Page 9 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

Gabriel bent to pick up his fat cat and brought him to his chest. “Look at her. Isn’t she pretty like I’ve told you?”

Right at that moment, as if she had heard him, Silene turned around to face his building and tipped her head up, forcing Gabriel to hold a breath. She could not see them, that much he was sure about.

He braced when she started raising her hand up, nearly folding over from laughter when she gave him a middle finger.

Gabriel wondered—he wondered if she’d always sensed him, if she knew he’d always been watching for years, hundreds of them.

Three o' Clock

Gabriel rarely made himself seen. Even to the one he loved most—his brother. Ever since they’d been little and new to their existence, they’d been pitted against one another and had been raised to believe that they merely existed as something to stand against each other. Despite never falling for any of it, he’d still been wary of how he loved his brother. Gabriel was afraid—he was afraid to love his brother properly. Truth was, Gabriel was afraid to love anything at all. The only way he’d ever loved had been from afar. As they were now. A river apart and both standing on different sides. He could only love his brother like that without hurting him.

“No,” Azriel curtly told him before he could even ask what he’d come there to ask. “The same answer you have gotten from me for the past five hundred years. You’re not going anywhere near her. You’ve already tempted your luck enough by interfering with her work.”

Even though his brother’s defensiveness towards Silene was not unfounded, a sliver of envy slid into his belly and curled up his gut like a rattle snake full of venom.

Gabriel hated himself for the resentment he’d developed for his brother these past five hundred years. On his guiltless brother who bore none of the faults he’d attributed to him since the day he’d heard of the woman who’d prayed about his own downfall to none other than his own brother out of all.

It was the first time Silene had prayed in her life. A life Gabriel did not know had even existed amongst his realms until that prayer so long ago now—it was how he had found her, amongst the living yet not quite. And that lone prayer had been wasted on his ruination. A plea made to the stars for his damnation. The worst one they could find.

At the time he’d laughed, revelled in that prayer he’d heard by chance, full of amusement. Until he’d chased after it and found its owner. His least regretful mistake, but the one that had cost him the most.

In the end, there had been no prayer to bring him nearly close to the ruin that he was standing in so many feet under. A ruin that he’d sunk into the very moment he stayed to watch a human girl with such hate in her heart for him—a hate he’d never seen her possess for anyone else, not even those who’d hurt her. Before he’d known that the land under him had been quicksand, he’d spent days there on that pale realm, just waiting for her to finally raise her hazel eyes in his direction. Little had he known that the girl had desired the ground more than the skies, and that she would have never looked at him anyway.

“And I’ve done as you’ve asked,” Gabriel said. “I’ve stayed away.”

Azriel tilted his head, shooting his brother a look full of doubt. “Have you?”

“The best I could.” From afar, it had all been from afar.

“You could hurt her, really hurt her.”

Something cracked in his chest at his brother’s words. “Never again.”

“She is close, Gabe. So close to getting to leave here. So close to a new life.”

So close to forever slipping through his fingers, burned out of her memory, burned out of his, too. Once she would fulfil her service to his brother, that’s when his punishment would start.

The words burned up his throat like burning embers dragged by an iron rake as he spoke them, “You think that will keep her away from coming here again as soon as she can? She loved you once. Do you think she will not love you again?”

“Gabriel,” his brother warned. “If the fates will have it so, then there is nothing you nor I can do.”

“Is this payback?” Gabriel asked his brother who’d started looking at him with a scornful gaze ever since he’d forced him and his human lover apart years ago.

Azriel shook his head. “Have you always thought so little of me, brother?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

He didn’t know for how much longer he could keep her bones warm before his would start to grow cold, too. How much longer could he bear to embrace the soil she’d been buried in that blighted realm he cursed every time he visited because he missed her and that was the only way he could see her. “I’m too desperate. Sleeping at her grave every night is not sufficing anymore. I might be tasting your power, brother. You might have won over me after all. Our father was right.”

“Our father is a demented old God.” His head lowered and he took off his glasses to rub a hand across his face. “You only have her for a few hours. The longer she stays away from Asphodel, the more danger she is in. I will intervene if you do anything that puts her in harm’s way.”

Gabriel nodded. He would have been satisfied even if he’d let him have her for a minute even.

The soft spring wind swept north, and he drew his eyes shut, inhaling the sweet scent of lilies carried with it. If it weren’t for the noise below his feet and the sound of humanity buzzing underneath him, he would have thought he was laying on a field somewhere the sun shone hard enough to blind you, not at the edge of a building looking hundred metres below.

She’d always smelled something like summer to him, but when she’d near him, winter would come as shivers spread down the length of his spine like the cold lick of brisk wind.