Page 227 of May: Bloom & Bane

My lip curls in disgust. Thirty-two and sixteen. The math is a desecration. It mocks everything holy about our bond. We are protectors of a sacred line, not predators who perform their perversions in the nursery.

Arteus tightens his coils, a powerful vice of muscle wrapping around my neck and chest. He presses me down, his smooth, cold belly applying a deep pressure.

“Calm your ssshadowsss, Little Reaper,” Arteus hisses. “He hasn’t finissshed the ssstory. You look at the math of mortal flesssh and you sssee a crime. But the boy did not look at her with the eyesss of a man. He did not look at her at all.”

My gaze snaps to Therael.

“Explain the sixteen years⁠—”

“I am trying to, Ashán, but I need you to hear what I am saying.”

I nod, forcing myself to listen.

“You are right. You are more right than you know, and it is the whole of what I have been reaching for. A true bond does not aim a grown soul at a child. It cannot. Micah and Anna were meant to enter the world at the same time. Two grown souls, finally finding each other after a lifetime lost.” He gathers my hand in his. “That was the bond. That was always the bond.”

Therael squeezes my hand once, grounding me before the rest.

“You say monsters do not act the same as men. You are right. The proof is standing in front of me—snarling, and sickened, ready to tear the sky down at the very idea of it. And that, Little Reaper, is why Micah died the way he did. He could not conceive the mere thought of looking at Anna; he assumed that the tiny sliver of her soul within Lumi was what was meant for him.”

Tears stream down my shadowy face. Some desperate part of me is still hoping for an exception, a single life where the soul I am got it right.

“So there was never—” My voice cracks. “Not once. In over three thousand years, we never once found her. We just kept… chasing her inside of someone else.”

“Hear me, Ashán, because this is the only part that matters. You were never wrong about who you love. Not in a single life. Across every turn of the wheel, your heart reached for exactly the right soul. You were only wrong about where to find her. Until now.”

“Eden,” I breathe.

“Eden,” Therael confirms, a small smile spreading across his face. He tightens his grip on my hand. “The clock is finally reset, Ashán. The delay is over. The ledger is clean. For the first time in over three thousand years, you are standing in the exact same hour as the woman you were made for.”

Eden isn’t the next woman. She’s not a replacement or a consolation. Not the newest face in a long line of wrong faces. She is my Anya. The first soul my soul ever reached for. Before Lumi. Before Naya. The fragment I chased through two whole lifetimes. The scent I locked onto. The ghost I followed off a cliff and into the snow—my ash’kaela.

“I finally found her,” I sob.

“You did, Little Reaper.” And there is so much love in his words, so much weary, ancient relief that I understand this is a thing that has weighed on his soul just as heavily as it has on mine. He has stood as a silent witness through all of these years.

“Now go, dark prince. Don’t keep The Sun waiting any longer.”

The dark around us softens at the edges. The distant pull of a body, a green-eyed woman with her hand pressed to a worried chest.

“What do I tell them?” I panic. “Sage doesn’t know any of this? Eden—how do I even⁠—”

“That,” Therael says, “is not a thing I can walk you through. Some doors a soul must open with its own two hands.”

I don’t miss the way his face falls. Why isn’t he happy anymore?

—THERAEL

“Forgive me, Little Reaper,” I whisper to the empty dark. “I have just handed you the knife. And I let you believe it was the key.”

CHAPTER 65

it was always you

—ASHÁN

The world rushes in all at once. And before I can find my footing in a body that feels too small… she hits me. Her arms lock around my neck, burying her face in my hair.

“It’s you,” I whisper.