Page 6 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

“Don’t send me there,” she said, lowering her pride just this once. “Please.”

“He can’t hurt you, Silene.”

“You know he can.” His presence was like a beacon, a fiery hearth. The closer you got to him, the more alive you felt. It defrosted the very air of death around her; it made her feel human again—in the worst ways possible.

“He won’t harm you,” Azriel assured. “Never. And you know that, too, Silene.”

A box. She’d been sent inside a big, dark box with flashing colourful lights that made her almost nauseous. One where they were playing pounding noise they shamelessly called music, while jumping up and down to it. That’s where the residents of this dull world found most fun. That and at the bottom of a liquor bottle or a small pill which took their minds out of their bodies, and usually their guts, too.

But Silene had lived too little to fully understand, so she took that moment to observe this side of humanity. The world she’d lived in had been very different from Asador, primitive and poor and sickness filled compared to this one, but in a way, its people were the same. Ghosts. Empty shells made of flesh and bones. Unfeeling. Determined to sink their claws into everything innocent and evil at the same time to find that high of being human felt. Always at the cost of others. Never thinking of their faults. They’d all learnt to justify their evil.

Silene’s ears were pounding along the beat of the monstrous music blasting from the speaker devices overhead. Half of her other senses had also been made void from the rapid flashing lights that flickered in all sorts of colours.

The crowd of people all recoiled when she stepped between it, shivering and emptily searching for the presence they had unwillingly encountered and couldn’t see, only feel. Silene was like an omen. One you could only summon once, and only when you grazed the precipices of living.

There, above a slightly raised floor over the club, sat on a big round table filled with glass bottles of alcohol stood Jenny, the young woman she’d come for tonight, her name already engraved on the stones of Asphodel.

Silene had never really hesitated. She liked to do what she was sent to do fast. But she was hesitating now. Standing frozen under the steps leading to her as she looked up at the God who had his arm thrown over Jenny's shoulders, holding her time hostage for reasons Silene couldn’t even begin to think of. All of them which seemed to revolve around her considering what Azriel had told her.

Gabriel had stilled, too, staring down at her under his lashes, the crystal glass filled with liquor held stuck to his lips. It was then she noticed how his chest had stilled, too, no longer expanding with a breath.

She didn’t understand the surprise in his eyes when he’d been the one to summon her there tonight.

He didn’t look away from her as she rounded the dance floor and started climbing the stairs to him. Gabriel raked one too many long looks over her before those hollow eyes of his met hers, clinging to hers like a magnet.

It frustrated her. Not because she couldn’t stand it. It was for a different reason entirely. It was like he could see right through her. Through every single thought of hers.

Gabriel was known for having a thing about skeletons and closets. He never left them alone. If anything, he loved digging up every single bone. He loved to piece them like a puzzle and then scatter them again over fire once he was bored. No story about him was kind.

He set the glass down on the table. “Don’t you look pretty for me again, Miss Carver.”

She almost reeled back at the name she had not carried since her death, a name gifted to her at birth by the man who’d sired her.

Even though he was far from her, she could almost feel his fingers over her skin, skimming down the length of her limbs for another bone to dig out of her flesh.

“Let go of her,” Silene said, standing a few feet from them. He knew very well he couldn’t interfere with her work. Yet here he was. Interfering again.

Gabriel only stretched back, pulling the woman even closer—the woman who should have been dead minutes ago. “If only you were a little bit more polite. You’re polite to everything. From rocks and trees. You even apologise to ants for stepping on them by mistake. Am I so undeserving?”

“Yes.”

Jenny looked around and then blinked up at him. “Who are you talking to?”

The odd God leaned in and flashed her a smirk even though his eyes had rolled in Silene’s direction. “A pretty Grim Reaper with a strange, strange fetish for lace who looks like she wants nothing but to stab me to death,” he whispered to Jenny, making her burst out laughing.

Gabriel liked games. For some reason, he was now wanting to play them with her. But the thing with dying was that it made one unbothered. Even by the most powerful God there was. Very little impressed Silene. Nothing as much as death did. “I have to take her. Her soul is already dead. If it starts rotting before her body does, we both will be in trouble.”

“Then come here,” he said. “Come take her.”

“You know I can’t do that.” Death and life could only meet so close because they never meant to find a middle. It was one or the other, circling the orbits of one another. There were consequences in stepping into one another’s space. She’d challenge those rules if only not for the fact that she was now merely four deaths away from fulfilling her service.

The smirk he wore told her exactly what she needed to know. He was doing it on purpose. To test her limits or to just simply annoy her, she didn’t know, and she wasn't really up to finding out. “I will let you have her if you give me something in exchange.”

“Or you can just give me her with nothing in exchange and we can cut this unnecessary interaction.”

“I don’t particularly want to.”

To Silene’s much unfortunate luck, she again had no choice when she was faced with life. “Fine. What do you want?”