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Chapter Twenty
I fell to the ground, the blast from Lilith sailing over me as the world moved again. I should have been grateful for that, but I was too focused on how the mist filled me, on how it made me cold andhollow.
I’d felt it before, that creeping sensation when I’d fallen into the abyss that first time, when I’d tried to find Rachel’s spirit and Gran had removed it from me.
But where that had been the tiniest amount, this time I let it truly fill me. I choked, gasping, my body rebelling as it did in my dreams. I’d tried to hold my breath then, but I didn’t now. I pulled in breath after breath, inhaling and exhaling as if it would fix it.
Was this how that first fish had felt when it had climbed onto land and tried to breathe, when it had realized what a monumentality shitty idea it was?
Maybe good old Dad wasn’t too happy with my progress and had decided he didn’t need me to fuck up the family line anymore.
Except there, above me, he stood. He was back to looking like a reaper, staring at me through the blackness of the shadows he was, as if waiting.
For what?
Oh, me dying.
Sorry, it’s taking a minute, Dad.
Except then I sucked in abreath, and it didn’t hurt quite so bad… One after another I took, each easing that choking sensation. It was like going out into a blizzard from a warm house, how the first steps were the worst, that shock before a body starts to adjust.
I rolled to my back, able to take easy breaths now, amazed by how muchbetterI felt. The exhaustion had subsided, the soreness gone as if I’d been revitalized.
At least some part of me wasmadeof this place, so maybe I needed this mist to recover. Maybe this was like blood to Kase, like hell to Hunter, like the moon to Troy.
I forced myself to my knees, then to my feet.
Lilith stood, mouth open as if she was as confused as I was.
It didn’t last long before she threw another bolt at me, but this time? It passed right through me.
I looked down to realize I was neither fully reaper nor fully human. I existed in some middle ground between the two, drawing on the power of purgatory but not bound to it as my father was, as the other reapers were. What he’d said made sense as I stood between these two worlds.
Lilith took a step backward, as if thrown by how I didn’t turn into a pile of ash as she’d expected I would.
I advanced, ignoring the way she repeated the action, frustration making her sloppy and erratic.
She was a memory, just an echo of who she had been in life, something trapped and twisted by fear and anger and a desire for revenge. She warped everything around her, including the immortals she influenced, and pulled in spirits to trap here.
Thiswasn’t even really her, not the person she’d been before.
It made me wonder what she’d been before she’d turned into this. Did anyone else even know? What had happened to her?
“Why won’t you just die?” she asked on a pant, a sure sign that she was at her end.
Echoes couldn’t be wholly destroyed, so what was I supposed todowith one here? Hunter had said they couldn’t be freed, they couldn’t be killed, so what were the options?
I didn’t have any answers, so I went with instinct, with trusting myself.
I reached out and set a hand on her cheek, staring into her eyes. When everything faded around us, though, it wasn’t because she’d done it. She wasn’t infecting me this time.
Instead, I followed her, deep into her mind, to the place that ultimately trapped her.
And there?
I saw Lilith, a woman who looked as she had when I’d known her, yet somehow different. Lighter, smiling,happy.
She stood in a home with stone walls and a dirt floor. She stared at a man who walked in with something I’d have never expected from her—love.
