Page 68 of Ballad of Nightmares

If this was a fraction of her true self…

Fuck, he couldn’t wait to see the rest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

SAM DIDN’T BOTHER caging those ghosts before they left the prison. But a few had tried to scare them again, their laughs rippling down hallways and chasing them in the darkness. Sam made a point to press his hand to the walls when they walked past and mutter a silent order for them to wait for his call. And the energy that filtered back to him was of greed and pride.

Stars greeted them as they made their way back to his bike, and when they arrived back at her apartment, Sam suggested a walk.

He was still high on the adrenaline of her, and honestly, he wasn’t ready to face whatever might await him at home. She was a beautiful, yet a horrible distraction, and despite the fact that he could hear Millie’s triumphant voice that she’d been right, he didn’t care.

That very thought should have scared him enough to send him packing home or slicing out her heart right there in the middle of the street.

But he didn’t.

“Can I tell you something?” Ana asked as they walked by the cemetery.

Sam squeezed her hand as the chilled night air wrapped around them. “Please,” he said.

“I’ve always had this… fascination, I guess, with death,” and Sam’s head tilted at the words.

“How so?” he asked.

“I suppose… I suppose I’ve just seen so much of it. I always wondered what was there, when you’re teetering on that final thread at the edge of existence. If Death is actually a person to answer the call or if he chooses those he goes to.”

“He doesn’t hear everyone,” Sam said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean…” His gaze skirted out to the cemetery to his left, to his home and the shadows that seemed to linger on the other side of the gates like they were waiting on his call. “The stories here. Our mythology surrounding Death. That he is a real person who hears that final call—“

“It’s a big world,” Ana said. “I imagine that would be tiresome. To have to take every person who dies into their new beginning.”

“Not every person,” he said, voice softened. “He uses his demons to take care of those in other realms. He stopped his reaching power at the borders after the last war.”

“Do you hear these calls?”

Sam hesitated. “I have heard them,” he finally said. “On occasion.”

“What does it sound like?”

He wondered if she would understand. He wondered if the woman beside him would be accepting and helpful at someone’s end. If she would help him carry them into the next life as no one else had.

Everyone else in his life had never been able to stomach it. Rolfe had helped on the rare occasion if it was a child. Millie, though… she’d stayed once, and had been so upset by the end of it that she’d told him she couldn’t do that again.

“I’m sorry,” Ana said then, having apparently felt the hesitation. “Sorry, I didn’t think—“

“It’s fine,” he assured her.

“Does it say how he decides who continues and who does not?” she asked, apparently choosing to go in a different direction.

Sam shook his head slowly, feeling his eyes darken. “I think that’s part of the illusion, isn’t it?” he whispered. “That people have any say over when this life ends and another begins.”

“What would you do?” she asked. “If you were Death, I mean. Would you give mercy to every person who asked for that end? Or would you pick and choose who lives and who goes?”

“It’s not that simple,” he said, and the images of all those he’d held begging for that filled his mind. “It can’t be.”

“I think if I were Death… I would be tired. I would miss the sun. I would miss what it felt like to live and love,” she said.