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He titled his head, as if the word meant little to him. “We areallalone. You were with mortals, though. That was important.”
“Why? Why couldn’t you at leasttellme you were there? That you existed? That someone gave a damn about me?”
“Because I could not speak to you, not in the living world. You could not understand me there. Only here, in our realm, could you actually see me, could we speak, could you understand me.”
“So you should have brought me here!”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t bring you here—you had to make your own way when you were ready. We, here, are not like you. You are part of us, part reaper, but your other side would have withered and atrophied here.”
“And my mother? Not that I want to have a sex-ed talk about reapers, but how the hell is it even possible?”
“I loved your mother. I watched her for a very long time, until I found a way to meet. A tiny tear in space and time, small enough for two, but the universe does not abide such things easily.”
I frowned as I thought about that, about how a woman could fall for a reaper, about the sort of woman who would see one and decide to put out right then. “So it was a hit it and quit it deal?”
“It was something impossible to replicate.”
“And where is she? My mom?” The old pain came back, when I asked something I knew better than to ask.
“I do not know. Watching her became too painful, to forever be on the sidelines, forever witness to a life I could never interact with.” His voice held sorrow that surprised me, especially since looking at him, I wouldn’t have thought he had much emotional depth.
I curled my hands into fists but kept from trying to hit him again. It hadn’t gone well the first time. “So what is this? Some sort of fatherly pep talk? A little late, don’t you think?”
“You haven’t understood,” he said.
“Understood what?”
“My lessons.”
“Sorry, but absentee fathers don’t get to talk about lessons.”
He lifted his hand and in his palm, a bird made of mist flew.
The reaper in my dream…
I thought back to when I’d been there, when the shadow—what I knew now was a reaper—had shown me the visions of the bird and the fish, and how thathadhelped. “That was you?”
He nodded. “I have tried to give you what I could, to guide you when you needed it.”
More hit me. The reaper who had brought Gran to me…the one who’d killed the man who had abused me. Was that him? Had he been trying, in his own fucked-up way, to help me?
I let out a soft laugh at how sad it was that even that made me feel wanted. No matter how much I tried to say I could stand on my own, I melted each time I thought I wasn’t alone. “I did listen. It’s what let me save Troy. It’s why I’ve been able to do any of this.”
“You’ve accepted your other side, but you are still trying to be something else.”
“I don’t have any idea what that means. If this is going to be the last conversation I get to have, could wepleasenot play word games? Come on—I’m about to die. Tell me you’re proud of me, something I can pretend means a damn thing.”
He shifted again, the strange way he moved that told me this wasn’t a form he used often. This wasnotsomeone who could have passed for human by any stretch of the imagination. “Do you know why Lilith hasn’t been touched by the reapers here?”
“Because you are all lazy and rarely doanythingthat doesn’t directly benefit you?”
“Lookat her.”
I sighed and turned my gaze to her. She was as she’d always been—beautiful in the way a spider was. Lethal and graceful and terrifying in way that made my skin crawl. The fire had moved more from her palm, but only a hair, as if time still passed, but too slowly to keep track of.
I went to tell him I didn’t see anything whensomethingcaught my eye. It wasn’t anything I could place at first, just a nagging feeling, but I stared at her and realized…
Something was wrong.
