away, but this near? Even the men could feel the way the air was disjointed.
“You know,” Hunter said with a serious tone. “I think we’ll be fine.”
“Oh really?” Troy asked. “And what is it about any of this that makes you think that?”
“Lilith once screwed a hellhound I knew. He said she could only come once, so, you know, not a lot of stamina there from her.”
The words were the last thing I expected, which was probably why the joke didn’t land very fast and I just frowned in return.
“Maybe it wasn’t her, but your friend who was the problem,” Grant added.
“What else would you expect from a hellhound?” Troy said.
Hunter set a hand over his chest, his mouth open as if he’d never heard a more offensive thing in his life. “You know, not all of us can impress partners with a knot.”
Kase snorted. “Werewolves evolved a knot because they know any smart female would take off running afterward. Their only chance is to trap one.”
Thatstopped me. I turned around to find Kase, his lip curled into the barest hint of a smile, his snarky response dry enough for me to wonder if he’d meant it as a joke at all.
Then it hit me—the joke, and just how absurd it was tomakethat joke here of all places. I laughed because I needed it. In the middle of purgatory, with shit odds of succeeding, here we were making jokes.
Not evengoodjokes, but maybe that was the point.
The men joined in, even Kase letting out a soft chuckle.
It eased the tension, helped remind me that even with all this craziness, with all the unknown, I still had them. They made sense, at least to me, when nothing else did.
The mist shifted around us, and even with the laughter, the movement caught my attention.
It settled, having created a path with a figure at the end. There, in front of us, stood Lilith.
So much for our happy little reprieve…Leave it to Lilith to fuck up a good thing.
