Page 50 of Grim

My cheeks are wet. My eyes pour forth a duality of emotion. One half of it feels the ache of loss, the sadness of a good thing now gone. While the other weeps in a joyous melancholy, where the heart can celebrate sweet surrender. I let out a sigh that releases some of that miasma of feeling .

“Where’s the boy?” The voice comes from the doorway—gravelly, thick, low, and lazy.

I don’t look up.

“I heard you talking in here.”

“He’s gone,” I state numbly.

“What do you mean, gone? Like back into the walls? Has he blended with the ether? Or did he piss off to haunt the attic?” Asher asks.

I shake my head. “Gone,” I repeat. “Really gone. Crossed over. Or moved on. Or whatever the technical term is.”

His eyes bulge slightly, and then booted steps cross the floor—deliberate, unhurried. A sigh. Then the creak of worn leather as he sinks down beside me. He smells faintly of smoke and paper. Not unpleasant.

“That’s not … that’s not a thing,” he mutters. “There are rules about this, you know? Whole bloody chapters. Reaper rule number nine: ‘No soul can cross after its portal window has closed. Decisive action is required from the reaper to prevent consequences that ripple into eternity.’ ”

“Haven’t read that book.” I state the obvious because the obvious is all I have right now.

“Well, you’ve read plenty of others,” Asher mumbles appreciatively.

The closest thing to a compliment I’ve ever heard from the brute.

He glances at the old book in my lap. His voice softens, just a notch. “That one was always a bit of a gut punch.”

“He wanted to hear it,” I say, voice wobbling. “Said it made him feel real. Didn’t peg you for much of a reader.”

“Stick around a couple of centuries, you hear a story or two.”

There’s a weighted silence between us, the space between chapters.

Then, finally, Asher speaks again. “And now he’s gone.”

“Yes.”

“Peacefully?” There’s something cautious about the way he asks. Like he’s never had the chance to see it done that way .

I nod. “I think so. He wasn’t afraid at the end. He was ready.”

“No one should be able to do what you just did.”

“And yet here we are.” I sigh, feeling Seek’s burden lifting slightly. “His spirit is at rest now.”

Another beat of silence.

Then, with something like realization creeping in at the edges of his tone, he says “So, that’s why they don’t like you.”

I blink. “Who?”

He gestures vaguely. “Them. The suits and the strings. It’s not just your feelings for Kane that have their knickers in a twist. It’s this. What you did. Quite a mess you’ve created for yourself and the Doc.”

“Yeah, well, life is messy sometimes.”

“You mean love.” Asher purrs the sentence.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Didn’t need to, Rue.” He smirks, taking me in as he returns to standing.

“Don’t get smug,” I say, not bothering to wipe the tears from my cheeks. “I didn’t break any rules on purpose. I didn’t even know it was possible. I just made space for his story, then provided some comfort in the form of someone else’s story.”

“Yeah, well …” He clears his throat, scratches the side of his nose. “Funny, isn’t it? The whole machine built to keep souls contained. And all it took to rattle the order of it all was a tattered bunny and a young woman willing to listen.”

I glance at him. He’s staring straight ahead, jaw tight. I can’t tell if he’s impressed or unnerved.

“But this, what you just did, changes everything. For everyone.”

“Doesn’t change anything for me. All it’s done is make me an enemy of Fate and Time and a burden to those around me.”

“For an empath, you sure do manage to find the energy to feel sorry for yourself. You have a gift, Rue. A power I’ve certainly never heard of before.”

“All I do is listen.”

“And it would seem there’s more power in that simple act than you will ever know. ”

“Well, my window for receiving stories in this world is drawing swiftly to a close. So, lotta good it’s done to discover this gift so late.”

“Never know what the future might hold. And it mattered to that one soul, didn’t it? That ain’t nothing, Rue.”

“You going soft on me, Asher?”

“Don’t tell Kane,” my reluctant reaper deadpans. “Or anyone else for that matter. I have a reputation to uphold.”

“Your decency is safe with me, Ash. I won’t do anything to dissuade anyone from thinking you’re a shit.”

“Thank you,” he concludes with a smile, then shakes his head in disbelief. “If only Mercy could see this. She would be beaming.”

“Tell me more about her. Her sisters were so vague at the ball.”

“That’s because no one is meant to speak of her.” Asher saunters to the chair, where he sits smoothly, crossing his legs in one fluid motion.

“She was banished after a huge fight with her sisters. Fate and Time always loathed her inefficiency and hated how revered she was by those on Earth. They were jealous of her, plain and simple. And jealousy makes us behave in the most peculiar ways.” He voices this last sentence with the weight of personal knowledge in his tone.

He continues when I don’t respond, “The Weavers felt that Mercy’s emotional outbursts kept leading to complications—adjustments of timelines, reversals of fortune, change.

And we all know that Fate and Time are anathema to change.

So, instead of making room for the complexities of human experiences and working with Mercy to create a compassionate tapestry of time, they sent her to the Moonless Mountains, forever lost to the world. ”

“The Moonless Mountains?”

“Yes.” Asher’s expression darkens as he describes this place.

“They exist on the outer edge of the OtherWorld. A place so dark it renders its inhabitants immobile. One wrong step, and the jagged edges of its rocky slopes can swallow you whole. Once someone is brought to the mountains, they are presumed lost forever. Destined to become rooted in rock, a part of the cold, dark landscape for all time.”

“Something kind of beautiful about the idea of a Mercy flower.”

“Yes, well, something rather ugly about a world without Mercy, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would,” I agree softly.

Silence folds between us again.

I lift my head at last. “I’m not her.”

“Maybe not.” He stands now, slowly, deliberately. “But you’re starting to sound like her. And those who sound like her usually end up with the same bloody epilogue.”

“I’m not afraid of endings,” I say, facing him fully.

“You should be,” he replies instantly.

“I’m afraid of not being remembered.”

“We’re all forgotten in the end, Rue. Merely a question of how long it takes.”

“Wish I’d left something behind. Some words echoing after me somehow.”

The tension in his shoulders eases by a fraction. “You’re exhausting, you know that?”

I smile faintly. “So I’ve been told.”

Asher continues to stare straight ahead, not at me. His jaw is clenched, thumb picking at a fray in his glove.

“You gonna go softly?” he asks tentatively.

I shake my head and answer plainly, “No.”

“No?” he asks, eyes turning toward me. There’s a crease between his brows, like he can think his way to the center of my truth.

“I’ve been told it’s much better to rage.”

“No offense, sprite, but you don’t seem like the rage type.”

“When faced with that good night, Asher, I plan to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light.’”

“Fucking poets,” Asher mumbles. “Making it harder doesn’t make it any more meaningful, Rue. There’s a certain power in knowing when to give up, to simply give in.”

“And when that moment arrives, I’m sure I’ll be ready. But that’s not now. And it won’t be anytime soon either. Perhaps I won’t go at all. Seek’s gone. Someone has to look after the house now. Remember her stories. The love and laughter that my father and our family poured into these walls.”

“I’m afraid that’s not an option. If I have to, I can make you. I will make you, if need be.”

My mind flashes back to the catastrophe, to Asher and his bowie knife in the field, cleaving souls with ruthless precision. He’s not lying, and I know it.

“I thought all souls were given a choice.”

“They are, unless they piss off three of the pettiest, most powerful creatures in existence.”

I roll my eyes. “I won’t give those girls the satisfaction. Punishing souls for believing in their dreams. Death eviscerating beings for clinging to memory. No. If I can’t take control over the when , I can still have something to say about the how .”

I rise defiantly from my spot on the floor, firm and resolute. “I’m going to bed. I need my strength for tomorrow. I’ve got a story to finish writing.”

The clock strikes a discordant note. The gong sounds off somehow. I flick my gaze to a smug-faced Asher.

“You won’t make it until the morning. You will be gone before the rise of the sun.”

I look outside, staring down at my family’s cemetery plot mournfully. Then up to the sky, seeking solace. All I find is grey. “There’s no moon tonight.”

“Now that’s poetic,” Asher says with a mixture of derision and futility.

I grab my notebook and pull it tightly against my chest. I hold it against the spot where Seek once laid his head. The same place Kane once kissed me. Where every story I’ve ever lived or loved echoes faintly in the final beats of my fragile heart.

I open the notebook to a piece I vaguely remember writing, my fingers finding the page instantly, as if they too know my time is short. I scan the words, my words. These captured moments of my mind.

I look over to Asher, who stares silently back at me.

I press the notebook closed. And I smile. My palms stay on the cover, grounding me to this reality.

I think of my mother.

Her hands in my hair when I was too feverish to speak. Her voice, fierce and tired and full of love, even when we fought. The way she stood in doorways, arms crossed but heart open.

The way she told me once, “I’d rather have you for a short time than not at all.”

I didn’t understand what that meant back then.

Now I do.

I swallow the knot rising in my throat and say, more to myself than Asher, “I have to make a phone call.”

Asher raises an eyebrow. “I imagine you do.”