Page 53 of Night Shift

His fingers close around mine.

“I do not know how to undo what I have become.”

“Yes, you do.”

He looks at me.

“You’ve known since the beginning.”

For a moment, neither of us speaks.

Behind us, Petra is loudly accusing someone of stealing her left shoe, even though I’m almost certain she arrived barefoot.

I squeeze Erebus’s hand once.

“Figure out what you’re going to do about it.”

Then I let go.

This time, when I walk away, he doesn’t call after me.

By the time I reach the parking lot, something shifts overhead.

Not light.

Not Dawn.

Not yet.

But the darkness loosens.

And for the first time in days, I think morning might still remember the way home.

CHAPTER 9

EREBUS

Night is beautiful when it is fleeting. I knew that once, with an intimacy total and molecular. Mortals have always been baffled by the way night bleeds from the world, how it surrenders at the sharp edge of morning. They never understood that the most exquisite aspect of darkness is that it is never absolute.

The night I tried to hold for Calliope was not poetry.

It was a room with no door.

Now, as I walk across the roof of her building, black wind knotting my hair and the horizon erased, I see what I have done. Above me, the clouds have organized themselves into a permanent bruise, while the moon, wan and overexposed, refuses to leave the sky. After a week of perpetual darkness, the world is beginning to unravel at the seams. Plants on balconies have curled in upon themselves. Pigeons fight for old sandwich crusts beneath the ceaseless dark, and the humans have become pale, exhausted versions of themselves, unsure whether it is morning or midnight and remaining awake until their bodies collapse beneath the weight of shattered circadian rhythms.

I set foot on Calliope’s balcony.

Inside, she sleeps.

For once, this is not a metaphor. She is curled beneath hospital-green sheets, wound tightly around herself, her face resting on a pillow the shade of graveyard lilies. I watch her through the glass, and something claws through my chest—a pain I did not know existed before her.

Love, it turns out, is not the answer to loneliness. It is the expansion of that ache to catastrophic scale.

I wait for her to wake.

I will not enter without her consent. She trusts me less now, and she is right to do so. Even as I stand there, the hours pile one upon another until finally she stirs and her eyes open.

She sees me immediately.